The Film Cheat

ii
 The Film Cheat
Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure

Murray Pomerance
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pomerance, Murray, 1946- author.
Title: The film cheat: screen artifice and viewing pleasure / Murray Pomerance.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013256 | ISBN 9781501364990 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501364983
(paperback) | ISBN 9781501364969 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501364976 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Psychological aspects. | Motion picture audiences–
Psychology. | Motion pictures–Aesthetics. | Realism in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995 .P65 2020 | DDC 791.45/652–dc23
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6499-0

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 Don’t drag your tricks, but work as quickly as you can, bearing in
mind the Latin proverb, “Make haste slowly.”
HARRY HOUDINI

Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of
a hat . . . if there isn’t already a rabbit in the hat.
LERMONTOV (ANTON WALBROOK) IN THE RED SHOES
vi
 For
Stanley Cavell (1926–2018)
in cherished memory
and for
Abraham Kaplan (1918–93)
Who taught us both

“The rest is silence.”

viii
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xii

Preamble: All in the Game 1

OF SCRIPTS 11

1 Yesterdays 13

2 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 20

3 Narrative Transparency 23

4 The Cheating Cut 30

5 Narrative Opacity 39

6 Our Faithful Friend 45

7 Bridge from Nowhere 55

8 And Here Endeth My Tale 64

9 Only Pretending 68

10 Keeping Minutes 72

OF PERFORMANCES 79

11 Monster! 81

12 A Star, Not a Star 88

13 Pain 93

14 Measuring Up 98
x CONTENTS

15 Privacy 104

16 Dance 121

17 Keyed Up 127

18 Don’t Believe It 137

19 “I Love You” 143

20 Surrender 149

OF CAMERAS 153

21 Corral 155

22 Show Me 167

23 On the Road 174

24 “Good Cinematography!” 182

25 “Picture This” 191

26 The Angle Angle 195

27 Moving On 199

28 Behind the Camera Behind 202

29 Peek-a-Boo 205

OF SCENES 211

30 No There There 213

31 Where Are We? 219

32 Walk on the Wild Side 227

33 Happy Trails 232

34 The Thing 239

 CONTENTS  xi

35 Heist 245

36 The Reality Effect 251

37 Stand-ins 257

38 The Superuniverse 262

OF JOINS 267

39 Believe in Me 269

40 Over Thames 273

41 Sequitur 278

42 Veni creator spiritus 284

43 “Bite the Dust” 287

44 Reflect On That 294

45 Presence and Presentation 300

46 By Contrast 308

47 The Blood Effect 316

Epilogue: Our Cheating Heart 321

Works Cited 335

Index 340
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sincere thanks to a great number of unsung helpers, advisers,

interlocutors, and general dogsbodies without whom this book could
not exist. One can have what seems the very slightest of conversations
only to discover, suddenly, a gateway to an unseen world. A special nod
of gratitude to Dan Sacco, who is unfailingly helpful with a smile, and
in emergencies, too.
All of these kind people have been profoundly helpful, too: the late
Reginald Bedford (Hamilton), Rebecca Bell-Metereau (San Marcos), the
late Kenneth Boulding (Ann Arbor), the late Dennis Brissett (Buffalo),
the late Henry Bumstead (San Marino), Alex Clayton (Bristol), the late
Herbert Coleman (Los Angeles), Ned Comstock (Los Angeles), Brandon
Cronenberg (Toronto), the late Evelyn Eby (Hamilton), the late C. O.
“Doc” Erickson (Los Angeles), the late Leslie Fiedler (Buffalo), Jean-
Michel Frodon (Paris), the late Erving Goffman (Philadelphia), the late
Assheton Gorton (Montgomery), Tom Hemingway (Coventry), Dorothy
Herrmann (Philadelphia), the late Arthur Hiller (Los Angeles), Jason
Jacobs (Brisbane), Ann Kaplan (New York), Mark Kermode (London),
Lewis Klahr (Los Angeles), Andrew Klevan (Oxford), Bill Krohn (Long
Beach), Dominic Lennard (Hobart), Daniel Lindvall (Stockholm),
Elliott Logan (Brisbane), Vincent Longo (Ann Arbor), Leslie Mitchner
(Princeton), Polo Ornelas (Los Angeles), the late Lawrence Paull (Chicago),
the late Victor Perkins (Coventry), Lisa Purse (Reading), Simon Rainville
(Halifax), Stephen Rebello (Pasadena), William Rothman (Miami), Bob
Rubin (Pacific Palisades), Steven Rybin (Mankato), Joshua Schulze (Ann
Arbor), Matthew Solomon (Ann Arbor), David Sorfa (Edinburgh), Dean
Tavoularis (Los Angeles), George Toles (Winnipeg), Daniel Varndell
(Southampton), Evan Williams (Los Angeles), Linda Ruth Williams
(Exeter), Jonathan Wright (Toronto), and Kat Zabecka (Brighton), as well
as the staff at Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Figaro (Los Feliz), The Margaret
Herrick Library (Beverly Hills), The Montague on the Gardens (London),
and Rapido (Toronto).
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  xiii

My enthusiasm goes out to Katie Gallof and the staff at Bloomsbury,

including Erin Duffy, Leela Ulaganathan, Dhanuja Ravi, Abdus Salam,
Juhi Roy, and Namkwan Cho, true lovers of the books they make and
perfect companions on this journey, and to my loves Nellie Perret and Ariel
Pomerance, who always see with their hearts.
Los Angeles—London—Toronto
May 2020
xiv
 Preamble:

All in the Game

FIGURE Campbell Scott and Rebecca Pigeon at Logan Airport in The Spanish
Prisoner (David Mamet, Jasmine Productions/Jean Doumanian Productions, 1997).

On February 5, 2007, Ricky Gervais’ Extras program (BBC)—a collection

of “interviews” in which the very celebrated are typically treated as
unknowns—entertained as guest Sir Ian McKellen. Asked what it was to
“act,” Sir Ian gave Ricky a very patient and gentle explanation:

What I do is, I pretend to be the person I’m portraying in the film or play.
[. . .] You’re confused. It’s perfectly simple, a case in point: Lord of the
Rings. Peter Jackson comes from New Zealand, says to me, “Sir Ian, I
want you to be Gandalf the Wizard,” and I say to him, “You are aware
that I am not really a wizard.” And he said, “Yes I am aware of that, what
I want you to do is use your acting skills to portray the wizard for the
duration of the film.” So I said, “Okay,” and then I said to myself, “Mm,
how would I do that?” And this is what I did: I imagined what it would
2 THE FILM CHEAT

be like to be a wizard, and then I pretended, and acted in that way on

the day. [. . .] And how did I know what to say? The words were written
down for me in a script. How did I know where to stand? People told me.

Pretend to be a person! There isn’t a one of us who doesn’t do this on

a regular basis, pretending and thus becoming who we have to be in one
circumstance after another.1 But something the actor does that most of us
do not habitually do is, develop the capacity to impersonate (some theorists
would say to become) a very great number of people very unlike one another,
and sometimes with relatively little preparation. A quick-change artist! The
basic idea of putting on a self, dressing in a self, has long been a normal
feature of philosophical speculation:

       within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable. (Richard II III.ii.160–8)

Yet, beyond that cinema is positively filled with people (actors) pretending
to be people other than they “really” are, which is to say, other than
they would be pretending to be (outside the critical view) were they not
acting in cinema. This is the much discussed actor/character formula, the
transformation that occurs inside the work of art. To be prosaic to a fault,
McKellen plays Gandalf quite compellingly but, as he himself knows, he
is not Gandalf. (Actually there is no Gandalf, beyond the word “Gandalf”
on Tolkien’s page and the screenplay, and the figure who moves about the
film thanks to McKellen’s pretending—with a long white beard and a tall
staff, and on a horse.) Cinema is not only filled with such performances and
performers but can be imagined only in the very abstract without them.
However, cinema offers a much-repeated, and fascinating, stretching
of the rules of transformation. Imagine this: for one or another dramatic
reason, there is a moment onscreen in which a character (already the
work of an actor pretending to be the person being portrayed) is required
in the story to act—to pretend to be a different person, not the character
we have been watching the actor achieve but someone distinctly other. In

Following from the enlightening work on “passing” by Harold Garfinkel, I give in An Eye for
1

Hitchcock an extended analysis of Roger Thornhill as “secret apprentice.”

 PREAMBLE  3

Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), for example, John Barrymore’s

eloquent, demanding, neurotic, and hilarious director/producer Oscar
Jaffe, a character if ever there was one, a man whose ego has swollen past
measurement (embodied for us by Barrymore as an extended cadenza),
needs to hoodwink a glittering actress who has had quite enough of his
tricks (Carole Lombard). He arranges that on a railway platform she should
encounter a heavily whiskered, doddering, helpless old man (performed, she
does not pick up, nor do we, at first, by Jaffe). The character becoming a
character. At another point in the film the irrepressible Oscar pretends he
is at Death’s door in order to get Lily to sign a contract to satisfy his final
wish. Think of these as performances-within-performance. In Easter Parade
(1948), a naïve chorus-girl-turned-famous-dancer, Hannah Brown (Judy
Garland), is onstage with her partner Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) doing an
Irving Berlin number called “We’re a Couple of Swells” in which she must
look not like the famous Judy Garland and not like the famous Hannah
Brown but like a toothless hobo. In the recent Operation Finale (2018),
Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) is masqueraded by Israeli agents as an
airline pilot, with fake mustache and full uniform, so that they can sneak
him out of Argentina on an El Al jet.
A variation on this theme has the performed character doing a fully
conscious dress-up while being ignorant of some telltale, some wholly
central feature of the “character” being performed. In Rebecca (1940), for
example, the new Mrs De Winter (Joan Fontaine) prepares for a fancy-
dress ball. She costumes herself, with the assistance of the housekeeper Mrs
Danvers (Judith Anderson) in an elaborate gown, innocently donning the
image of—the one person her new husband least wants to see in the world.
The masquerade itself—her fancy-dress costuming—is openly declared as
put-on, but it is not until the husband (Laurence Olivier) reacts with horror
and vituperation that our character grasps her performative gaffe. For a
hilarious comic variation, we have E.T. in little Gertie’s (Drew Barrymore)
closet, hiding among her platoon of stuffed dolls and wearing a preposterous
hat that has been found for him; the creature knows that if he keeps still he
will likely “pass,” but as an alien he has no particular knowledge of earthling
habits, certainly not doll collecting, and could not for the life of him identify
the various zany creatures who surround him or how funny he looks.
More contemporaneously we find a variant on this trope in which, through
the careful application of some “advanced technology” not shown to the
audience, the onscreen pretension is made convincing in itself, that is, made to
look not like the result of pretending but instead like a very reality (a make-
believe, since this is a film); at a giveaway moment the pretender—in Mission:
Impossible (1996) Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)—is discovered in a secluded
chamber swiftly pulling a latex mask off his face and we discover that along
with dozens of others onscreen we have been fooled. Now a familiar character
is “recovered from” what is plain, only now, as a masquerade.
4 THE FILM CHEAT

Two distinct issues of deeper interest are raised by the film actor’s
pretended pretending.
Visible Seams. First, a cool, even, and revealing illumination is spread
across the surface of any one film, and then of fictional cinema everywhere,
showing up the delicate seam between the characters with whom we are
engaged in our watching and the actors we (persistingly) act as though we
do not see. The very idea of acting, of putting on, of pretending is raised
explicitly to view, even spoken about. We can note that these people of the
screen world generally act as though things are quite different from this, as
though we do not see them acting, but in fact we do see. And seeing while
acting as though we do not see we, too, are pretending. As an audience, we
pretend to be “not in the know” yet know that we are very much in the
know. At least when confronted with familiar stars it is virtually impossible
not to see that they are the folk they are while earnestly proclaiming
themselves to be other, Celebrated Other, especially impossible if one has
spent heavy money to see the film—or time downloading it—on the basis
of the actors’ fame. Again, we spy on Gandalf but we know Ian McKellen
is there, too. The performative fiction may be brought more fully to life,
become more electric and more present, when we watch unfamiliars, men
and women we have not already learned to recognize as “themselves.” This
is often the case with children. Christian Bale was only a pre-adolescent
prodigy when he shot Empire of the Sun (1987), amazing to watch yet
otherwise unknown. The same went for Nicholas Hoult in About a Boy
(2002) and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker (1962). And for Leonardo
DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993).2 With such actors, we can
know superficially and generally that “acting” is going on, without actually
teasing out the actor at work inside the character. With established stars it
is entirely different. To watch Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
is to see not Maria Vargas but Ava Gardner as Maria Vargas, not Harry
Dawes who makes Maria into a star but Humphrey Bogart (who already
is one). At the beginning of Minnelli’s The Band Wagon only a year before,
we had seen the famous movie star Ava Gardner as the famous movie star
Ava Gardner; but that screened “famous movie star” inhabited a different
universe than the woman who was playing her. That diegetic “Ava” was able
to interact with Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) because she knew that he and
she were both in the entertainment business and had achieved fame there,
but the Ava underneath “Ava” had no truck with Tony, could never touch
him, although she was able to interact with, and make more than one film
with, Fred Astaire (they reunite working together in On the Beach [1959]).
If we are constantly aware of actors putting on their characters, if we
always know there is a seam, and if we can make our awareness routine

2
Bale, Hoult, Duke, and DiCaprio had all done work before these breakout performances, but
not with wide popular recognition.
 PREAMBLE  5

enough that it seems to dissipate, the further step of an actor’s character

putting on a character undoes the dissipation, cues us openly and bluntly
to the process of characterization once again, a sharp reminder, an alarm.
Seeing characterization happening before our eyes, we go on the lookout
for it more broadly and more deeply in all parts of the film. John Huston’s
The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) is an extravaganza play on this turn.
But the apparent revelation of a performative seam is a trick, a cheat: a
door marked BACKSTAGE that does not really lead us there (that leads,
one might well sense, to only a brick wall). Our perception of performance
in action (that the figures of the story are being performed as such) is the
centralizing trick, or cheat, cinema offers in giving us persons tacitly claiming
to be other persons inside the work. As the play-within-the-play of even
a character becoming a “character” opens activated performance to view,
with literal spontaneity and presence, it offers the perfo​rmanc​e-ins​ide-t​he-
pe​rform​ance-​of-a-​perfo​rmanc​e without affirmation, too. Characters, and
characters’ characters, simply appear as such, without asking us (or giving
us pause) to consider the astonishing transformation that is taking place to
realize them. The cheat of film narrative is made accessible, albeit unlabeled
as such, and provides grounds for thinking about narrative more broadly as
a cheat as well. A cheat we adore. A cheat we adore to adore.
A Game of Charades. The second issue invoked by pretended pretending
is more slippery. When characters are seen putting on characters, they “live
as” (extend the performance of) those put-on characters typically for a very
limited time, engendering and joining a kind of game in a bounded zone
(a zone subject to the observation of diegetic bystanders). One can see a
game because particular rules of engagement are being strictly adhered
to, “game pieces” are in play, and the entire construction is manifestly
unlike the everyday world—either the world we live in or the one the film
ordinarily depicts—as long as all action is discernably transformed by game
conventions identifiable as such: in short, the game boundary is palpable.
Suddenly the people who seemed to be interacting are figures playing a
“scenario” together, one specifically not identified as a scenario while it is
in progress, especially if we watch from up close since from up close we
are also in the “game” and we know and accept that game players do not
openly identify as game players while playing the game, unless extrinsic
circumstances render the situation untenable. In a filmed poker game, for
instance, a player visible to us as such but not self-acknowledging might
“pull out” a little and suspecting another of cheating call the issue; in effect,
this caller would be saying, “Look, I am a rule-abiding poker player and you
are not” and by calling himself a poker player actually not, at that instant,
be playing poker.
A complex and elaborate play-within-the-play can be established, entirely
non-evident as such until some crisis moment when, to some calculated
degree, it is revealed. Indeed, consider a game in which there are quite a
6 THE FILM CHEAT

few players, all looking different from one another and no one of them self-
identifying as a game player while playing. In sport, all the many players
wear identical uniforms; in the case I wish to point to, there are no uniforms
of any kind. This is the con movie, the film about an ignorant “mark” being
taken in by a group of performers not recognized as such. The donning
of the interior role-within-the-role is very often not shown at first, so that
initially we accept the put-on “characters” as true characters themselves.
Only later, for the viewer’s pleasure, is the con artist revealed to have
scripted, produced, directed, and often starred in a supposed “real action”
that was in fact only a show within the show. In an extreme form, with the
con game being elaborated at very great length and in very minute detail,
the “reveal” might come so late that we barely catch sight of the performers
beneath the “characters” at all. They might seem to be strangers.
At the con film’s crisis moment, some high point of dramatic probability
is reached as we take note of what the complicated charade was all for: a
great deal of money suddenly revealed to have been stolen, a rare museum
piece revealed as a clever forgery, and so on. Our noting suggests that there
has been produced for the film’s audience a moment of stunning awareness
in which the guying-up of performance is put on show for itself, in the center
ring of the circus as it were, with lighting apparently showing all of its parts:
“Look at the little show we have given!!” Now it is undeniable that a trick
has been in progress, a cheat. And not only some of the characters you’ve
watched but you yourselves have been taken in: you, seduced and deluded,
just as they were. In the con film this reveal is central to the emotional turn,
a vital requirement.3 The resolving mechanism is as blunt as it is curious:
seeing that some onscreen characters have been duped, the viewer, feeling
superior because safely outside, presumes that no duping has affected him
or her. One can both know one was cheated and avoid seeing that one was
cheated simultaneously. Perhaps with pleasure, one projects one’s own state
onto the figures of the screen.

* * *

The con film isn’t the same as the heist film. In the latter, the victim typically
does know he has been taken. And focus is given to elaborate methods
of penetrating a defensive shield that is extremely patent to begin with:

3
Erving Goffman’s “On Cooling the Mark Out,” a classic analysis of cons, indicates how in
actual practice the discovery by the victim (the “mark”) that he has been taken in, is potentially
disruptive to success. So a process is put in place (“cooling out”) that disengages him from
social contact with those who have been running the game but in a way that is rationalized
in terms of everyday discourse (someone has bought a house in another city and is moving,
etc.). While cooling out is beneficial for actual con artists, it is inutile in producing audience
catharsis.
 PREAMBLE  7

vaults within vaults within vaults, uniformed guards with submachine

guns, surveillance camera systems wired to a central control facility where
some character has highly expanded sensory power (often a large bank of
television screens) which will be disabled. The con is the manufacture of a
typical social reality standing on thin air. A kind of induced psychosis. Those
taken in by cons very often never know or—more pleasing to the viewer—
come to learn only as a dramatic surprise.
There is a significant catalog of con films, the most popular, ironically,
being a film which overtly announces itself as such, George Roy Hill’s The
Sting (1973). Some films have con-game sequences, such as Paper Moon
(1973), House of Games (1987), or The Lady Eve (1941). But the limiting
case is presented in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1997), of which
it must be said that telling the story to a reader who may not have had
the pleasure of seeing it is a complicated challenge. I will be brief and
circumspect.
Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) is a brilliant young mind, and he has created
a new secret “process” (about which we are never told anything) for the
advantage of Klein (Ben Gazzara), his boss. Klein has brought him, along
with a newly hired secretary, Susan (Rebecca Pigeon), to the enticing island
of St. Estèphe for a business meeting with principal investors. Turquoise
waters, green palms! On the beach there, Joe meets a very polite and
apparently vastly wealthy man who introduces himself as Jimmy Dell (Steve
Martin). Soon later, in the hotel bar, Susan introduces him to someone else,
her drinking partner, Pat McCune (Felicity Huffman), an FBI agent on
holiday. Joe has been trying unsuccessfully to get Klein to agree formally
to a settlement in reward for the fabulous “formula.” Just before leaving
the island, Joe is accosted by Jimmy who begs a favor: take a little package
to my sister in New York, a devoted tennis fan and player. The package is
wrapped in brown paper and addressed to her at The Wiltshire.
On the plane, Susan gives Joe a little irritation by lecturing him, repeatedly
but with the vocal tone of an uneducated innocent, on how the world is a
strange place and you don’t really know who anyone is. Someone might
even be a drug mule. Startled, he rushes to the toilet and tears open the
package, which turns out to contain not drugs but an antiquarian book,
Budge on Tennis, the binding of which is coming apart. In New York he
proceeds to an antiquarian dealer and picks up a much better copy of the
identical book, keeping the damaged one for himself. He drops off the gift
with the doorman of the sister’s building.
Jimmy has made a dinner date with him for Friday night, but when Friday
night comes Jimmy stands him up. The next morning he chances to find his
new friend at an exclusive car dealership and confronts him. But Jimmy is
even more irate than Joe: “You didn’t give the book to my sister. She waited
all afternoon for you.” Later, he telephones Joe to apologize for his manner
and takes him dining at his exclusive club. At his swank pad on the way,
8 THE FILM CHEAT

Jimmy shows Joe—on a lark—how easy it is to open a Swiss bank account

by creating one with Joe’s puppy’s name as logon and with fifteen francs
deposited. They head off to the club but are informed there that, it being
Saturday, entrance is for members only. Accordingly Jimmy, refusing to
disappoint his guest, signs Joe up as a member, and to finalize the ceremony
Joe is given to sign a gilded certificate of membership. Jimmy now informs
Joe that in his opinion, Klein is going to exploit him as far as he can, and will
show his “appreciation” by according Joe very rude treatment. Immediately
thereafter we see that this is absolutely true, with Klein’s lawyers pressing
Joe to sign a new contract—basically a kiss-off—and infuriating him. He
storms out. By telephone, Jimmy assures him that his own lawyer is going to
help. They should meet the next day at Central Park, near the carousel. Joe
should bring his contract. And the formula.
Meanwhile, sweethearted Joe buys flowers to apologize to Jimmy’s sister.
But delivering them to her building, he finds to his surprise that the “tennis
player/fan” “sister” is in fact an extremely elderly woman with a walker and
a helper. At Central Park, confused Joe is encountered and whispered to by
a chain of park workers who are apparently agents in disguise. They guide
him into a conference in the park men’s room, where a leading agent (Ed
O’Neill) is working with McCune to “get” Jimmy, who is a thief in disguise.
Joe watches the agent put his formula on the window sill while he is wired
with a mic. Carrying the red notebook with the formula now, Joe goes to
meet (and record) Jimmy, but he is stood up a second time. He spies one of
the “workers” and greets him but when the man pivots around he turns out
to be a stranger. Joe runs back to the men’s room and it is now completely
empty. He goes to a payphone and calls the FBI, asking for Pat McCune, and
a man says that he is McCune. Frozen, Joe opens his red notebook and all
the pages are blank.
When he brings a team of police to Jimmy’s place they discover not a
residence but a totally empty space, the “shower” from which Jimmy
had emerged in his robe to chat with Joe being nothing but a tiny toilet.
There isn’t a single fingerprint. At the “exclusive club” they discover only
a restaurant. Joe finds himself arrested for the murder of a colleague,
suspicion falling heavily upon him. When in interrogation he is asked if
he has any undisclosed bank accounts and says no, he is shown details of
his now plump Swiss account. Asked whether he was trying to escape to
Venezuela (a country from which there is no extradition) he again says no,
but is shown the “membership” certificate he signed, which turns out to be
a request to the government of Venezuela for sanctuary.
I will cease recounting here, so as not to deprive readers of the pleasure
provided by the resolution of this film, and in order to frame this discussion
around a central conundrum which will help us focus on the “cheat,” quite
generally, as a structured and vulnerable endeavor involving theatricality in
all its elements and a kind of narrative architecture: just as films do.
 PREAMBLE  9

The question is:

How exactly does not-so-stupid (indeed, “brilliant”) Joe get locked into
the puzzle game of the Spanish Prisoner that is being run by slick Jimmy?
Where can we put a finger down on some vital and unequivocal clue that he
was offered but entirely neglected, or declined, to pick up as we believe he
should have? It is worth mentioning that all the pieces of the scenario are
played out in crisp, bright, gaily colored images without particular shadow
or murkiness or obscurity in which some machination could be hidden.
All open to view (to our view, to Joe’s view), all beyond reproach. That
turquoise island sea; Jimmy’s nappy forest green baseball cap; Susan’s red
dress and matching lipstick; the light flicking off the giant lenses in Joe’s
eyeglasses (through which he is failing to see); Pat McCune’s blond hair in
the brightly sunlit Central Park men’s room; the fire-engine red notebook,
and so on. While the “formula” is penned in clearly visible but also arcane
mathematical symbols, still we can know it for what Joe says it is. When
Joe finds out that the female McCune is really a man, and that the “tennis
player” is an old lady he is in a position to know something is going on,
and to tear open his notebook. But how did he get into a pickle barrel this
deeply?
As with this film, every detail of the cinematic cheat is offered in plain
composition, attractive, gay, alluring, and without confounding our view.
Every detail as it comes up is palpably credible in itself and in its context,
and indeed contexts are elaborated so as to substantiate every detail. The
people (the characters) behave in a completely unsuspectable way, merely
being there, being only human, just being kind, being naturally generous.
Everything is only, just, merely, naturally what it is, and yet we find, if we
back ourselves up just a little for observing, that we have been caught in a
trap not so dissimilar to Joe’s. Was he pulled in by Pat because in the men’s
room she was working with a senior agent who believably wired him? Was
he pulled in by Jimmy at the club, with the gilded membership certificate,
with the play bank account, with Jimmy’s ineffable charm, gentility, sweet
affability—the reason for casting Steve Martin. Was he pulled in by Susan’s
obvious sexual interest in him, a kind of flattery, a stimulation that drew him
off-guard? Was he intoxicated by the brief holiday on the beautiful island,
all expenses paid? What did the trick?
The antiquarian book, which turned out to be, yes, an authentic
antiquarian book, because here—somewhere . . . somewhere . . . oh yes,
here’s another copy, in better shape. Or perhaps the white card inside, on
which Jimmy had penned a note to his good-looking sister to pay attention
to the carrier, because he was entirely the right sort of man for you . . .
Was it, indeed, the visual intoxication? (Because the world Jimmy created
had to be seductive for Joe much as David Mamet’s film has to be seductive
for us.) Not just an island but white sands, arching trees, the green-blue sea.
Was it not just the exclusive club but the particularly sententious and somber
10 THE FILM CHEAT

voice of the maître d’ whose unfortunate fate it was to inform Jimmy, in

front of his guest, that of course it being Saturday night entré is for members
only, I’m so sorry to say, if I could do anything myself I’d . . .
But still more important than understanding The Spanish Prisoner,
catching the catch of it, is understanding the catch of this, why I raise the
film to attention here as an exemplification of what cinema does altogether.
Even in my questioning and detailing I am shedding particular light, keying
one thing and moving another aside. After all, it is not the story of this
film that counts. It is not merely the succession of moments—because
moments will be arranged (just as Jimmy arranges them) to flow logically
one after another in an unquestionable way—but the moments themselves,
the quality of the voice coupled with a precise light flickering in the eyes, a
casual bathrobe, the gilding around the edges of the membership certificate.
The cheat in filmic narratives, and in this con film the elaborate narrative,
is not the unfolding plot taken in itself as a telling but what it covers, what
is much more telltale, the telling way of telling, the nuancing, the etiquette,
the apologies, the explanations that cover all the necessary bases. Not
what happens but the way that what happens is accounted for, since the
accounting is the vital assurance the storyteller needs to touch the viewer.
The story, in effect, is but a pretext for the touch. The events summon the
accounts, but the accounts constitute the real structure.
To ask how Joe Ross can succumb to having his magical formula stolen
before his eyes is similar to other cinematic puzzles, established, ornamented,
brought to an apex through narrative assembly: in Vertigo (1958), how is
Scottie Ferguson convinced when he meets Judy Barton that if he wishes and
works hard enough he can work with her to bring Madeleine Elster back
to life?; in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), how is the ex-con Riedenschneider
(Sam Jaffe) brought to such a position that all he can wish for in life is the
pleasure of watching a pretty girl dance?; in Some Like It Hot (1959), how
is Sugar Cane Kowalczyk, smart enough to know she is typically stuck with
the fuzzy end of the lollipop, unable to discern that Geraldine and Josephine
are not really women?; in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), how can
the respectful and dignified Sidney Poitier be brought to a condition in which
he must scream at his father that he won’t be able to become a man until
he can get him off his back? How many events, how many contingencies,
how many collisions all seemingly uncontrived, all apparently pure, occupy
narrative space in such a design that the culminating moments arrive so
inevitably, as though dictated by a fate that eludes us?
This journey now winds on to a close look at the accounts and the
moments, some of them at any rate, that as we view cinema bring us in, keep
us there, and hold us from noticing what is happening to us as we participate.
Traps that look like islands of paradise, or like red-bound notebooks we
must try very hard to penetrate, so daunting is the mathematics and so
taunting the formula.
 Of Scripts

{1} Yesterdays
Facial recognition aphasia; with and without a memory; Oliver Sacks, “The
Lost Mariner”; access to “a past”; character transports

{2} Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Structured foretelling; knowing while not knowing the future; The Wizard
of Oz; Lawrence of Arabia; present moments

{3} Narrative Transparency

Blow-Up; Character knowledge and rehearsal; Dial M for Murder; chase
scenes; Bullitt; Grand Prix; District B13; markers; The Naked Prey

{4} The Cheating Cut

David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity”; The Bourne Supremacy; Citizen
Kane; Luigi Galvani; The Long, Long Trailer; 2001: A Space Odyssey

{5} Narrative Opacity

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); Thomas Scheff’s “ladder of
awareness”; Vertigo

{6} Our Faithful Friend

Omniscient voice; Michel Chion, “the acousmêtre”; The Dreamers; Sully;
The Day of the Locust; What Maisie Knew; The Go-Between; Atonement

{7} Bridge from Nowhere

Contiguity and likelihood; Arthur Freed Unit at MGM; The Band Wagon;
probable eventuality

{8} And Here Endeth My Tale

Arbitrary endings; Citizen Kane; Singin’ in the Rain; La notte; The Third
Man; Donnie Brasco; The Day the Earth Stood Still; A Star Is Born (1954)
12 THE FILM CHEAT

{9} Only Pretending

Dr. Mabuse; Dr. No; overt and covert villainy; The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo; Inside Man; Minority Report; introducing the villain

{10} Keeping Minutes

Dr. Zhivago; The Magnificent Ambersons; John Carey, “Temporal and
Spatial Transitions”; The Time Machine; Easter Parade; The Entertainer;
Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know; music and anticipation; Baby Driver; The
Touch; Rachmaninoff
 1
Yesterdays

FIGURE 1 Margot Winkler in The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, Embassy

International/Twentieth Century Fox, 1982).

I had lunch recently with a man I’ve known a very long time, an old friend,
who confessed something I had never realized, that he suffered from
facial recognition aphasia, the manifest inability to recognize faces. Not
discriminate: recognize. He could see just fine, but he could not absolutely
be sure he would know what he was seeing. Recognize: to affix a nominal
label to a face one knows one has seen before, somewhere, sometime, and
a face one can certainly tell apart from other faces. He could know with
certainty that he had seen a face but not be able to put a name to it. With
me he had no trouble, he said, but there were many others who would
approach him amicably but leave him confounded, since although he knew
14 THE FILM CHEAT

that somehow he knew them he could not say (to himself) who they were,
could not address them by name.
Many people have trouble remembering other people’s names, sometimes
needing several repetitions (and perhaps even then remaining unable to
retain the information), yet they know that the name is something they
know, even though at the moment it is unretrieved and seems unretrievable.
They have it but have misplaced it. (The mental “room” in which one stores
such things is, apparently, chock full of items of all kinds, so many that
Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu seems meager by comparison.) FRA produces
a strange, alienating sensation in which a person’s name is not unretrievable
from the vaults of memory but seems instead to be absent from the vaults
altogether. Instead of “I can’t recall (re-call) your name,” it’s a case of “I
don’t know your name.” (I don’t know, I have never heard, your face has
never been associated with a name.) A great deal of what is mentally elided,
then, is the past.
Happily our lunch went; fantastic Cobb salads with cold poached shrimp!
My old friend treated me warmly, as a dear familiar, and we had a splendid
time chewing over our two lives, together. He never once used my name as
here now I, for quite different reasons, step aside from using his.
The peculiar reason I adduce this anecdote is that it illustrates something
far more widely diffused than naming and name-forgetting, a particular
odd interactional situation in which, notwithstanding an aphasic’s (queer,
personal) sense that he himself did not know a person he was recognizing
(from a point of view similar to what would be taken up by others), he could
also present himself openly, dramatically, as someone without a memory:
not only someone who doesn’t know a name that is not on the tongue but
someone who is not knowing something he reasonably should—so very
reasonably should, indeed, that his not knowing is an indicator of lost time,
a horrible gap between then, when the name was on the register, and now,
when it is gone. Let the aphasic protest he is not exactly forgetting, forgetting
is not quite the word: no matter. He becomes a notable case of someone who
apparently cannot delve into his past, cannot travel backward, when any
and all of us ought to be able to do so.
When any and all of us ought to be able to move backward at will.
“Of course,” all normals routinely journey backward, one supposes;
everyone and anyone can (and should show that she can) bring up a
recollection. I remember going to the Museo del Historia Natural y Cultura
with you and eating queso fundido. Such “memoryless” figures as my lunch
partner could be taken to be may well give the appearance of living entirely
in the present, exactly and explicitly because they do not openly stage
retrievals. Note: the open staging of a retrieval. I am reminded some of
Oliver Sacks’s “lost mariner,” victim of a severe Korsakov’s, whose present
was more or less his world: “I wondered, when I first met him, if he was
not condemned to a sort of ‘Humean’ froth, a meaningless fluttering on the
 YESTERDAYS  15

surface of life” (39). But Sacks is making a diagnosis, giving the claim to
be looking in. I am referring to the individual’s performance of having no
memory.
Certainly to openly stage a retrieval—I Remember Mama (1948)—is to
identify oneself as having a history (and fake retrievals can be arranged so
as to accredit a newcomer to the game with the bona fides of the longtime
player). Further, one transmits an open signal about such a history when one
gives a notably clear and open staging of retrieval from the past, one displays
knowing oneself to have been placed before, and therefore to be placed
now, in a temporal context. (A) There was a before; (B) I was participant
to that before; (C) I here now point directly to it and thereby (D) credit
my participation then and my pointing now. The facial recognition aphasic
notably fails to give this signal with specific regard to other people, is easily
taken as having no subjectively accessible past in which human encounters
happened. Surely there must be a past, the person could not have been born
yesterday; yet there appears no regard for or access to it. The past has no
present meaning for the being who is ahistorical, and the social past has no
present meaning for the facial recognition aphasic.
Open retrieval of information from “historical” files, the invocation of
“remembered” names, directions, warnings, estimations, preferences, pet
peeves, awkward situations, glorious achievements is a signal feature of what
we call “normal” behavior, and when memory of this “typical,” “everyday”
kind seems to be blocked we anticipate the employment of one of a limited
number of permissible excuses to both explain and bandage the situation.
Momentary confusion, for example: “Oh, sorry, I didn’t quite get what you
asked me”; understandable stress: “Oh gosh, you have no idea how bad this
migraine is!”; not having had coffee yet: “I can’t do anything first thing in
the morning!” Part of what makes for a condition we would call “real” is
a presentation of self that includes actual or demonstrably possible open
retrievals or, as above, reasonable accounts for their absence. Seeming to
have nothing to fall back on, a person could be displaced from the real.
But the everyday, casual reading of others, just like psychiatric and
neurological diagnosis, is similar to watching movies, at least because in
both cases evaluation of a (character’s) personality is tagged to the way he
or she gives patent signals of both perception and memory: the character can
see a red light as a red light; she remembers that a moment ago it was green;
she knows that while then she could have driven through the intersection
now she cannot (i.e., then is not now). Excepting in comedic situations,
and working on the assumption that names have somewhere in the story
already been shared, the character who mistakes another character’s name
signals a quirky, but at the same time symptomatic, relation with the past.
Martin Scorsese plays a marvelous take on this problem in The King of
Comedy (1982) with the receptionist at the Jerry Langford Show offices
(Margo Winkler) who is confronted by Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro)
16 THE FILM CHEAT

again and again and again and again and again but can never quite get his
name right. The first time De Niro puts on a charitable smile of toleration,
as though to say, “My name gives a lot of people trouble, has always done
so, and I can remember that, so it’s no surprise it’s giving you trouble, too.”
But also—and here is the charity, “I am telling you this because I also know,
from past experience, that you might get flustered or embarrassed or feel
you have done me an offense, and I want to assure you that’s not the case.”
Yet he is not picking up on the possibility that to her he is a nobody already,
since only people with appointments show up at this desk; one of the legion
members of the great urban crowd, whose name one is under no obligation
to know. Or that she’s distracted. Or that she doesn’t like him for some
reason. Later on, when she persists in niggling with the name, he makes a
correction that is curt and demands to get past her—a clear indication that
from his point of view, she has failed at a crucial task and now, yes, indeed
produced some offense, so that she ought to be, not embarrassed or flustered
but, reproached—not that he has the authority to go about reproaching her.
Note that it is Winkler’s character whose genuineness is dubious, first to us
and not long later to Rupert; the actress is genuinely there throughout.
What viewers calculate about a character is a kind of diagnosis itself,
a positioning of the subject on a scale of believable normality not much
different from the scale we all use in everyday life. The people we meet
within our “reality” are, each, more or less real, depending on how they
seem placed in long time. As we might tag the people we meet with various
identities, surely with the tag we would call “real,” we tag film characters,
and they tag one another. That means that reality is up for grabs here,
particularly the reality of the artifice. The people we take to be present
“really,” to be fully and unquestionably sharing our reality, can show or
recount (and can reveal that they can show or recount) what they have just
finished doing; or what they did an hour ago; or what happened yesterday
or when they were only children (or give reasonable accounts for failures
at this). Winkler’s receptionist isn’t present “really.” Those who are, move
around here and now; but they also dip backward in time. This dipping
into the past and reconfiguration of its content into present anecdote or
reference, embedded in conversation if not in behavior more generally, is
what rounds a figure out as genuine rather than ersatz and simulated. I
exist now, fully and roundly, but I have also existed before, here or in other
places, in like or unlike situations, versions of which I could extract, re-
form, and present evidentially here and now. I can “quote myself.” I am here
because I took a path in order to arrive, and I can recollect at least some of
the landscapes visible from that path. The formula works in reverse, too. If
to seem real a character must share a past in the present, when a character
shares a past he or she seems real: a useful tip for writers and actors, who
might inadvertently focus too strongly on what is to come: have someone
just remember something; anything; just like that.
 YESTERDAYS  17

I remember sitting at a polished wooden table eating a delicious Caesar

salad at the moment the idea of writing this book came up.
With narrative characters this adjudication we make is of central
importance, because at their first appearance on the screen they really and
truly have come out of nowhere, out of pure non-history.1 The scripted
character has no past. For the watcher, she has arrived spontaneously (albeit
in close connection with a wholly made-up and carefully produced showing,
of which the making-up and production are meant both to capture our
attention and elude our consideration). She is, in fact, emerging out of thin
air, most especially when what we are looking at is an actor who has not
been seen on screens yet (or not been seen much). Yet to seem actual, to
merit our belief, such a character will gesture to “remember,” to own “a
past” blocked to us alone. The dialogue will be cheated to effect this illusion.
Here are the very first three speeches, from “Jimmy” and “Cliff,” sitting
with newspapers in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), with my
emphases to show how Jimmy points backward in time directly we set eyes
upon him:

JIMMY: Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to
be the same as last week’s. Different books—same reviews. Have you
finished that one yet?
CLIFF: Not yet.
JIMMY: I’ve just read three whole columns on the English Novel. Half
of it’s in French. Do the Sunday papers make you feel ignorant?

Because for a character The Past is an actorial and script invention, in plain
fact any character who behaved onscreen as though he or she had no access
to a past would be the realest possible character, but far too real, since our
game of nominating realism doesn’t buy this. We expect that any and every
real present—and the character is really present—has, for those who share
it, a precedent that only the wounded fail to access. The presence of the
character, like the presence of any one of us in a social scene, is modulated,
rounded out, nuanced by memories and hopes—hopes congruent with
memories.
To unmodulated extreme presence, presence in the here and now and
only in the here and now, a kind of unreality, a phantasmal quality attaches,
as was the case with his patient originally for Oliver Sacks.
To some degree I am spelling out elements of a textbook for actors. They
have learned that in order to seem strange and inexplicable they need only
behave as though they don’t have, or cannot access, a past—that is, as though

1
Except in the case of sequels (not so very frequent), where their origins are indeterminate,
being recognized by some audience members and entirely unknown by others.
18 THE FILM CHEAT

they are precisely what they are as scripted, floating constructs embedded
inexplicably in a contrived “present” that has, and can have, no relation to
any other time. Go back for one moment to those lines from Look Back.2
Jimmy was found asking Cliff whether he has read this newspaper every
single time the play ran, night after night, hundreds of times in total on the
West End and then some two hundred and fifty times on Broadway, and,
newborn each time, Cliff said he hasn’t, without any memory of having
been asked before and having given the same answer, verbatim. Here is the
reality of the drama, now. But that each of these can invoke past time brings
on the reality of character. Performance is scripted and carried out with
continual flickering rear views. That a character can seem to have a past is
the cheat of the script. Seem to have a past: give the impression of thinking
back, wondering, trying to remember or speculate, frame an argument on
putatively accepted (earlier) principles. (Interrogation scenes work with this
reaching backward as a fundamental material.)
In most filmic scenes of transport, where a character separates the self
from present diegetic circumstances in order to wonder, to daydream, to
worry backward, to try against all hope to remember what is forgotten, to
reach beyond this—this thing that is the present, this Now—a great deal can
be accomplished by the actor playing with special genuineness two kinds of
scripted lines: (a) those that bring up (supposable) memories; and (b) those
attesting, with substantial reason (we are to believe) that memory is out of
the question (post-traumatic scenes). And ironically, the character who is to
seem vitally and dramatically present will seem to be that way if the script
allows for the actor embedding a present experience in what is to seem,
and what is to be claimed as, a memory—even if later that memory will be
known to be entirely made up and false. “Oh God yes!, I remember now!,”
with the eyes popped wide open. The act of “remembering” itself makes for
the “normally real.”
But the central peg in such a performance, this genuine quality of playing
a truth, this way of making, supporting, modeling, and dramatizing the
simple directness of yes!, having found the lost memory!!!, is finally a quality
that is always, for the actor doing the work, a forthright lie. Owing to the
fact that the actor knows what it is to remember a past—his lunch today, his
rehearsals, a former love affair—he can fake remembering a past quite well.
But the character: no. The character only ever claims to have a memory, since
the character is but surface. And especially in film, where we are separated
by the screen even as we are brought near the screen, the claims as claims are

2
This play was elemental in British “kitchen sink” drama of the 1950s, and is widely credited
with introducing the character of the “angry young man” into culture. In 1959 Tony Richardson
released a film version starring Richard Burton and Gary Raymond as “Jimmy” and “Cliff,” but
the stage play at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square (May 8, 1956), had starred Kenneth
Haigh and Alan Bates.
 YESTERDAYS  19

more pertinent as such. My friend at lunch did cheat with me a little, as he is

accustomed to cheating regularly with others who must not, it seems, come
to the recognition that he does not know their faces, must not take the step
of finding him weird. He talked around my name, Joe?, Samuel?, Matthew?,
Harry?, Murray?, and brilliantly; skipped sentences that would require
him to utter it; and switched to related and demonstrably more interesting
subject matter. This friend had no past, it appeared, as far as remembering
my name was concerned. And his blocking me from taking explicit note
was his cheat. In respect of giving over the character as a person with a
past, actors are cheating, too: always, every time, since the central point of
dramatic presentation is that while the character cannot remember, without
claiming memory he would seem out of place.
 2
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
and Tomorrow

FIGURE 2 Margaret Hamilton (with Jack Haley, Judy Garland, and Bert Lahr in
the ball) in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, MGM, 1939).

On quite another order than memory is foretelling, the talent for seeing
what approaches from down the road, for helping us “eat the air, promise-
cramm’d.” To represent foretelling visually, David Lean constructs a scene
in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) where his protagonist, led into the farthest
reaches of the shining bleachy desert, stands with his guide near a solitary
 TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW  21

well. The guide makes bold to drink as Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) watches.
Blazing, almost incandescent sunlight, the sands whitened past exposure
limits, indistinguishable from the white sky. (We grasp why someone would
thirst for a drink there; and how disciplined Lawrence is by not going
along.) Suddenly, as he peers off toward the quivering horizon, Lawrence
sees (we see with him) a tiny dot bouncing. Now it grows a little larger and
seems, perhaps, just perhaps, a person. Dark against the white, hundreds of
millions of miles away. But growing larger and larger.
A sharp, sudden, reverberating shot.
And the guide lies dead.
Closer and closer and closer, until the rider can be made out, all dressed
in black, his face dark and glowing (Omar Sharif). “It was my well.”
Seeing what is far away in a future unknown. Seeing it coming. A very
carefully constructed shot, that took time and labor and a film stock with a
wide range of exposure.
Even the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) does not do this
looking ahead as well with her crystal ball. She stares into it and it sends a
(television) view of what we are to believe is happening now, somewhere far
away. But to be far away now is not necessarily to be in the future of she
who gazes there.
To see and know what will happen. Because canny Lawrence somehow
knows to hold off from drinking.
As with any stage play, the film actor will have been given the script in
advance of shooting; will have been in a position to read it through, to grasp
the many nuances of action he or she will have to embody for the camera.1
In Scene 22 I shall be meeting a person for the first time, in a hotel bar, over
cocktails. In Scene 184 I shall be naked in bed with that person. In Scene 225
that person will put a bullet between my eyes.
Thus, regardless of the order in which scenes are finished in principal
photography, while Scene 22 is being played the actor will act as though
entirely without consciousness of, entirely without regard for—even
without a hint to—what is to be done in 184 and 225. In 225, the actor
facing that gun will be playing a character whose characterological “life”
earlier on, in Scene 22, at that bar, had a certain removed quality (that we
shared), therefore a character, now, who remembers that bar back then,
that introductory moment, that first drink. The performing aspect can be
simple: as memory in action can be shown only through insert shots; the

1
Speaking to Jeffrey Brown about his stage performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a
Mockingbird (Shubert Theater, December 13, 2018), Jeff Daniels made the explicit point that
after as much as two years’ intense labor thinking through the character, learning all the lines,
imagining one’s way into the story, his method was to jettison all that as he walked onstage.
Éric Rohmer was reputed to use a similar technique when he went on scene to shoot. One has
it all, very securely, very intensively, and then one just walks on without it.
22 THE FILM CHEAT

remembering character looks exactly like a character not remembering.

When shooting 22, the actor knows that later on in the story he or she will
be “remembering this,” that this scene will found later action that the actor
can have known about in advance and can be thinking of all through the
work, can be ready for.
While characters tumble from experience to experience, and tumble
notably if they are to be believable, actors take calculated steps; they know
what is going to happen before it happens; they see the dot on the horizon.
Yet none of this presents exceptional difficulty on set because no matter
their training, in practice actors work existentially, living out the moment
as characters. They must be present in the moment, however it is designed,
and must summon the energy appropriate to the moment, the attitude, the
posture, and the emotional tone. If one concentrates on what is appropriate
for the present scene, earlier and later scenes will not matter since the chain
of appropriatenesses, scene by scene, is in the script. Thus proceeds the
systematized work of the actor. But beneath that systematized work is a
person, who brings a living self to the job, one whose living self is recorded,
in fact. The film is a record of the action of living selves. The person beneath
the actor beneath the character knows what is going on in a more complex
way than his labor calls for.
How does the performer cheat the story as a whole by managing a clear-
cut focus on a present moment, when he or she in fact knows more than a
present moment can show? Where does the performer lay away and store
the knowledge of the full script, which knowledge must never be allowed
in any one scene to come fully into play? As we are looking at knowledge,
not artifacts of knowledge (tape recordings, jpegs), the storage can be
nowhere but inside the performative body, the selfsame body in living action
before the lens. The actor’s task, then, is to establish and maintain a vital
bifurcation at work. The character shares the actor’s body, on and off—
the actor’s whole body—but must be constrained not to share the actor’s
whole consciousness. The character must have a consciousness apart from
the performer’s, a way of knowing, a storehold of awarenesses, an expertise,
a history of experience, a plan for the future. The character must give the
impression of being as much a person as the performer is when not at work
performing, a whole and rounded person, with the only exception that very
unlike the performer the character can be terminated at will and revivified
later, at will again. At the curtain call, night after night, or by means of
the closing credit scrawl, the character will be excused. But the performer
who made that character will not sleep quite yet, the finale being part of
the performance. Performers are, and must be, very awake as they work.
The performer cheats the viewer’s awareness by being fully present at every
dramatic moment while pretending successfully not to be. While pretending
to be someone else who is fully present, now in this moment closed off to
time.
 3
Narrative Transparency

FIGURE 3 Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, MGM, 1966), David Hemmings in

far background.

It is not only the past that believable characters access onscreen. They also
travel forward, relentlessly, and sometimes there is a remarkable occurrence:
the beings we are watching even seem to pass through the fourth wall, cross
the axis, so that they gain a point of view remarkably similar to what has
been afforded to us in our seats. Point of view: knowledge, awareness,
curiosity. Note that a character suddenly sharing a viewer’s knowledge is
not at all the same as a viewer suddenly sharing a character’s.1 We can note

1
A condition outlined thoroughly by Thomas Scheff, and discussed here in Chapter 5.
24 THE FILM CHEAT

the strangeness of the effect when a character seems to have recognized that
in general viewers are jumping from place to place (having been made to
jump), and now, hinting at where he is intending to be, aids us by leaping
ahead, by being prepared to offer greeting as he arrives: we are not following
the action, categorically speaking, because in this case when Joe or Helen
moves from A to B we find ourselves at B beforehand. The character action
is following us. And by rights, as we think, it should: if we have jumped
forward to meet the character on arrival, he or she had best arrive where
we wait. (How wondrous, yet how inexplicable, it might seem if we were to
jump to a location where, next, nothing happened.)
An elegant example of the “transparent” jump can be found in
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). There is a charming old junk
shop in southeast London, full of dusty treasures and enticing darkness.
Outside is a paved road leading up an easy slope toward a park. The
entrance to this park, as we can easily see, has tall trees with slender dark
trunks, side by side. A young photographer who has been scouting the junk
shop goes outside to catch a breath of air and starts, quite naturally for him,
to photograph the place, snip snap, snip snap, slowly backing away and up
the little rise toward the park but without seeing where his body is headed.
Snip. Snap. Snap. Snap.
We CUT.
We are now inside the park looking out at that little street, with the
photographer’s back turned our way and four trees directly in front of us,
separating us from him and the world outside. He turns our way, detects the
park, and walks up into it.
To make a conventional cut here, the editor would have lingered on the
photographer in the street until he stopped shooting and turned around:
turn the other way, see the park, then head up the rise to gain access. At some
instant just before he reached the entrance we would have cut to the inside,
now to be with him as he goes in—cutting inside only on the cusp of his
movement. His motion would lead the cut. Here, however, we see the park
before he does. We see it behind him, dwarfing him, enticing, beckoning. We
are enticed by the beautiful trees, waving in the wind, so green. We want to
go in there. The filmmaker (and his camera) permit us to do what we crave
to do. The character comes to “know” where we are, as it were, and moves
to join us. Our desire leads the cut.
In this way a character can behave as though he knows what we know
about the circumstances—what we know from watching this film of which
that character is unknowingly a part. It is not, after all, because we are
there that we spy that park. In a routine, obvious, and unannounced way
characters very generally open out action in front of audiences who are
watching action open out, and in doing this can be said to share if not
perspective at least sensibility. But here, in a specifically invoked way, a way
“out of the ordinary,” a character has knowledge that seems impossible or
 NARRATIVE TRANSPARENCY  25

odd, surely eerie, except for the silent intervention of forces on the other
side of the camera (and the other side of the screen). On the other side of the
screen is to be found that viewer, divided away from the character (so that the
character’s pains do not become the viewer’s). A sharing on the character’s
part of the viewer’s knowledge, an awareness of where the viewer is about to
be, of where he should travel in order to meet the viewer’s (important) gaze,
can happen only if the veil of “the screen” becomes temporarily permeable or,
as I am calling it, transparent.2 Through the screen, as it were, the character
can sense us, see our moves, divine our desires, and sympathize. Narrative
transparency. This is a cheat, of course. Arrangements have been made so
that events will appear to unfold this way. As “our” camera has brought us
forward in space and time, the character “magically arrives” to be met by
us instead of captaining the action; and sometimes this odd dance plays out
when the new (second) location is by no means obvious from the old (first)
one. Blow-Up is a good example. The photographer did not at first appear
to see the park at all, was not enchanted as we were in watching it behind
his back, and could with equal diegetic logic, if he got tired shooting the
junk shop, just as easily walk to his car and drive off. It wasn’t a guaranteed
conclusion that he would head our way. In film the character can always
go “anywhere” but almost always directs herself in a way we must wait
to understand. In narrative transparency, the character seems to have read
the script and thus know in advance: this is transparency because not only
can characters not read the script; they do not even know there is a script.
Wondrously, moving to the spot where we wait presents no difficulties for
her to overcome. Very briefly, perhaps for only a flash, it is as though he or
she knows the audience—knows that an audience is there and knows the
“self” of that audience, but the character must also know that the audience is
watching a movie, this movie. This movie made by actors. Consequentially,
it is as though the character knows the actor who is underneath. Apparently,
both we and the actor—first we and then the actor—moved according to
some plan available only on this side of the camera. We followed a friendly
camera, and the actor knew how to go in our tracks.
Another version:
As part of an unfolding story—say a crime mystery—we are transported to
examine the inside of a character’s house or apartment. Prowling around there
with our chum the camera, we discover all the boring normalities that make
lives interchangeable to some degree: room hooked to room, certain interesting
pieces of furniture, a sofa, a bed, a table lamp. But lo and behold, what’s this?:
a secret hiding place! A little nook behind the sugar jar. Fascinating! But we’d

2
A transparency that goes beyond the organized puncturing invoked by Michel Chion in his
book La toile trouée, a structuring phenomenon that gives viewers intimate access to characters’
worlds. In narrative transparency a character has (appears to have) access to a viewer’s.
26 THE FILM CHEAT

better not linger too long (it somehow being the case that while we puttered
around the kitchen there was no threat of the inhabitant returning but the
moment we set finger into the secret chamber the return is imminent!). We
have discovered the secret spot, at any rate, have gone where no one but the
absent resident has gone before. We’ve made a step. Imagine now that we
leave the scene and the film action continues. Later on, another character,
one we recognize (but who, like a typical character, does not know we exist)
and also someone we know as being a hunter after the secret object, gains
access to the same apartment, on whatever narrative pretext, but immediately
she is inside the door, instead of puttering around drawers and cabinets and
under beds as we did, proceeds straight to the secret spot we found earlier,
the spot we found only after considerable hunting. The discoverer shares our
secret hunting diary, as it were, reads our notes that exist only “out there,
beyond the screen,” all in the interest of moving the story along. The detective
finding the door to the hero’s secret laboratory, just quickly enough to stop
the murder about to take place there but far too quickly for someone who has
never been there before. Take the townspeople in 1931 intuiting where to find
Frankenstein’s monster, up in the rocky crags.
A subtler variation of the narrative transparency cheat is used de rigueur
in chase sequences, all of which, from the Keystone Kops to Bullitt (1968)
and 6 Underground (2019) and beyond, depend on some pursuer P hot
on the trail of some evader E, moving, most often, through a fascinating
warren of architectural forms urban, exotic, or labyrinthine. One need
hardly catalog the celebrated chase sequences in James Bond films, which
form but a microcosm within the catalog. As P(ursuer) races after E(vader),
a number of considerations come into play:
●● Pursuer cannot catch up to Evader too soon, for two reasons.
The catch is the end of the chase, and the pleasure of watching
demands prolongation as much as the proportions of the narrative
can make possible. But also, if P catches E somewhat easily, then E
is evidently not so spirited or talented an evader, probably doesn’t
merit the extravagance of the chase at all, in the audience’s eyes.
This is not a diegetic issue, since in any chase-style diegesis E will
always seem to merit being chased by P simply on the face of it: the
chase is happening, P is eager to have E and shows the eagerness; E’s
flight shows the hunger for freedom (Chuck Jones’s Road Runner
cartoons). For the viewer to have a sporting thrill, P and E must be
reasonably matched. But the catch-up must be held off for a further,
quite dominant reason: because, in the end, the chase is not about
the catch, because the P-E inter-relation is not about the value of E
to P or to the audience, the actual moment of the catch, if it comes,
can be as deflating as it is satisfying (as would happen in Bullitt
without a fireball explosion adding hot sauce to the soup).
 NARRATIVE TRANSPARENCY  27

●● Neither P nor E can sustain an injury or succumb to an accident

that vitiates the chase. Accidents must have, as in music, only
accidental weight. See the Monte Carlo racing sequence in John
Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), where the cars represent P1,
P2, P3, and so on, and the E figure is the finish line. When one
of the cars goes off the track in a horrible crash, the others just
keep chasing, and attention to the destruction can come only after
the race is done. The chase outstrips all other action. More: as a
rhythmic continuity the chase, not the catch, being the audience’s
pleasure, nothing can curtail the chase. Cutting it off for reasons
however logical—say, a thunderstorm is making it impossible for
P to see E in the heavy rain—nevertheless makes the filmmaker’s
invocation of the chase format seem ill-advised in retrospect (since
both the chase and the thunderstorm are the filmmaker’s doing).
Why invoke a process (that is extraordinarily expensive, dangerous,
tricky to manage, and fraught with difficulty) only to throw it away?
●● Neither P nor E can behave as though the eccentricities of the locale
are non-existent since only a locale with eccentricities establishes a
chase as dramatic (and, as per Ruskin, Romantic). The eccentricities
are all. Watch the parkour chase in District B13 (Banlieue 13
[2004]). The complicated apartment-complex environment acts as
a resistance to the electrical flow of E who flashes by in the lead,
with P (a gang) following: slammed doors, slick corridor halls, other
people’s bedrooms, transoms, window escapes, leaps from rooftop
to rooftop. Without eccentric resistance, the chase is only two mad
figures running. Interestingly, if the setting is featured but entirely
disattended by P and E, the filmmaker looks silly. If it is disattended
or altogether elided by the filmmaker, so that the chase is an
interlocking and alternating series of medium close-ups of individual
speeders, then the chase makes reference only to the stamina,
courage, and spiritual powers of each individual; but for this sort of
interaction, some kind of battle, contained and carefully staged, is
more apt to show proper diegetic action than a chase would be.

The chase form will work effectively whether or not the purpose of the
pursuit is made clear, whether or not we know which of the two participants,
if either, means harm, or which could do more harm, and indeed whether
or not we are gaining access to the full circumstances. One of the format
requirements of James Bond films is a pre-credit chase sequence of
astonishing speed, athleticism, derring-do, and difficulty placed in one or
more environments of spectacular bizarreness or unlikeliness; the context, if
given at all, will come only (much) later. The chase alone is enough, P after
E, P after E again, P still after E, P closing in on E with increasing odds of
success or increasing odds of failure or no perceptible odds at all. Not P
28 THE FILM CHEAT

after E because; not P after E lest; not in order that, or owing to the fact that,
or even catering to the whims of Z, the powerful third party. Only P after
E, nothing more. Method is relatively immaterial, too. Run by foot, drive by
car, fly by helicopters, ski on a steep slope, what have you. P in pursuit of
E, P wanting to possess E, the formula of capitalism. P after E, P wanting to
do E damage, the formula of retribution.3 A good example begins On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).
The film chase is a chain of narrative transparencies, typically, since we
do not follow P (and very often not even E) but stand where they are about
to be so that they can arrive after us. (As though they are but pretending to
a chase, so that we can be entertained!) Now a fourth consideration:
●● P and E do the dramatic event no courtesies by disappearing from
view no matter how hard they struggle, no matter how hungry each
is to succeed. We have to see because the chase isn’t for them, it isn’t
for P who needs to corner E, it isn’t for E who needs to evade P, it’s
for us.

And here arrives the fundamental cheat of the form. As far as the
choreographic design is concerned, P’s hunt for E will seem believable only if
E is evasive, in short, if E is given plenty of opportunity to change direction,
find alleyways, jump over fences, migrate through cramped spaces, fling
himself into the air, dart around laundry hanging on the line, all of these
obstacles unexpected and unforeseen by P. But in order that we may see
these escapades, the camera must foresee first. (Foresee position, lens,
lighting requirements, focal problems.) Must establish us there before the
character comes. Must force the character to intuit where to be next (to
peek at the script).
One can twist this examination yet further. Even in scenes that are not
chase scenes, just simply dramatic encounters running one after another, the
elements of the film are arranged in something like a chase, events constantly
being pursued by characters, and here, too, we must always be placed for
an ideal view. As Donald Crafton writes, it is possible to be “using the
term Chase metaphorically, suggesting the linear trajectory of the narrative
in general, not a specific instance” (111). One could argue it is through
narrative transparency that we manage to see all of the cinematic story, since
we are enabled to leap ahead of the action without noting the cheat: the
action seems to be cannily following us. The pursuit sequence models what
normally happens before the camera but with all the stakes raised, all the
conditions extrematized for high visibility.

3
What Kenneth Boulding called the exchange system and the threat system (Personal
conversation, October 1966).
 NARRATIVE TRANSPARENCY  29

Before any character “knows” how to commit an action (to the extent
that we can imagine a character knowing), knows where to sit, knows
what to eat, knows what street to walk or race down, knows what flight
to take to Tijuana, the camera must know because the camera will be there
first. But no sign will be given of this foreknowledge, save that it will result
in the successful vision. No character will acknowledge a bond with the
camera, even in face-to-lens moments such as abound in Alfie (1966) where
the (Michael Caine) face is aimed only at a non-lens or with Matthew
Broderick’s categorical adorableness in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), but
character thoughts can never seem bonded to production contingencies. The
script must cheat the fact that it is always one step ahead.
Without being one step ahead, it cannot function as a script. And
without being one step ahead the camera would show nothing but a kind
of afterimage.
By contrast, if we know the camera is one step ahead, if somewhere it
actually tells us it is—Hello! Watch how I always know where to go!—the
tension and thrill are leached out of the film.
The more elaborate the territory, the more pitfalls it contains, the more
apartments are in the corridor, the more narrow the transoms above their
doors, the more restricted or even obstructed the alleyways with barbed
wire fences at the end, the more contrived will seem the camera’s canny
placements, and thus the more artificial will seem our easy ability to see
clearly—always to see clearly, even too clearly—how the character daringly
moves. Yet without elaboration, territory becomes flat and tedious, fades
off, and the strength of the character(s) takes over. In this light compare
District B13, with David Belle’s fabulous precarious parkour maneuvers
and Manuel Teran’s marvelously sentient camera, with Cornel Wilde’s
The Naked Prey (1965), where in an extended and breathless sequence an
almost naked victim must flee barefoot across the African landscape while a
group of marksmen, ceremonially clad and bearing sharp spears, chase after
him as their prey. With both, the P-E shot sequence model is fully in use,
especially involving a “sentient” camera that always knows how to signal
the character where it will be, but the dangerous eccentricity in B13 signals
the technique spatially and the signals in Prey are characterological.
As any instant of narrative transparency could easily be a dangerous
reflection of the audience to itself (the character playing to a camera; the
camera rendering the picture to the viewer), it is typically edited with
distracting visual discontinuity and accompanied by pulsing and exciting
musical cues, also composite elements of the cheat. The character’s “reading
the production from behind” functions unceasingly while being unceasingly
out of view.
 4
The Cheating Cut

FIGURE 4 Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, RKO, 1941).

If any and every edit is a kind of cheat, undetected or unaffirmed by audiences

as itself while they buy into the seamlessness promised by production
grammar, it leads us to shift, with calculated ease, away from what we are
looking at presently and from the position in narrative space we occupy
in that looking. As we know well, yet do not acknowledge, there is no
way to effect such easy movement other than by way of a camera-eye that
 THE CHEATING CUT  31

moves, that is, through some effect of the filmmaking. A camera-eye that
moves, which is to say, a mechanical and logical arrangement for moving
the camera, some invisible and tightly planned production involving such as
shots, lights, ancillary personnel, a divided script, a developing character—
all the things we would prefer to claim we have no truck with while we
watch and become caught up by the film. Not only that editing is set to be
invisible (as it is); but that editing-set-to-be-invisible is invisible. And finally
the moving camera—its being, its motion—is read onto the character. And
actors are aware of this.
Almost all narrative film is edited, made up of numerous shots that
are hooked together (on historical variations in the length of shots, see
Bordwell). The shooting script is a kind of manual for fashioning the various
parts that will be collected to make the film.1 In watching a film we agree
to move discreetly and unconsciously from one isolated shot to another
and in moving to understand the character as moving and being moved to
move. Discreetly and unconsciously, as in “without acknowledging our own
action” (as it is prompted and made possible by what shines on the screen
to be seen). We effectively move through the story, but we move thinking
ourselves stationary and imagining that it is the story that moves. The fiction
of cinema demands that we digest and neglect our own motion without
comment, even when, as with the Moscow chase in Paul Greengrass’s The
Bourne Supremacy (2004), the shot transitions are lightning fast, even in
some instants unperceivable (quarter-second) blurs. In refusing to comment
on our own motion we deny it. As long as we seem ready to play by the
rules of this game of secrecy, editors can reasonably expect us to put up with
any transition however outlandish, our only alternative being an open (and
sullying) doubt as to how one could get there from here, so quickly and with
no obstruction, no traffic jam.2
Of course the cheater who behaves with extravagant panache will not
only go scot free but also gain immense credibility as a genius, the unnoted
discontinuity he or she may have presented, the chasm across which one
leaps, showing off as a kind of triumphant battle scar after the unforgiving
turmoil of creative work. Three marvelous edit cheats, forward motion
accomplished so effortlessly it seems as natural as rain, with each of these
standing upon, evidencing a script built to support it and give it display.
One can write for cinema with full knowledge that the camera’s jumping is
a standard possibility. One can write with the invisible pen.

1
The “Building an Interocitor” sequence at the beginning of This Island Earth (1955) is a
chilling, but also wholly entertaining comment on breakdowns and constructions, multiple
parts for making unified wholes. Underneath both this rendition and the studio process itself is
Durkheim’s “organic solidarity” (Division Ch. III).
2
Excepting the one the diegesis imposes, of course at a critical moment. See The Taking of
Pelham One Two Three (1974).
32 THE FILM CHEAT

●● Citizen Kane (1941; ed. Robert Wise). Humiliated and rejected by

his wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), who has (stridently
and proudly) walked out on him, Kane enters her fabulous bedroom
at the fabulous castle Xanadu and fully trashes it. There he comes
upon his tiny snow globe and picks it up thoughtfully. He stumbles
through the door and into the hall, where his majordomo (Paul
Stewart) and servants stand anxiously waiting. Staggering, his
legs like lead, he moves past them down a long hallway. We see
his reflection, tiny in an immense inset wall mirror to screen right.
Then an improbable cut that somehow seems probable. We have
jumped several leaden steps ahead of Kane. He is approaching the
camera from the left and around a curve, still staggering, his eyes
beads of darkness, and as the camera in its new position gently pans
rightward with him we follow the body passing in front of what
seems a hall of giant mirrors (an effect produced by one mirror
on each side of the hall, although the one behind us isn’t visible).
Kane appears now in boundless recursion,3 one mirror cameo inside
another inside another inside another, retreating forever and to
infinity. In every one of them he is striding, beat . . . beat . . .
beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat. The
image of Kane as a multiple self, the unboundedly puissant Charles
Foster Kane (Orson Welles), populating his own little universe—an
Orson Welles universe, of course—all of these Kanes stepping in
unison like an army on the march. An army on the march against
the enemy, She of No Faith, or the outside world with its caustic
gaze, or anyone who might pity him, anyone who might come to
know his awful secret.4

But that apparently unobtrusive cut from the long shot of Kane walking
away from us and down the corridor, his tiny reflection stalwart if wooden
at right, to the shot of him stumbling forward toward the camera which will
discover the hall of mirrors: the cut that confers upon Kane the inevitability
of his multiplicity, that shows him marching toward a future—that cut is
telltale, outlandish. Why? Because it is another thing altogether to offer a
straight continuity of motion, a pickup of the moving man to follow him
stepping along, and indeed the promise of “straight continuity” is what
operates as a pretext for the cut. Kane moves, stay with Kane. Keep following

3
Interestingly, perhaps strangely, this recursion was pictured as well, and in the same year, using
Joan Crawford, in George Cukor’s A Woman’s Face (with cinematography by Robert Planck);
then paid homage by Jean-Pierre Melville using Charles Vanet in his L’aîné des Fercheaux
(1963).
4
Yet at the same time a scathing Wellesian reference to Triumph des Willens (1935) and thus
allusion to the model for his character, William Randolph Hearst, as a Nazi sympathizer.
 THE CHEATING CUT  33

him, see what he becomes. But here, the second shot is a whole new world,
in effect a whole new destination, as though in a new dimension, something
marvelous in itself, something unexpected and unexpectable, calculated
to give the viewer a chill and a thrill: quickly, blatantly, with quaver and
reverberation. The shots until this have been cut together to follow action
and characterological feeling: Kane amok in the bedroom, Kane stunned in
the doorway, Kane jerking away from the scene of the crime (this bedroom
has been his trysting place with Susan, no doubt), Kane dropping away
from the servants down the vacuous hall. Complete coherence, even logic,
and aesthetic sensibility, too. Then suddenly a jump to a perspective that is
nothing short of galvanizing. An entire camera and lighting crew, among
many others, had to be at work in order to effect this magic, and for the
editor Robert Wise still more work, to effect the transition in such a way
that no one would notice.5
Galvanizing from Luigi Galvani (1737–98), who was fascinated with the
body’s transmission of, and susceptibility to, electricity. Bioelectromagnetic
pioneer. Feeling and sentiment, the muscles (of expression) as electrical.
Medical electricity. The Galvanic idea is that electricity is resident in the
body itself, whether or not the body is stimulated from an outside source.
Seeing the Kane-mirror shot we have a frisson of pleasure and wonder, a
jolt, and so we can say the shot is galvanizing. Yet our principal character
Kane is clearly on the verge of a fugue at this point, rigid of posture, robotic
even, and silent because all his language (he was a newspaper baron) is now
swallowed in catatonia. The galvanization is in the viewer, not the character.
Kane in the bedroom, Kane in the doorway, Kane in the corridor . . . all
electrically disconnected, but then, in a cut that audiences accept without
questioning, even without detecting for what it is, Kane as the depleted and
progressively shrinking doll, our doll, the doll that with a jolt jumps away
from, and into, itself. A focus of vision, surely; but in the mirror shot there is
no one to look at him but the viewer outside, who looks at the whole.
An ominous musical cue helps create the ersatz effect of the earlier
shots being blended, through transition, into the mirror shot, but while
it develops the action, while it expands and enriches our sense of Kane’s
world, nevertheless that mirror shot is not about Kane as much as it is about
our thrill in observation. It works as what Tom Gunning, writing of early

5
I can only notice in the way that legion scholars and cinephiles notice such things nowadays,
freezing a frame to study it, repeating a movement over and over and over, reading about it
perhaps, certainly not being forced by circumstance, as the viewers in 1941 were, to grab
whatever I could get as the movie rolled on, rolled even away from the theater and into what
would have seemed then like obscurity. After initial screenings and subsequent B-exhibition in
smaller venues months later, the form was that a film would simply “go,” and viewers had no
way at all to retrieve it until the videotape revolution of the 1970s, if then.
34 THE FILM CHEAT

cinema, termed an “attraction.” It seizes us improbably and draws us (away

from the story plane) into a reverie.
The design here was effected by the filmmaker in consultation with his
editor, his cinematographer, and his designer, because the jump shot depends
entirely on the structure of the set, which had to be conjured in advance and
also tested to be sure a precise effect could be given. Welles, then, with Wise,
Gregg Toland, and Van Nest Polglase. Welles as performer, too, because
thinking back we can see that the slow stumbling gait, the jerky hesitations,
are all in place so that at the instant Kane comes in front of the mirrors
he can seem to pause there (for breath, for reflection, for inspiration) thus
aggrandizing our thrill at his endlessly recursive chain of selves.
●● The Long, Long Trailer (1954; ed. Ferris Webster). Comedic
pratfalls generally work through a strange admixture of narrative
transparency (see Chapter 3) and character self-abasement. When a
joke is set up elaborately we follow along with keen attention, eager
to know in what direction we are being led for the explosive finale.
We don’t foresee that finale (the joke would “fall flat” if we did), but
we march along desiring it and sensing its approach. For the joke
to work keenly, the punch has to be unpredictable from the set-up,
not so very unpredictable as to elude comprehension but not so
predictable, either, as to fit comprehension too well.6 A “bad joke,”
in fact, is one for which the listener or viewer can see the punch far
too soon, even soon enough to imagine or state it before it happens.
With comedy film, as with all film but here more expressly, more
flamboyantly, we happily take a ride toward a future we do not
know. But the successful ride depends on a shift of scene.

The successful ride takes us somewhere else, a destination entirely missing

from the map. In slapstick, this movement is decidedly physical, throwing
the body of the performer into turmoil but also terminating the present
performer/viewer “voyage” in an entirely unanticipated way. But when
something is unanticipated it surprises; and when something is a surprise
it comes to consciousness. The filmmaker’s cheat here is to bring off the
slapstick surprise without conveying to the viewer that he is bringing off a
slapstick surprise, to cause explosive surprise without permitting awareness
by the surprised viewer that she is surprised. The viewer must therefore
find some astounding strength to be present for the punch, call it the ability
to leap, without knowing it. This means, finally, leaping without knowing
how the figure onscreen makes the leap, since the viewer’s attention is
contractually bound to the character. As Goffman writes,

6
For discussing punch lines with me I am grateful to Alex Clayton and Tom Hemingway.
 THE CHEATING CUT  35

If the onlookers laugh when the clown suddenly finds himself falling like
a stone it is because they had all along been projecting their musculature
and sensibilities sympathetically into his walk and now find that their
leaning into his anticipated conduct, into the anticipated guidedness of
his doings, their framed prediction of what is to come, is disordered.
(Frame Analysis, 381)

How does the character manage to travel to the punch, the new location
apparently unplanned and unforeseen at the beginning—but still, of course,
intensively planned, intensively foreseen, for the benefit of the actor and that
of the camera, which must permit the audience to be there to receive the
character when he arrives? This is where the narrative transparency comes
into play. The character must somehow be reading the audience’s mind (the
audience/the camera), the traveling mind that lets the camera ride away with
it. The camera is the script, so, weirdly if unnoticeably, the audience has
access to the script. But now, apparently, so does the character.
As is known albeit forgotten: while actors have deep access to the script
the characters they play have none. For the characters, indeed, there is no
script; no camera; no audience; only plastic space and time. This is a space-
time in which it is not so very easy to believe. Our thought keeps dropping
back to the actor with her script, with her plans, with her foreknowledge of
the scene, and must be cheated if pleasure is to ensue.
The character’s apparent foreknowledge (assuming that we can
countenance a character having knowledge of any kind!)—the impression we
could have, were we to consider the situation quite fully, that the character
had somehow read the filmmaker’s mind, because at some punch line even
if the floor is pulled away from the character still the character found that
floor first—might reveal itself in numerous ways beyond his or her appearing
in a distal location to be met by the camera. A character could appear in a
proximal location, even in the same location, but, time having passed, in a
way especially idealized for camera, posing as she would never have posed
in other circumstances. The change of state, as it were, is the jump forward.
And in that renovated pose, a character could deliver an action not only
fresh and unheralded but one that the camera was ideally placed to see, an
action that would lose all its oomph were it to be seen from any other place.
The pose-to-camera is found through transparency, but more: when we see
this climactic pose, when we respond by exploding into a laugh or a gasp,
the thing as a configuration and a design will seem quite inevitable, although
previously it was unimagined, improbable. Improbable inevitability.
The telling case is Desi and Lucy. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, two
catastrophes waiting to happen, as viewers in the 1950s happily knew.
An urban couple, they have acquired a long, long trailer and set off to see
the majestic countryside. They know nothing of maneuvering a trailer,
and little more about driving altogether. Many hilarious and precipitous
36 THE FILM CHEAT

escapes line up (Vincente Minnelli going over the top with set-up jokes),
including one in which Desi goes apoplectic trying to back the trailer into
a suburban driveway. Finally, thrillingly and relievedly on the road, Lucy
has decided to make a fancy dinner while he drives. Beef ragout, some kind
of white cake iced with gentility, a Caesar Salad (in a huge bowl: “You
don’t cut the lettuce, you tear the lettuce!”). She is dressed in a lovely dark
green full-length dress, looking a little like a Caesar Salad herself—a nifty
foreshadowing. We know things have to go wrong—this is Desi and Lucy!
He is up front idiotically singing: he believes himself an operatic tenor, and
is bellowing nonsense news: “We’re having beeeef ragouuuut! And Cae-e-
e-e-esar Sal-l-l-l-l-l-l-ad!” The road is bumpy, the trailer rocks, left right, up
down. Lucy is challenged, to put it mildly. The lettuce is flying out of the
salad bowl, especially when, having cracked in two raw eggs, she makes
to toss it by hand. Soon it is on the floor, and also on her head, and the
cupboard door has flown open so that all the foodstuffs are flying out,
unlimited quantities of white flour spraying all over her and mixing with the
salad moisture to make a kind of sticky dough that clings to her hands and
dress as, with increasing desperation (and increasing energy), she careens,
slips, twists, jerks, and collapses around the trailer. (Nobody but Lucille Ball
could do this so magnificently, not even, I beg to say, Chaplin.) But now for
the silent punch. The camera “discovers” her in a tableau moment, body
dumped up against a corner like a sack of flour itself, shoulders slumped in
vivid now-splotched green, legs spread helplessly, head dangling as though
from strings: she is a giant marionette. Her eyes look into the lens beckoning
and surrendering (as in a Warner Bros. cartoon). And the body is positioned
perfectly at frame-center, a frame in which the food detritus is reduced so
that only defeated, deflated Lucy is visible as content. It is as though she has
collapsed with intent here, just in order to be seen this way in a feature shot.
The feature shot is the joke’s payoff.
But there is more:
As we look at her in pity, from screen left the trailer door flies open and
Desi pops in to say, with exquisite inanity, “Is everything all right, Lucy?,”
whereupon with her left hand (screen right) she quite suddenly plants what
looks like a cream pie in his face. (We realize it is the remainder of the cake.)
Not only was the scene constructed for a beautiful (and beautifully messy)
portrait of (beautifully messy) Lucy, it was constructed ideally to show the
whipped-cream gag from the perfect angle—one that gives complete access
to not only the goo but also Desi’s stupefied surprise. A payoff’s payoff.
Here again, choreography is kept out of view and beyond suspicion.
Were viewers to see arrangements, the sort of arrangements necessary for
setting up this long final shot with its two-beat conclusion, the delightful
haphazardness of the action would dissolve. It is Lucy’s foibles apparently
occurring without (or against) plan that makes them funny. What is cheated
is the arrangement of action for camera, not some aspect of the action itself
 THE CHEATING CUT  37

(since the moment we see Lucy with food we intuit that she is going to
become food). The scene is a little dance, with the finale chord being the
concluding pose. And the camera, we see too late, was dancing, too.
●● 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; ed. Ray Lovejoy). One of the
supremely celebrated and much-recognized edits in cinema history,
for which almost no description is required. In prehistoric times,
Moonwatcher (Dan Richter), a violent ape who has just picked up a
tapir bone from a skeleton and brandished it as a (first) weapon now
hurls it up into the sky, and just after the white rectangle reaches
its apogee and begins its descent POOF! it magically turns into a
white rectangular spaceship against a black star field. Robert Kolker
describes it vividly:
The bone-white spaceship falls gracefully in the interstellar ballet
that synchronizes its movements with that of the space station.
Johann Strauss’s waltz “The Blue Danube” plays on the sound
track—nineteenth-century music accompanying twenty-first
century space technology. Death (the bone) seems to give way
instantly to life—the exciting future of space travel. (611)

Not only death-into-life but time-against-time. A leap forward several million

years in a jump cut. To see the transparency here, consider the ship—which
for the moment is the protagonist—as a sentient entity (surely it represents
advanced sentience) that not only cruises through hyperspace as we find
it but acknowledges itself to have been cruising through time, through
eons, now both sensing the dramatic irony of this fact and adjudging the
precise spot to find itself where our camera will be, so that the irony can be
hammered home. (Punch line.) Imagine the cut if there was no object-on-
object match . . .! Not only does Kubrick know this spaceship, this spaceship
knows Kubrick. This conjunction is achieved through nothing less than
editorial acumen, since the ship must be picked up at a particular point
in the rectangle and matched with the bone at a corresponding point in
order for the magical metamorphosis to seem believable: these are, after all,
two distinct pieces of film, each of which was framed independently. Man’s
long journey from the exceedingly primitive to the technically advanced,
curtained off in a split-second metaphor by an edit foretold in the script.
How fortunate for the aesthetically hungry viewer, and for the ship as star
of a hilarious ironic moment, that the camera just happens to be present and
ready to make the match, as the plans predicted it would.

* * *

Conventional sequential editing—the editing together of the pieces of

a single sequence of actions—has a progressive grammar, with the shots
38 THE FILM CHEAT

following one another more or less as the movement within them dictates,
notwithstanding that inserts can be added. A character reaches a stairway;
the character is seen climbing the stairs; the character reaches the top
of the stairs. With each successive shot added on, there is instigated no
particular surprise that the character having been located in the previous
shot now appears in this one: the action itself is taken to make a dictate.
With narrative transparency, ensuing action is not logically probable and
so when the camera jumps for a position to see, it jumps as a result of the
director’s dictate, and the character’s arrival is finally, effectively, in response
to the jumping camera. This, simply, is why I see it as a situation in which
the character sees through the production wall to the camera itself. The
editing in narrative transparency hides, as it were, beneath the grammar of
conventional sequential editing, which shapes most of the film space we see
and also our steadily ongoing expectation.
 5
Narrative Opacity

FIGURE 5 Outside London’s Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much
(Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1956).

We may consider narrative opacity to be a condition in which the actual or

potential establishment of narrative transparency is itself pointed to overtly
and directly, a pulling back to reveal a magic now completed or a magic
that, entirely within the magician’s power, is held back. But this pointing
undetectably cheats the coverage of something else, as in the recursive
conundrum where revealing something to have been revealed hides that
the revealing of the revealing is not being revealed. “Here!” the filmmaker
can seem to whisper; “here is what you may have recognized as ‘narrative
transparency,’ but look at me using it quite intentionally, without covering
it up, to produce a particular effect regarding which there is something I’m
40 THE FILM CHEAT

covering, something else you don’t know.” Although I have looked at it

before (see Man), here is another peek at the much-celebrated Albert Hall
concert sequence in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); it
works upon a signal narrative opacity.
We are placed ahead of her to see Jo McKenna (Doris Day) arrive
breathless at London’s Royal Albert Hall: narrative transparency. She has
been advised that Scotland Yard’s Inspector Buchanan (Ralph Truman) will
be found there and she is desperate to see him for assistance in finding her
kidnapped son, who is tucked away she-doesn’t-know-where. At this point,
Jo is relatively uninterested in the concert program tonight. Her missing
son is all she is thinking about, and also Buchanan, who might be able to
discover where he is.
However:
We are interested in that program, and in the pertinent fact that it is to
be performed here at this place and tonight. While it could possibly seem as
though transparency is in play, with Jo “knowing” and “being interested”
just as we are, because she arrives just at the place where we already wait to
find her (at the drive-in on Kensington Gore), nevertheless she is there for
one reason and we have preceded her for quite another (our interest in the
Hall having little to do with Buchanan and his presumable powers). Why do
we care about the program, specifically the cantata that will be featured in
it? Because we received—but Jo did not—a briefing about tonight’s concert
as, in an upstairs room at Ambrose Chapel, Drayton (Bernard Miles) played
an excerpt for his hired assassin (Reggie Nalder) to make plain the precise
musical cue for taking the decisive shot. There will be a downbeat at this
concert tonight—we know but Jo does not—fatal and politically incendiary.
Jo’s arrival is based on reasoning different from our own when we arrive
(and catch on an outside billboard that, as expected, the “Storm Clouds”
cantata is to be performed). Different reasoning: note that in attending the
rehearsal, “flies on the wall,” we could easily presume a condition of narrative
transparency, as we could find ourselves doing frequently in cinema without
having conscious awareness: Jo, who is not here, is somehow reading our
mind, or reading Drayton’s mind, or reading the Assassin’s mind, or reading
Hitchcock’s mind, and learning the kill cue just as we are. But no, Hitchcock
goes to lengths to assure us that Jo is not doing that. Jo is not in the Chapel,
nor anywhere near enough to learn what we learn. Hitchcock shows her
outside in the street (in a complex and expensive matte composite). It is so
easy to forget that the narrative flow involving Jo carries the story action
forward from that street, where she is finally unable to convince the police
there is trouble inside, to the Albert Hall, where she hopes to find Buchanan.
The filmmaker’s intention for us is that we are carried with the “rehearsal”
in mind to the Hall where, unbeknownst to Jo and every other ticket buyer,
the music that was “rehearsed” will be performed to dire consequence.
Parallel tracks that do not meet—at least, not yet.
 NARRATIVE OPACITY  41

All of the clues in the Albert Hall sequence are double clues, then, directed
in two separate vectors at the same time, one vector aimed toward [A] Jo on
her Buchanan hunt, another toward [B] the musically informed viewer (one
toward an observer who knows what the future will bring, “what will be”;
one toward an observer who does not1):
●● [i] When, in Kensington Gore, she moves past the poster into the
lobby [A] Jo (the American tourist who, even earlier in life, as a
famous performer, never gave a show here) is certifying to herself
that yes, this is the Royal Albert Hall, the place where Buchanan
will be; whereas [B] oblivious to Buchanan we are noting that this
is the place where the cantata will be sung (and even, thanks to
Hitchcock’s considerateness in showing the poster, the names of
those who will perform it).
●● [ii] When in the lobby Jo encounters the Assassin (whom [A] she
knows to be a strange man she saw at her hotel room door in
Marrakech, but not an assassin, while [B] we know him for who
he really is because we watched him “rehearse”) and he threatens
her with the life of her son, [A] she is made especially desperate to
find Buchanan; whereas [B] we confirm to ourselves that the man
who practiced with Drayton, and smirked intelligently at the man’s
condescension, is now here in front of us, fully equipped and ready.
●● [iii] When Buchanan makes his (grand) entrance along with
the portly visiting Prime Minister (Alexei Bobrinskoy) and his
Ambassador (Mogens Wieth), [A] Jo thinks, “Oh yes!, there is
Buchanan now! Maybe I could signal to him?”; but [B] we think,
“Ahhh, that plump man in Buchanan’s care is the target. Alive now,
dead soon.”
●● [iv] When the music begins, [A] Jo is swept away by the flow
of it, and more deeply anxious about her son and the fact that
she couldn’t talk to Buchanan, while [B] we are on track for the
assassination shot, listening through the score (the script) for
the right moment. Jo is not listening for a cue; she is listening to
the music integrally. Were she as aware as we are that a killing is
planned here, and that this cantata will trigger it, her lack of action

1
An underpinning irony being that Jo McKenna (Jo Conway, the famous singer) is musically
informed, thus a very particular member of this audience, perhaps even more knowledgeable
than the viewer of the film, yet Hitchcock makes her musicality seem irrelevant for the moment.
When the cantata begins, her response as a listener (to the orchestra under Bernard Herrmann
and the singer Barbara Howitt) becomes far more sympathetic, far more musical in the quality
of its sensitivity. The many other patrons are carefully shown sitting expressionless as statues
(the intended victim notably included).
42 THE FILM CHEAT

as she listens, undisturbed until her husband arrives, would be

incomprehensibly deplorable, not worthy of a film’s hero.

If in a more conventional development the ongoing story would have

been transparent to Jo, if she would have raced up to the concert hall fully
intending to block the concert, here it is kept opaque instead. We have a
fully unobstructed window through which to examine the opacity she faces,
and her facing it, if only we recollect and acknowledge the central gearing in
the mechanism, our presence and Jo’s absence at that “rehearsal.”
Thomas Scheff writes of the “ladder of awareness” in narrative. The
characters and the audience stand together, as it were, on various rungs of
such a device, it being conceivable for us to stand on a higher rung than
a principal character, on the same rung, or on a rung beneath. Similarly,
each character can be placed with, above, or below other characters. In
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), to offer an example that has provoked
considerable discussion—Hitchcock being a real master of “ladder”ing—
the audience is (shockingly) placed above the central protagonist at a key
moment in the film, and must now wait in anxious suspense to see whether
he will ascend to share their height or not; and if he does, what will happen.
Given that this protagonist suffered horribly from fear of heights, as we have
all too clearly seen, the narrative problem of him climbing or not climbing
a “ladder” is metaphorized and complexified! Narrative opacity, as I am
calling it, is essentially produced through a differential in the “height” of
the audience and a key character, the separate knowledge that belongs to
the audience being significantly different from the knowledge that belongs
to the character not only in its content but in terms of how crucial it is for
the narrative as a whole. In the Albert Hall sequence of Man, Jo finding
Buchanan in the concert somewhere is far less crucial to events generally
than what is going to happen with the music. She would never be able to
credit this, but we know with certainty. Also, for fans of the film or fans of
argument: when Jo does come to her senses about the assassination, she is
obliged to keep firmly in mind what she was told in the lobby, that she’d
better do nothing obstructive because her son’s safety “will depend on you
tonight!”
The opacity in this case is a script cheat. Two interesting reasons, one
positive and one negative:
Negatively,
●● Were Jo to know what we know about the Royal Albert Hall—
essentially that it is the scene of a forthcoming tragedy—her
behavior as the music played would have had to be different,
and markedly so. She would have had to distinctively notice the
billboard advertising the telltale cantata (and in order that the
advertisement had meaning for her, she would have had to somehow
 NARRATIVE OPACITY  43

overhear the rehearsal earlier, where we learn about the cantata for
the first time and from which she was utterly excluded).
●● She would have to have been much more suspicious of the man in the
tuxedo. Not just a memorable face (an unforgettable face, Hitchcock
knew) but a face from where? The only thing Jo ever saw this man do
was politely speak at her hotel room door. Nor just politely. Exquisitely.
●● Regarding Buchanan, she would have to have made some attempt to
get the man’s attention, rather than just timidly watching him ascend
a staircase. “My son is in danger! There’s going to be a killing! I’ve
just seen the killer!”—all of which we fill in, and inaccurately. Her
son is in danger, yes, surely, but not here. She knows there will be a
killing in London but not here. She knows the gaunt-faced stranger
is bizarre-looking, yet he is also a textbook model of etiquette and
only we know he is the killer.
●● And when the music started Jo would have to have attempted to
do something to stop the proceedings, instead of riding along with
the melodies as she does. Yet, do what? She has not put the pieces
of the puzzle together, nor would we have done so had we not been
treated to that “rehearsal.” (Again: treated as Jo was not treated.)
And in assembling the puzzle she would have to have been willing
to sacrifice Hank, dismissively, coldly, because at least ostensibly
she would have more care about the prime minister of a country
she does not know. None of this is conceivable, given the details of
Hitchcock’s demonstrated logic.

Jo’s being kept out of the picture cognitively and physically is an essential
aspect of the film’s composition.
And positively,
●● The ironic thrill we obtain as the sequence rushes to its cadence
partially grows out of our sudden awareness that Jo now knows
what we knew all along, that the concert, Buchanan’s presence, the
assassin’s shot, the intended victim (and the openness of all this to
our sight) work together in a tightly composed and unbreakable
knot, a knot threatening, with mounting amplitude of voice and
quickening pace, to come apart. To our delight she is sharing our
rung of the ladder, but has very little time to rest there (the editing
shortens the shot lengths as the cantata finale approaches). Were we
to have known from the outset that Jo either already knew all this
or would soon enough discover it, that her awareness and ours were
matched all along or very soon to be matched, all this excitement
would escape like air from a punctured life raft, and the music itself,
nine minutes and more of it, would have been little other than a
tedious delaying mechanism.
44 THE FILM CHEAT

One must appreciate Hitchcock’s cagey staging at the “rehearsal.” The

villain facing a mirror and combing his (scant) hair. The Assassin lazily
strapping on his holster.2 All of this “backstage” behavior Heimlich, private,
personal. And the wonderful trick of repetition. The shooting cue is repeated
so the Assassin might hear it twice, since he is (quite erroneously) presumed
by Drayton to be musically dense, and while this happens we get a close
shot of Drayton’s fingers placing the needle down carefully on the spinning
recording.3 Then, after the Assassin has gone off, Drayton, himself an
enthusiast of either music or murder or both, plays the cue one more time
for himself, now making a visible (not just acoustic) emphasis by dropping
his hand, finger curled as around a trigger, in a conductor’s downbeat.4

2
As in the family scene at the detective’s house early in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground
(1951).
3
For the reader born in the twenty-first century: he is using a 33 1/3 rpm vinyl recording on a
turntable connected to a rudimentary built-in speaker. Such devices were almost as routinely
available as laptop computers today.
4
Miles shows exquisite musicality, because his downbeat is executed with the cleanest
professionalism, although this moment is cheated, of course, since the music track can be back-
synced to coincide with his downbeat—the very opposite of what is happening “live” in the
Hall, one might think (but, of course, what we see there is not “live” performance). As creator
and director of London’s Mermaid Theatre, founded in St. John’s Wood in 1951 then shifted to
Blackfriars, he had in fact given the “downbeat” for numerous productions, not least of which
was Treasure Island in which he played a memorable Long John Silver. The Assassin’s putative
musical denseness is another private joke: Reginald Nalder had been a singer and dancer in
Vienna before emigrating to the United States. We do see his sensitivity as he listens in the
balcony later, curious to glance at his companion’s pocket score.
 6
Our Faithful Friend

FIGURE 6 The precarious sound stage in The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger,
Paramount, 1975).

Not only do audiences stand at an ideal point of view in following a

narrative but they are typically aware of this fact since what is spread
before them has so much detail so brilliantly visible and one surely must
be somewhere perfect in order to see all the splendor. In the omniscient
narrative, the camera functions as a direct extension of the viewer’s eye
and consciousness. In watching we are simply transported to the various
locations in which key events will take place, as though nothing else could
happen to us, as though the transporter could never take a wrong turn, as
46 THE FILM CHEAT

though no one gazing at this incredible world ever blinks.1 As John Belton
has made crystal clear, sound after the early 1930s was, and now remains,
recorded so as to make the space of the picture acoustic, not to be faithful to
the shape of the diegetic space. In a related way, the picture is recorded so as
to make logical the world of the story, not the world in which the recording
was made. The presumption we make in being transported through filmic
narrative—arrangement is made so that nothing in the film will contradict
the movement that is accorded us—is that no key event will be omitted from
the story, no event of significance will take place somewhere we cannot see,
no significant character will fail to appear, no meaningful utterance will be
unhearable. We are not only embedded in the ongoingness but embedded
with a completeness and totality in which we can have faith, placed as far
inside as one can be without breaking through the wall of the skin. This is
a special view, and we have been accorded it not because we can rightfully
claim to be worthy but because a filmmaker we do regard as worthy has
made the decision to grace us that way.
When I watch Kenneth Branagh’s performance of Hamlet (1996) or of
Hercule Poirot (2017) I do not suffer the same nauseating doubt or intrigue
we are to presume is inside the character, yet this doubting Hamlet and the
intrigued Poirot are my closest chums as I watch. In the omniscient narrative
that I know intimately—whatever “intimately” finally means—what they
experience I share, and since I would not wish to feel nauseating doubt or
intrigue myself (a little doubt or intrigue maybe, but not the Full Monty) I
tell myself to remain calm and let them “carry” me and, as loyal chums, they
remain calm and do just that: we go on and on. Even quintessentially private
moments between characters—Hamlet confiding to Horatio (Nicholas
Farrell); Poirot questioning Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench)—moments
such as I would never be able, or ask, to see outside of cinema, are shown
openly and with a tickling casualness, as though, like an invisible phantom I
inhabit (and properly should inhabit) the secret space containing the action.
Lovemaking and murder are two rich examples of this effected intimacy.
When either occurs onscreen I am not afforded a view so very involving
that I wonder whether I am somehow naked or covered with blood spatter,
yet I do sense myself to be privy to something others are not, and would
not be, privy to, and something, further, that I should see from up close (see
Chapters 19 and 47). Others: even all the people sitting around me in the
same space, who, though what I see is light coming from a screen, somehow
do not, as I believe it—as I require to believe it—see what I see the way I see

1
Rule-proving exception: Blow-Up (1966) features a marvelous nocturnal moment with David
Hemmings skimming down Regent Street in his Mercedes with the top down. Suddenly he
thinks he sees a familiar woman on the sidewalk and quickly halts, but the camera, following
our delight in the movement, keeps tracking ahead until suddenly, realizing the car is no longer
at its side, it turns and looks back at him looking back.
 OUR FAITHFUL FRIEND  47

it: my belief in the uniqueness of my sight helps me integrate the viewing as

a personal experience (a vital integration if I am to willingly put my personal
money up, at the box office).
In an omniscient story, the “voice” of the cinema is taken to be, if
unknown personally still entirely amicable, amicable and inviting, inviting
and embracing, embracing and enriching, enriching and therefore acceptable
as an object of belief. It is the voice of an unimaginable being of great
generosity, who would wish to give information but also never demand
interaction—any interaction, even our expression of thanks. “I give,” it says
apparently, “because you deserve to be given to, and only that. You above all
people deserve.” We are made royal by the system. If, as per Michel Chion,
cinema can often invoke an acousmêtre (“The all-seeing acousmêtre appears
to be the rule” [Voice 25]),

This was apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose

followers would listen to their Master speak behind a curtain, as the
story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from
the message. (19)

then this “voice” of cinema to which I refer, the “person” not in but of the
film, the presence revealing presences to us, is an acousmêtre’s acousmêtre,
a spirit behind the puppeteer. When, to introduce whole films or specific
scenes the camera, elevated, swoops over a strange and notably fascinating
territory (New York City’s Spanish Harlem from high above when West
Side Story [1961] begins; the solarized “mindscape” during the star voyage
of 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]), we immediately accept and adopt the
required point of view as offered by a flying cicerone who loves us and out
of love has given us to see. We immediately agree to find the vision valuable,
even indispensably so, and sense a thrill at having this particular—this
particularly entertaining—exposure to something we might not ordinarily
glimpse now opened up by someone so estimable (as to find us estimable),
so kind, and so careful not to drip the tea. Yet the system of service works
only when it can be known in advance how the motor of our satisfaction
works, known how we can be tickled, known how to afford a view beyond
the apogee of our imagination, and known that good service will pay off.
Instead we could be watching something cryptic and fail entirely to be
touched.
As to the location of the drama as set onscreen: if the camera is indeed a
“magic carpet” of sorts, we are willing to let it take us anywhere, anywhere
in space and time. (H. G. Wells’s time machine could move through history,
but always and only at one particular place; in David Lowery’s A Ghost
Story [2017] these constraints are relaxed, with profound results.) For
Hamlet, we are swept off to the parapets of the Castle of Elsinore, hundreds
of years ago, hovering in the Danish shadows there so that we can watch
48 THE FILM CHEAT

the night watch. “Answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.”—but not bloody
likely. Far, far, far more entrancing, at any rate, than most day trips from
Copenhagen. For Good Will Hunting (1997), a corridor at Harvard where
a janitor stares at a math challenge scribbled on a blackboard (a challenge
intended to stymy any member of any audience). For Titanic (1997), a pier
at Southampton, 1912, a pier like any pier in a place like any other place,
except, of course, not. For Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991),
the Starfleet Academy somewhere in the general vicinity of San Francisco
(like Lucasfilm!), hundreds of years in the future, everything clean and tidy
and sensibly ordered.
Wherever we go and whenever we presumably go there, being given to
see by means of whatever delicious movements, we trust implicitly that the
narrator is wise, capable, informed, and forthcoming. And not forgetful.
And having our best interests at heart. Also, if the film is indeed true to what
cinema is and can do, a narrator who manages to show things, not just use
words to refer to them. This “voice,” as I call it (perhaps it is more a hand
opening out); this personality: it is friendly because nourishing, ceaselessly.
Nourishing, responsive, considerate, loving. Generally the narrative has no
motive to trick us, at least finally, to make us dupes of Cartesian deception.
To keep a secret, yes, as long as that secret is either finally revealed or finally
left for a rather easy evening’s homework. When at film’s end there is a
radical, shuddering turnabout, we feel we ought to be able to look back
over the thing in memory and discover how, very close to the beginning, and
with an insouciance immeasurable, the secret was tossed upon the table.
Generally, anything and everything we would need to know we may glean
from what we see; and anything and everything that we need to see our
narrational chum openly, unabashedly shows. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers (2003) has Matthew (Michael Pitt) staring in excited amazement
at the vagina of his new friend Isabelle (Eva Green), and because we are to
affiliate with his moment of enlightenment we must stare, too (the filmmaker
paying homage to Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde [1866]). Later
Isabelle will stare with a matching amazement at his penis, and we are given
her point of view, too. If in the story there are vital secrets they will be
fashioned to appertain to some character(s) wanting to keep things away
from others, but we—oh, no no: we will not be left out; by means of Scheff’s
“ladder of awareness” we will know what is “not known.” Or else, finding
out later, even too late, we will know that, and how, we did not know.
But while we are tacitly let into the “interior” of the film’s habitation
the hand holding open the gate is entirely concealed from us, so that in
being admitted we have the feeling of entering of our own volition. Indeed,
more: we have the sensation, having divined the combination to the lock,
of sneaking in transgressively out of hunger and desire. An interesting case:
Clint Eastwood’s Sully (2016) puts us in the cockpit with the pilot and co-
pilot of an aircraft that after taking off from La Guardia must make an
 OUR FAITHFUL FRIEND  49

immediate emergency landing in the Hudson River (based on a true story).

Important to know: the setting of the tale is contemporary, that is, after
September 11, 2001. By the time of the story, and for some years before
it, no passengers were allowed into the cockpits of any aircraft, not thugs
with pistols and not little boys hoping the Captain will show them the
Northern Lights. Logically, the only way we can experience the thrill of
Sully is to feel our presence as passengers—we don’t know enough to be
on the crew. But we are made uncontrollably eager to go to the cockpit, the
film’s advertising having warned that the pilot’s behavior, and only that, will
be the instrumental action of the story. He will fly the plane, we will need
to see how he does it. Where is the force that recognizes our need, evaluates
our enforced passenger status, recognizes the prevailing countermands, and
kindly opens the cockpit door just enough for us (for the camera) to slip in.
That force (which is of course the writer-producer-director-cinematographer
team) is unavailable to view. Thus, the cockpit orientation of the film is a
cheat, a presentation entirely out of sync with the facts of everyday life,
which facts, by the way, govern the graphic design, the script, and the
cinematography of the film.
In Sully, the cheat formula works through naughtiness. (1) Flying his
aircraft into the Hudson River rather than turning it back to La Guardia,
Capt. Sully (Tom Hanks) is going against all the protocols and all the rules,
not to say violating the air space of New York City and possibly putting
at risk civilians on or near the water. Naughty naughty. (2) Being in the
cockpit as he works, or at any other time, is transgression on our part.
Naughty us. (3) Sully’s transgression is by no means less than our own; in
fact, given that we are peaceable filmgoers and he is saving the lives of all
the people on board his aircraft, his transgression is supreme. It is a sublime
transgressiveness. (4) Indeed Sully is a bona fide hero, and what makes him
a hero is his naughtiness, not his rule keeping. (5) The vision we get in the
cockpit, by comparison with what we would see if we were pinned down in
the fuselage, is a notably creative one. (Naughtiness pays.) Therefore (6) our
creative transgression is hardly worse than Sully’s and, in fact, is tinctured
with the flavor of his heroism. All of this is embedded in the architecture of
the film’s structure. If we were heroic, as heroic as Sully, it could hardly be
wrong or unnatural for us to be watching the action as we do; watching thus
makes us heroic co-pilots. Thus are we cheated into the cockpit, against FAA
rules, just as Sully cheats the airplane into the Hudson, against FAA rules as
well. So amicable is the narrative in giving us an ideal point of view we do
not question or even notice the gesture when it occurs.
Narration, visible or invisible, means sincerely to cheat, that is, (a) to
open us, without admitting it is opening us, to wanting an ongoing and
unconstrained view and then (b) to actually afford us, without telling us it is
affording, the view we have been opened to want. “Friendly” cheats abound
in narrative film, the problem of “ideal placement” bringing the issue nicely
50 THE FILM CHEAT

into the light. Consider a very complex narrative space where it is necessary
to leap around and see many facets of a situation before it can be fully
understood: say, the soundstage catastrophe scene of John Schlesinger’s The
Day of the Locust (1975), where first we are brought into the Napoleonic
Wars, and up very close, but then pulled back to see that it was only a
simulation on a movie set, then taken further backward to see the director
with his megaphone upon a crane dolly, high in the air with the soundstage
ceiling and lights above his head. Hundreds of busy extras are being halted
at work so they can do another take and get it right, damn it!, and then,
under the scaffolding of the constructed redoubt we see not only the way
the carpenters’ 2 x 4s have been arranged but also how the “DANGER”
signs have all been binned. Now the face of the designer (William Atherton)
standing in frozen fear and panic as he notices. Back to the view from the
top of the redoubt with extras racing up only to plunge into nowhere when
the set (now, predictably) gives way. The camera is never not in the perfect
position to see what must be seen2; nor is any logic implied or interposed to
explain our power to hop from position to position.3 We of course accept
this offering of power, but the camera quietly empowers us to accept it.
In scripting these jumps, the filmmakers know that any explanation, not
of the cluster of places to which we must move but of our easily moving
there, would draw the magic curtain away from the production machine,
would permit us to “see that man behind the curtain,” even in the ironic
case where, as here, what we are seeing is exactly the men behind a camera.
Note the non-replication of our everyday experience. Were we to be present
on the soundstage like that designer, we would stand at every moment in one
particular spot there, or at least one area, more or less frozen, incapacitated
to see (even if urged to imagine) a great deal of what was happening. Always
in life we are unable to see a great deal of what is going on. There are hidden
actors, actors we hear without seeing, events of which we get a bad view,
movements that are sloppy, rumored happenings that we do not catch, and
so on. The ideally aimed and cultured vision blocks our attention to the
fact that in the story world are hidden actors, too, ones we hear without
seeing; there is sloppiness; there are events not quite in view. But we are
happily swept away with the generous, the exciting, the unfamiliarly violent,
with the exceptionally sexy peephole a film does manage, contrivedly, to
provide. Cinema will persist in seeming not only an eye but a magical eye,
that goes far beyond what the human eye can do in framing and seizing a
“world.” Anything that would dissipate the magic will be blocked away. For

2
Or to hint at, if not exactly configure, what remains out of frame but for the viewer is resonant
with what the screen shows. Offscreen space, the subject of fascinated rumination, speculation,
wondering, and desire is not random.
3
This “hopping” (my language) is a key feature of “intensified continuity” as discussed by
Bordwell.
 OUR FAITHFUL FRIEND  51

Schlesinger, the cohort of assistant directors hidden all over the set, some
conceivably even in costume, massing, herding, urging, moving the army
of extras playing the army of extras (and the assistant directors) in this
way not that way, and in so many directions to boot, so that the effect of a
catastrophe can be generated. The “director” in this sequence barks away
through his megaphone, but his “assistant directors” are invisible until one
of them leads the charge up the redoubt to his own peril. The director is
scripted to bark, “the way directors do,” as if out of his lungs comes control
of everything.
One goes forward not only trusting the friendly “maker of displays”
but also believing in what the displays offer, with unquestioned and
unquestionable acceptance, as in a dream, where we take what we see and
hear as absolutely given and, regardless of how twisted it may seem, given
for the Good. We are trusting, even loving, because the narrator of our
dreams, although hidden, is a goodly (if not Godly) narrator who merits our
full commitment of respect. As Walter Benjamin suggested, the dream has
no outside (839).
More. The friendly narration, configured if not actually embodied,
has identifying characteristics, so that its presence and its workings, if
unrecognizable themselves, have recognizable effects, telltale stains. We
notice and affirm certain narratorial characteristics without wondering how
these might work to enchain us: roughly the age (perhaps older than we are
and wiser as with Kane in Citizen Kane [1941]); perhaps younger and more
innocent as with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)]); roughly the social
class and technical knowledge (Heywood Floyd on the moon voyage in
2001). Narrational tics become evident as the narration acknowledges certain
realities rather than others, notices some things rather than overlooking or
avoiding them. More importantly, just as the narration acknowledges social
realities it also staunchly avoids claiming acknowledgment but treats them,
instead, as only, merely, naturally, simply, obviously present to the narrative
eye because there is no other way for them to be but present, and as though
any other reality isn’t real. Read through Henry James’s What Maisie Knew
(1897) for a study of social knowledge openly accessed by adults but artfully
concealed from a child who is in their presence:4

“I say, I say: do look out!” Sir Claude quite amiably protested.

“There’s nothing she hasn’t heard. But it doesn’t matter—it hasn’t
spoiled her.” (74)

What we feel we know we feel accustomed to. If we sense the narration as

friendly, we are instantly accustomed to the sort of information it reveals

I am grateful to Nellie Perret for pointing the way to both What Maisie Knew and its author.
4
52 THE FILM CHEAT

and holds back and to the kind of social access one is presumably afforded
through its agency. In Stephen Frear’s The Queen (2006), we are accustomed
to going into the sitting room at Bucks House, as it’s called on the inside.
We see the telephone in her hand. In Empire of the Sun (1987), we are
accustomed to being sequestered in a prison camp by the Japanese. In The
Queen we are not so blinded by opulence, nor in Empire so overtaken by
shadow, as to have our view compromised.
Feeling accustomed to friendly narrative, we feel the comfort that comes
with custom. We can relax our hold on the reins of thought. Striking us
when we are relaxed this way, the writer’s cheat comes as a shock and a
triumph at the end of two valuable films. As they progress, The Go-Between
(1971) at Brandham Hall, an English country house late in the nineteenth
century and Atonement (2007), some decades later in a similar place, we
have the sense of a love story being spelled out phase by phase. In both cases
there is a kind of awkward (unstable) triad.
(1) The Go-Between. Young Leo (Dominic Guard) is the eponymous
go-between, invited to a seat in the English countryside and then expected
to shuttle back and forth between the entitled Mary, Lady Trimingham
(Julie Christie), and the farmhand with whom she is madly in love, Ted
Burgess (Alan Bates). It is a glorious summer, a time of brilliantly sunlit days,
bleached haystacks, shadowy barns, trickling rivulets, emerald swards, and
taking off one’s clothes. For Mary the world is enchanted by her passion,
but she and Ted are caught in a mad, transgressive affair, in a cultural setting
and at a time when social-class boundaries were rigidly observed and a girl
like her could have no purpose in cavorting with, or even acknowledging the
presence of, a boy like him. For navigating assignations messages must be
carried back and forth, and Leo is the innocent messenger. Things turn out
badly, Mary being led to marry a man of her class and “having a son with
him” (secretly a son by Ted). By the film’s end a great deal of time has passed
and we learn from Leo’s mouth how, Mary’s husband having died in the
war, he was asked once again to be a go-between for her, revealing the secret
love to the son. However, this forthcoming Leo of the finale is more than a
neutral, disembodied voice. Our faithful friend brings us to see him sitting
behind a window during a heavy rainstorm, a very old man now looking
back through the long inverted telescope of cinema and of life, decades upon
decades back, to the time of his own childhood when for him everything
was brave and clear and sun-drenched and utterly not understood. The
writer’s cheat here, that provides a thoroughgoing pleasure for the viewer,
lies in giving full information about the narrator only after it is too late
to imagine anything being done to mend the tattered situation he helped
rend—in revealing only at the film’s end that the entire film was being told
from only the film’s end. While the film was progressing the audience had
intuited itself at Brandham, in the days of the affair, and had felt a continuity
of presence there and in succeeding actions elsewhere. Suddenly it becomes
 OUR FAITHFUL FRIEND  53

shockingly clear that the whole thing was a living memory, experienced
now somewhere else, in the rain, and so long afterward that it is impossible
to find certainty about anything. While the film does begin with the adult
Leo, we are not given enough information to position him temporally or
to come quite to the realization of who he is or what his involvements will
now be shown to be (that is, to have been): he is made, when first we meet
him, forgettable, so that as the alluring and complex story unwinds we find
ourselves fully present with Mary and Ted, oblivious, just as they are, to
what is beyond themselves.
There is a verbal irony here, of course: Mary and Ted are cheating with
their dalliance, in order to make life especially delightful; and the script is
cheating their cheating, to make it especially delightful for us. The principal
power of the cheat is in abeyance until we are confronted with the shocking
irony of Leo, our Leo, having aged; of much time having passed, without
narrational comment. The friendly narration has jumped us through a
lifetime but makes no claims to having done so; or to having the power to
do so; or to having considered the kind of effect such a charge might have
on us. It is as though we must of course have known where we would be
headed; we must of course have seen it all coming. Any other presumption
of our presumption would draw attention to the radical alteration in setting,
costuming, makeup, and tone, so much attention that, swept away at the
finale by our own gasping grasp that we swooped forward we would fail to
catch the strange pain Leo is trying to give over.
(2) In Atonement we find ourselves witnessing the feux d’artifice of love
between Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley), a girl of the upper class, and Robbie
Turner (James McAvoy), far from a nobleman but the object of her passion
nevertheless. Their trysting is accidentally witnessed by Cecilia’s thirteen-
year-old sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan), who in her consternation tells her
parents that Robbie is a thief. He is cast out of the family circle, away from
the estate house, away from Cecilia. Five years pass. We meet Briony (Romola
Garai), conflicted and anxious in regard to her past. Robbie becomes caught
up in the war, is wounded on the beaches of Normandy, and dies a horrible
death there while she fails at nursing him. It is only at the end of the film that
we meet the figure who, it turns out, has been revealing this whole fabric
to us, Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) as an aging author looking back on her
childhood with deep regret at having destroyed her sister’s chance at love.
A similar cheat works here: the intelligence, sensitivity, and point of view
being employed in recounting the tale is that of a very mature and reflective
woman, in this case even a magician with words, but the imagery puts us
so close to Robbie and Cecilia, so close to Briony who is perforcedly so
close to them, so close to all the family and their friends who circulate like
butterflies around the Tallis brilliance, that we feel ourselves embedded in
early twentieth-century history, even suspended in time—as becomes evident
with the wounded Robbie (helpless Cecilia resting by his side)—imprisoned
54 THE FILM CHEAT

in events as they occur. In practical fact it is all a memory-vision, perhaps

faulted, but certainly a vision from sadness and looking over a gulf.
What happens here if the audience is told from the start of the film that
the whole enterprise will be a looking back upon ancient history from
the point of view of one of the protagonists who made a significant mess
when she was a child and is now a long way from childhood—as, say, in
James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) with Gloria Stuart? Simply, every event
that presents itself in the story to engage and enchant us with, if nothing
else, the purity of its presence before us, becomes instead tainted with the
shadow of the long gaze, affixed to a logic of retrospective chagrin. As
Robbie and Cecilia make love in the library, Briony silently creeping in and
watching, they’d be, already, here, now, nothing but a pair of failures-to-be,
birds taking flight doomed to be brought down by the hunters nearby. When
seen through a constantly invoked retrospection, every take-off is only an
impending crash, and there is no aura of glory and wonderment first to be
tasted and savored, then pined for in regret, and only much later rather
coldly dissected as hopeless from the start. The cheat keeps our spirits up,
gives a prospect of brightness, until love is history.

* * *

As to the cheat of the “friendly narrative,” as I am calling it, one more word:
The “faithful friend” was intentionally spawned for, and has been much
cloned in, commercial cinema, certainly cinematic narrative, in which a
certain interpretive binding holds the viewer’s consciousness in registration
with the imagery. In life as we know it there are very few such considerate,
outgoing, unstinting, kind, and all-knowing companions who would arrange
to give us boons of experience (ideally staged) without letting us see the
gifting as well as the gift. Parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, perhaps. But
surely not scriptwriters. It is just because the camera is no friend of the heart
that all its many boons must be offered while we are unconscious.
 7
Bridge from Nowhere

FIGURE 7 Leroy Daniels (l.) with Fred Astaire, doing “Shine On Your Shoes” in
The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1953).

Contiguity in process is an important feature of “reality” as we construct

and understand it. When one event leads to another, or comes sufficiently
close in precedence that a second gives all impression of flowing from it, we
ask ourselves—this flow being insufficient in and of itself, as flow—whether
the second event, as a type, seems a likely outcome of the first. Likely: given
56 THE FILM CHEAT

that we know such results have come previously from “causes” such as this
“cause”; given that our theory of the world incorporates flows like this one;
given that we have no reason for doubting whether an outcome such as this
outcome could result from a cause such as this cause; given all of this, when
we think back on the cause we do not doubt the effect as effect. The forward
flow will always be a flow, but it can also be an effective flow.
It is widely understood by those who have experienced their culture that
a very broad range of possibility exists as to event-to-event flows, some
events being capable of leading to (preceding) virtually anything within
reason, reason, of course, being a set of known and accepted formulae for
limiting probability in a local setting. The final determination of cause-effect
relationships is open to negotiation socially. I snap my fingers and the sun
rises, but only in a relatively primitive culture (not my own, I suspect) would
any credibility attach to that pairing as cause-and-effect. I say a primitive
culture: certainly, let us agree, a pre-modern one. Moses stretches out his
rod and the waters of the Red Sea part . . . If I had a rod to stretch out, and
I stretched it, waters would not part anywhere.
Contiguity and likelihood, then. In the typical film musical, which
replicates the structure of a dream more than it does the structure of the
everyday (to which, thanks to designers and performers, it very often bears
some resemblance), there is the scantest imaginable contiguity between
events for very good structural reasons. When, say at the Freed Unit at
MGM, a decision is made to produce a show, the first step is the assembly
of a contractually feasible group of musical items, these very often selected
from the studio library (where on most items the studio owns copyright)
or coming from the catalog of a musician (and producer) like Arthur Freed
himself. The songs will be “lined up” in some way that makes for an arc of
musical phrasing, rhythm, and harmony, one number seeming appropriate
as a kick-off and another as a finale, etc. Then a story structure is made
up that will weave the songs together, or more properly, that will narrate
between the songs in what seems a forward-flowing chain of contiguities,
which amounts to a continuity. The narration serves to build bridges. Each
narrative bit has as its primary function making the song that preceded it
and the song that follows it seem more or less contiguous; and making the
second song seem as though it flows from the narrative, too. But no part
of this is anything but constructed, by which I mean not always already
socially understood and accepted normatively (as in the “social construction
of reality” [see Berger and Luckmann]) but literally put together (with art
and arbitrariness) like the pieces of a kid’s Lego set.
The sense viewers would have that one sung moment fluidly (inevitably)
leads to another is thus an induced sense, and the manner of inducing it is
a grand cheat. With certain sorts of characters—the ones who overpopulate
Freed Unit musicals!—the everyday they inhabit allows for almost anything
to happen, and so the writers are in a position to invoke almost any
 BRIDGE FROM NOWHERE  57

integument to bind musical numbers together and make the binding seem
indubitably real. But a very nice example of the fragility and artfulness of
this kind of cheating is to be found in the opening few moments of The
Band Wagon (1953), one of the really glorious musicals of the Hollywood
golden age.

[1] Tony Hunter’s memorabilia are being auctioned off at deplorably

cheap prices, nobody really seriously wanting to collect the artifacts
of this once-great (indeed once-almost-regal) Hollywood song-
and-dance man whose career has utterly lapsed. This is a kind of
prologue, very swift. Auctioneer can’t even get one dollar for the
famous top hat and stick.
[2] On the train heading to New York. Tony (Fred Astaire, whose career
by 1953 had indeed seemed to collapse so that, like Tony, he could
do with a comeback) hides behind a menu while his seat mate, a
chubby cigar smoker (the chubby and irrepressible Thurston Hall),
babbles about wishing he could meet Ava Gardner and comments
that Tony Hunter “hasn’t made a picture in years.”
[3] Arrival at Grand Central Station. Tony is nattily dressed and happy
to be back in town, but a little unconfident. He stays in his seat a bit,
humming a tune, about to step out of his car onto the platform. A
gaggle of photographers and reporters are ready to catch a fish, and
he gives them his professional smile and friendly wave1: “Thanks for
the red carpet, I didn’t expect it!” But alas, it is for the grande dame
Ava Gardner (in person), stepping just after him, that they have
come. She comes up to give him a warm old-friends hello, but soon
Tony is left alone beside the long empty train, quiet, reflective, a little
chagrined.
[4] He swings into a charming performance of that tune he started to
hum, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s “By Myself” (1937)—
“I’ll go my way by myself/Like walking under a cloud . . .”—as he
casually paces the length of the train, nappy mauve button-down,
lavender necktie, pearl gray double-breasted suit, maroon pocket
handkerchief crisply folded, straw boater. He finishes up as he comes
to the ramp that will lead into the station.
[5] At the head of that ramp are voices calling: “Tony, Tony!! Tony!
Tony Tony!” And here, waiting excitedly to welcome him, and
bearing TONY HUNTER FAN CLUB signs, are his two chums
Lily and Lester Marton (Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant), putting on

In a little gestural moment Alfred Hitchcock neatly reprises this scene in Torn Curtain (1966)
1

with Tamara Toumanova.

58 THE FILM CHEAT

the Welcome Show. “Tony. Hunter. Sis boom bah!” The three do a
happy-smiles routine, Tony assuring Lily, “You’re much too pretty to
be married to that!” Lester: “There’s work to be done. I have here a
script. . . . Smell it, you can smell it’s good! There’s a great part in it
for you and nice little parts for Lily and me.” Dissolve past nocturnal
street traffic to a medium-close of the three of them talking in a
sidewalk crowd.
[6] Lily and Lester are trying to persuade reluctant Tony to get in on
their new musical which will be directed by the fabulous Jeffrey
Cordova. But, “What’s happened to 42nd Street?” he wants to
know, “This used to be the greatest theater street in the town. The
New Amsterdam, I had one of my biggest successes there. . . . Noël
Coward and Gertie were here in Private Lives2. . . . First show I
ever did was at the Elgin and . . . and I don’t believe that’s even here
anymore.” Key action: a cigar-chomping drunk (Cigar Reprise) steps
on Lester’s foot. In agony, he pays the man and apologizes (typical
Oscar Levant self-deprecation: “I can stand anything but pain!”).
Tony sees his pals off in a cab.
[7] He is in front of an open arcade (where, had the threesome kept
walking, he wouldn’t be), filled with notably goofy automata, such
as a fortune teller, a weight machine, a baseball throw, and a mystery
machine dominating the space but all closed off. Here, and weaving
among the adults and young people populating the place, and while
acquiring a hot dog he doesn’t want and a collection of doubtful
looks from strangers, Tony performs Schwartz and Dietz’s “Shine
On Your Shoes” (1932), dancing through the number, as he sings,
in the classic Fred Astaire fashion (the classic Tony Hunter fashion,
as we are to imagine), in this way quickly showing us (but not the
people around him, who seem oblivious) that he is back (tastefully
mismatched socks and all). The number—one of the really beautiful
musical numbers in the Hollywood canon, given the lilting tune,
the vibrant color, and Astaire’s debonair smoothness taken to an
extreme—ends with him duetting with a shoeshine man (Leroy
Daniels, also wearing, in the Astaire tradition, vibrantly colored
socks) and finally kicking the mystery machine into life.

Two songs, then, “By Myself,” which is soft and slow; and “Shine On Your
Shoes” which is more rhythmical, jazzy, upbeat, and promising. Between
them the intercession of Lester and Lily, their goofy show idea, Tony’s

2
A flicker of researched realism: original production of the Noël Coward play, January 7, 1931,
Times Square Theatre, starring Noël Coward (1899–1973) and Gertrude Lawrence (1898–
1952).
 BRIDGE FROM NOWHERE  59

hesitation—less than a minute onscreen. Let us consider the elements of this

little construction:

[A] Fictional space. Both the station and the sidewalk on 42nd Street
are jammed with people heading in all directions, dressed in all
colors: a twittering kaleidoscope. Yet the closeness of the shots in
both locations, centering on the trio, lifting them away from their
background, makes the planet of Grand Central and the planet of
42nd St. seem to fade away while a bubble of private, joking, ultra-
friendly human relationship looms forward. We had a tiny hint of
this spatial division on the station platform when, leaning close to
her old pal Tony, Ava Gardner made a subtle comment “only to
him” about how trying the “business” is, a comment only he would
understand, as her confiding smile telegraphs. Tony is worried about
the wounded Lester, and helps to get him into a cab with Lily, but
at the same time he is caught in his own reverie, thinking about his
past, the old 42nd St., the glittering distraction of the present, and
generally “going his way by himself.” In one pair of spaces, then:
the old and the new; the more private and the more public; buoyant
energy and patient reflection; the general crowd and the special
talent.
[B] Talk. Beyond saying how happy they are to see him, the Martons
are giving Tony a sales pitch. (The sales pitch is an elemental aspect
of entertainment production, and this film will focus on it later, with
some sharpness.) The pitch falls flat, maybe. But a telling query: is
Tony-starring-in-a-new-musical, as a conversational subject, linked
to what came just before (his solo train voyage in dismay) and what
could come after (beginning with his play at the arcade, then his
sliding into song there, then his spirits lifted, then his participation
in the musical)? At least for the viewer, the pitch works as a promise
of refreshment and rebirth for the admirable, the handsome, the
debonair, and the sweet-voiced Tony, especially welcome for the
somewhat sad Tony singing “By Myself” because he knows the
adulation he got while being famous is all gone. The promise here is
that Tony will be famous again, albeit his confidence isn’t presently
up to it. (Hopefully if Tony tastes the flavor of fame, so will we.)
As he wanders among the arcade machines he is at play, and the
dance-song that comes out of him is unreflective, almost unthought,
a genuine show of a talent that is inherent in the personality without
effort or intentful control.

[However]. However, any conversation on a crowded sidewalk could be

forgotten and wiped away by the audience, as Tony, Lester, and Lily’s is
likely to be. The conversation doesn’t function as information here. It is
60 THE FILM CHEAT

filler, realistically conceived but underplayed to much background acoustic

and optical accompaniment. What is really required in the film as a whole
is a breather here, between one (kind of) song and another, a breather
quintessentially produced by a setting as mundane and bustling and public
as is the area around Times Square, “a prism through which to see the
twentieth century’s ups and downs and reflect about its meaning as a whole.
. . . Any feature of a public space that facilitates a process of mutual looking
over and checking out—sidewalks, mirrors, billboards, anything—has got
to represent growth and progress in city life” (Berman 41; 56). What is
happening here technically is that one song number (“Shine”) is being
produced out of another (“By Myself”) as though naturally, like sunshine
following rain. But: to have the musical numbers enchained nakedly
would turn the film into something more akin to a vaudeville routine than
an MGM musical. The dialogue as speaking (recitativo) is essential, but
becomes overwhelming if we pay too much attention to what the sayers are
saying. Thus, at the peak of the sales talk Lester is grossly interrupted by an
ignorant passer-by. And more: the exceeding excitement and eccentricity of
Lester and Lily, not only in the rah-rah-rah but in everything they say. We
catch the tonality and personality, but the content of the speech can slide by.
[Further]. Further, if we were to take the conversation as signal for the
film (yet it is really coming too early in the film to work this way), the
parenthesizing songs would fall back in prominence: we would have to note
that they are selected arbitrarily for their musicality, their decorativeness,
not their implications about Tony. If the dialogue were telling and important,
any two pleasant-enough songs would do. “By Myself” is lyrical, “Shine” is
jazzy and syncopated: nothing more need be gleaned. The two could have
been reversed, indeed, had the story been written to explain or cover that.
As affected and emphatic as the musical numbers are, still, when we watch
the opening of The Band Wagon we have a natural and spontaneous feeling,
a sense of being positioned in everyday space, and thus conclude swiftly
that the events occurring in sequential order here—auction, train, platform,
station, street, arcade—are realistically, merely, uncontrivedly occurring
this way—that is, that there is no supradiegetic producer’s or director’s
consciousness mapping out the elements of the film and making decisions
as to how to place happenings. Of course this “naturalness” appertains to
cinema generally yet it is not often recognized how elaborate must be its
infrastructure, the building needed in order to keep the production crew
out of not only the light but also the viewer’s thought. What we see fills
out a “received” order of happening: of course this would be the order of
happening (since out of our ken it was ordered that way). Once we fade
from the abortive auction in L.A. to the train there is, ostensibly speaking,
“nowhere the film could go except where it goes,” notwithstanding that
Tony, whom we find on the train, is not at the auction except by way of
his photograph. To focus more tightly: “By Myself” must inevitably lead to
 BRIDGE FROM NOWHERE  61

“Shine On Your Shoes.” Just as it seems natural his getting off the train in
loneliness to sing “By Myself,” it seems natural for Tony to have his friends
meet him and shepherd him away, and natural for him to want to be alone
and find himself at play in the arcade. Natural, too, if it is Tony (Fred)
playing that a shoeshine turns into a dance display. Happenstance, if we
insist; but unquestionable happenstance.

[C] Probability. When we experience what seems to us “real,” we have

a tendency to find it likely. We take real eventuality to be probable.
Once we see Tony riding on the train, Tony getting off the train is
probable. To zoom: not that he must get off, or that other actions
cannot happen, but that when he gets off the train we do not wink
at the surprise of it. Once we see the reporters, Tony thinking they
are there to welcome him is somewhat probable until Ava Gardner
manifests, looking more glamorous than ever, and he can back into
the shadow (even if only out of graciousness). Once Gardner and
the publicity retinue have disappeared Tony’s leaving the train is
probable (what is he to do otherwise, stand there all night musing?).
Walking along the train singing is not probable, it is arbitrary and
superfluous, exactly in the way that fans of musicals hope for, but
Tony did start humming that tune as he sat disconsolately, waiting
for the passengers to leave, so we can fathom how it might “still
be on his mind.” In another kind of film, the editor would have
dissolved from Tony walking off the train to him in further motion
elsewhere or arriving at a destination (as when, in film after film,
after a person touches a door handle and opens the door to a
room we cut to a shot from inside, of her entering). That lonely
Tony might find two friends in the station is neither probable nor
improbable (as we know little about how warm and how long-lived
this friendship is), but it is entirely thinkable; nothing surprises us
in the way that Lester and Lily surprise him. Having met up and
chuffed each other’s jaws merrily, they will go somewhere together,
and why not 42nd Street, after all? We learn that the Martons are
a song-writing team, so there is little that is improbable about their
insistently pitching a new idea for a musical: they live, think, and
breathe musicals. Nor is it improbable that weary Tony would be
hesitant. But the arcade is entirely a surprise, set up by, yet not
probably following from, another surprise, the injury to Lester.
While the arcade may normatively be there to be visited it is, for us,
not in focus yet; there is little probability of a sidewalk passer-by
breaking off his conversation and dashing in to play with the games.
Again, the arcade moment is deliriously joyous (for us as for Tony),
but we had no grounds for expecting it at all. Yet also: a crowded
sidewalk actually is a space one can vacate on a whim, suddenly,
62 THE FILM CHEAT

with no explanation, notably in spontaneous, jivey, unstable Times

Square. Putting Tony on the sidewalk with the Martons is the perfect
way to slide him away from Grand Central and at the same time
allow for his kneejerk reaction to the arcade. A plain ordinary walk
down the fabulous 42nd Street, of the kind young New Yorkers and
blithe tourists take all the time.

Plain. Ordinary. Although there is no rule saying our trio must find
themselves on 42nd Street.
Ordinary. What might be true for anyone.
Anyone might feel lonely and sing “By Myself” if she knew the song.
Anyone might wander among the crazy machines, snag a hotdog, start
dancing. What anyone would not do is perform with the elegance, the trim,
the practice, and the extraordinary fluidity of Astaire/Tony, but by setting up
the former star, Star and only a Star, as the subject of concern, the filmmaker
solicits our tacit agreement to bond with this paragon of talent. This is
true from the first shot, where near the desperate auctioneer is the giant
photograph, a smiling, entirely benevolent, wholly lovable Tony Hunter,
Tony Hunter the Famous, As Was and Ever Will Be. We may be told Hunter
has aged, but to look at Astaire is to doubt that.
The sales pitch/chummy chat between the Martons and Tony is a major
cheat here. It gives the impression of artlessly bridging the railroad platform
moment to the arcade moment, since what would our focal hero do but
emerge from a platform and what could he do meeting the Martons but
go along, with them nudging their script all along? But there is no such
thing as an artless bridge. The apparent artlessness, the “obviousness” of the
connection, is what is cheated, what I am putting into question. Levant and
Fabray must play the Martons as literally exploding with excitement to see
their friend, quite as though they have been talking over the idea of snagging
him into their project until they’re blue in the face. They burst upon him,
and all the eventfulness they suggest bursts too—makes a forward motion
probable. The film is filled with interstitial linkages, keeping in relation to
one another songs that are in actual historical and performative fact quite
self-standing: “Triplets,” “Louisiana Hayride,” “Stairway to Paradise.” We
will be guided to feel that a man who was sad a few moments ago, and who,
because of that, turned down a prospect of work, has now found renewed
energy and hope. We can reasonably anticipate that very soon, very very
very soon, Tony will be onstage again, doing the material Lily and Lester
have fashioned for him to do (since if he’s going on Broadway what other
material could he possibly use?).
The interstitial dialogue in a musical such as The Band Wagon functions
somewhat in the way printed text cards easeled before the audience
functioned in a vaudeville show, as overt indicators that one act was closed
and another about to begin. But in vaudeville the signal system was part of
 BRIDGE FROM NOWHERE  63

the basic arrangement—audiences expected to check out the cards, to accept

the presence of that easel at the side of the stage—whereas here, and in the
film musical more generally, the dialogue is not our point of focus; the story
it furthers is. The dialogue is transparent. If the story were truly our reason
for watching, there would be little sense in MGM spending (for this film
alone) almost three million early 1950s dollars so it could sing and dance its
way along. Song and dance, then, isn’t a decoration of a story; it is the story,
but the songs and dances are arranged so that they seem to depend on what
people say and what people say is arranged so that songs and dances will
seem to spring out of it like petunias.
 8
And Here Endeth My Tale

FIGURE 8 Alida Valli in The Third Man (Carol Reed, London Film Productions,
1949).

Every story comes to an end. And yet if the writer’s job in fashioning a script
is to arrive at an ending that seems logical, replete, appropriately sonorous,
and more or less conclusive it is true, too, that no construction functions
automatically as an ending, and that no matter the ending one creates there
is always something that could come afterward if one wished it to. Always
 AND HERE ENDETH MY TALE  65

an afterthought. The ending of a film as we have it is a completely arbitrary

event, then, but in order that the viewer not have access to the construction
it is necessary to cheat and make it seem inevitable, conclusive, a point after
which “the rest is silence.”1
Elegant and satisfying endings have frequently been made, then extended.
(1) In Citizen Kane, after the camera dollies into a furnace and, seeing
revealed a very rich secret, we hear a stunning Bernard Herrmann musical
cue, the film could be done with a fade to black, but instead we seem to travel
upward to see the plume of black smoke rising into the troubled sky over
Xanadu. (2) Singin’ in the Rain (1952) could tidily end with Kathy Selden’s
(Debbie Reynolds) apotheosis onstage, or even with her big kiss with Don
Lockwood (Gene Kelly) in the sunshine, but a piquant twist is made as the
camera pulls back to show that the kiss is replicated in a massive advertising
poster just behind them. (3) Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961) ends
with the married couple (Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau) stretched
out exhausted on a golf course after a night’s disturbing revelries. Alone. But
the camera pans to show that they are as though alone in the universe, which
is all grass and trees and space in tones of gray. (4) The Third Man (1949)
ends with Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) striding away from Holly Martins
(Joseph Cotten) and disappearing down a straight road, walking, walking,
walking, walking away, walking away . . . But the camera waits and waits,
waits and waits and waits . . . AND WAITS for her to turn back, which she
doesn’t do. (5) Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997), a film about a police
undercover operation, ends with the masquerading detective (Johnny Depp)
pulled out of his precarious performance by a police raid that feels like a
warm embrace, but we cannot depart the scene until we see him receiving
a commendation along with his wife and children. (6) Robert Wise’s The
Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) ends with Klaatu taking off for his home
planet, assured that the people of earth will unite in peace, but we are left
with the feeling he intends us to be carefully watched, because peace may
be out of our reach. (7) A Star Is Born (1954) ends with Norman Maine
(James Mason) striding quietly into the Pacific at sunset, but we linger to
see the former Esther Blodgett, now Vicki Lester (Judy Garland), accepting
an Oscar after his death by looking up proudly and announcing, “I am Mrs.
Norman Maine.”
All of these films and so many others end in a way we find beautiful and
compelling, like a hymn with a Plagal IV-I cadence. Also, the present endings
I cite here all valorize a particular subject directly or by trace reference: a
subject we are meant to consider both supreme and wonderful. In Kane,
the private secret in public space. In Singin’ the trumping dominance of the

1
Note that while this phrase comes near the end of Hamlet it is not, actually, the last thing we
hear from the stage.
66 THE FILM CHEAT

show-business image over reality. In La notte, not modernist emptiness but

existential tranquility and acceptance. In Third Man, the finality of the loss
of fidelity. In Brasco, triumphant heroism as an individual product. In Earth,
the illusion, call it dream, of harmony on the planet. In Star, the importance
of the husband, even after death.
It is merely necessary to see so-called “inevitability” as “evitability” to
catch the cheats. In every case, we could imagine a continuation beyond
what is currently the end point,2 a path to some other climax that would
both turn the present ending into an unresolved middle and afford us reason
to see how the official ending is a completely arbitrary choice, a rejection
of other possibilities. (1) In Kane what is rejected is a careful look at the
reporters ravaging Xanadu, their reaction in depth, their feelings about a
man like Kane, so that finally he remains an Olympian figure, even in death.
(2) In Singin’, what is rejected is the idea that a love like Don and Kathy’s
might be not eternal but wholly human, that beneath the movie-star façades
there is to be found, somewhere, people. “People who need people,” in fact.
And what of poor Cosmo? Didn’t Don and Cosmo have a bond, too? (3)
In La notte, what is rejected is the banality of the small everyday, not the
vast golf course at dawn, the spreading lawns, the interminable sand trap,
and the draped bodies, but just two dignified people back in the city living
life. (4) In Third Man what is rejected is a small display of plain civility, that
Valli might pause even for a second and say goodbye to Cotten instead of
just walking past him as though the moral force of his action, his essentially
unfriendly action, frees her to be unfriendly, too. (5) In Brasco, what is
rejected is the bureaucracy of police work in place of its heroics, that Donnie
would now have to sit somewhere and fill in a very long report. (6) In Earth
Stood Still what is rejected is any questioning opinion about Klaatu, that
someone might call him an arrogant know-it-all, instead of sententious
acquiescence to his dictates. “Who do you think you are anyway, in that
advanced civilization of yours?” (Because it was only earthling civilization
that stood behind the making of this movie, after all.) (7) And, as so many
observers today would see, what is rejected in Star Is Born is Vicki at the
microphone crying over her beloved husband but at the same time taking
rather than humbly refusing credit for the career she herself made through
sharply focused care and hard labor. In the film, notwithstanding that
Vicki’s deferral to the dominant male may have garnered some approval, at
least understanding, in the audience, the emphasis in her self-identification
as “Mrs. Norman Maine” suggests an audience prepared for, even already
expecting, the female self-reliance she is distinctively not showing. Every

Readers who are fans of music will want to listen to Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand
2

Overture Op. 57” (1956), which nicely poses the problem of coming to conclusions.
 AND HERE ENDETH MY TALE  67

ending valorizes, and every valorization shines because something else is

cast into shadow.
More than bringing a harmonic close, the ending must seem inevitable.
The writer’s challenge—consider The Barefoot Contessa (1954), On
Dangerous Ground (1951), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), to name only
three possibilities—is to craft a de facto ending, but with such panache,
making so ethereal a cadence, that nothing else seems conceivable: a funeral
in the rain; a bonding after a death; a triumph on the keyboard. The apogee
is reached; and it is singular; and it is exhausting of all hope for action. A
contiguity cheat again, but this time with explosive power. “The End,” not
“An End.”
The presence of arbitrariness in the writer’s toolbox is no surprise, since
those who create fictional worlds arbitrate every single aspect of them (and
filmmakers rearbitrate in their own vision). But we should note the seeming
finality of the end point, its tendency not only to wrap up the story but
to wrap it invisibly, as though the story really is over and really does end
this way and there isn’t any more to be shown because, in truth, in reality,
under the Eye of Eternity, nothing more exists. (This, when the story is
only its telling.) If the first few moments of a film are those that attract the
viewer’s most pronounced and most vulnerable attentiveness, the ending can
offer the deepest catharsis, as in the deepest and most unequivocal sense of
release, not enlightenment. Catharsis, if only the culminating chord is found,
as though there is one culminating chord awaiting discovery.
And a radical transformation is possible, too. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers (2003) puts an American teenaged tourist in Paris in the family
life of a pair of cinephilic twins (Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel),
where he learns the taste of feeling, love, desire, truth, and worship. But in
the final moments it is 1968 and they are on the barricades. Theo (Garrel)
hurls a Molotov cocktail and Matthew (Pitt) screams at him, “No, no! We
don’t do that. We do this,” and kisses him full on the mouth while the angry
mob throbs all around. But Theo roughly pushes him away, away out of
his life, away out of the film, and as the youth of Paris flow toward the
camera the image is suddenly frozen in apotheosis and we hear, in charged
orchestrated rhythm, Edith Piaf:

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait
Ni le mal.
 9
Only Pretending

FIGURE 9 Max von Sydow (l.) and Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor
(Sydney Pollack, Wildwood/Dino De Laurentiis, 1975).

Since Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), a broad array of
films about institutionalized villainy have been made to popular acclaim.
Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) reappears in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
(1933; Rogge again) and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960; Wolfgang
Preiss), in all three films a consummate criminal mastermind who sets in
motion complex and fabulous misdeeds and perplexes the forces of law and
order. The idea of the criminal confounding authorities stems from Poe, of
course, but Mabuse’s telltale characteristic is the megalomania behind his
enterprises, his penchant for the grand scheme (that we see partially echoed
today in heist films). Two aspects of Mabuse, the character, were central:
first, his overall heavy negativity and secondly, his capacity for disguise. Not
only a villain but a powerfully theatrical one, who could masquerade as just
about anybody. Evil dressing up as Good.
 ONLY PRETENDING  69

The James Bond films, beginning with Dr. No (1962), extracted the first
of Mabuse’s evil traits, expanding and aggrandizing it in the character of
the mysterious supervillain, a figure with a diabolical plan to, effectively,
take over the universe. In comedic form this same trope appears in many
superhero films as well. It would be characteristic of a descendant of Mabuse
to inhabit a secret lair, to have capable assistants very often not publicly
visible, to lead a virtual army of clearly uniformed serflike myrmidons who
run some vast, highly technologized facility containing the superweapon he
intends to unleash. Like Mabuse, the Bond supervillain is very, very, very bad,
calling up the sharpest and most intelligent—not to say costly—of civilized
resources aiming to bring him under control. Most filmic supervillains do
not emulate Mabuse’s theatricality, however. The Bond villain blatantly (and
super-civilly) presents himself, very often inviting Her Majesty’s noble spy to
sit at the table, supping him with elegant and expensive foods, and chatting
away with cultivated aplomb. In effect he is making the statement, “I am not
hiding,” whereas Mabuse was a genius at hiding, like Doyle’s Moriarty. He
could be standing next to the chief of police in complete safety.
This second strain, villainy in disguise, deeply structures a great number
of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century films about pernicious
corporations, pernicious government agencies, in general the apparently
normal and sleek but actually lethal social world. A purely Adornian
critique, pointing to myriad ways in which our capitalist development
taken to a high level compromises ethical concerns, human health, dignity,
community, the sense of beauty, and other estimable aspects of our lives
together. And one of the principal and notably recurring elements of these
films is the arch-villain who, we learn only too late, has been hiding all
along in the skin of a character introduced early on as powerful, dignified,
wealthy, noble, charitable, and fine, in short an epitome of the species. Or
else as a completely boring bureaucrat stuck behind a desk with nothing
interesting to recommend him at all. We come finally to discover a blazing
truth, that the “bad guy” is not the good leader with the benevolent smile,
as seemed, but a warped, very often profoundly psychologically damaged
monster whose smile was only a mask. We can take Martin Vanger (Stellan
Skarsgård) in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), ostensibly a dignified
head of a family empire but latently a sadistic torturer and murderer. Or, in
The Fugitive (1993), Dr. Charles Nichols (Jeroen Krabbe), on the surface a
meticulous medical researcher heading a dignified and multivariate project
but really a malevolent crook scamming a false drug trial and willing to
arrange for the murder of innocents in order to succeed. In Spike Lee’s Inside
Man (2006) the ostensibly austere and dignified Christopher Plummer is a
soulless Nazi exploiter. Examples of this script maneuvering are legion.
A number of “games” are in play here. The scripter (and/or script
doctor) who uses the “civilized villain” trope (“uncovering of evil”) is
making a more or less clear statement of the audience’s foreknowledge and
70 THE FILM CHEAT

expectation, certainly by the early 2000s, because the character type is by

now well recognized as part of the equation of such fictions—as is the actor
who often plays such types. There is an implication that the film is straight,
that for all its claim of disguise it in fact openly avows from the start all
the disguise that it claims, becoming in the process something of a carnival
dress-up. We are intended to know up front that the apparently noble head
honcho is actually a vicious insider undoing his own company, threatening
or killing his own employees, and all this in order to bring to fruition a plan
of which no one, least of all the hero, had or could have had any inkling
earlier, so outlandish, so maniacal is it. You may surely guess that I am evil,
but not what my evil plan is. My evil plan is greater than anything you can
imagine! You will have smelled that I am the poisonous fish, but not the
lagoon in which I aim to swim. The hero’s exhausting hunt for this villain is
thus something of a cheat, bearable only because in carrying it through he
entertainingly becomes an acrobat, a wit, a social charmer, an athlete, and
sometimes an actor himself.
Also cheated in such films is an interesting range of other potentially
normal, good, civil, and well-meaning characters, many or most of whom
must die horribly in order for the plot to advance. Just as we have a required
scene in which the villainy is dumbly invoked—the hero’s visit to the
disguised devil who ceremonially sets him off on the quest for the bad guy
(who is standing right there, shaking his hand)—Max von Sydow in Minority
Report (2002)—so are we treated to numerous scenes in which, just like
the villain, subsidiary characters behave exactly as the (decent) people they
claim to be. But with these folk there is no surreptitious message: watch out,
nobody is what he seems to be, and everybody around the hero is a faker.
Instead of that, the hero’s friends and teammates are taken at face value, and
either effortlessly forgotten or horrifyingly sacrificed. Cut the throat of the
best friend, shoot the girlfriend, throw the lifelong chum off a balcony. The
evil villain is also taken at face value in the particular, peculiar sense that he
is made in the script to look somewhat iffy right away. He has a stare that
goes on a millisecond too long; he has a sideways leer; his tastes are far too
exorbitant and lush, effete, leading to a supercilious pride. “But,” screams
the script, “I am not revealing him!” The script is pointing to its own use of
disguise by partially stripping it away to hint (bravely) that maybe things
are not what they seem to be, on either side of the moral spectrum: what
they deeply seem to be, when we consider the crystal goblets, the crystal
chandeliers, the crystal bracelets, the yacht named Crystal . . .
What must be met through the script cheat here is a double challenge:
●● The villain must be introduced clearly enough early enough that
when he “pulls off his mask” and shows his true colors the viewer
is not so shocked and displaced as to be unable to maintain a
position of engagement with the film. What is needed is “surprise”
 ONLY PRETENDING  71

that is not actually surprise, because actual surprise is momentarily

debilitating. “I only look like the nice man you see,” the villain must
smirk, “You will not be too surprised to learn that I am somebody
else . . . but of course you will not learn that just yet.” The fact of the
Mabuse derivative using a mask is not the great secret; the depth of
his depravity is. We knew he was bad, but who on earth could be
that bad? As with the race for status by amassing wealth, a race for
negative status by amassing horror; in both directions the centrality
of measurement, characteristic of the Age of Science.
●● At the same time, and without compromise, the viewer needs to be
shown a believable, admirable, even adorable hero, someone who
merits being looked up to but who, mysteriously given his strengths,
cannot see until the film’s climax what the audience has suspected
all along. If he is so noble and so astute, how are his powers of
observation so limited or so dulled? And by contrast, if he is truly so
incapable, how can he be our hero? The claim could be made that in
the twenty-first century we are hungry for ordinary heroes, people
like you and me, fallible sorts, except that much care and expense is
taken in these films to show that the hero is anything but ordinary.
He is athletically, militarily, strategically, and intellectually way
ahead of the crowd. Yet evil, secretly present, overrode him.

Evil ostensibly superior to intelligence, to strength, to light. The dramatic

Force of Moral Purity comes from the same authorial pen that suggests
bloodshed, maiming, decortication, defenestration, scarring, gouging,
burning, slicing, and all the other apparently desirable traces of The Bad (for
a good example see Sabotage [2014]). The idea that through every exercise
intelligence will never match the powers of the dark (chthonic, evil, debased,
or desanctified) and the idea that one should tolerate without striving to
erase multiple and rabid displays of violence, are contradictory. Holding
both sides of this conundrum in the palm of the hand at once is the scripter’s
greatest cheat.
Can it be that finally the innocence of the hero is more vital to us, to
the film, to film’s potentiality than anything he or she can do? Innocence
floating to the top in a fetid basin of corruption, malevolence, murder, and
fragmentation. Even impotent innocence, as long as it looks pretty. The hero
was only pretending to strength while being, in truth, just as helpless as we
are.
 10
Keeping Minutes

FIGURE 10 Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, TriStar, 2017).

Time flies, but not in cinema as in life.

Consider that within the first seconds of David Lean’s one hundred
and ninety-seven-minute Doctor Zhivago (1965; from the 1957 novel by
Boris Pasternak) we meet eight-year-old Yuri (Tarek Sharif) as he marches
through the cold steppes to the funeral of his mother. Only a few minutes
before the film’s end we witness his death by heart attack on a Moscow
sidewalk. Within just over three hours, then, we attend almost the whole life
of this character, child prodigy, doctor, supreme poet, husband, father, lover.
As the film unspools the little boy grows in size and maturity, the young
medical student becomes hardened to life and to love. The middle-aged man
struggles with his Russia and his poems. How strange is the experience of
sitting before a screen and seeing all this long history pass by, before one
gets up to leave. Even odder is the reflection afterward that the pieces, if one
 KEEPING MINUTES  73

may say, of Yuri’s life do not, in the film, seem equably extensive, flowing
to culminations at the same rate. His arrest by partisans late in the film
happens in what seems a blink; his studious regard at his mentor’s side as
an attempted suicide has her stomach pumped, much earlier, is slow and
methodical. This elasticity of narrative time is one of the features of cinema
as art, as Victor Perkins taught in Film as Film. The motion within which
one feels oneself caught up is variable.
Plenty of other films accomplish a character’s “aging” or “development” or
“transition,” yet not so repletely as Zhivago. In The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942), for a classical and wonderful example, arrogant Georgie Minafer
(Tim Holt) grows into repentant George Minafer in a swift editorial flare.
In Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) the eponymous protagonist (Welles) surely
ages, and visibly so, but we met him already in late childhood, and then with
only the briefest moment to examine him, swiftly, through a window. As we
watch Zhivago, what can we think time to be, that a poet’s more than five
decades might pass before us, contracted entirely within only three hours of
our lives?
Contractions involve anticipations, a sense of phrasing. As one begins to
be enraptured by a melody the ending hints itself, more and more firmly.
Well thought at least since Aristotle is the capacity of fiction to embody
and compact time, and all the rudiments of cinematic shooting and editing,
the grammar of film, afford opportunities for speeding up time (Fellini
Satyricon [1969]), slowing it down (Umberto D. [1952]), bringing it to a
halt (Murder on the Orient Express [1974]), making it seem not to exist
(One From the Heart [1981]). Life is fictionalized as a malleable material
that can be drawn and squeezed, cut apart and put together, shaped and
re-shaped. And there are several ways a transition can be effected from one
piece of film (showing one diegetic moment) to another (at another time). As
John Carey nicely showed, changing conventions have existed in cinematic
history for detailing to an audience the “fact” that story time has passed.
We experience film moments and passages by way of their occupation of
time, their procession. But little attention has been paid to the tempo of the
movement, an element that is central to our filmic experience.
The filmmaker can cause some moments to pass very slowly and others
to race, all without using those (cutesy) conventional effects: pages of a
calendar flipping quickly to show months elapsing, dates flashed onscreen
to show years going by, newspaper headlines flying past, or blunt references
to significant cultural events or changes of fashion. If we compare, say,
the voyage into the future in the 1960 and 2002 versions of H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine, a fiction explicitly about temporality, we find that the
earlier film satisfies itself with scenic change and some slight lighting effects,
whereas the later film uses a full-scale computer graphic sequence to show
buildings shooting up and falling down in mere seconds, wars evaporating
in seconds, inventions flashing on and off, day turning into night over and
74 THE FILM CHEAT

over and over and over as with a strobe. The implication here is that were we
to have access to a Time Machine, and were we to ride it into the far future,
our optical experience would be something akin to this effect produced by
(the time machine of) cinema. Or for an example very different: in Easter
Parade (1948) there is a musical number with Fred Astaire dancing in front
of a chorus, all this watched in stunned admiration by Judy Garland in the
shade of the wings. Suddenly, we see something new. Astaire is dancing at
half-speed in front of the chorus continuing to dance at full speed.1 Consider
as well slighter variations, subtle modulations of tempo, adjustments of the
story clock that are cheated, produced in such a way as to carry action
forward usefully for the storyteller but without the audience being let in on
the curious stretchings of the taffy of time.
Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (1960) offers a double metronome, a
parallel (ostensibly simultaneous) pair of dances, running against each other
at different tempi (as with the Easter Parade number). We are probing the
life of Archie Rice (Laurence Olivier), a washed-up song-and-dance man
at the end of his sad career. To regain some chance of pocketing enough
money to pay the tax man, he is putting his aging father to work, Billy
Rice (Roger Livesey), former mega-star now in his dotage but feisty. He
believes he can still catch an audience. As he gets dressed backstage Billy
doesn’t stop muttering about his routine and his illustrious past. We cut
away from his blithering to the hot-lit stage nearby, where a salacious and
notably rhythmic routine, “Put Me Among the Girls” (by Johnny Wakefield
and C. W. Murphy) is in progress. Jump back to Billy coming into the
shady wings, still without his jacket. Archie and the loving but exasperated
daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) are both hunting around for it. Back to the
stage, “Put me . . . among the . . .” Back to the wings, Billy getting his false
mustache on—it’s enormous, preposterous—trying faces with it. Back to
the stage, “Put me . . .” Now in the wings, however, Billy is having trouble
breathing. Back to the stage. Hot, hot lights. In the wings Billy is having
serious trouble breathing. Archie tells the stage manager to signal the singer
to stall and we catch her from the wings dancing offstage, a false smile on
her lips, quickly demanding what’s wrong. “Billy isn’t feeling well, you have
to go back and do another verse. Go back. You have to go back!” She goes
back onstage and picks up a reprise, this time almost doubling the tempo,
“Put me among . . .” Backstage Billy has collapsed. Back to the singing.
“. . . among the girls! . . .” Billy is in his final moments. Billy dies. All of
the cutting here is designed to give the impression that the many events
occurring in different visual fields—the stage, the wings—are in a single
temporal space, yet if we consider each side of this twinning alone we find
the clock ticking by, the “downbeats” of expression, not matched by those

1
For a discussion of this routine, including a technical explanation, see my “Bells Are Ringing.”
 KEEPING MINUTES  75

on the other. The stage song is jerky, frenetic, wild, mechanical. What’s in
the wings is somber, vague, stuttering, like a candle flickering out. Billy dies
between two visual phrases of the onstage song. His anxiety and palpitation
is brought on, we are given to suspect, by fear of the stage moment, which
for him, through the whole sequence I’ve detailed, is coming closer with
more and more rapidity. That is: as time runs out (on his reprieve from the
audience) it seems to pass more swiftly. This is a standard parallel editing
situation, originated in 1911 by D. W. Griffith for The Lonedale Operator
but here, thanks to performative talent on both ends, there is a distinct
quality of variation between what the singer is doing (with false gaiety) and
what is happening to Billy. The moment of Billy’s death can be imagined to
be a race for him, while for Archie the future is opening up to a bald and
salted field in which no happiness will grow. The future opens slowly, as
though tiers of curtains are being drawn away from Archie’s eyes when he
sees his father expire, but the song he cannot help hearing in the background
has an unrelenting tempo.
But it is our proceeding through the film I wish to examine. Not the death
scene alone, but how we move away from it into what happens next. The
speed of happening. We move (instantaneously) to the funeral scene, on a
hilltop under a gray sky. The transition is through a normal dissolve, taking
about a second or two. We feel ourselves moving now as in conventional,
unmanipulated film narrative, at an even and uninterrupted pace. No matter
the events being narrated, the film is giving them over . . . the film is giving
them over . . . the film is giving them over. But since there is a relation
between diegetic events and the extra-diegetic editing pattern, we can watch
how the film gives things over. Billy dies → We are at Billy’s funeral. No time
seems to pass between the two events, no distinct time: a mere inhalation.
No time for Archie to sit at a table and think. No time to mourn. No time
to make funeral arrangements. The film could linger over the absence of
the fondly remembered Billy, or over the anxiety of nervous and nervous-
making Archie, but what it does instead is direct our attention to its own
forward flow through the ether.
If we think of the temporality of the backstage sequence in The Entertainer
(wings >>>>> stage >>>> wings >>> stage >> wings > stageWINGS) and
then of the temporality of the shift to the funeral, death |---| funeral, we find
that felt, known, experienced, and depicted time is handled in two different
ways, first in (increasingly swift) metrical steps and latterly in a leap across
a gulf. Once again: not what is happening, but how it is that, in seeing what
is happening followed by what is happening afterward, we breathe our way
forward. In the stage sequence of The Entertainer and in the large arc of
Doctor Zhivago, the underlying assumption is that so many things happen
in a life, even in a few hours of a life, that each and every one of them cannot
be shown onscreen: some (artful) elision must occur. But beyond elision is
secretly accelerating and decelerating elision, making patient (tranquil) and
76 THE FILM CHEAT

anxious (jerky) elisions. In the end, elision is the control mechanism for
the advancement of what is to come. It is possible to cheat the fact of the
modulation of elisions.
Elision and holding off oncomingness are intrinsically and very profoundly
musical. In his autobiography, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory,
our greatest contemporary philosopher, whose life was devoted to both
thought and harmony, writes of the signal part played by anticipation in, as
he says, “our need for music” (Cavell 400). Stanley Cavell was remembering
a traumatic moment when he first came to consider this, but the nub of his
suspicion was that the musical interval, a fundament of musical form, was
tied in its power and effect to the very human experience of waiting for a
release yet to come. It seems a wholly musical aspect of cinema, then, that
scenes might move differently, some promising resolution swiftly, here, now,
here, now, here; and some implying that time and life move in an adagio,
that change will surely come but one must be patient for it. One thinks of the
spluttering, egotistical Italian music teacher in Kane (Fortunio Bonanova)
pressing Susan to get a phrase right---NOW! Her lack of vocal talent will
become clear to everyone, but not quite so swiftly as that. By contrast, if we
watch Baby (Ansel Elgort) sitting at the wheel of his robin red getaway car
while his associates hit a bank in Baby Driver (2017), sitting at ease with
his headphones on, singing along with the music, using the steering wheel
as a drum set, twitching and gyrating in his seat all the while keeping his
calm, steady eye on the doors to the bank, we see a progression that could
well be an unbounded wait. In fact, he is so appealing to watch waiting
that we wish the moment could go on for the whole length of the film, and
feel irritated when it is interrupted by the thieves racing back with the loot.
Anticipation is variable, as musical tempo is, but it is always the extension
of form through tempo, the placement of event in a phrase of anticipation,
that builds the musical character of a drama and fills its heart.
Audiences sense this if they do not explicitly know it. They do not expect
diegetic movement to be uniform. In Baby Driver, immediately after the
bank heist, and its culminating, very long, unbelievably catastrophic and
near-catastrophic road chase—a prestissimo staccato adventure if ever
was—we see Baby cruising happily and in an idiosyncratic little dance down
a sidewalk to fetch coffee (more on this later). The pace is all new, but the
shift away from a prior pace to a present one is part of the music that is
expected in cinema. The building up and cultivating of this expectation,
however, is a cheat: a mounting of cultivation that occurs while the viewer
is blocked from noticing that she rides in a vehicle driven by someone whose
foot presses down upon, then pulls away from, the accelerator.
Beyond all of this rests a still more colossal cheat.
Regardless of the tempo at which a scene’s or moment’s “melody” is
struck, regardless of the number of beats to the minute it has (a metronome
marking of sixty meaning that there is one beat every second), regardless of
 KEEPING MINUTES  77

the stretch of action, the actual minutes of clock time, always quietly present,
move by without tempo. Tempo is an artifice laid over time. The clock has
no tempo, but it is through tempo that we experience what it registers. (By
altering some of the words in a sentence, or its length and placement, a
writer can affect the reader’s sense of tempo in reading. But the ethereal
page is always underneath.) Ingmar Bergman illustrates this paradox in The
Touch (1971), where Bibi Andersson slowly walks around the thoroughly
objectified body, stilled upon the bed, of her recently deceased mother. On
the wall we see the hand of a clock jigging along in its mechanical life. Tick-
tick-tick, time goes by as one is frozen in the face of the living and non-living
bodies together.
However it is that time passes--if we can say that it actually does pass-
-as far as we are able to surmise it passes uniformly. Yet even this cannot
be established. If we can presume—as we do always tend to presume—that
there is one time and only one time, and that it has a certain precise density,
we must see that through any pair of film scenes, any dramatic processes,
where a figure moves ahead through anticipation to some resolution or
partial resolution, first to one destination and later to another, through
all of this sped-up or slowed-down movement time itself is uniform. The
expectation of an event coming after this event produces an interval, but
intervals are superimposed on time. When we go to the movies, we spend an
hour and a half or two hours of our lives looking at the screen, no matter
how fast, and across what time frame, creatures on the screen appear to
move. In musical terms, when we listen to two movements of a symphony,
an adagio and then an allegro, even if the first seems reflective and swellingly
slow and the second brisk and urgent the clock ticks on, through both.2
Filmmakers are obliged to cheat this truth, and anyone’s acknowledgment
of it, by concocting, just as composers do, variable scenes, slow, fast, fast,
faster, faster still, very slow, stationary, fast again. Failing to do this would
leave the audience open to seeing how artificial even accidental scenic
rhythms are; how filmic “time” and time are not the same. At that point the
screen’s precious illusion is broken. The changes in tempo, the accelerations
and decelerations, keep us awake and waiting for what is to come as though
it really is what is to come rather than only “what is to come.” Our actual
wait as cinemagoers must be the wait we endure as human beings, because
it is (only) as human beings that we are cinemagoers. We wait through the
drumbeats for tomorrow, knowing that Time makes dupes of us all.

2
And the conductor can tell you how many minutes and seconds that movement will take. But
that clock: I forbear here to include discussion of Einstein’s dictum that the issue of whether
one is moving with the direction of the ether, against it, or perpendicular to it actually affects
the clock in use.
78
 Of Performances

{11} Monster!
Lon Chaney; The Phantom of the Opera; The Unholy Three; The General
Died at Dawn; latex; Akim Tamiroff; Predator; Alien; Jacques de Vaucanson

{12} A Star, Not a Star

The General Died at Dawn; Akim Tamiroff; Nils Asther; The Bitter Tea of
General Yen; Dragon Seed; Gary Cooper; Andy Serkis; David Warner; Clint
Eastwood

{13} Pain
Montgomery Clift; Judgment at Nuremberg; Jack Nicholson; Chinatown

{14} Measuring Up
Dustin Hoffman; Marlon Brando; Christopher Walken; Christian Bale; Sean
Astin; Robert DeNiro; Vincent D’Onofrio; Jaws

{15} Privacy
Animal Kingdom; Psycho; Elephant; North by Northwest; Alien: Covenant;
Blow-Up; The Forsyte Saga; Taking Lives; Atonement

{16} Dance
Kramer vs. Kramer; Annie Hall

{17} Keyed Up
Hercules; Samson & Ulysses; Casablanca; Remember; An American in
Paris; The Big Store; The Birds

{18} Don’t Believe It

Baby Driver; Singin’ in the Rain; Born Yesterday; Mystic River; The
Hospital; The Train; The Gypsy Moths

{19} “I Love You”

The Third Who Watches; The Third Man

{20} Surrender
Edward Scissorhands; A Ghost Story; Alien
80
 11
Monster!

FIGURE 11 Raymond Massey in Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, Warner
Bros., 1944).

Manifesto:
It is never wholly salutary to launch an attack on other people’s
fantasies, though in the case of politico-military fantasies taken to extremes
in everyday life (the dream of the Master Race) such attacking has more
than once proved necessary and effective. But the imaginative, fabular,
82 THE FILM CHEAT

mythological fantasies that distort for thrill, that effect some telltale frisson:
these live within our darkest thoughts in a logic none of us can control
or find the origin of. If conscience doth make cowards of us all, so does
consciousness. In film stories, the character of the monster is everywhere,
chilling, terrifying, awakening, warning, provoking us through the mask of
characters’ engagement.
Monstrosity is not always biological or corporeal, yet in film, which
must relentlessly make shows, the body warp is the least ambiguous way
of suggesting it. While in the real world there are no twistings, meldings,
hypertrophies, absences, duplications, and miscolorations of the body
that lack a medical explanation of one kind or another,1 usually in film
narrative the scientific rationale for monstrosity is either only hinted at or
vaguely circumlocuted, or skipped entirely in favor of a disarming depiction
floating without rationale. When we see disfigurement in the everyday, and
without an explanatory rationale, it can be powerfully disarming, and this
happened to me many decades ago when I was brought face to face with
the residents of a retreat for the bodily disfigured not far from Chicago.
The faces I saw there I had dreamed, or seen, onscreen dozens of times, yet
I knew those cinematic faces were accomplished with makeup, while these
were not. Misshaping, duplication, swelling, and, perhaps most disarmingly,
misplacement of facial elements were legion, among these mostly quite
young people who got along with one another effortlessly but seemed wary
of outsiders coming in to visit, even with the kindliest intention.2 If there
were explanations to be had in every case, one did not have them, they
were not provided. In cinema the explanation is often not provided, surely
not with any accuracy of detail. Stories instead labor to regale us with the
“magical potion,” the “experimental technique gone awry,” the “chemicals
inadvertently mixed up,” the “mad scientist,” the “curse,” and so on.
Monstrosity onscreen is typically produced by means of an actor
transform, and Lon Chaney (1883–1930) is widely considered to be the first
performer who accomplished this in a prodigious, elaborate, and brilliant
way. His mutations, as the monster in Frankenstein, as the Phantom of
the Opera, and as legion others are Hollywood legend, particularly since
he designed and almost always single-handedly applied his own makeup.3
While the general proportions of Chaney’s face remained more or less
constant through his work, the qualitative modulations he produced in his
eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hairline, cheeks, and jaw were so radical that his

1
A medical explanation that vitiates the chill of encounter, according to Fiedler.
2
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) will give plain illustration of the sort of kindly
intention that has no weight in such circumstances.
3
See Matthew Solomon’s analysis of Herbert Brenon’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) in
“Laughing Silently.”
 MONSTER!  83

creatures gave all signs of having genuine physiognomies of their own, and
he became known popularly as the Man of a Thousand Faces.
Chaney’s tricks usually included some combination of three main features.
He would use tiny wires to pull or twist skin or musculature (painfully), thus
producing ricti, uncontrollable slobbering, the twisted gaze (as he told me
in 1986, Dick Smith used a similar technique for removing Frank Sinatra’s
jowls in The Detective [1968]). Secondly, Chaney would use make-up paints
to color and miscolor parts of the body, always with a view to what the
effect would be on black-and-white film (where color contrast does not
function); and he would wear wigs, rings, distinctive costumes in general.
Thirdly, he would use performative techniques: grimaces, postures, limps,
stooping, and so on. His last film was Jack Conway’s The Unholy Three in
1930. He died at the age of forty-seven, before the era of latex.
For Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), Charles
Gemora invented a liquid latex application for producing slanted eyelids
on the Caucasian actor Akim Tamiroff (1899–1972), celebrated later for
his work in Dragon Seed (1944), Touch of Evil (1958), Ocean’s 11 (1960),
and Topkapi (1964), among many other films. The latex eyelids permitted
Tamiroff’s Genl. Yang to appear on camera without the actor experiencing
notable discomfort (as was Chaney’s lot). The success of Gemora’s
application promoted its use more liberally in The Wizard of Oz (1939) for,
among many other demonstrables, the Wicked Witch’s extensive nose and
much of the Cowardly Lion’s adorably cowardly face. Gemora (1903–61)
had been a Hollywood stand-by for populating the famously popular gorilla
suit (partly because he was not tall); he worked that way with Chaney in
Unholy Three, Béla Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), the Marx
Brothers in At the Circus (1939), and many other films, before leaving the
suit behind and turning alien, beginning with War of the Worlds (1953).
Latex applications are made after a face mask is taken of the actor, baked
to hardening, and then used as the substrate upon a copy of which the artist
applies the monster “flesh” using soft, moldable clay. When the copy and
the original are superimposed, blank spots will show wherever the build-up
is found and from these blanks, separate latex partial masks are fashioned.
Ron Miller astutely notes how these partial masks are used even when a
whole face is to be refashioned, since one of the telltale giveaways that
makeup is being used is a rigidity of expression, and multiple partial masks
allow the actor much more muscular flexibility. (It goes without saying that
actors develop a particular facility in using the musculature of the face.) The
partials are applied to the actor’s face using spirit gum or other adhesive,
having been fashioned in the first place with extremely thin edges so that
make-up paint applied on top can blend them smoothly and imperceptibly
with the actor’s (normal or painted) skin. There are so many cases of supreme
latex effects in Hollywood cinema it would be impossible to construct even
a short list, especially considering the bizarre creatures in George Lucas’s
84 THE FILM CHEAT

Star Wars (1977), the Gary Oldman transform as Dracula (1992), the water
creatures in Hellboy (2004) and The Shape of Water (2017), and one of the
most celebrated makeup jobs in Hollywood history, Dick Smith’s aging of
Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970).
As legion movie fans know, from having grown up with the relative
normality of “monstrous” configurations on their favorite screens, latex
applications painted with extraordinary artistry can be used to turn any actor
into virtually any sort of being or thing, as long as the producer is willing
to spend the money and time and can find the make-up artists to do it. The
turning is affected, however, by whatever knowledge, or half-knowledge, lies
latent in the viewer. While most who watch films do not know precisely how
disfigurements are created, they do know that disfigurements are created,
and that as they watch the unspeakable movements and actions of screen
monstrosities they are seeing tricks.4 (A neat evasion is to avoid gaining
knowledge of the cast in advance. With Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer [2013]
the benefits can be delightful.) Whereas with stage magic prestidigitation was
a central, perhaps the central, technique—keep the hands moving so quickly
nobody can see what they’re doing—with the “magic” of screen make-up
the artist using latex and paint is not at work in front of the audience at
all. The process can therefore be as slow and methodical as production
schedules allow for. The chief skill involves hand-eye coordination: having
deft skill cooking and baking the latex and then a keen eye for figuring the
precise colorations to apply in blending it in (with a view to photography
under specific light temperatures and against specific backgrounds).
But as in stage magic, the essential problem of cheating appears and
reappears: something is being done that must be made to appear as something
else, or as nothing. The latex pieces must not be seen as latex (Andy Serkis,
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [2002]); nor the paint as paint (Judi
Dench, Shakespeare in Love [1998]); nor the dental implants as implants
(Jerry Lewis, The Nutty Professor [1963]); nor the special contact lenses
as contacts (David Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth [1976]); nor there
being a point where the bald cap or wig attaches to the skull (F. Murray
Abraham, Amadeus [1984]); nor the actor’s technique in modulating vocal
and muscular movement (John Hurt, The Elephant Man). With the screen
“monster,” a sharp professional eye is turned not to what has been done
with the body but to how this change will look once photographed, and so
the make-up test is invaluable. Nevertheless, the screen “monster” walks a
very thin tightrope in performance for many reasons:

4
The education of many viewers, especially young ones, has been fostered by Mission Control
Media’s television show Face Off (2011), featuring Michael Westmore (of the Westmore
dynasty), Ve Neill, and other artists.
 MONSTER!  85

●● Having little or no experience with medical anomaly as rationale,

still the viewer “knows” that the monstrosity on view is not, in
reality, monstrosity. Our social organization is arranged to keep
medical extremities far from public view. When physiognomic
extremity is seen onscreen it is taken, de facto, as fabricated.
In fact the audience comes to film ready from the outset to see
special effects, and this is a sword that cuts two ways: they want
to see something special, far beyond the everyday in proportion or
extension; but they also want it to be an effect, and to know that it
is an effect as they (safely) experience it. The effect per se is the thrill
now, not the charged creation that can be accomplished through the
agency of special effects. Thus, aliens are not alien, zombies are not
zombies, but we take pleasure in gawking at them and we permit
ourselves (within the safe darkness) to wonder.
●● Challenge is an essential quality here. If the monstrous makeup must
seem a concoction to some degree it must also face the viewer’s
accumulated knowledge head-on by suggesting, somehow, an
unimagined, unheard-of step that goes beyond traditional concoction.
Those other creatures were intelligible as fakes, easily recognizable;
this has gone past the horizon, and is something we do not and cannot
know. (In 1939, when the film was first viewed, the Munchkins of The
Wizard of Oz were not read immediately as actual midgets in make-
up and costume. In 1972, naïve again, audiences didn’t see amputees
[Mark Persons, Cheryl Spark, Steve Brown, Larry Wisenhunt] inside
the drones of Silent Running. In 1977, naïve yet again, they didn’t
fathom that a dwarf [Kenny Baker] was inside R2-D2 in Star Wars.)
Confronted with the expectation of technology at work yet also dimly
aware of unknown steps-forward, the viewer is forced to take up the
contradictory position, “I know at the same time that I do not know,”
and the contradiction is a source of excitement (excitement because it
is unstable).
●● Yet, too, a lapse of belief waits at the core of the experience, or a shift
in the focus of belief. Chaney’s Phantom (1925) seemed to skip before
the eyes as a real being, much too quickly, too momentarily to be fully
taken in and thus horrifyingly beyond one’s ken. The movement was
fluid, humanesque. Yet the being seemed inhuman. The expression
on the face was agonized, the sort of expression one would have seen
studying the photographs in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of
Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), except that movie adepts did
not study these photographs before coming to watch The Phantom
of the Opera. Believing in the phantom as phantom, watchers were
displaced from the order of the everyday, carried swiftly and urgently
into a dream (nightmare) consciousness. This metamorphosis of the
86 THE FILM CHEAT

audience, this powerful charge, is absent when viewers know they

are looking at effects: absent but also transposed. Now the wonder is
for the artistry of the effect, a technological fascination rather than a
mythical-existential wonder. “How did they do that???,” a question
that could never be asked unless someone was certain an effect had
been “done.” The resultant thrill is similar to that of tasting something
wonderful at a special restaurant and then wishing for the recipe, yet
also wishing not to have the recipe so that the mystery of the taste
might linger. One wishes not to have the recipe that one knows exists
in some special kitchen.
●● In order to shock the viewer, monstrosity is extended,
reproportioned. It is proposed as enduring, ineradicable (Gary
Oldman’s Dracula). Or it moves faster than we (than screen
characters) expect, or even can have expected (the creature from
the crewman’s thorax in Alien [1979]), with the result that it acts
far before one is prepared to defend. Or it operates through an
augmented structure: there are more parts than can be taken in
by a portrait shot; parts that work in strange and unprecedented
ways (the wrist control in Predator [1987]); or parts internally
ramified or multiplied far beyond the catalog (as in the Alien’s triple
mouth). The monster type may also look disconcertingly human
but control a vast source of power or incalculable space (Dr. No’s
island [1962]; the underground storage in The Circle [2017]). But
the more outlandish the design of monstrosity, the further it climbs
out upon the thinning branch of believability, the more it seems an
outgrowth of cinematic production. In the constant battle to one-
up the past, character designers are always daring the catastrophe
of dematerializing their monster, making it a mere mechanism. One
of the tricks of the cheat is to have the monster, the fabrication,
perform an unlikely action, which will take the audience’s attention
away from the structure of the thing itself and focus it on some
ironic juxtaposition of objects and events. The paragon is Jacques
de Vaucanson’s mechanical gilded-copper duck (early 1740s), here
described by Richard Altick, citing in part Sir David Brewster and in
part W. J. G. Ord-Hume Arthur’s citation of Vaucanson himself:

“It executed accurately all [a natural bird’s] movements and

gestures, it ate and drank with avidity, performed all the quick
motions of the head and throat which are peculiar to the living
animals, and like it, it muddled the water which it drank with its
bill.” It also quacked. But its most spectacular accomplishment
was digestion. “The Duck [wrote Vaucanson] stretches out its
Neck to take Corn out of your Hand; it swallows it, digests it, and
discharges it digested by the usual Passage.” (65)
 MONSTER!  87

The “discharge” proved most popular, most tellingly evidential of the trueness,
the naturalness, and unaffectedness of the thing. How, if it does this, could it
be constructed?5 With the alien in Alien, two discrete tricks are used to cheat
the audience’s attention. First, we never see the entire thing top to bottom
until the very end of the film—and then only far too briefly—so it is left to the
imagination to specify magnitudes (as with the shark in Jaws [1975], where the
trick is taken one step further in that the entire creature is never quite visibly
shown, unless it is underwater and thrashing, at which point the thrashing
action distracts us). The second is that the innermost mouth is geared and
powered to run over with distracting drool when—so unbelievably swiftly—it
snaps to produce death.6 The monstrous body is doing Show Business. Before
one can stand back for serious evaluation, the “show” is over.
The actor playing the monstrosity finds in the mirror that a trick of a
different kind has been played, because inside the appurtenance the self is very
hard to find. The movement of the face must be relearned to fit the moldings.
Movement on land and in the water must be naturalized to the species—
the “species”—of the thing instead of to the needs of the performer. And of
course working conditions deteriorate almost always, because one is locked
into gear that limits muscularity, produces sweltering heat under film lighting,
is hard to eat through and so on. The point here isn’t that the “monster” is
uncomfortable for the performer to act but that the discomfort is a distraction
and being “monstrous” in front of a camera requires intense concentration of
effort, all of which must scrupulously be hidden. The monster is the veritable
star of the film, and when it is onscreen audiences do not back away from
inspecting its smallest features, like nineteenth-century nursemaids picking
lice from the head of a child. The telltale small feature is one of the cheats of
the monster trope: it distracts attention from the thing as a whole.
With monstrosities, the viewer is positioned in two discreet atria, one in
which is exhibited nothing but technique, strategy, know-how, manipulation,
and craft, and the other a cavern of fear and disorienting “ugliness,”
misshapen abysm, horrifying excesses and absences. We see the special effect
we have paid to see, surely, yet are shocked by sights that go far beyond
what we knew to want, sights that disarm, terrify, and rouse other screen
characters just as they do us. If in this delicious and elaborate cheat our
foreknowledge fails to salve, is this because in some grand Schadenfreude
only the thought of destroying our knowledge through exceeding it, brings
release?

5
The Eating Machine at Hobart’s Museum of Contemporary Art works in a cognate fashion,
although with literal transparency.
6
A derivation from the snap of the animated crocodile in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953).
 12
A Star, Not a Star

FIGURE 12 Akim Tamiroff as a vanquished Grande in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles,

Universal International, 1958).

Hollywood labor practices divide the on-camera workforce, since some

actors are deemed magnetic to audiences and must be highly remunerated,
and others are relatively decorative and more replaceable. The star magnets
bring crowds to the box office, nowadays no less than in the classical era, and
must reward the viewer’s investment with a glowing and plainly discernable
 A STAR, NOT A STAR  89

presence onscreen. Stars thus play key roles. Character players are cast as
eccentric sidekicks, bizarre villains, personable henchmen, and the like. The
problem that produces the relevant cheat here is one that becomes clear
when we note the differential optical allure of both types of actors.
The star must shine, indeed must appear to be the source of light that makes
the whole screen shine. No matter the character in question, the star beneath
has the viewer’s commitment of love, and must therefore be manifested in an
unquestionably recognizable way.1 There are few exceptions to this formula.
Not only will the star appear to dominate the story, he or she will on every
appearance dominate the screen. But often a scene must be played with
a partner who is a character actor, a persona comparatively enshadowed.
Character players, in role, are as often undetectable as detectable, as
often marginal as nearly central, as often accompanied by a team of other
character players as alone. These actor types, stars and character players, are
effectively statuses that attach to persons in an ongoingly negotiable way.
In a film like Murder on the Orient Express (1974) (reprised in much the
same form in 2017), many former big stars—Michael York, Wendy Hiller,
Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins—
are relegated to character-player status, albeit “star character-player” status,
against the repeating (but in this case marginal) domination of Albert Finney
(latterly Kenneth Branagh) as Hercule Poirot. However, given that the star
is central and the character actor only (but fully) adjacent, how can the
difference between their statuses be reconciled with (a) the need for the
fiction to elude viewers’ consciousness of status difference as such, (b) the
director and cinematographer’s need to compose shots including both at
once, and (c) the ongoing requirement that no matter what happens, all the
players onscreen should appear to belong in the same package, the same
“world,” yet at the same time belong there in different (classed) ways?
Return with me to Akim Tamiroff, born of Armenian descent in Russia, a
student from 1918 of Konstantin Stanislavsky. A consummate professional,
he was noted in America for his character parts, playing always against a
dignified, handsome, or flamboyant star (Anthony Perkins, Frank Sinatra
and Dean Martin, Orson Welles). The thick Slav tongue, the pouting eyes,
the extraordinary bejowled cheeks made possible a kind of expressive
plasticity, to which the actor’s off-kilter English added tang. Like so many
character players in Hollywood’s golden age, Tamiroff found himself cast
many times over in the same sorts of roles, it being a production practice
trusted and true for directors and heads of casting departments to look at

1
Although in this context, it is wise to consider Noa Steimatsky’s inspired confusion watching
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il provino/Prefazione (The Screen Test/Preface, 1965): It was
impossible for her to know “at what level of the re-enactment we stand. Fiction and actuality,
action and re-enactment, person and role are compressed” (183).
90 THE FILM CHEAT

actors by way of clips from previous films, often and easily borrowed from
any studio (nowadays, eager actors seeking work provide their own “reels,”
which are typically high-definition disks containing scenes from the films
they’ve made). The prosthetic eyes he wore in The General Died at Dawn
(1936) attracted attention in their own way in a white-dominated culture
that doted on caricaturing other cultural types—in her book Romance
and the “Yellow Peril,” Gina Marchetti gives a critical view of this kind
of colonization, commenting, for example, on how the Swedish actor Nils
Asther (1897–1981), a notably handsome face in Hollywood from 1926
through the mid-1950s, played Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1932) in “grotesquely designed” makeup (50). Asther had no prosthetics
there, but he did sport sharply defined and outrageously angled eyebrows,
which consistently brought attention to his eyes. As to the easily converted
Tamiroff, in the mid-1940s, when Harold Bucquet and Jack Conway were
preparing Dragon Seed at MGM, they would have been familiar with
Tamiroff’s work in General Died and possibly even have cast him because
of it. The cheat of the latex was therefore helpful not only for establishing
a precise (and peculiar) caricature but also for furthering an actor’s career.
The character player is faced with the challenge of unendingly transforming
the self for camera, so as to be able to play one distinct type, say, at Warner
Bros. for three days’ shooting and a quite different one at Fox just afterward
for two days’ more, and so on. Make-up, hairdressing, the manner of carrying
the costume, vocal modulation, quirky facial expression—all these features,
taboo for the star who must always be a Self—aid in the changes. While
one will find the star’s portrait photograph a fairly accurate representation
of the being one has been seeing on the screen, the character actor’s might
be unidentifiable, posed as it is in unaffected clothing, without makeup for
character, and in less sculpted light. In fan magazines and other publicity, the
star’s head shot will gain a different kind of prominence, showing him or her
off as a blemish-free, intensely expressive point of contact. Stars typically
don’t need to withdraw prosthetic masks for such “everyday” photography
because as a rule they don’t wear prosthetic masks in the first place, they
show and sell themselves as being what they “actually are.” In the case of
Gary Cooper, a photographer will take care to light the facial bone structure
prominently, to have bounce light emerge from the eyes. And assistants will
see to it that the hair is not only impeccable but also harmoniously singing.
Cary Grant will look debonair and relaxed, as though the camera is his
mother. Joaquin Phoenix—who started out playing characters and became
a star, yet maintained a preference for odd characters to bear his stardom—
appears on a cover of Vanity Fair (for October 2019) standing at the lip
of a swimming pool in a white shirt and black tie, but he is in the pool,
having been doused, and is sopping wet: adventurous, daring, over the edge,
serious, sincere, and calm, with dark penetrating eyes. Marilyn Monroe is
photographed by Richard Avedon in a tight-fitting black spangled dress
 A STAR, NOT A STAR  91

with an extended V-neck. She is fully made up but her hair is in shambles
(the Hangover look) and she gazes slightly off-camera with her eyes half
drawn in what seems like sadness. For Bert Stern her platinum hair explodes
in waves, her eyes beckon, and her smile tickles amusingly, as though she is
having a dirty thought.
All actors’ head shots are cheats—they must be; their function is not to
tag but to flog the person—but the star shot is an elaborately fashioned
one. Studio executives don’t cast on the basis of this sort of thing, since
stars are either on contract with work routinely assigned or else independent
contractors desired in advance by the producer. But for both the glamour
figure and the character figure, advertising photographs and narrative
cinematography both work to create two bonds: one of the actor with her
diegetic character, the other between the characters themselves (the relation
between the actors being almost always of no account on set). The identity
of any actor as employee is wedded to the identity of a character and also
to the ensemble of personae to be found inside the narrative. Each character
abiding there must fit. Yet at the dining table of labor, only some sit at the
head.
But the star’s centrality and the relatively peripheral placement of
character actors work together to fashion a complex cheat upon the
audience’s knowledge. The screen must be composed with fields of relative
importance so that the viewer can have assistance in swiftly focusing and
following the details of a story. This is one good reason why star players
constantly have more intense lighting. But the lighting of character players
in the star’s surround must seem to logically derive, to be related in intensity
if not to match, and all this irrespective of the “natural light” that is being
simulated in the “place.” Lighting does a lot to bring actors’ work in line,
to affiliate characters while maintaining bright star centrality, and thus the
lighting hides actual working relations in a very particular way. In the world
of film labor offscreen, however, hierarchical distance may not exist between
workers or may exist very acutely, it being possible for a star to attend the
same synagogue on Rosh Hashanah as the character actor he played with
yesterday, or play poker with him on an off-work weekend, or refuse to be
in the same room. Yet at the same time, and completely covered over by
both script and light, one performer may be separate from another—even
when both are stars, or both character actors—for reasons audiences do
not surmise. One example: in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Burt Lancaster
and Tony Curtis share star billing, and both feature as centerpieces of any
and every shot that includes either of them. But Lancaster’s company was
producing the film, and in effect he was paying Curtis for his labor. There
is a power split between the two onscreen but it has nothing to do with the
power split behind the camera. Harry Carey and later his son Harry Carey
Jr. were intimate friends of John Wayne, but in John Wayne’s westerns they
again and again played subsidiary character parts to his star turns.
92 THE FILM CHEAT

More than external manipulations—the lines in a script, the beams from

an arc lamp—the professional training and astute talent of performers cheats
their relations as people and in character very profoundly. Friendships are
masked over. Antipathy is whipped into a delectable frosting, as we see in the
ultra-smooth scenes in State of the Union (1948) with Katharine Hepburn
and Adolphe Menjou, whom she loathed, and the testy scenes there and in
Adam’s Rib (1949) between her and Spencer Tracy, with whom she was in
love. While in their relations the characters of a story will display social
status and differentiation, before the lens there is fostered the illusion that
the performances themselves, as performances, inhabit a democracy.
 13
Pain

FIGURE 13 (Top) Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer,

Roxlom, 1961); (Bottom) Jack Nicholson with Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (Roman
Polanski, Paramount, 1974).
94 THE FILM CHEAT

On a May evening of 1956, engaged in the filming of Raintree County for

Edward Dmytryk, Montgomery Clift was in a serious car accident and
sustained multiple injuries to his face. Notwithstanding the producer’s fears
that his star’s disfigurement would negatively affect the box office, Clift
himself took a stoic position, imagining that he would now be able to act
better and the film would be a smash. He was interested, here as always, in
the quality of the performance he could give, not the pretty face he might
present to the camera for the viewer’s pleasure. Of course, from a fan’s point
of view Clift had been showing a notably pretty face since his early work
in Red River (1948). The smooth-faced innocence he projected there was
in need of serious modulation by the time he came to shoot Judgment at
Nuremberg for Stanley Kramer in 1960.
As Rudolph Petersen in Judgment, he is put up by the American prosecutor
(Richard Widmark) as witness against the Nazi atrocity perpetrators on
trial, and then grilled mercilessly by the defense attorney (Maximilian
Schell). The testimony occupies a scene that runs some twelve minutes, with
Clift onscreen throughout. He is forced to whimper self-consciously that the
Nazis sterilized him, that he is now living only half a life. The defense alleges
that the sterilization took place because Petersen was mentally defective to
begin with, and the hesitant, stammering, out of control speech he produces
in response, the gazing around and flailing helplessly in the witness box,
would indeed seem to evidence a deficit (although not excuse decisions that
may have been made because of it). The performance is a tour de force of
vulnerability, insecurity, victimization, and loss. In the many close-ups of
Clift, it is unavoidable that we notice that damage upon his face, the scar
traces, the pudginess, the disproportion between his left and right sides, all
of which adds to the weight of the moment.
Another vision, now. In Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the private
detective J. J. (“Jake”) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is caught prying around a Los
Angeles aqueduct one night by a paid henchman (Polanski), who proceeds to
teach him to stop nosing around other people’s business by literally slashing
his nose with a knife. From here onward, we see Gittes with a clean white
bandage on his nose. Beyond it, the face of Gittes is thoroughly the face of
Nicholson, tanned, smart-eyed, purposive.
Two prominent facialities, then, Rudolph’s and Jake’s by way of Clift
and Nicholson, clearly and unmistakably presented as marred. Do we
regard them with an appreciable difference, the plots that ground them
notwithstanding? One face is wounded, the other is “wounded.” How are
the visual treatments unalike, and what responses do each mobilize? Like
other actors who have been disfigured, or eccentrically figured, through
birth or through accident (Joaquin Phoenix and Stacy Keach with harelips,
Natalie Wood with a missing finger, Mark Hamill after his January 1977
accident) Clift brings up a hesitancy on the viewer’s part to look directly,
a respectful (or fearful) withdrawal in the face of extreme vulnerability on
 PAIN  95

show. One is overcome by the sense that if there were any way for him to
do it, Clift would cover over his scars and his reshapen face and resort to
only performing a character’s grotesquerie, yet also that any cover-up would
bring him closer to the looker’s attention not further away. The only solution
is willing (even proud) acceptance of the blemish as, now, an intrinsic part
of identity, a feature that belongs where it is, and hoping that the viewer will
make the necessary allowances. Nor is serious wounding always a strictly
visual matter. When we have a performer with a broken voice, we hear the
break in every syllable of dialogue, but make allowances (Jack Krugman,
Julie Andrews after her Broadway run in Victor/Victoria), fully aware that,
unlike a false limb but very like a tortured face, it cannot be hidden. Erving
Goffman notes in Stigma one of the effects of body repair: “Where . . . repair
is possible, what often results is not the acquisition of fully normal status,
but a transformation of self from someone with a particular blemish into
someone with a record of having corrected a particular blemish” (Stigma
9). Clift’s “blemish” not only resulted from but was the accident itself; his
history and his presentation of self in Nuremberg is an indication of a repair
dutifully and successfully undertaken. Goffman goes on:

While a blemish such as a facial disfigurement might put off a stranger,

intimates presumably would not be put off by such matters. The area
of stigma management, then, might be seen as something that pertains
mainly to public life, to contact between strangers or mere acquaintances,
to one end of a continuum whose other pole is intimacy. (51)

The matter of Petersen and Clift together on the witness stand complicates
analysis. Petersen has been disfigured in an invisible way, but his wail renders
the sterilization at least conceptually visible; at the same time Clift, who
is Petersen at this moment, carries a very visible and totally unchangeable
stigma. Between the audience and the character, between me and Petersen as
I watch his torment (and perhaps think of it as a remodeling of his torment
in the car, as Clift), there is a relationship of intimacy, “public intimacy.”
We are always intimate with the characters of the screen but this peculiar
intimacy is touched by the touch of fate.
The structuring of Rudolph Petersen as a man whose sex has been
maimed and, more chillingly, as a victim at the hands of the Third Reich,
gives him a stigma not only ineradicable (like Clift’s facial trauma) but in
a way pendulous, of great gravity. The male can think of himself as “the
same” (but altered) if his face is reconstructed surgically.1 But if his testes
are removed surgically or blocked chemically from functioning his self-

1
This applies to Mark Hamill’s transformation and to Ann-Margret’s after her stage accident
in September 1972.
96 THE FILM CHEAT

regard must suffer a far more grievous assault, an ongoing, repetitive,

unending assault. By placing this aspect of Petersen’s life into the script, and
foregrounding it through the way he is treated and how he responds during
testimony, the script in effect allows the performer to cheat (by outbidding)
his own disfigurement, surely to cheat the otherwise overpowering effect
of it, the “Some​thing​-stra​nge-h​as-ha​ppene​d-to-​the-w​ay-he​-look​s” effect. We
think of the face and the sex, here both wounded, as imbricated with each
other. The facial structure is part and parcel of the character who wails that
he was sterilized. If he is mentally deficient in any way, we can read the face
as proper to that condition. In any event, we are given multiple reasons for
downplaying the wounds on the face. Knowing we will be likely to respond
this way, the cinematographer has no qualms lighting Clift flatly, letting the
gray tones of his torso and face drop back into those of the witness box.
He is only a small organic figment in a gigantic arrangement of sociopathic
terror, and the vision of him testifies to this reduction and gearing of self, as
he testifies to atrocity.
As to Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, his is not, like Clift’s, a face to be lost in
performance while being remembered as belonging in a crowd of stellar
presences—Burt Lancaster’s, Spencer Tracy’s, Judy Garland’s, Richard
Widmark’s—but instead the principal figure and perceptual object of
Chinatown, an embodiment to be featured always, through special, accreted
illumination, central positioning, perfection of focus. Curiously, as the story
winds on Jake’s nose bandage continues scene after scene to appear pristine
white, as though refreshed nightly (a not implausible arrangement), and
because of that stark whiteness it becomes the single prominent point of
concentration no matter the conversation or the action. Functionally, of
course, the effect is produced by the prop and wardrobe assistants, working
with the makeup people, who actually replenish that bandage routinely
through the day’s work. Any perspiration or staining it picks up, even
inadvertently, will show and be likely to mar a shot. But the effect is to make
Gittes’s handicap leap into our awareness and gain identification, through
the extreme clarity of its display, as constructed. An interesting side effect is
produced here for aiding the narration. Jake is a sly fellow. He becomes a
character who might very well, it seems, be putting on his own contrivance,
distracting the attention of those he meets just as Nicholson is distracting
our attention. This lends him tactical kenning, deviousness—more than the
placid-looking Nicholson would convey (without overtly laboring) if his
face were untouched.
The narrative is helping both actors work with facial disfigurement as
they appear, one by incorporating the disfigurement itself as a metaphor
for a more general debility which must be openly shown for the Clift scene
to properly work, the other putting light not on the wound itself—Jake’s
nose—but on strategic labor to wrap it up, cover jobs. Two cheats, then.
For Judgment, don’t put any cover at all, none, not of any kind. The subject
 PAIN  97

matter is so grandiosely horrible that only the deepest truth of performance

can legitimately and honorably address it. Then, for Chinatown, put a cover
and show it as the central fact at hand. Nicholson is (satisfyingly) at risk of
coming across as tactical himself, something of a chameleon who hides in
public view, or at least strategizes beyond our awareness. Clift becomes a
model of sincerity.
 14
Measuring Up

FIGURE 14 Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger,
Jerome Hellman Productions, 1969).

“We already and from the first discern him making this thing other,” writes
Norman O. Brown (8). This thing, the whole thing, the central thing as he
must know it, himself, yet also the self as entity, his body. The body as sized.
The body as a performance in itself.
Acting is more or less one or the other of two possibilities, in practice.
It is being, which is living, in its fullest essentiality, such as is seen with
Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper (2016) or Elliott Gould in The Long
Goodbye (1973). (The camera catches it all. You cannot lie to the camera.)
And this is metamorphosis. (Metamorphosis – Becoming – Transformation
– Hiding.) As there is never anything onscreen but truth and whole truth,
 MEASURING UP  99

what was complete and real at the moment the aperture was open. In this
sincerity of the flesh there is constant metamorphosis in that as time passes
life flickers and develops and no two moments are the same. The actor must
authentically feel his presence in his moment, and must negotiate secretly,
that is, privately, with the character in order to give the character openness
to, and access to, that mutability. In such acting one does not play a scene,
one plays a life.
On the other hand we have construction, masquerade, where the character
is a device the actor literally or metaphorically puts on. Anthony Hopkins as
Hannibal Lecter, Mary Astor as The Princess Centimillia in The Palm Beach
Story (1942). One finds here a notable constancy moment to moment, the
constancy (almost rigidity) of a portrait in a frame, because the mask is not
alive in itself. Also a strange quality of presentation: metallically articulate,
burnished, intensified beyond human limit, not what we find in people but
what we find in people represented.
With both kinds of acting the performer has no choice but to be, finally,
in self-knowledge as well as in presentation, a body, this body and not that
one, and whether the body is expressed without reserve (Brando in Don
Juan DeMarco [1994], playing a toss-and-catch-the-popcorn game in bed
with Faye Dunaway) or is affected through contortive manipulations (John
Hurt as Merrick in The Elephant Man [1980]) still the camera cannot but
show it, there being nothing else of the performative self to show. And what
the camera shows must stand, hold itself, breathe, and get dressed. What is
it that happens onscreen with the actorly body as the camera team contrives
to shape, arrange, and show it? Especially in regards to a key aspect of
the actor’s body, something no actor and no person would go through life
without both sensing and recognizing: size. Toooo large. Tooooo small.
Jusssst right!
As to corporeal girth, overall weight (involving bone density), or bulk,
essentially horizontal displacement, impressions are not difficult to manage.
Pads work very well (Orson Welles as Falstaff [1965], Angelina Jolie in
Regression [2015]) and are nicely concealed, but lens choice can be easier
still, wide-angle lenses (below 50 mm) tending to spread space laterally
(permitting a more closely-positioned camera) and spreading body elements
(facial elements notably) outward from the center of the screen. Dream
sequences, drug hallucinations, memories, and so on are very frequently
established through extreme wide-angle photography, 18 mm or 20 mm.
On the contrary, the longer the lens the more the body will withdraw.
Clothing may hide a body the camera finds oversized in relation to others
in the scene, in construction but also in fabric texture and color in relation
to the texture and color of the props and set. Color affects us strongly
through contrast (on which see Albers). Coloration can cause a garment,
and therefore the body encased in it, to apparently recede into or spring
from the background, as a shot or character placement might require. The
100 THE FILM CHEAT

cinematographer can use filters to affect a coloration’s distinctness and

sharpness; and can use the shadows created by his lighting to hide part or
all of an actor’s body, as happens with the very heavy Brando as he makes
an entrance in Apocalypse Now (1979).1 Extreme corporeal variation can
come into use for, among other possibilities, bold comedy, as with Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins (1988) or Alan Hale with Errol
Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
Actors will sometimes slave to adjust their weight for a role, and some will
be made legendary for their exploits. Christopher Walken filmed Cimino’s
The Deer Hunter (1978) after a six-month-long diet of rice and bananas,
depriving himself until he was spindly. Christian Bale used diet and exercise
to bring himself down to almost fifty-percent of his body weight for The
Machinist (2004). Going in the other direction, Sean Astin bulked up for
Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003), much as Robert DeNiro had done
for Raging Bull (1980) and Vincent D’Onofrio for Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Actor labor, coloration, lighting, lens, and garments can work in
combinations to establish girth, then. But with fully grown adult actors the
length of the body is not so malleable outside of CGI today or the make-up
and photographic tricks we find in, say, The Nutty Professor (1963). An
actor who is very tall will be very tall at work; a short one not as tall as that,
and these sizes will have to be accounted for. What can production do when
a tall actor and a shorter one must walk side by side or hold a conversation
in close-up? Or when shots of two such actors in the same setting must
alternate in editing (in good match)? If a tall character and short character
interact against a detailed background, both of them shot at chest height,
the background will wildly fluctuate and the viewer’s experience will be of
a vertical bouncing when the shots are cut together. The cheat for a single
shot involves cranking the camera up or down on its stand or dolly, thus
getting a framing of the actor’s head and shoulders roughly at chest height,
and with careful attention to the kind of background present and how much
of it shows. One way to avoid the background bouncing is to have the
set designed from the start so that one side of it looks very different than
another, each side usable as background for one of the unmatched actors;
the effect of creating exchangeable backgrounds at differing heights is thus
made somewhat easier. Of course when computer graphics are creating the
background, or when bluescreen or greenscreen are being used, background
problems of this particular kind disappear (giving way to others). And with
very neutral backgrounds, a director can line each of two actors up on the
same side of the location or set and later have the pieces of film intercut as
though they are on opposite sides.

1
My gratitude to Dan Sacco for this and related observations about actor size.
 MEASURING UP  101

As to considerable repetition of a shot take after take, presuming that the

camera position is fixed and the camera height is registered, an exposure
can be redone as many times as needed; the actor usually has marks on
the floor to indicate where to stand, and script supervisors will work to
help the actor re-strike a particular pose, get a cigarette partially smoked
at the right length, have a bead of sweat repeatedly on the brow located
exactly over the center of the left eye. Paired shots usually require that the
shorter actor be placed on a wooden box or a ramp, and some actors wear
lifts in their shoes; thus the camera can favor the taller figure and a usable
composition can be obtained (Claude Rains on an ascending ramp as from
a distance he walks toward Ingrid Bergman for Notorious [1946]). Filming
Jaws (1975) off Nantucket, Steven Spielberg discovered the nightmare
problem of making shots that would match in editing, because here he
had not only actors of differing heights (Roy Scheider distinctly taller than
Richard Dreyfuss) but a boat that was bobbing on the tide. As the side of the
boat went up and down, so did the horizon line, but in order to make stable
editing possible the horizon has to be kept constant, a problem that here
required enormous patience, long waiting times, and willingness to waste
film. People who admire Jaws tend to overlook the astonishing coherence
of the editing. Those critical spirits who flagellated Spielberg’s reputation by
accusing him of economic profligacy on set failed to see how any attempt to
use film stock inexpensively would have made for an impossible editing job.
Between actors and their characters we find a certain elemental separation
that invokes the problem of cheating in that audiences are not always to be
let in:
●● The actor as (i) an embodied being, one who moves about the social
world in a normal way, and the actor as (ii) a characterized being,
one who sparks and maintains the drama, are essentially identical
twins, identical in that the person who acts and who underlies
the character is the same person who made way to the studio to
be filmed. Yet for the viewer these two personae neither match
nor overlap. The body of the performer, viewers rarely note, is a
construction for the screen, a visibility resulting from adjustments:
of lighting, of clothing, of the lens, of the camera position, of other
performers nearby, and so on, and through this construction the
viewer imagines that body as a sized and a palpable one. Sensing
the onscreen actor-character body to be coherent and present,
one values its size, even believes in it, yet in the everyday world,
where people reside, the same performer may well be taller, shorter,
broader, slimmer, and generally other than was envisioned onscreen.
The viewer is led by production cheats to an imagination of
character size, alone and in relation to other characters, yet viewers
can tend toward extending this reading off the screen and into real
102 THE FILM CHEAT

life. The imaginary character size exists in a space inviolable, the

space of the story as seen, and need bear only the slightest affinity
with the performer’s size off-camera.

The star close-up will very often take an actor’s face and magnify it so
that it fills the entire screen. Spread poster-like before us will be the well-
known features in sympathetic array, the parts bearing relation to one
another in a predictable and pleasing manner. But in the real world, close-
up lenses missing, we do not have opportunity to view the star, or anyone,
with this kind of proximity mixed with sharp focal clarity. The performer
is of necessity smaller in reality. On the street one can perhaps recognize
the performer (there is a delicious scenic moment in The King of Comedy
[1982] about precisely this: “When it’s him it doesn’t look like him.”). But
the comparison between screen persona and real personality, as embodied,
goes far beyond the simplicity of measurement. For the viewer there are
subjectively felt components of any perception. The screen body has a
plasticity actual bodies do not present themselves as having; it seems to
float in space rather than being gravitationally bounded. Onscreen there is
no gravity. The screen body travels magically, is cut apart and apportioned
magically (medium shots, close-ups) then magically reconstituted (long
shots), touches the objects in view in an only barely discernable way. The
actor’s everyday body, should one encounter it in the everyday, turns away
in privacy or modesty or distraction and does not present, “face-on,” that
recognizable star hieroglyph.
●● Nor is there recognizable pathos in the screen body itself, outside
of what a scripted moment might inspire us to read or imagine.
The actorial face that is scarred, blemished, misshapen—all
medical contingencies—is made over so that the character face
can harmonize with other character faces. Extra lines are filled;
pimples are covered; scars are painted just as sometimes for good
dramatic reasons scars are painted on. The character body is
entirely fashioned in coherence with dramatic requirement, and
at the expense of the producer; but the performative body is kept
in reserve—it operates through a history of employment. We must
always remember that in the golden years, actors on the studio
contract found that the way they appeared, both onscreen and
offscreen if they were in public, literally belonged to the studio.
●● Further, although we come to know the character in her diegetic
surround, become able to effect recognition in a flash, we tend not to
know the actor at all, except as a result of work. She offers a routine
presence behind characters roughly like this one (like: recognizably
covering or based upon the same actorial persona). The face goes
with a name, if only a name attached to a face. We don’t know
 MEASURING UP  103

the autobiographical past, the birthplace, the friends of youth, the

formative experiences, the taste for color and shape and flavor, and
much more. We don’t know the size, whether we would have to look
up to say hello or look down or look straight forward. In the classic
theater, with the large screen, we always look “up.” The figures are
gigantic. On handheld screens, we always look “down” at figures
that are figurines. This “knowledge” of a performer is in reference to
the age of mega-publicity in which we now live, and in the context
of which we watch films. There is so much “information” of one
kind or another circulated about the people we see transmogrified
on the screen (Anthony Hopkins on Instagram, September 2019,
petting his tabby) that it is virtually impossible, watching them in
narrative action, not to entertain some kind of imagination of their
presence in (what is for us) some wholly fabular “real” world. Eating
at Musso’s. Giving an interview to MSNBC. Getting out of a stretch
limousine with a love partner of the moment, grinning, gleaming for
the cellphone cameras. We need not see these kinds of trans-diegetic
scenarios to suspect they exist, yet our conception is perforce
vague. In response to the strength or frequency of our imagination
(publicity is aggravating that imagination relentlessly), we may be
confused into thinking these are people we know. Of course, this is
fetish. When I was two years old I had a much chewed-up stuffed
lamb, and I gave him a name and he was my friend.

It is true, too, that once a characterization is in progress the actor finds

the character and only the character, in the mirror. Perhaps for the actor
the character has no size, since he or she is well aware that characters will
appear great or small as the picture crafts them. When a very tall actor
(Peter Graves and Alexander Siddig are two I have met, whose height was
striking) works, he will make certain his character knows how to easily pass
through doorways and so on. But he will know, too, that this character at
ease in his body is not himself, does not watch doorways and low ceilings
the way he, almost instinctively, does—not unless the watchfulness is in the
script. The character merely is, but the actor works with his own bodily
“equipment” and that of his co-workers to negotiate the pictorial space
together. Once the film is finished, no character will be too tall or too short.
Every one of them will be just right.
 15
Privacy

FIGURE 15 The cast of Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, TriStar, 1997).

Actors on the screen always experience a kind of privacy, a closeting, in

that we cannot get at them or be with them in the same space and time (and
they recognize this and feel it as they work); they are untouchables, a cast(e)
aside. But characters may never find guarantee of such privacy. How they
are exposed to us varies script to script, but exposed they indubitably are.

Wash
In Animal Kingdom (2016), teenaged orphan Josh (Finn Cole) has taken up
residence with his grandmother, her chum, and her three sons, who range
 PRIVACY  105

in age from their mid-twenties to late thirties. One of this crowd, Shawn
(Andrew “Pope” Cody), is fresh out of jail, and eager to help the other
three with a heist job. He is assigned to find a getaway car and wishes to
commandeer the help of the young visitor. At the moment in question J.—as
he calls himself—is in the shower. Important to be clear: (a) a young actor
at least appears to be in front of us, completely naked, self-cleansing; and
(b) a script has specified that in this scene the character called “J.” will be
showering. Earlier moments have explicitly not identified J. as mudstained
or uncomfortable physically, that is, desperately in need of a shower, and
nothing in the immediately ensuing action dictates that J. should be recently
cleansed. We have to find him somewhere, and the decision has been made
to put him in the shower.
Our camera is both inside the shower stall with J. (a cursory half-nod to
Psycho [1960]) and malingering on the wafer-thin border between the stall
and the bathroom, where Shawn makes his entry and presses J. to hurry up
and get dressed so they can get going. In the shots of their interaction the
camera is cranked up so that the images are uniformly chest-up on both sides,
eyeline match being established with some care since, again as per the script,
it is to be signaled to the viewer that the sudden intruder is not looking, just
as the viewer is not looking (has not been given to look) at J.’s body, only
at J.’s receptive face. The sound of the running water is continually present.
There are intermittent, and rhythmically edited, de rigueur shots of nude
J. running hands over himself as he listens (that is, Cole gives a believable
show1).
This little scene figures for me here because it is a notably clear and
uncontaminated example of a much replicated trope in contemporary
television and film work. Some character of interest, alone or with someone
else, is in the process of showering or taking a bath when the camera
discovers the action and attends it. Eric Deulen and Alex Frost in Gus Van
Sant’s Elephant (2006) tellingly cleaning each other, an erotic and revealing
moment if at the same time cheated through (typical) genital masking;
Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko in Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace
(2008); Virginia Gardner showering behind a heavy (but not heavy enough)
curtain in David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018); Keanu Reeves with Ana
Ularu in the bathtub in Matthew Ross’s Siberia (2018); Scarlett Johannson
simulating Janet Leigh in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock (2012); Matt Damon
fingering the warm green water as Jude Law bathes in The Talented Mr.
Ripley (1999); little Jack Dylan Grazer showering with his favorite clown
in Andy Muschietti’s It (2017); teenaged Gabrielle Anwar sucked under the

1
Believable: he follows a series of steps that could be taken from a Shower Manual that all of
us possess and use religiously, as though nobody could be in any doubt as to what some other
person would do in a shower.
106 THE FILM CHEAT

soapsuds in Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993); Anthony Michael Hall,

Ilan Mitchell-Smith, and Kelly LeBrock in John Hughes’s Weird Science
(1985); Amy Sedaris in Jon Favreau’s Elf (2003); Jim Carrey in Tom Shadyac’s
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994); Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s Carrie
(1976); Kate Beckinsale in Dominic Sena’s Whiteout (2009); Michael Pitt,
Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003);
Nick Robinson in Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon (2018); Molly Ringwald in
Hughes’s Sixteen Candles (1984). And the water drips on. All of these scenes
have three features in common:
●● First, a very unequivocal sight is offered to the viewer of the
character(s) positioned in a shower or bath. That is, showering
or bathing is going on without any shadow of doubt, and going
on believably. The shower enclosure or bathtub is included as a
distinctly marked, centralized feature of the scene. While there are
exceptions, normally we see the shower or bath take place when the
character does not explicitly need a shower or bath; and in the scene
that follows afterward other characters normally do not trouble to
mention that the bather has just discernably bathed: “Golly, you
look clean! You must have showered!”
●● Secondly, the view afforded the audience, unlike any view
presumably afforded one of the characters who steps into the place
for some reason, is foxily curtailed, this in such a way that as one
watches the screen one is made conscious of not only the view being
presented as an open gateway but also of its limitation: limitation
of perspective here becomes a blatant subject of cinema. Not only
am I seeing, but somebody has made an arrangement for me to see,
because what I am seeing is invisible stuff, seen but not to be seen.
●● Thirdly, the scenes as set are almost always entirely irrelevant to the
narrative, the shower scene in Psycho being the definitive exception:
whatever important and/or revealing dialogue is set under the
running water could as well be spoken elsewhere, even more clearly
because without the running water sound. Our young J. could be
finishing his bowl of Special K at the breakfast table, for instance,
when Shawn interrupts him and presses him to hurry. He could be
outside, washing a car. He could be watching tv. He could be nestled
on a comfortable chair under a warm light, doing his homework or
even—mirabile dictu!—reading a book.

Are we led into the shower because, absent narrative declarations

notwithstanding, the character is evidently stained or dirty, disheveled or
wounded in some way, and narrative decorum requires not only that he
or she clean up but that we witness the clean-up act? (In La trêve [2016],
Joann Blanc’s Inspector Peeters is often extremely out of sorts and showers
 PRIVACY  107

for recuperation [that never comes].) Why would it not be sufficient for the
showering character to say, “I’m going to shower,” and then emerge cleaned
up and in fresh clothing? In what way can we understand it being necessary
that the shower be evidenced? Leaving aside the nonsensical speculation that
we find the character inherently false and want to get underneath the clothing
to find the true identity—since there is nothing inherently true about skin,
in performance—can we think we understand ourselves entering the shower
because we doubt some situational sincerity and ingenuousness, suspect
the character is really using the shower or its sound for a purpose quite
other than cleansing, and one we should discover (Roger Thornhill [Cary
Grant] slyly deceiving Eve Kendal [Eva Marie Saint] in North by Northwest
[1959])? Or do we imagine there is some important piece of information that
can be conveyed only in the shower/bath situation, a code to be discerned
in the grout between tiles? Regarding that last possibility, it’s important that
we keep in mind a simple fact of visual narrative: that the tiles would gain
attention. No matter the content of the dialogue in a shower or bath scene,
the fact of the naked body in a warm and cozy circumstance will override it.
Do we enter the shower because, as the filmmakers have correctly presumed
of us, we are eager to see the actor without clothes and the shower or bath
is the perfect (and perfectly conventional) pretext? Thus, in watching the
shower/bath scene, or at least in watching ourselves watching it, are we
made conscious to some degree of our own desire to strip the performer?
Do we have to make some particular self-identification in order to accede
to this hypothetical situation, a self-identification that is a potential self-
incrimination, and does the setting of the shower or bath assist us, prime us,
in doing that? Because stumbling into a stranger bathing can be a cause of
shame or embarrassment, a cheat is required in the cinematography so that
we can preserve our self-esteem, and that cheat is the odd framing. Is cinema
perhaps always everywhere about stripping away coverings, so that a desire
to see people without clothing is no different, really, than a desire to hear
them tell the secrets of their heart? What are we presumed to want always
and already, that we can relish being given such spectacles?
A certain realism is built up by masked shower/bath scenes. We are
systematically brought close to a stranger’s body—speaking in terms of the
intimacies we all allow, both the character and the actor are in fact strangers
to us—and allowed, even encouraged, to participate in two optical fictions:
(a) First, that this stranger, while being rather fully unknown, is
nevertheless, somehow, not quite a stranger. Not only can we apply a name,
in fact two names, but this person is sharply and instantly recognizable as
belonging to a type we have learned to recognize already: not only a female,
say, but a female of a certain race and age, who does or does not have a
job, and if she has a job who works in one kind of occupation rather than
another; so that altogether she belongs on a kind of “team,” containing
not only her but others as well. She is an exemplar. We establish a relation
108 THE FILM CHEAT

that is typical rather than personal, encountering and swiftly accounting for
aspects that accord with our general expectations of people like this. And we
neglect, if we even detect, quirky, idiosyncratic, personal tics, gestures, and
features such as birthmarks, scars, flab, tattoos, all of which could be used in
typification but tend not to be, yet at the same time help mark this body as
foreign, belonging to someone with whom we might form an idiosyncratic
personal bond. The birthmark or tattoo at the top of a bicep, gleaming
now with water, becomes only “a birthmark,” or “a tattoo,” which is to
say a singular example of the broad category of colorings we would name
“birthmarks” or of the broad category of designs we would call “tattoos”
in full knowledge that a legion human beings have similar ones and scrub
them in the same way, yet also, to some little degree, this birthmark or this
tattoo, drawing us in a little or nudging us away. The shower is not the
place we zoom in for deciphering. In the shower/bath we are presented with
singular examples of types, but not individual people. Not fully and only
this mark, this tattoo, this positioning, this body, this arm, this man but
Mark, Tattoo, Posture, Person. This cataloging is a form of cheat, in that
the peculiarities, the puncta, that describe a single unique embodiment are
flattened and subsumed under types so that we can operate as though we do
not see the actual solitary nude human being in the frame.2
(b) Secondly, that we are performing the gaze upon this body strictly
in accordance with well-accepted conventional norms of behavior in such
places and such company. There is a proper way to watch someone shower,
and we know and obey the rules. We look at the head, the head and shoulders,
the shoulders and back, even the feet, even the hands using soap upon one
of the body sections just named; but we do not look at the genital area, the
buttocks usually, the breasts, the armpits, the lower belly. This allows us to
think of ourselves as modest, polite, authentic, and sincere rather than being
forced to recognize ourselves as eager to see other people’s privacies. But
this opportunity to confer nobility upon our own gaze is afforded by the
camera’s careful placement and framing, not by our self-discipline (which
in this case is a mere follower), and so it is an ethical cheat as well. We are
never shown something from which the genteel person we would claim to
be, would humbly turn away.3
The underlying question here, the question that brings the cheat into
focus, relates not to our own prudish reticence to look at the naked body

2
By virtue of its identificatory clarity the cinematic nude shot, notably in bathing, differs from
the painted nude discussed by Kenneth Clark.
3
The keyword here is “shown”: we can much more easily be told, especially in printed fiction,
since, first, the verbal mode allows full disbelief and secondly, the words on the page are not
in public display—we are not seen seeing them, so that “turning away” is hardly requisite or
useful. See for a particularly interesting example Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama 382ff. And
thanks to Jason Jacobs for pointing this out to me.
 PRIVACY  109

(the naked Star Body, indeed) or admit that we would like to, but to the
persistent peeking that is arranged for us, and that we gleefully accept in
the face of that reticence; in short, we have a hungry reticence that models
itself as abstinent reticence; a reticent curiosity that insists on denying how
curious we are. The requirement to direct one’s emotional commitments in
two opposite directions at once produces the requisite cheats that we find—
cheats that help us: heavy glass shower stall doors and walls (easily penetrated
by brutish tongue, as we see with Alien: Covenant [2017]!), extremely misty
weather conditions, flagrant shower heads, copious lakes of bubble bath, or
neatly positioned bodies or body parts. The neat positions work beautifully
for camera, but no one would wish to suffer one of them in real life. All
this notwithstanding the extreme care with which a cinematographer can
compose his frame, using (very typically) the bottom cutoff line to dissect
the bathing body. That cutoff line is an “offside” over which a hand or two
can easily stray, as in grasping a bar of soap or other accoutrement that
might attract attention; or as in reaching up to smooth water away from
the eyes. The actor’s face, a notably expressive zone, often acts as a body
covering: that is, covers up the fact that the filmmaking team is covering up.
The expressive face is endlessly fascinating, and also endlessly distracting if
it belongs to someone on the marquee. It is because covering up must itself
be covered up that cheats become fascinating.
There is nothing particularly new about prudery, modesty, or lascivious
curiosity. What is worth attending to is the structural arrangement by
which curiosity about the body and its private functions is partially but
only partially satisfied, the limitation on satisfaction imposed in the name of
some noble protection of vital interest, some show of diminishing the very
curiosity motivating the style of the presentation in the first place. Without
a presumption of curiosity about the body, there is no sense in visiting
someone in his or her shower in the first place. Taking a shower does not
beg accompaniment: it’s too wet for a secret phone conversation, too humid
for typing a code, too soppy for inscribing codes onto the tiles. And truth is,
there are very few people who sing in the shower so well we would feel we
were at a concert were we there listening to them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when John Galsworthy
published The Forsyte Saga, civilized people repressed their curiosities
about other people’s naked bodies, sufficiently satisfied (at least as far as
they felt it was acceptable to demonstrate) by the kind of hints that clothing
could provide. Nowadays while curiosities of this sort are still repressed,
guarded against, actively fought, there lingers a common pretense that they
are not; that glimpsing, peeking, openly seeing are all commonly possible
and socially acceptable exactly because they can be done. The camera’s peek
is taken not to compromise modesty because (only because) modesty can
systematically not be admitted to. Thus, when the camera creeps down a
hallway into a bathroom facility, and thence into a shower stall, where the
110 THE FILM CHEAT

water is running and a naked body is present alone or with another naked
body (or, as in the case of Starship Troopers [1997], a platoon of them),
nothing is marked in the screen image as untoward, strange, perverted, wild
even though we are looking in the manner of those who are not looking. If
the curiosity the camera addresses is considered a wild extravagance if not
a transgression, the camera only marginally gives this the nod. Metonymic
redemption: a body fragment sufficiently rounded and glistening to stand in
(secretly) for the (imaginary) whole.

Copulate
Consider a relatively superficial cheat. Two naked bodies are writhing on
a bed, steamed in the throes of lovemaking. By convention, one tends to
hear an underscore heavy on strings and light on brass and woodwinds, a
score absent the hyperbolic accents of percussion: violins as heartstrings.
Or violins as nerves pulled to the breaking point. Usually in contemporary
film at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the bodies and bed are
photographed in color, although not a great variation in color is actually
to be seen—high color contrast would separate out the bodies, give them
roundness—amber light very often flooding over a bed with rumpled pink
or amber sheeting and casting gleams over amber bodies. There may be
a vocal track of moans and squeals, but they would be minimized in the
mix and the scene would “read” just as clearly without sound as with.
There is sometimes shown a (relatively swift) mounting toward climax,
sometimes not. One is regaled by a virtual Kama Sutra of variant positions.
And with some regularity one or both of the participants rises afterward
and goes about doing something else. In all of this, the body as visualized
is used as a self-cover: intertwined legs symbolize (stand in for, mask)
the linked genitalia that, present or impending, are rigorously not shown
and rigorously motoring the action; torsos overlap; arms interconnect to
form bizarre glyphs as if while copulating the team are sending off coded
intelligence. Parts of heads are visible, or whole heads severed from bodies,
just enough to make sure the viewer can identify the characters and be
pinioned to the drama. Of course the body parts we can see mask over the
body parts we cannot. As to the point of view: the camera seems to rest just
beside the bed, or perched on the sheets to the side of the bodies in play.
We are there.4 Sheets and duvets will decorously cover, and then salaciously
uncover, parts of lithe, pink, undulating bodies, making a beautiful abstract

4
A very popular weekly television series commencing in 1953, narrated by the prestigious
Walter Cronkite, You Are There episode by episode posited direct narration of a celebrated,
important historical event (the landing of the Hindenburg, the Gettysburg address, and so on)
 PRIVACY  111

composition that can be viewed from on high. When the upper erogenous
zones of either lovemaker are shown they are used as sculptural forms for
creating such abstracts, and for cheating the absence of the lower regions.
Even the presentation of buttocks, seen from the side, can work as a tidy
cover (the ass not as a thing to be figleafed but as figleaf itself).
Frequently climactic moments are covered over by lap dissolves, which
can be multiplied to create a kind of alternating rhythm between dreaminess
and awakeness in the characters and for the benefit of viewers. It is easy
enough, too, to have the camera suddenly transported to another zone
so that the orgasm is merely a sound effect from the distance or, indeed,
substituted for by a telephone call or crowd cheer at a football game.
In cases of frenetic sex (increasingly popular after 2010) where very
shortly after meeting for the first time the (entirely overwhelmed) characters
race to disrobe in some private space and then conjoin vertically, say against
a wall, there being no time to wait even for lowering the self to a bed, the
camera dutifully shows the speedy dispensing with trousers, panties, skirts,
in order to suggest boldly that erotic action is in play below the waist and
of such urgency that decorum of any kind is out of the question. Urgency
becomes the compositional form. The urgency is almost always further
cheated through the actors’ guttural expressivity. An example accomplished
with some style and recognition of class priorities involves Ethan Hawke
and Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives (2004). Another is the library lovemaking
scene in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007), where we have Keira Knightley in a
floor-length forest-green satin gown and James McAvoy in a full tuxedo. As
their passion comes to the point of overflow, he has her pressed up against
a burnished wooden bookcase, floor to ceiling, softly illuminated. It seems
a simple—because exceptionally swift—matter for him to have her panties
off and the brilliant green dress sufficiently hiked up, and his own fly (at
this time in England he would say “flies”) down, so that in a breath there
is, presumably (because of her [virginal?] gasp), penetration: litany in the
library. What we see is two otherwise dignified people, each representing a
principle gender, standing and spasmodically jerking toward each other if at
the same time maintaining cool British composure, all this more or less in
full clothing (depending on the angle of view).
In the case of this film and this particular scene, the voyeurism
conferred upon us is significant narratively, thus philosophically, because
we are not the only lookers-on. A thirteen-year-old sister, Briony (Saoirse
Ronan), garbed entirely in angelic white, has wandered in and is standing
in frozen fascination, her eyes pried as wide open as clamshells. She will
not turn out to be silent as a clam, however. Her report about Robbie and

with the audience “in direct attendance”; we were there. This was obviously an advertisement
for television’s ability to, as we were meant to sense, take us around the world.
112 THE FILM CHEAT

Cecilia, however confused (we do not hear it, and have no reason at all
for supposing she knows what she has seen with any exactitude), leads to
Robbie being banished from the house and the love affair being destroyed.
As the film progresses, this single instant has the deepest conceivable
moral and emotional implications. Robbie’s banishment and the tragedy
of the broken love affair both expand in volume and meaning because of
the authenticity, read compelling heat, of that lovemaking. Yet it was an
authenticity that begged our belief, that demanded vicarious participation
to be fully comprehensible.
Two frequent assumptions leading to cheats:
●● That the personnel who make movies are the sorts of people who
would believably engage in sexual activity whenever and wherever
possible, with insatiable and inordinate appetites. The sex we see
onscreen, therefore, leans toward the real, has a tendency, barring
obstructions, to seem journalistic and hence believable; actually
happening. BUT: we know, and can be presumed to know, that what
we are watching cannot actually be happening. This verisimilar
behavior is, and can only be, faked. And since we are known to
know this (that we are knowingly looking at acting, after all), some
trick must be pulled to con us out of that knowledge, to suggest that
here, finally, and, thankfully, visible to us in perfect composition,
is a moment of sexual presence. Actors, many fans assume, would
always automatically want to have sex; the film system would be
designed to facilitate the preferred view that they are doing so
when they are not; and then finally the system would be designed
to inform us that actors are not sexually active in the manner that
we think them to be. The absence of the giveaway shot is direct
evidence of this last contrivance, because it is a discernable absence.
Even a central absence. We are openly shown that a culminating
truth is being kept away from us, and in being shown that,
something else is also kept out of view but not in such a way that
we are aware of. That something is our shame, our overriding sense
of propriety now violated with our participation. Since the orgasmic
truth must be omitted, there is a sense in which we shouldn’t have
been there at all, not for any part of it. In Atonement, young Cecilia
is frozen to the spot out of astonishment, curiosity, the hunger for
experience, and shock; she cannot bring herself to leave. Neither
can we, yet we feel we should, and when the sex builds we feel
the cloister more and more. We want to see, quite desperately, but
are surprised, even shocked, to note that we can see. This desire,
fostered by what is onscreen, cheats the moral code we know we are
violating. Our violation is one that, because of the helpful cheat, we
need not atone for.
 PRIVACY  113

●● Also, that we may—indeed must—be shown explicitly the outplay

of an action generally (and widely) considered intimate and private,
shown it without doubt—without the kind of doubt young Briony
must have had—yet at the same time without untrammeled clarity.
Clarity could be provided by a more clinical view—precisely the sort
of view that would be labeled pornographic and avoided at all costs,
yet at the same time a point of view that would in fact show what
cinema in such moments is purporting, yet failing, to show. But the
clinical view is treated as poison. The lovemaking scene is carried
off in such a way as to leave the viewer with a kind of trembling
modesty.

There is a far less superficial cheat about filmed lovemaking scenes. They
systematically beg a certain provocative, deeply troubling question that
surpasses the nature of the narrative itself and goes to the center of our
film-viewing experience. We are always, by agreement, stood in for by the
camera. The camera is our factotum and our simulacrum, our friend and our
distanced eye. What is the camera—and what are we—doing in this place?
We come to be near the bed because the camera merely moves to be near
anything at all “of interest,” yet how and why is this “of interest” and how and
why does the camera move to it with such apparent casualness?5 Casually,
as though there is nowhere else the viewing eye could reasonably be at the
orgasmic moment, nowhere any viewer would prefer to be. Even Lawrence
Durrell’s fascinated narrator, confronting the lovemaking moment, has a
greater degree of modest self-consciousness as he finds himself describing
“an indistinct mass of flesh moving in many places at once, vaguely stirring
like an ant-heap”:

My sudden appearance must have suggested a police raid for it was

followed by a gasp and complete silence. It was as if the ant-hill had
suddenly become deserted. The man gave a groan and a startled half-
glance in my direction and then as if to escape detection buried his head
between the immense breasts of the woman. It was impossible to explain
to them that I was investigating nothing more particular than the act
upon which they were engaged. (186)

Durrell’s viewer knows he was “investigating,” while in our cinema watching

we are held back from that knowledge, with purpose. We are merely there, not
intentfully gazing, nor investigating, nor exercising curiosity, nor admittedly

5
Apparent casualness, note. Since late in 2018 “intimacy coordinators” have been employed
on-set as intermediaries between actors and directors, and choreographers of ideal sexual
representations. More on the problem of achieving “comfort” in intimate scenes in Chapter 16.
114 THE FILM CHEAT

feeling thrilled. The thrills pass into and out of us too quickly to be known
as thrills while they are there. Our excitements are unnameable and invisible
until seen in retrospect. The objectivity we find in Durrell—“They lay there
like the victims of some terrible accident, clumsily engaged” (187)—is
forever part of his textual narrator’s talk and consciousness (the narrator is
a long way off), however the very present film camera in lovemaking scenes
has not penetrated, like the narrator in Justine, by accident. Could not have.
Can do nothing by accident. Yet because of the cheat of the scene, accident
seems to be everywhere.
As we pattern our interpretation of the lovemaking scene, in framing a
reason for the camera’s presence we also frame a reason for our own. How
is it possible, how can it be rationalized, how can sense come of the fact
that we are here watching this now? Watching directly, without mediation.
As it occurs. Who could we claim to be, or not to be, in gazing the way the
camera allows us to gaze? That the onscreen lovemakers were showing off
to a third party (Georg Simmel’s tertius gaudens) for augmentation of their
own pleasure, and that the camera might silently be occupying the stance of
this third seems a rather far-fetched consideration. Similarly disregardable
is the thought that as watchers of this, we consider lovemaking—bluntly,
sexual action—as no more interesting in itself than, and in fact not especially
different from, any other perfunctory action, such as doing the dishes,
cooking a pot roast, having an argument, making a bank deposit. It is simply
behavior, that only, and we are simply observers, here and everywhere. This
scene isn’t special.
But hardly so. The special lighting, the artful compositions of form, the
peremptoriness of the dramatic action all suggest this is not something
quotidian at all. And, we must recall, even Durrell’s narrator, adopting a
quotidian point of view in order to “surprise the truth of [his] own feelings”
(186), uses language with a kind of awed hesitation, as though he is aware
that suddenly he is faced with something distinctly not banal.
It may well be with a kind of transgressive, even somewhat ashamed
daring that we permit ourselves to be the seers the camera must be imagining
it is photographing for. In the Durrell, the viewer-narrator’s self-conscious
reaction is produced by the lover’s startled awareness and response; whereas
in the cinematic scene the lovers have no such awareness to pique us. Indeed,
the viewer who has lapsed into a thoughtless sleep while watching may well
have no self-consciousness at all, but merely drink in the vision of naked flesh
in the same way as everything and anything else onscreen. A true imbibition.
A soporific dullness prevents even the elementary consciousness that certain
truths, certain pleasures, certain eventualities are being systematically
denied in the process of showing; denied without proclamation. To be
offered a piquing sight and denied fullness is, after all, both an insult and a
demeaning. For this to happen without indication, quite as though it is not
happening, is an outrage.
 PRIVACY  115

Arise
Getting out of bed brings us from one world into another. There is narrative
cogency: the character getting up is a person, persons sleep, when they have
slept they get up. A character who remains alive but doesn’t get up fluidly
is either not well or very tired, neither condition generally useful for action
narrative. Getting up is topically irrational: when we see a character do
something, we do not need to be told that the night before doing it he was
asleep. Principal in depictions of getting up is a coherently designed bedroom
space, accurately reflecting either the private tastes of the sleeper or else
those of the person whose bedroom is being shared (even if the space is a
hotel room). Standard items of composition: rumpled sheets (almost never
blankets); naked or semi-naked body(ies); evidence somewhere of sleeping
habit (nude, shorts, pajamas); demonstrative semi-conscious attitude. By
attitude we read the character’s drowsiness on being drawn out of sleep,
slowness to adapt to waking conditions (often by sitting up in bed for a
few seconds or by sitting on the edge of the bed). And also first tasks: to
march into the bathroom to pee, to march into the kitchen(ette) to put on
the coffee maker (film characters almost never have their first coffee of the
day at an outside emporium), to march to the window, draw the drapes, and
peer outside (into the street; into the sky; into nowhere). The wake-up scene
is almost always followed closely by a business scene with the character now
fully dressed, fully awake, and fully aware at a workplace or else making
way to some important destination; we pick up the action as he or she
moves into it. We could also have picked up the action without the wake-up
scene that came before.
Of this (very typical) get-out-of-bed construction, we can note two
important features that seem to define narrative bounds and possibilities:
[1] A temporal shift. As the preceding scene will conventionally have
taken place at night (often very late at night), thus in darkness, the morning
wake-up is given in order to inform the viewer that time has passed, a spate
of time, indeed, during which the character in play has rested safely and
been entirely uninvolved in relevant action, in short, a rest period in every
sense, a time-out. Extra-diegetic narrative time has passed, we are moving
forward in (ordinary) diegetic narrational time, what we are about to see is
to be taken (either fully or provisionally, until subsequent confirmation) as
happing after what we saw happening before. We are awakening to a new
day. “New,” meaning: unplanned developments may occur; we may travel to
a new location; we may meet unknowns. All of this is a nice reflection on the
filmmaking process itself, since when a cast and crew awaken after sleeping
off one long day’s work and head off to a new work call, they, too, will enact
new developments (unexpected by the viewer), will do this in a new location
(even if the same set, still the same set later), will encounter strangers. One
could see that in the moment of awakening and crawling out of bed, the
116 THE FILM CHEAT

character is most closely affiliated with the actor beneath. Yet, not to forget:
in such scenes, actors are not actually awakening from sleep, and the sleep
we see at the introduction of the scene is mere “sleep,” the play sleep every
one of us learned to perform in childhood. The producer cannot afford for
the actor to actually sleep during a “sleep take.”6
[2] Preparation for the day’s action. Consider the difference between (a)
having a narrative move from any nocturnal scene A, where something of
interest happens with the protagonist, to any morning scene C in an action
setting, where time has passed and some ongoing continuity of action is being
established (reflection, ensuing behavior, discussion with others); and (b)
making that narrative move but inserting a transitional scene B, a morning
scene in which the protagonist from the night before now awakens in bed
and goes off to get ready for C. What is added logically by the addition of
B, aside from humanization of the character—he or she has trouble waking
up, just as I do; he or she takes a shower; he or she gulps down a cup of
coffee—and a pointer to the character’s design taste (which could easily
have been effected already in other previous scenes). What is the narrative
value of the oft-witnessed scene of a character “opening the eyes”? Do we
need to see that the character sleeps, else we might fail to believe? Scene B
gives evidence, yes, that the character spent a night sleeping; but there are so
many bodily functions we do not appear to need evidence for, that are also
real: the character checks a small pimple on the cheek in a mirror, applies a
little alcohol; the character takes a half-open book on the coffee table and
either puts it back in a bookshelf or decides to leave it alone; the character
picks up the telephone, then thinks twice and decides not to make a call. On
and on. Perfunctory, everyday, trivial things. How is the character rolling
over in bed, sitting up, and walking off (with a small ballet of body moves
to keep vital areas from showing to camera) substantially different? Won’t
the viewer make the assumption, all else considered, that in any scene the
character comes into action prepared (in an embodied way) to do what he
or she does?
Is the moment of sleeping in a bed an especially private moment, more
than, say, going into one’s safe deposit box or dropping a letter into a
mailbox or receiving a telephone call? Is it somehow primal, elementary
beyond elementary? And if it is this, what exactly is established by our being
given access to the elementary-beyond-elementary? Surely that the character
is just like we are--albeit that the character is not just like we are--at least in
some respect now demonstrated before the camera: human in the same kind
of way, vulnerable, feelingful, desirous, fearful exactly as could be anyone
watching. Such a demonstration would of course contradict a number of
scenic imperatives of cinema, including a belief carefully established and

I give a much fuller discussion of “sleep” in Ch. 5 of Virtuoso.

6
 PRIVACY  117

nurtured in viewers that the characters are entirely special, entirely worth
watching in some charged, elevated, transacted way. We paid to see them
wake up in bed (in the way we know we wake up ourselves in bed), paid to
see evidence of the everyday. Watching them behave at first light is higher,
better, more delicious than going into a public square and watching strangers
feed the pigeons.
In many ways, then, the bodily exploration we can make as we watch a
character get out of bed is a narrative cheat in total. Artfully replicated from
the real, effectively staged and photographed, emphatically timed, it almost
always nevertheless takes place without performing a narrative action of
significance. The scene of awakening is a filler: the shot of the character with
eyes closed and head on pillow; the shot of the character groaning; the shot
of the nude or semi-nude body appearing out of the sheets and standing;
the shot of the stumbling action that comes next. All this is perfunctory in
the extreme, narratively speaking, with only rare exceptions. A significant
exception, yet one that is handled very swiftly onscreen and entirely
without titillating ornamentation, is the photographer’s (David Hemmings)
awakening in London the morning after the pot party at the end of Blow-
Up (1966). Here we are to feel—and the filmmaker and cinematographer do
make us feel—that a vital change has taken place while the character slept.
That the world he is awakening to is a different world (for him). He goes to
sleep in a tumble, fully clothed, and when he comes awake it is merely by
popping his (all-seeing) eyes open in morning light.

Douche
In the opening episode of Granada Television’s The Forsyte Saga (2002), we
are made privy to the bedchamber of Soames and Irene Forsyte (Damian
Lewis, Gina McKee) as, early in their marriage, they engage in lovemaking.
This is a double cheat, first in the way that all lovemaking scenes are
cheats, as I discuss above; but secondly in that the diegetic logic would
have us believe we are in the Victorian era, when marital sexuality was kept
entirely out of strangers’ view. The bedclothes are pulled over Soames and
Irene, and both are clearly dressed in white muslin sleeping garments the
lower parts of which, we are to presume, have been pulled aside to make
genital engagement possible. The man is atop the woman and is thrusting
rhythmically, then more and more quickly, then arching in an abrupt halt.
Again, a series of gestural (body-gestural) moves intended as a chain of
signals or indications, all this based in a gestural language ostensibly shared
with the viewing audience: the thrust from above, the variation in speed, the
intensification, the halt as climax. Gestures are here aimed to signal action
at a distance (a distance from the perceiving eye), a fundamental function of
the gesture broadly speaking.
118 THE FILM CHEAT

The “distance cheat” is repeated in the ensuing moments. Irene gazes

upward (as though thinking, calculating), then slips out of bed and goes into
the toilet for privacy. There she has a lit candle which she carefully places on
a shelf, lifting down from a hook that is positioned at shoulder height a small
metal pitcher-and-tubing apparatus. We see her hang the pitcher above the
tub, see her pulling the robe from her shoulders, and “testing” the “device” by
holding it up so that she can see four little fountains of water emerging from
the tip. She now positions herself in the tub in a way not clearly visualized by
the camera, brings the tubing down below the bottom of the screen. Facial
gestures indicate feelingful responsiveness to something she is doing out of
sight (presumably using the tubing as a manual douche and also, we are to
calculate given her general earlier expressions of distress regarding physical
contact with Soames and the speed of her withdrawal to the toilet, as a device
for literally displacing his semen). A great deal is left to the viewer’s suspicion,
imagination, and presumption to knowledge, not least the decision as to
whether Irene should be read as abhorring Soames’s sexuality or as wishing at
all costs to prevent impregnation by him (thus, serfdom in the Forsyte family).
One might make some headway arguing that at this moment for Irene, the
interruption of seminal flow is a task of urgency; but the central analytical
point is that whether or not this is so, we are not given an explicit statement
by way of pictures. As we do not definitively see, we cannot definitively know
what is going on; yet still the nosey camera makes its point of sneaking into
that toilet and “watching” this procedure without actually watching.
In the original John Galsworthy novel, The Man of Property (1906), it
is five hundred pages before one comes upon Soames Forsyte’s mastery of
his partner:

The morning after a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his
rights and acted like a man, he breakfasted alone.
...
He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not
swallow attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering
hunger of the night before, and break down the resistance which he had
suffered now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly
constituted helpmate?
He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before
which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands—of her terrible
smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still
seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling
of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame
of the single candle, before silently slinking away. (509–10)

That single candle and that silent slinking: the first finds its way, filmically,
into her hand, in the toilet, where instead of covering her face and producing
 PRIVACY  119

smothering sobs she calmly proceeds through a technical maneuver, crude as

it may have been made to seem as a reflection of the times; the second infects
the camera-brain. Soames’s “asserting his rights” and his “acting like a man”
are converted as well: the former into his superior position and solitary
movement within the bed, as far as, through brute gesture, we can detect,
and the latter into his pressing rhythms and their startling interruption.
What an allusive marvel! The technique of allusion is well at work,
optically in the television film no less than textually in the Galsworthy.
Circumlocution or wholesale bypassing keeps the material from stating
bluntly and unequivocally what we are to take as “happening” inside the
drama, at the specific node that involves physical pleasurable engagement
between persons. With a tone of haughty charity, we might nowadays
look back upon writing of the very early twentieth century as formal,
prudishly Victorian, for us inappropriately secretive about sex—pretending
to ourselves, no doubt, that the twenty-first-century version of the story is
more explicit, less restrained, and rightly less prudish. But is it less prudish,
in fact, to openly invoke an action or behavior one takes great pains to avoid
specifying, indeed to avoid locating in space because of the closeness of the
camera’s framing, and to avoid showing in the kind of detail that would
render it unimpeachably clear? If, in order to be true to the spirit of the
source material, the 2002 production needed only to make some assertion
that Soames Forsyte took an opportunity one night to “assert his rights”
and “act like a man” (whatever, in 2002, such phrases could reasonably be
taken to mean), would it not have been sufficient to have someone remark
casually at a garden party or at a breakfast that rumor had it he had done so?
Would we really require to have watched him asserting and acting? Require
out of some compulsion to witness the orgasm and, that being apparently
insufficient, to witness as well Irene’s complex reaction? Witness, that is,
without actually witnessing.
To the educated eye, the movement of Soames’s body looks very much like
the sexual sort; but to the uneducated eye it might well pass for muscular
spasms of any kind, unimaginable precisely because of the lack of education.
And the self-showering utensil, the mini-douche, would, again, have been
incomprehensible to the untutored except as a strange toy with a cryptic
utility. We do not see the actual application of the instrument to Irene’s body.
Were the film produced during the era of Hollywood censorship (roughly
1933 to 1966), we might imagine these as smart strategies, allowing for a
double reading without making explicit statement: but the film is produced
in 2002!
A still more remarkable gap presents itself. Assuming that for some
reason the filmmakers did sense a need to openly demonstrate Soames as
a fully engaged, sexualized male; and Irene as a reticent, fearful, and more
broadly unsatisfiable female, who needed for some reason to reject his sexual
intrusion; what is gained in being coy about the demonstration? Why in the
120 THE FILM CHEAT

first part of the scene be certain that the bedclothes are pulled up and in
the second part that the camera never shows any truly informative details?
Although in the Victorian era many husbands, prudish, personally modest,
would have penetrated their wives beneath the bedclothes, those bedclothes
are cheated as covers for penetration now, in a distinctly non-Victorian era.
The answer that will be forthcoming is, needless to say, “realism,” as though
Damian Lewis and Gina McKee are otherwise perfect representatives
of the Victorian person. If it is argued that the filmmakers wished to be
authentic to Victorian tradition rather than to contemporary practice, one
would have to ask whether in Victorian tradition people did what we are
doing, sneaking into a private bedroom for an entertaining surmise. The
point about Irene’s douching is that she would have hidden her device and
its usage from Soames; that it is the man’s eyesight from which this little
performance is being masked away; and as the camera now masks it away
quite efficiently, we may presume the contemporary camera is picking up the
Victorian man’s dominating viewpoint.
Yet why any viewpoint? A quite realistic approach would have been
to avoid showing anything at all with respect to conjugal sex; to have the
whole thing intimated, circumlocuted, altogether distanced. Here it seems
necessary for the filmmakers (possibly because they sense that it will seem
necessary to their viewers) to show what goes on during the sex; yet also,
and crucially, to avoid showing it, because, owing to our own prudery, the
offering of an actual sight would be a violation of sensibilities—-not Soames
and Irene’s sensibilities, but ours. It is quite all right for us to be peeking in
on the activity in bed, peeking and, indeed, holding ourselves there until the
culminating moment and even afterward; and quite all right, too, for us to
visit the secret toilet facility; but in both the bedroom and toilet we should
have our eyes either closed or turned away, or blindered, or be able to claim
that we did.
Here, then, is an open demonstration that persists in being entirely closed.
A closed “open,” which is to say a complete cheat, itself covered up by the
details of set design and actor behavior so as to seem anything but what it
actually is. Peter Gay quotes a comment in the Saturday Review’s evaluation
of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss: “There are emotions over which we
ought to throw a veil” (Heart 250).
 16
Dance

FIGURE 16 Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (Woody Allen, Jack
Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, 1977).

As screen sex scenes demonstrate with particular clarity, what is visible to

the camera results from an involved and often complicated prior dialogue
between principal agents, the actor whose body will be photographed
standing most certainly among them. But a dialogue, which is to say a
conversation; not touch. Words written into a contract clause here, words in
a rider there, keywords especially: “ass,” “top ass,” “cock sock” (a miniature
garment for holding the penis away from contact with other people’s skin),
“pubic hair,” and so on. Not only an aggravated vocabulary but a chain
of discussions in which it is shared, some of these being formalized ones
in which scenes will be taken apart, discussed shot by shot, negotiated
122 THE FILM CHEAT

with pinpoint specificity so that everyone associated with every maneuver

is comfortable. Military sorties work in roughly the same way, with the
same kinds of minute mappings of the relevant territory and deployments.
Commercial airline flight plans. Filmed car chases. Best to think of the sex
scene as the final result of a long chain of tactical workups, some of them
amicable, some of them perhaps contentious, yet all devoted to producing
what actors and production personnel would call, in unison, “comfort,” not
to say the desired effect on film.
Salient features of this “comfort,” a condition that will not show onscreen,
since it is a different matter than the “comfort” the characters might be
“feeling”:
●● After the arrest of Harvey Weinstein in May 2018, the problem of
exploitation and abuse became well-known and much discussed.
Thus a great deal of what goes on today in Hollywood filmmaking,
certainly a great deal of the talk that precedes it, flows from the
Weinstein shock wave and a spreading (perhaps epidemic) public
concern for delicacy regarding the body and the optimal search
for consent. “His right hand will be on your back, here, and his
left hand won’t be touching you.” One can easily imagine tentative
mutually agreed finger-pointing, use of a little stick as “pointer,” or
even full-color PowerPoint shows with body maps and arrows.
●● But at the same time, the “comfort” screen that performers feel when
they make (and sign) deals about action in sex scenes—again, all
essentially verbalism—is not the same kind of comfort that people
feel when they are engaged sexually: the comfort of anticipation, of
closeness, of unexpected heat, of release. Negotiated “comfort” is a
verbal commitment, hanging upon a set of designs and definitions
and tantamount to a pledge. And much of what can be claimed
openly as “comfortable” behavior conforms to a shared moral code,
a set of agreements about what other people will (and should) find
acceptable—that is, claim to find acceptable—in one’s body use
and movement. Proprieties, norms, conventions, patterns, routines.
An actor might very well feel uncomfortable with a filmed move;
or might feel less than comfortable; might even wish that for more
comfort the filming should involve a move that officially one should
avoid feeling “comfortable” about: “Touch me here.” The word
“comfort” is thus the result of a political negotiation open to public
scrutiny. The actor doing “sex” is not to feel the comfort she would
feel while doing sex, not, at least, admittedly.

Take the case of an actor, let us call him Joe, who (a) has filmed more than
ninety percent of his shots for a picture (and who is therefore, from the point
of view of a producer watching a budget, almost impossible to replace);
 DANCE  123

(b) is now and has always been the favorite choice of the director and the
producing staff for the role he is playing; (c) is obliged to film a scene in
which, as the script dictates, his character “masturbates”; and (d) indicates
to the director, privately, that, although he knows full well the framing will
be cut off at chest level and no genital configuration will appear onscreen,
still, for his own comfort he desires to be naked and to masturbate actually
(say, because he was trained in the Method Acting tradition). This is not
the kind of “comfort” that would be typically assumed and negotiated in
filming, although here as elsewhere, the filmmakers would try every trick to
satisfy the actors they wanted to work with: yet, “satisfy,” not satisfy. What
if the issue is important enough to the actor that he will walk off the picture
if forbidden?
●● The screen images of so-called “sexuality” will not only be separated
and distanced from moments of real sexuality in the offscreen world.
They will be proclamations of being separated in this way. Here is
what was done, here is what was agreed to, here are the lines we
promised not to cross, here we are—watch carefully!—not crossing
them. Sex becomes, in effect, talk and also a record of talk. Sex is
words.

For clarity: I do not mean to point to chatter, discourse, or any use of

language by anyone in an actual situation that has become sexual. Such a
thing is the tease it is intended to be. But here onscreen, the sexual moves
we see are all physical choreography of verbal scriptings—usually in legal
form. “I said I would do this, and I am doing it” is the essence of the sexual
act. More urgently, “I said I would not do that, and here I am, not doing it.”
Because the camera does not film the vital discussions, the action in front
of the lens seems to be all there is and all there ever was, when in fact it
is the tip of a very large iceberg preconceived to the smallest detail. An
actor whose finger is fondling the body of a screen partner will appear to be
exploring, investigating, playing, whereas in the fact of it the moment will
have been rehearsed several times, with both actors trying many variations
until they find one they and the director think works.
More, however:
In terms of its pre-arrangement the typical filmed sex scene is like any
and every other scene in motion pictures, even if more generally the hidden
sensitivities of participants are not on view to be compared. In any scene
before the camera, movements, touchings, pointings, alignments, brushings-
against, utilization of objects, entrances, exits, the whole works all depend
intrinsically on body-to-body arrangements—contacts, avoidances,
angular positionings, sudden movements—that would be unlikely to show
successfully on film if they happened on the spur of the moment for the first
time when the camera turned. Comfort is perhaps the smallest consideration
124 THE FILM CHEAT

here. Money is more crucial, and every pause, every retake, every gaffe costs.
The scene must be prepared. The workers must know, each, what the others
are doing now and are planning to do next. She is standing there, and she
will walk to here. I am here, and I will walk to there at the same time. She
will move more quickly than I do. I will spit out a line of dialogue as I cross
past her.
How and why do negotiated preparations make their way into filming?
And by what cheat are they erased, camouflaged, tucked away from the
audience’s view? In general here, as with so much else in our experience of
cinema, we know a great deal that we disavow; we accept and believe so much
that contradicts what we know. The delight of participation is unthinkable
otherwise. Are we helped somehow—and if so, how—to conceive the action
we see as spontaneous and original, not negotiated and rehearsed?
[1] Gravitational Tricks. A glass containing liquid is knocked by a
character’s hand so that it falls off a table and smashes on the floor. No
matter the choreography of the scene, for an actor to make a move like
this very convincingly sells the spontaneity of the character’s action. The
legendary case is the restaurant argument scene between Dustin Hoffman
and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). He has a tall glass of some
delicious-looking French white, perhaps a Pouligny-Montrachet—the
character’s money appears to have been spent. They are fighting about the
custody of their child. Heat mounts. Finally a point comes (apparently so,
because we are in no way given preparation for it) when Ted (Hoffman)
loses his composure entirely and with a spasmodic, violent, explosive gesture
smashes the glass off the table and into the air. The wine, the glass all go
into oblivion, loudly, visibly, in a gasp of complete gaucherie. What has been
said many times about this scene is that Hoffman did not tell anyone he was
going to do this; and in fact it would not be difficult to imagine that he did
not know himself, until he felt the action. The shock of Streep’s reaction is
stark. This cheat toward spontaneity is effected by breaking the rules. Yet:
breaking rules inside a very tightly drawn boundary—everything must be
in frame, for instance; everything must be lit;1 no harm can come to Streep
from Hoffman’s maneuver; preparations must either be in place or possible
in the event the shot has to be re-taken, and so on. Was it a real glass glass,
or a breakaway? Was she sitting exactly in the right place and posture not
to be hit by any of it?
[2] Population Tricks. As characters in narratives populate spaces together,
when any one of them takes a position it will be necessary to ensure (a)
that he or she does not block our view of any other character important

1
Alfred Hitchcock on light in film: “We must bear in mind that fundamentally, there’s no
such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is
nonexistent” (Truffaut 183).
 DANCE  125

at the moment or any important object, and therefore the actor’s position
vis-à-vis the camera needs to be worked out; (2) that no person or object
has already been positioned in such a way as to block a key actor’s stance
or move. Consider a much-celebrated comedy scene. Alvie Singer (Woody
Allen) and girlfriend of the moment Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) are at a
Long Island summer rental, standing in the kitchen, trying to cook lobsters.
Part of the joke is that Alvie being Jewish, he doesn’t know lobster from
pinochle; when he holds up one, he extends his arm to keep it as far away
as possible, as though it is a monster. Another part of the joke is that Annie
is from the Midwest where they ain’t got no lobster. Another part of the
joke is that they are trying out domesticity. Another part of the joke is that
the lobsters are having a revolution and seizing power, crawling all over the
floor. The two people need to jump around the kitchen space, jump around
one another, and jump around the lobsters without inadvertently stepping
on any of them, all with rhythm and pacing to keep the scene moving.
Allen and Keaton had to know where they were to stand and move,
how many beats to take on each line, and where the partner would act
as well. Considerable staging, measuring the distance from each character
to the lens to establish proper focus, making sure the lighting was right
were all called for. Letting the character breathe, each actor tacitly follows
a set of choreographic commands. The positions here had to be learned and
retained without aid, because since a white floor had to be laid in order that
the lobsters not disappear against the terra cotta tile floor that was part of
the kitchen, and since there would be medium-long shots showing most of
the room and notably that white floor, marker tapes for the actors could not
be laid down.
In this scene, the untrainable lobsters crawling around throw the switch
for definitive spontaneity, realism, uncontrivedness; and all the actors need
to do is appear to be reacting to creature movement they cannot in fact
predict.
[3] Display Tricks. Not only are objects touched and grasped before the
lens in such a way as to make them sufficiently visible for telling the story,
but actors in role make themselves sufficiently visible as workers, too. This
process occurs through a translation: Actor A is playing character X; B is
playing Y. In order that A get necessary exposure in a scene he sees to it
that X is exposed to the right kind of light, and B counterposes by worrying
about Y. Standing at a certain distance from the lens, making the smallest
gesture of the head or body while not speaking, knowing how the color of
one’s garment will show in the scenic composition, and so on: all these tricks
help actors have their characters get primal exposure; or, more importantly,
not be overcome by other actors working to do this. “If you stand just there
like that, you’re blocking my key light a little.” The director and surely the
cinematographer will be conscious of such things, but actors have their own
professional reasons for caring, too, and for looking after themselves. But
126 THE FILM CHEAT

a nice move for gaining attention in a shot is to respond to a partner’s

line of dialogue with no gesture at all. This works especially strongly
when the partner has uttered a pregnant line, something that would call
for reaction. The apparent non-reaction thus becomes the reaction, and the
silent character the odd sort of person—odd: noticeable—who would react
this way. But this trick also conveys to the viewer a sense of directness and
spontaneity, of unrehearsed reality, as though the non-responder is hearing
the other for the first time, is finding the dialogue astounding or outrageous,
and is truly stunned.
In all these cases—actors’ self-display, actors’ ways of being-in-scene,
and actors’ use of gravity and other physical forces—the telltale sudden or
delicate move may well be an accretion upon a set of intentions, gestures,
and articulations that have been worked out in detail much in advance.
An accretion: something that decorates the behavior without altering it,
without requiring that the scene partner get an advance signal. Sometimes
it’s necessary only to take a silent beat before hitting a word, as though one
is thinking as one speaks (spontaneously) and searching for the right thing
to say.
The tension in the negotiation-rehearsal construction is an elemental one.
The actor will have made conscious arrangements to be unselfconscious,
to be comfortable in the scene. The scene will be caused very intentfully to
play as though it is happening out of an explosion of spontaneous feeling, in
short, in a way that could be wholly comfortable for no one.
 17
Keyed Up1

FIGURE 17 Christopher Plummer in Remember (Atom Egoyan, Serendipity Point

Films, 2015). Lory Wainberg is listening.

One often sees a character sit to play the piano, but there are relatively few
performers who know how to do it. And the piano opens itself to much
deception, chief among instruments, since anybody can place hands upon
a keyboard and almost anybody can move fingers one or two at a time.
The illusion being created in “authentic” screen pianism, as we sometimes
sense it, is that not only the character but also the actor beneath abounds in

1
A small part of Chapter 17, “Keyed Up,” was presented in a different form as “Shoot the Piano
Player” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, March 2019.
128 THE FILM CHEAT

musical sensitivity and talent, is richly filled with the desire to express, and
doesn’t mind putting on a show. To stick the label “musical” upon a person
is to perform a strange elevation, as though he or she now approximates
some Olympus of high sensibility, tasteful refinement, and especially melodic
desire, not to say athletic capability (because to play the piano is athleticism
to be sure). The played tune is a kind of utterance or articulation, and in
using the hands to produce it the character is making a speech beyond what
words or tongue can muster.
Another feature of musical instruments, generally, is that in direct
presence, the use of them cannot be faked—anymore than the use of a bat
can be faked on a baseball diamond. You can either play or you cannot.
Were the viewer to become aware of a character merely “playing the piano,”
not really playing the piano, were a viewer to notice during a musical scene
that the body onscreen isn’t doing what one is supposed to understand it
doing, the only resolution would lie in finding reason for the character to
be dramatically cheating—a cheat inside the story, a fictional cheat—but
almost always such a reason is absent. Further, as actual piano playing
cannot be cheated the character—living in a reality—cannot be presumed to
be cheating it, and since the actor is closely allied with the character, here by
way of arms and hands, we have a tendency to believe the actor isn’t cheating
either. Musical cheats are thus in a special category: easy to accomplish in a
way that much else isn’t for film, in the sense that the audience is unlikely to
pick the cheat up, and this because it is notably unlikely to try. Yet cheating
there must almost always be.

Shoot the Piano Player

A roundabout route can lead us to the problem of filmed hands upon keys.
Consider Pietro Francisci’s Hercules, Samson & Ulysses (1963), starring
Adriano Bellini, Iloosh Khoshabe, Liana Orfei, and Enzo Cerusico, all of them
orating outrageously in palpably dubbed English. As one observes the many
technical operations calculated to hide this aspect of the production—lips
moving emphatically but out of sync with the dialogue, compositions favoring
an unusually large number of extreme long shots or medium-long shots that
obscure the actors’ speaking mouths, and shots in which the actors’ faces are
obscured during speech—it becomes evident that a kind of ventriloquism is in
progress: a body, or part of a body, in physical action acoustically mobilized
from without. As Kenneth Gross observes in Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny
Life, “While a puppet’s movements will seem to belong to the physical thing .
. . the puppet’s voice always comes from the outside. Its voice is always alien,
never its own” (66–7). Of actors, slaves, and prostitutes—I think we could
add puppets and almost all performers who sit at keyboards in films—Shadi
Bartsch sees a “symbiotic relationship between foreignness, self-display, not
being one’s own master” (164). Sound cinema’s separation of image from
 KEYED UP  129

sound not only facilitates a general ventriloquism but is emblematized by it,

the visualized object puppeted with an alien voice. Ventriloquism generates
metonymy of a sort, one part of a moment fragmented away from, standing
in for, another. Shooting the piano player is an elegant approach to this
problem. Although in some rare cases an actual pianist plays in front of the
camera, typically the sound of music is fed into a picture from an outside
source, in order that the illusion be given, as it is in Hercules, that vision and
melody are unified at the same time in the same place.
There is no art that is not metonymic, using a part to express the whole;
nor one that does not employ fakery of one kind or another, since no matter
the artistic representation of life, life is the more complex. But metonymy is
not always an explicit method of trickery. To say this another way: the part
need not reference a whole that is entirely nonexistent, as we see happening
in onscreen piano playing, where hands at the keyboard can suggest a pianist
who is not, in any way, there. As with many other physical and emotional
activities, the act of playing the piano becomes reduced for cinematography;
but here, as in depiction of other instrumental performance yet in pianism
with more complication, the reduction has the capacity to separate what we
see from what we hear, producing shots that amount to visual emblems or
equivalents of sound passages only apparently being generated as we watch.
There is a sense, indeed, in which we hear without seeing—hear authentically,
at any rate, while not seeing authentically—thus achieving a state of relaxation
addressed by Simmel in his essay on city life. This separation, this puppeting
is in play notwithstanding the standard additional dialogue recording (ADR)
trick, mentioned more fully in Chapter 18. Even when sound is recorded live
on set, piano sound is more than likely to be fake.
Always and inevitably at stake in authentic piano performance, as
authentic piano performers know from their earliest days at the piano, are
three independent variables: [a] technique, [b] touch, and [c] musicality.
[a] Technique involves agility, strength, reach, and precision: getting all the
right fingers on the right notes with appropriate, but easily modulated, speed
and loudness; moving the fingers up and down the keyboard, note by note,
octave by octave, chord by chord, fluidly and without gulps; not hitting false
notes; and having a hand sized appropriately for the composition at hand,
J. S. Bach not calling for the reach one would need to play Rachmaninoff,
for example. Since in most filmed pianism the sound of moving fingers, the
correctness of the notes, and the appropriateness of the performance to the
composition are all arranged ventriloquially, nothing in the image necessarily
suggests bad technique, this, ironically, even at the level of young persons
playing very simple music. More bluntly: if the sound recording of piano
playing is good, any hands moving on the keys will seem to show technique.
In real life achieving and showing technique are supremely difficult, even
taxing—as with, for example, dance.
[b] Touch involves degrees of delicacy, expressed physically, most
important being the ability to sound a note without undue application of
130 THE FILM CHEAT

pressure: an outside production again, although in this case one far less
frequently to be heard, since the cost of acquiring the services of a first-rate
musician is far greater than the cost of getting a performative filler. Touch
works upon the action of a piano—the ease with which a finger might
depress a key.
[c] Musicality is essentially the marshaling of enthusiasm: causing the
piano to speak or sing on behalf of both the composer and the performer
at once.
Only the very greatest masters of the piano are extremely technically
adept, possessors of a perfect touch, and intensely musical. While some
actors can play piano, there are no actors one could call great masters of the
instrument; they are great masters of another instrument, that substitutes
onscreen. It is worth noting further that the display onscreen of profound
musicality could be overly absorbing for the audience, draw attention
from the characters, the story, or the moment. Competence is required, but
serious musicality could ruin a scene. In the same breath one should say that
“serious musicality” must frequently be performed.
While the puppeting of the onscreen musical moment is essentially
an off-camera matter acoustically—no matter what is happening on set,
the actual sound is not the sound we are hearing—the added sound must
be aligned with the photographed image in order to give the complete
effect. Any sound dubbing moment at all will present the same kinds of
challenges, except that with piano playing, if we are seeing the keyboard,
there are ten sound effectors moving alone or in groups slowly or
quickly at each instant and the sync has to match all of this. As with
more conventional forms of the maneuver, successful puppeteering means
hiding the puppeteer. Thus arise the many cinematic gestures of revelatory
concealment: showing disembodied hands, or arms and hands, and adding
in pre- or post-recorded piano sound; substituting the expressive face or
upper body for performing hands; moving the camera to such a distance
that the operation of fingers on keys cannot be ascertained; or, in an
extension of puppeteering that seems to bring the puppet alive, giving very
brief shots of a performer actually playing a short—and easy—passage
carefully learned out of musical context: a few chords, a small scalar
passage, and not necessarily something from the music we are hearing
as long as there is a match. This kind of “vérité” passage will be intercut
with disembodiments and expressivities to lend the impression of a holistic
performance. David Sudnow recollects a process like this in learning to
play the piano: “For the most part, my practice sessions were given over to
playing a handful of songs, doing my improvisations. Fluent manipulations
of these pathways produced a semblance of competence, and I was able
to sustain long playing sessions” (35). We can see the same “semblance of
competence” employed in filmic depictions of painters at easels, where the
combination of expressive and highly skilled bodily action and technical
 KEYED UP  131

manipulation is similarly, in the cases of most performers, impossible to

show.2
In diegesis, screen pianism usually involves casual entertainments or
distractions, salon moments, onstage meditations after the song-and-
dance rehearsal is over, even, as in the celebrated scenes of Casablanca,
performance for an exclusive audience by a knowledgeable club pianist,
sweetly informal of manner, doing a piece that is hardly more than a soft-
chord accompaniment for voice. The script will tend to eschew depiction of
many aspects of piano playing familiar to those who do it seriously: use of
the feet on the instrument’s pedals, often enough a vital component of tonal
production; discussion with other pianists or with anyone else of the music
at hand, its difficulty, its challenges to the player; rehearsal of any kind,
which might, if shown, lead viewers to think that, contrary to what the film
naturalistically shows, actual labor is involved in playing the piano.
In both standard puppeteering and ventriloquism, both of which contain
extrinsic mobilizations of what is made to seem like natural action but
only the latter of which necessarily involves a tonal supplement, the cover
mechanism is intended to keep the audience’s thoughts away from the means
by which the illusion is effected, to make a systematic cheat: hide the strings;
throw the voice. I leave for further discussion the relation between the hidden
ventriloquial voice and Michel Chion’s acousmêtre. The secrecy has two key
facets: frontal elimination of the actual source of musical production; and
giving the impression that what one is seeing amounts to that source. What
is essentially metonymical here is the presentation of a partial body not in
performance to stand in for an entire body in performance; the presentation
of various views of the operation of a device without showing fully that a
character is operating it (since the character is not).
It might seem that using a performer who actually plays the piano would
be a straightforward solution for filmmakers, but a number of production
and dramaturgical contingencies get in the way, in effect force the cheat.
First, there are relatively few Hollywood actors, especially star actors, who
can play the piano, are known to be able to play, or are willing to give the
show. Exceptions like Clint Eastwood, Oscar Levant, and James Stewart
prove the rule. Even in the case of actors like these, care is regularly taken to
ensure that they are seen to perform music far below the level of difficulty
one associates with virtuosic pianists. But although the star persona and
character strength merge onscreen to create a unified situated front, the
façade of illusion is vulnerable to being overshadowed by the music itself.
A bravura piano passage, even an especially touching rather simple one,
captures the highlight, erasing the character and star together, and it takes a

Screen performers who were off-camera painters themselves (Vincent Price, Tony Curtis,
2

Anthony Quinn) tended not to play painter characters for the camera.
132 THE FILM CHEAT

performer of exceptional sensitivity and talent to yield to the music and then
quickly regain star stature at the keys: we see this with Christopher Plummer
playing Wagner in Remember (2016). But the least effortful procedure—as
in the least expensive and time-consuming—is to use the inexplicit view and
the ventriloquizing offscreen musician, even, sometimes, substitute models
for arm and hand work.
Most inexplicit views take up camera positions similar to what audience
members would have at a concert if they did not occupy the precious few
seats that afford a direct, close-up view of the keyboard. A number of
energizing cheat routines are conventional:
●● Spasm. As we see it rendered, musical passion makes (carefully
cultivated) long (“authentically musician-like”) hair shake, elbows
pump in and out like bellows, shoulders desperately hunch with
the strain of concentration. Musically untrained actors can perform
expressive gestures like these quite easily, more easily than they can
display artful flexibility with their untrained hands. A glance on
YouTube at Daniil Trifonov playing a concerto will quickly show the
folly of such “emoting.”
●● Spontaneity. We witness a production of musical performance
happening, as it were, on the spot, out of a flush of momentary
spirit, with no history, since the moment of pianism is very often
inserted into the film arbitrarily and without build-up. Yet no one
but the savant merely plays the piano, it is necessary to practice
long and hard today in order to give a good show tomorrow. Scales,
arpeggios, chords, close finger position, octaves, not to mention
fragments of a piece played over and over at different tempi—six
to eight hours a day: all of this is elided in screen representation.
Except in cases where, themselves the subject of drama—Madame
Sousatzka (1988), The Piano Teacher (2001)—piano lessons are
substantially ornamented with emotion and conflict, practice
is treated as a boring and pointless, or conflict-generating, time
waster. In An American in Paris (1951), the concert pianist Oscar
Levant, who in his real life practiced substantially, plays a character
named Adam Cook who again and again merely sits and plays with
aplomb. The pianism “slumbers” in his hands and need only be
“awakened.”
●● Centralized maneuver. The pianist’s feet are kept out of camera
frame, while, as anyone who plays the piano knows, the instrument’s
pedals must often be involved in performance and cannot be
managed other than with the feet. Upper bodies dominate the screen
as much as arms and hands. Thus, screened pianism is an “upper”
business, coming from the torso (the heart) and its extensions, the
 KEYED UP  133

dexterous hands, rather than a “lower” self. If there is no lower

involvement, no passion in melody or form, piano music ceases to be
human.
●● Hand jobs. Two aspects of the hand movement shot: the degree to
which the camera reveals actual muscular training and flexibility;
and the extent to which whatever we are seeing is in correspondence
with whatever we are hearing. As to the first, in film fictions musical
passages of bravura difficulty are never shown directly, so we are left
to presume the strong muscularity. As to correspondence, a musically
untrained viewer will be prone to seeing it even when there isn’t any,
and will also tend to take any movement of the hand upon the keys
as a specialized index of talent. Of course, it makes no difference at
all if a figure plays keys that don’t sound out what we hear (sound
to be synced afterward), as long as no sharply visible discontinuity
appears onscreen (a scale doesn’t even vaguely resemble a chord).

Nor do audiences tend to pick up the blatant continuity mismatch between

disembodied hands at the keyboard and the diegetically “same” hands
attached to the character’s arms in other scenes. In short, one looks at the
hands but one does not look at the hands. With close-up shots, hands can
move in any way that won’t seem incongruous with a dub-in, and indeed
dubs can be designed, redone, or completely altered to suit the visual drama
of the moment.
●● Optical involvement. Coverings will effectively be covered if
showcase attention is accorded a character’s especially studious
regard of the keyboard while the fingers presumably move off-
camera: scientists looking through the musical microscope, as it
were. This demonstration of eager observation sucks in viewer
engagement, suggesting that in zoning in on the keys the piano
player is doing what the viewer is doing zoning in on her. And the
piano music seems authentic if we see somebody raptly focusing on
producing it. Sometimes in a concert—but not on film—a pianist
will have the eyes closed.
●● Empty reading. In general, filmed piano playing offers the non-
musical viewer a catalog of interpretable gestures: the bowed
head, the head raised back, the expressive eyes, the moving arms,
the flashing fingers of the right hand, those of the left, trick
ornamentations (trills, glissandi, bravura ascending or descending
passages). Regardless of their non-indexicality, such gestures can
constitute a piano language that filmmakers and viewers tacitly
agree to share, with some particular signs gaining considerable
repetition from film to film: the bodily, usually facial, beauty of
the pianist in elegiac melody; the augustness of the polished piano
134 THE FILM CHEAT

itself: handsome and enormous like a Steinway-D, or battered and

diminutive, like an old upright; the busy busy busy fingers; and
amour between the player’s body and the instrument. But piano-
playing viewers will regard all of this optically gestural material
quite differently than naïve viewers do: a pianist knows, for instance,
that it matters not a whit how pretty one looks while playing (Farley
Granger beware). The implication here is that with piano playing, an
entirely spurious collection of discernable gestures can be attributed
meaning; we may think of this as “empty reading.” A language loses
indexicality through a kind of jargon.
●● Flattening. The first act of cinema is to erase the distinction
between accomplished and unaccomplished pianism, since what
appears onscreen must appeal to a largely unwitting audience
and many people, competent only to recognize the wholeness or
sweetness of a melody, are unable to note what the performer
adds through musicality. Thus, the diegetic moment does not
depend upon technique or musicality. Let us say the treatment is
sentimental, in that the diegetic pianist’s sweet “desire” to play
beautifully—a matter for scripting—is taken as de facto evidence
of skill. In The Big Store (1941), Chico Marx is typically perceived
as merely comedic, even only barely skilled, whereas any pianist
will note his marvelous technique and delicate touch. By contrast,
in The Birds (1963) “Tippi” Hedren sits at an upright and plays
a Debussy Arabesque apparently with sufficient technical skill,
but almost entirely lacking musicality or a sensitivity of touch;
the candy-wrapping of the lovely music and beautiful “musician”
covers.
●● Uncertainty. As the outside and inside of the pianistic moment
cannot be seen at once we are confronted by a Heisenbergian
fragmentation: in one shot we cannot see an effect being produced
and also the motive of that production. Here, of course, is a feature
of cinema, drama, and social life generally—that interiors must
become characterological claims; but when music is the product, the
artist’s “inspiration”—innermost desire—becomes a central dramatic
issue. If keyboard sounds cut in with images of hands or body
parts become for the moment evidence of musical production, a lit
disembodied face alone conveys the feeling of an inward moment of
inspiration. But on both sides of this equation one finds cheats: the
musical “production” isn’t the thing we are seeing, and the face in
ecstasy doesn’t necessarily cue musical fever.
●● Performative focus. While screen narratives do not show this,
the trained performer can make music sing while thinking about
something else (like any actor hard at work).
 KEYED UP  135

●● Tic. The arm muscles, very frequently the objective center of a piano
shot, need not come into use in order to mobilize the muscles of the
hand. To play a perfectly fluid scale (a difficult challenge) covering
three or more octaves; or an arpeggio over the same range; or a
chord progression or octave progression, it is not necessary to lean
over one way and the next, or to wave the arms; it is not required
to pretend one is on a cricket pitch. Everything happens in the hand.
In effect, much of what is seen onscreen when the hand is concealed
amounts to a kind of actor’s tic. Were a character to tic this way
without a piano, he might be read as a ticquer.3
●● Cubism. Attending a piano performance in the everyday world, one
need not see anything. It is quite sufficient to listen. And those whose
pocketbooks can afford only the cheapest seats may well be placed
where no view is afforded. But if one does wish to gaze, the most
productive target is the hands upon the keyboard. The power and
the capability, as well as the tenderness or ferocity, are in the hands.
Wherever one is placed, however, that is where one is. Cinematic
pianism invariably makes the piano experience cubism by cutting
(delicately!) from angle to angle, as though what is happening has
so many facets it takes numerous camera positions to gather them
all into one vision. The impression the editing tries to foster is that
as the camera positions change we move closer and closer to the
sacred fire at the heart of the music. But since it is the sound of
music that rules, and the showing of piano players is a matter of
arbitrary concession, the particular choreographies one finds in
filmed piano scenes are telling in themselves rather than reflective of
the music. The screen is made continually interesting as a vision, so
the problem faced by cinema is the conversion of the sound of music
to the look of music, or at least the look of what can be sold as the
sound of music.
●● Musical interest. As normal citizens, do piano-playing characters
onscreen ever even show themselves interested in music, do they
talk about it or worry or plan, do they have favorite composers, or
favorite pieces to play, or favorite techniques to chat about? In much

3
Here as in so much else of cinema we gain a clear view of Kenneth Burke’s act-scene and act-
agency ratios, the bias in reading an action that is given by the place in which the action is made
or by the tools that are used to make it. Take a person making a repetitive movement with one
hand while holding the other palm-up and it is easy to make the reading “mentally unstable,”
or “hallucinatory” (as we can see in Frank Perry’s David and Lisa [1962]). Put a wooden spoon
in the first hand and a bowl in the second, and place the whole thing in a kitchen, and you have
a diligent cook.
136 THE FILM CHEAT

dramatic piano playing, the musical character sits at the keyboard

and operates as an automaton.4
●● Onscreen offscreen. Piano players onscreen don’t engage in routine
“backstage” activities that would characterize the daily life of actual
musicians. They typically do not discuss their instrument—“I much
prefer a Bösendorfer to a Steinway if I can get one, but my very
favorite is a Chickering”—nor refer conversationally to a keyboard’s
“touch”—“Heavy heavy heavy: gotta have bigger hands to play
this”—or to the decision of opening, half-opening, or closing the
top—“We’ll do it with the top down unless that’s a problem for
you”—or to matters of tuning, or difficult passages, or muscular
pain. The narrative piano player as emotional sprite is thus always
entirely the figure, or part-figure, in view, with no life outside the
frame: no consideration of the instrument beneath the fingers, no
need for Epsom salts.
●● Indications or silences. In Hollywood narrative, the piano
performance given by a character at one moment will not come
in for discussion by other characters later on. Someone might be
encouraging at the time: “That’s beautiful, Anton! Keep playing!,”
but evaluative conversation is eschewed, as is remarking on the
piano playing having had some distinctive and overwhelming
effect on the listener’s life. In concert set-ups the audience of course
applauds, even goes crazy, but the film cuts to the performer
stepping backstage and mopping the brow, receiving a stern look
from an angry lover or whomever, heading back into the light to
take a bow: all business. The partner riding home in the limousine:
“That went very well tonight.” But never, “I don’t know how you
do that beautiful melodic passage near the end, you play it so
magically”—all this because the audience onscreen and the one
watching in the theater have just heard that melodic passage and
don’t require to be sententiously informed of how beautiful they
already found it. This dramaturgical knot of never overinforming
the viewer operates as an ongoing rationale and mechanism for
cheating, because in the offscreen world people do comment to
performers with the enthusiasm we must take for granted when we
watch movies.

Workers are often shown one-sidedly this way. But in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956),
4

Hitchcock interposes a short but telling scene in an embassy kitchen and the corridor outside,
where slaving laborers are seen on a break, being only people with one another.
 18
Don’t Believe It

FIGURE 18 Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Paramount, 1952):
Jean Hagen is at the front microphone, here suddenly revealed as a mouther only, as
we find Debbie Reynolds dubbing her from behind.

The centerpiece of narrative screen composition is the human act. Dramatic

construction will have us looking after motive and effect, those couplers
which permit that linear assemblage in which one act owes to another and
begets yet another. But from the point of view of watchers observing human
action there is an omnipresent feature more elemental still than motive and
138 THE FILM CHEAT

result, an address to the possibility of conviction. This is what we might

call credibility. Any moment in which we see a doing, a completion, an
interrelation, we take the object of sight to be authentic and believable in
itself or else an incitement to suspicion about its production. This thing
being done exactly as I see it being done: I believe it or I do not. In Frank
Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955) Dean Martin is singing a street song
with some children, one of whom is a little boy pulling a wagon onto which
Martin hops. Post-sync recording aside, we can believe on the instant that
Martin is credibly singing, but that little boy: is he really pulling that wagon
all by himself?, or is a clandestine device being used, so that he need only
give the impression of pulling? As we will discover, while some confusion
can attach to the distinction between credible and incredible acts, typically
for viewers in the act of viewing none does.
An elegant example of the problem can be found with something as
simple as walking down the street,1 bright illustration being given in Edgar
Wright’s Baby Driver (2017) in a scene that follows directly after a very
long and involved car chase with Ansel Elgort’s Baby pulling off incredible
driving stunts to escape from numerous avid chasers. He races into a
parking structure, stops, and abandons the car. And now we see him gliding
down the sidewalk, as it turns out on his way to get coffee for his heist
cohorts. He is listening to music through his earphones and dancing his way
down the sidewalk. Twisting, sidestepping, pacing, twisting, with exquisite
form and a vivid sense of spontaneity. When we see this, we take the body
onscreen (character and actor together) to be both (a) visibly, dramatically
posited as the agent of the movement and (b) authentically the mover. This
action looks as though it is being done by this person and this person only.
There are no cutaways to long shot, the whole thing is in medium shot
with the body wholly visible. Shot distance is critical for credibility. If a
character mounts a horse for a race and during the race we cut away to
long shots, the riding might suddenly seem incredible, the jockey suddenly
replaced by a professional or a stunt rider. If a shot is made too close-up, we
might be watching a performer upon a dummy horse inside a soundstage.
John Wayne’s riding backward as he leaves Ed Asner’s abode in El Dorado
(1967) is a brilliant demonstration of the credible act: a character played by
a performer who really did know how to ride.
When we see someone walking we take them seriously, as though they
are actually and uncontrivedly walking just as appears. If by contrast a
man limps, he is either seriously, actually, and uncontrivedly limping or
else faking the limp for some reason: perception alone will not solve the
riddle. The actor could fake a limp in order to characterize. The character
might fake a limp in order to gain some advantage over other characters

1
For a thorough analytical discussion of which, see Ryave and Schenkein.
 DON’T BELIEVE IT  139

in the story. But simply put, limping is incredible—not to be taken at face

value in and of itself. There are few recognized ways in which plain walking
can be produced other than by the walker (the walker riding on a dolly is
one), but there are many conventionally recognized ways in which a limp
can happen. Credibly, for the character, an accident onscreen. Incredibly,
for the actor, a specially constructed shoe, a faked walking style. But the
fully framed and unadorned walk is credible. When we see Elgort moving
down the sidewalk we think, “Elgort is moving down the sidewalk as the
camera watches.” Similarly Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in a duo, in
Midnight Cowboy (1969), especially, perhaps, the moment when Hoffman’s
Ratso (limping some) smacks the hood of a taxi and screams, “I’m walkin’
here! I’m walkin’ here!” There are variations that make the situation more
complex, to be sure. As a camera slowly zooms in we find revealed the true
status of the walker. Say it is a robot programmed to behave this way (in
the story) and designed to look human: the discovery shows that the walk
is something we ought to have found incredible (it wasn’t a person walking,
as seemed) but didn’t (because from a distance it looked like a person).
Or a camera pulls back and we see that the walker/dancer is not moving
on the sidewalk at all, but is floating in the air in what we are to take as a
dream: again, our sense of credibility was mistaken. But these exceptions are
relatively rare. Usually when a character walks we believe we are seeing the
banality of walking and nothing else.2
Talking we tend to take as credible, as long as the talker’s face is visible.
Being stationary and watching or listening tends to seem credible.
Buying a little bouquet of flowers at a vendor’s and carrying them:
credible.
Taking a yoga pose: credible.
Kissing, chewing and swallowing, breathing—credible, credible, credible.
But a great number of dramatic actions are patently incredible, in the
simple sense that we can see them without being able to determine with
conviction that no special support structure is guiding, managing, and
polishing the action. I have discussed playing musical instruments: we are
never to be certain a technical cheat is not in use. But singing: lip syncing
makes possible the secret substitution of a foreign voice, as demonstrated in
the extended “dubbing studio” sequence of The Errand Boy (1961), where
we not only see Rita Hayes dubbing Theodora Davitt, in detail, but also
come upon the hilarious outcome of the protagonist’s invading the facility at
lunch time and tinkering with the controls. Or in the famous finale sequence

2
In their analysis of first films made by Navajos given only the scantest instruction on camera
loading, Sol Worth and John Adair found that walking was a signal aspect of narrative
construction and cultural meaning for the filmmakers, a telltale authenticity they felt the need
to explore.
140 THE FILM CHEAT

of Singin’ in the Rain’ (1952), where the obnoxiously controlling Lina

Lamont (Jean Hagen) “sings” in front of a live audience, who suddenly see,
as the curtain is raised, that Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) is at a hidden
microphone, singing for her.
I am forced to leave untreated here what could occupy another volume,
the delicacies and tricks of artificial sound, as in ADR (additional dialogue
recording), which is done after shooting, or Foley tracking (addition of object
sounds, again done after shooting). In voice synchronization, sounds are
made to match lip movements. In the Foleyed overlay of slapping, clacking,
clumping, squeaking, burping and other sounds when doors open, car doors
are smashed, and so on, lies a virtuoso orchestration, turning the everyday
world into instruments of sound production. With both we have an entire
second tier of cheating expressly calculated to waylay and misdirect the
viewer’s consciousness. The actor on the ADR stage is benefiting from a
projection of a loop, watching a take and recording the dialogue (which
was merely spoken in front of the camera) now with the proper rhythm
and emphases—over and over as many times as it takes to get it right.
For Foleying, a special stage is larded with half coconuts, framed pieces
of glass attached to metal hammers for smashing, fake doorknobs, horns,
sticks, smackers, brushes, leaves, and anything else on earth that can make
an interesting sound. Foley artists are continually experimenting, finding,
and adding to the storeroom of “magical” devices.3 For ADR, actors must
develop in secret the talent of making sound to match the movement of their
own lips as seen in a loop.
Driving a car: a breakdown partial vehicle is filmed on set showing steering
wheel, seat, windshield, rear seat, and so on, but the outside environment is
rear projected. If we take the “driving” character to be authentically driving,
still the apparently obvious link between the “driver” and the action we
see is not, analytically speaking, so obvious. The credibility is up in the air,
especially when, as the vehicle moves, considerable interior action must
take place (an ultimate version being the mountain-car sequence of Family
Plot [1976]). In walking, the link between the observed actor body and the
observed motion is obvious. Yet presence in location is essentially incredible,
since photographic tricks can place a body in any ground (William Holden
and Judy Holliday standing outside the National Archives in Born Yesterday
[1950], a rear-projection composite); and since set design is powerful enough
to render any interior space believable even when it is fake (for example,
the tiny apartments built by Henry Bumstead for Eastwood’s Mystic River
[2003]). Having a meal is incredible: actors cannot possibly actually eat
the food the character is seen eating, since the act may have to be repeated

3
For more on film sound more generally, see Altman; Beck; Chion, Audio-Vision; Eyman; and
Weis and Belton.
 DON’T BELIEVE IT  141

as many as seventy or eighty times to get a good take (and since nobody
producing a film takes for granted any actor’s physical tastes or allergies).
The tactical point of the filmic cheat is to overcome the viewer’s resistance,
his or her proneness to considering an act incredible by conveying it in a
credible mode, or by erasing features that lend toward the incredibility. The
meal: the actor can’t eat all that much food over and over but actually we
don’t see any actors eating, we see them passing food around, hear them talk
about food, watch them fork food up and move it toward the mouth before
a cut switches us to another diner. The production problem lies in having the
food on the table diminish as the scene proceeds.
In a way, the enhancement of credibility through substitute action is a
kind of stunt, and anyone on the crew might be converted into a momentary
stunt person. Here are two fascinating stunts, one secretly disruptive and
one openly kept from view:
Stunting voice. When he was shooting The Hospital (1971), Arthur Hiller
told me,4 he had a scene with George C. Scott, head of a hospital in which
patients are systematically being killed, now utterly frustrated and a physical
wreck for lack of sleep. The character was to stand up, walk to a window,
open the window, lean out, and say in utter exasperation, “Jesus . . . Christ!”
Take after take after take after take after take Scott leaned out the window
and said, almost sotto voce, “Jesus Christ.” A meek whisper.
No matter what he tried, Hiller could not bring the actor to change his
rendition. So in the editing room, he went to another part of the picture
where Scott was railing and said “Jesus . . . Christ!!!” He snipped that out
and edited it into the other scene. When we see the film, albeit the character
puts his back to camera when he leans out the window, nevertheless we take
his expostulation to be wholly credible, to be emanating from this body we
see from behind; when in fact it is wholly faked, ironically with his own
voice and without his intention: unwitting self-mockery, entirely guised.
Stunting expertise. It goes without saying that whenever an act A is to be
substituted by another version B, a version accomplished more inexpensively,
more accurately, or even accomplished at all when the actor working to
produce A simply cannot do it; whenever a cheat uses extraneous footage
to make credible what would otherwise be open to question, the viewer’s
presumption, quite naturally, is, that the substitute performer is an expert,
sufficiently to do handily what we see being done. When a character has to
do something physically taxing, so that in watching we might be filled with
doubt about the actor and think him “dubbed in” by a stunt person who can
manage more easily, we take this stunt person to be notably expert at the
activity: driving cars, leaping from heights, recoiling from gunshots, even,
as in the case with body models, standing (or lying) in for the star during

In personal conversation, Autumn 1971.

4
142 THE FILM CHEAT

a lovemaking scene. Not only expert but more expert than the actor being
replaced. The replacement is taken to be working, in fact, only because the
actor is in some particular way relatively incompetent or blocked. And once
people have seen quite a few filmic examples of such transfers, they come to
automatically expect certain kinds of stunt substitutions—that is, they know
their credibility is being poached. What a lovely challenge to rationality, then,
is the physical stunting of Burt Lancaster’s characters, almost invariably
performed by Lancaster himself even in conditions of danger as in The
Train (1964) and The Gypsy Moths (1969). As long as we are ignorant of
Lancaster’s stunt work, we read the character as amazingly accomplished
and presume some even more amazingly accomplished stand-in has worked
to convince us: sliding down a high ladder against the clock in The Train,
for example—a trick the actor would have learned much earlier in life as an
acrobat. Producers and actors know that the perception of “credibility” or
“incredibility” is rooted much less in the accomplishment of action before
the camera than in the viewer’s knowledge, and the expectations that flow
from it.
 19
“I Love You”

FIGURE 19 Charlize Theron and Johnny Depp in The Astronaut’s Wife (Rand
Ravich, New Line Cinema, 1999). A tiny homage, perhaps, to Edwin S. Porter’s The
Kiss (1900).

It is eye-opening to consider how much narrative cinema is finally,

climactically about two people in love, the pledge, the rescue, the tentative
courting, the culminating union; and very stable is the myth that such a state
of affairs is apotheosized in “the perfect kiss.” The kiss of truth.
Assemble the players as we may wish, the perfect girl(s), the perfect
boy(s), in the end it is the merger of mouths, the intercourse of interiors, that
brings the union, the hiatus that we feel as (at least momentary) “closure.”
144 THE FILM CHEAT

The kiss, even in action stories that ostensibly have nothing to do with
human passion, devoted instead to showing how a heroic band struggle
against an assembly of social forces, against gravity, against the limits of
their own endurance, against anything and everything to redeem some vital
treasure. For the Good, one finds, ultimately, the hero and heroine bonding
with an embrace, the two chums striding into the night, the galpals swept
away from the everyday, albeit in an embrace that is played sometimes for
comedy. Always, finally, the union:

               By this marriage,

All little jealousies, which now seem great,
And all great fears, which now import their dangers,
Would then be nothing: truths would be tales,
Where now half tales be truths.
(Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.136–40)

Very little screen action is as vulnerable to collapse as the romantic gesture,

since audiences are prone to taking it as so unaffected and natural an
agency, something no one has to rehearse. (Whence the comedic value of
the teenager rehearsing a kiss with a pillow, or charging to a waiting mouth
in the nocturnal shadows but without aim.) There is a belief, further, that a
superficial look of passion is linked to, can only be linked to, real passion
hidden away: that even for the few seconds of the kiss we are watching, the
performers who produce it together are experiencing roughly what their
characters seem to feel. When we see two stars of a film bonded together
(Robert Redford and Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover [1965], directed
by Robert Mulligan; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? [1966] directed by Mike Nichols; Sidney Poitier and
Katharine Ross in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner [1967], directed by Stanley
Kramer; Al Pacino and Diane Keaton in The Godfather [1972], directed by
Francis Ford Coppola; Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost
Ark [1981], directed by Steven Spielberg; Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis
in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape [1993], directed by Lasse Hallström; Jake
Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain [2006], directed by
Ang Lee), and photographed close-up so that the soft gleam of one person’s
skin radiates against that of the other, lit to look like precious stones in a
perfect setting, melodically intoning mythic epigrams, “I Love You, I Love
You, I Love You,” it seems automatic to think that there are beating hearts
beneath the skin we see, and that in those hearts there is desire to unite this
way. The fiction of movie-star romances thus stems in many ways from
narrative constructions arranged by third parties. Unthinkable except as
bald comedy (Han Solo egotistically shuffling Princess Leia aside) is a scene
in which one beautiful, heroically strong, selfless type stands nose to nose,
cheek to cheek with a second one and says, “Well, nice talking to you,”
 “I LOVE YOU”  145

and calmly walks away. The proximity must bring on the meeting of lips,
the meeting of lips the opening of mouths, and the opening of mouths a
coupling of more severe contingency in a planet far, far away once the lights
have come up.
That kiss:
There are probably no living persons who have not taught themselves
how to perform it through some reminiscence of what was seen onscreen
(the motion picture operating essentially as a mannerist textbook). Getting
the right interpersonal distance, as measured in inches or centimeters.
Angling the head. Moving one’s mouth forward at some calculable speed.
Actually aiming for the partner mouth, locating it with the very blind lips
(since way down there and from this angle and proximity the eyes cannot
get a view). Moving into, not back out of, the touch. Deciding when the
moment is done, that is, knowing how long to engage, how long and with
what ornamentation. Pulling apart slightly, what to do with the eyes, which
now gaze longingly into the other’s eyes gazing longingly into one’s longing
gaze. What to say, if anything, since whole architectures have been known
to collapse on a word. And then continuing to operate with what is now not
only knowing but knowing-oneself-to-know more than can be known from
exterior viewing alone.
The kiss! . . . . .
Onscreen it cannot but be summative. It cannot go wrong. It cannot be
obscured. It cannot be scenically mishandled. And the building hunger, the
itch, that is initiated and grows monumentally—this must seem actually
present, which is why one speaks casually of the good or bad “chemistry”
between actors. When there is “good chemistry,” the two major stars appear
to yearn for each other’s nakedness and desire, but for real. Legion are the
studio publicity stories concocted about one contracted star beginning an
affair with another (even while shooting a film), these putative escapades
functioning as spurs to audience belief in the chemistry which, like all
chemistry, is quite beyond sight.
Onscreen the kiss, something affected as natural and easy to do—when of
course it is neither—betokens the joining of the stars, a culminating moment
for the drama but also for the stargazing experience. As long as the mélange
of feelings is orchestrated as a finale or cadence the success of the film can
depend on the accuracy of the kiss, its believability even if all else seems
bogus. This is the supreme bodily touch (censorial restrictions of the times
notwithstanding), the link that brings the actor and character together in
their own internal “kiss,” as it were. The bond that weds passion to action.
But the problem here, here and always, is the conundrum presented by
what the social theorist Georg Simmel called the tertius gaudens. The Third
who Watches. As voyeurs in reality, we would have the same difficulty as the
camera has: obtaining, from any conceivable viewing position, a perspective
in which the action of each party is visible wholly and fully at the same time
146 THE FILM CHEAT

as the action of the other. As viewers of intimacy we can but seize an illusory
angle, something that charges us to imagine the coupling beyond our limiting
frame. And when we look at the camera as a tertius, noting that it is wearing
(as both enabler and prophylactic) a lens, we must see that angles become
expressly, overwhelmingly important. And in physical fact it is not the case
that the angle one person requires in order to do mouth-to-mouth with a
second is the same angle that a camera requires of kissers in order that a
sight be made of it. Displacement, refraction, warping, misalignment—all
these potential grenades—always threaten to exaggerate features of the kiss,
throw the act out of proportion, make what is intended to be graceful and
accomplished look sloppy, amateurish, and hopeless, even grotesque. Actors
learn, for instance, that in extreme close-ups with one another, and varying
according to the size of the lens, they must not look into one another’s eyes
or onscreen their gazes will fly past each other. In Virtuoso I quote Peter
Lorre revealing a lesson he gave Bogart about choosing one eye to focus on,
but not both (267–8) and those two had only dialogue together. Physical
engagements are more complicated still.
Mouths will frequently not touch in the way that it appears they are
touching. Aimed targeting might bring a modicum of pleasure to the actors
but the characters would appear to be misaiming. All this warping is because
the clarity and proximity of focus most desirable for kissing scenes requires
an aperture of f.2, perhaps even f1.2, and not more than f.4. At f.2 the linear
depth is foreshortened intensively, the graphic planes of space are brought
together. For the kiss as kiss to be discernable it must be shot in profile, or
“cheated toward” the profile, and this means that the depth between the side
of the actors’ cheeks near to the viewer and, say, the distal side of their noses
is contracted. When people kiss in reality they physically negotiate a space
that is not contracted in this way. As well, when characters talk to each other
certain slight angles must be interposed in the actors’ body placements, in
order that the alignments of the bodies look as though they match.
Beyond being cheated optically so that it seems optically right, the screen
kiss is cheated symbolically. The character never—but never—openly makes
statement about that kiss, what it felt like exactly, whether or not it seemed
acceptably good, or, even more, precisely what sensations affected various
body parts. “Gosh, when I kissed you my lower lip, toward the left side,
felt as though it were being eaten alive.” After the kiss comes silence. In
that way, the kiss can be taken to be culminatingly informative, to speak
the speech in the fullest, least ambiguous way, leaving “no stone unturned,”
no hint undelivered. There is an electrical cheat as well, almost always: the
kiss moment summons and delivers extraordinary illumination, as though
the mouth-to-mouth is actually running electrons through hitherto hidden
lightbulbs. A glow in the eyes. A glow on the cheeks. The world opened
in wonderment as a visual entity. Except in the rarest of circumstances, in
everyday life when people kiss the lights do not come on except, perhaps, in
 “I LOVE YOU”  147

the dark cave of the imagination, and the cheat in film here as elsewhere is
to make the luminosity in that cave tangible. Key lighting helps a lot.
The screen kiss also cannot fail. No character can say, “Golly, I have been
thinking for some time how wonderfully attractive you are, and I have been
desiring beyond desire to plant my lips on yours; but now that I have done
it, I have to confess it wasn’t as wonderful as I hoped it would be, no offense
intended.” Nor can a character tell a second character, “Gee, yes I would,
yes, love to kiss but I have a bad tooth infection.” Or, “Gee, I’m a vegan and
you eat meat so if I kiss you am I eating meat, too?” Or, “Kissing you was
actually not so much at all, because in my dream last night I was kissed by
an angel.”
The kiss has to seem to be the universe in a grain, everything here and
now, all possibility contracted into this blaze of shining penetration. If one
kisses with spontaneity and release, nothing of the sort can happen on
camera, since for the screen kiss, considering focal distances and hot spots
of light, angles of bodies and timing, make-up and the grace summoned for
movement, there is enormous work to be done. The kiss as architecture.
148
 20
Surrender

FIGURE 20 From Predator (John McTiernan, Twentieth Century Fox, 1987).

Inside the costume and under the makeup is Kevin Peter Hall.

In matters of honor and value between antagonists it may be prudent to adopt

a combative position, but as one actually practices it acting is not, principally
at least, a matter of honor and value between antagonists. Being combative
is unhelpful and unproductive in many ways, not least of which is that in
straining to gain ascendancy in a shot or scene the performer draws attention
to her own urgent self-consciousness, breaking the dramatic illusion. The more
obvious a dramatized confrontational situation, the more apparent can be
the actor’s travail, an illustrative case being the heated argument in Marriage
Story (2019). But as to confrontation, very few situations are worse for a
performer than confinement within the artificial boundary of special effects,
150 THE FILM CHEAT

with the accompanying obligation to restrain one’s actions in line with the
limitations and capabilities of the effected character. Is one subsumed by one’s
makeup, or does one make a distinct point of emerging as a performative self?
The actor and character are in a face-off.
In diegetic surgeries, battles, alien encounters, plague outbreaks, and
other like situations, the actor will typically be smeared over with an entirely
artificial sheath, a suppurating make-up wound, a latex facial substitution,
a scaly alien skin; or confined to a wheelchair or stretcher or bed or other
mechanical device (as in torture chambers or, for Andrew Garfield in Breathe
[2017], an iron lung). Such transformations can be felt as reductions of the
self just as much as aggrandizements, aides to the creation of, as it were,
monstres par défaut as much as monstres par excès (see Fiedler 20ff.). And a
construction might bring experiential traumas. Actors who must wear full-
body suits (Haruo Nakajima playing Godzilla in 1954 and onward, Bolaji
Badejo towering in the Alien costume for Ridley Scott) or actors wearing ape
costumes (David Warner in Morgan!: A Suitable Case for Treatment [1966])
or being locked in rubber (Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands [1990],
Ricou Browning in The Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]), or being
turned into a kind of flexible figurine (Tilda Swinton in The Chronicles of
Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [2005], Boris Karloff in
The Mummy [1932], Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age [2007],
Helena Bonham Carter in Alice in Wonderland [2010]) may find it difficult
to do the things most people don’t think about at all, like sipping a glass
of water, chewing a sandwich, using the toilet. The point of the taxation
through confinement is only the producer’s profit, in that taking the make-
up off and putting it on again is an expensive process and producers would
prefer to have it done only once in a shooting day.
More difficult than tolerating the get-up, however, is working with it
expressively, because the actor feels a need to be seen as himself, not only as
the character, and the laid-over character tends to dominate the performative
self, even obliterate it. Once the studio system dissolved, actors could not count
on the seven-year contract (which, a kind of imprisonment itself, did offer job
security for a time) and found themselves, in many cases, continually reaching
for a new job in the knowledge that “Look at me, look at what I can do!”
isn’t something producers would take to heart if it came from the mouth of
a character instead of the mouth of an actor who could make characters. The
best path to a successful performance in masque is to hold back from fighting
the conditions, exactly as in coming to terms in everyday life with a debilitation
like a broken leg. Let the mask take over . . . entirely. Become the mask, though
hopefully not to the point that the mask becomes taken as the performer, that
is, will not come off. One recognizes that it is the mask affecting the audience’s
sensibility and thought, and one’s job is to service and support the mask. If
it is sometimes necessary to go to extreme lengths in providing this support,
one must always avoid openly competing with one’s own character, however
 SURRENDER  151

ersatz that character might seem. The more one competes against it, tries for
characteristic personal expressive signals and permits tics, the more and more
constructed and arbitrary seems the character mask. The more arbitrary the
character mask, the more arbitrary the film altogether.
In this odd case, then, the actor’s supreme cheat, his or her way of turning
the viewer’s critical mind away from the thought that the character is an
artful and made-up creation, is to do nothing but play the lines and move as
the constraints permit. For self-advertisement one must trust to the publicity.
There are delightful, deeply engaging moments in Scissorhands when one
senses the actor becoming acutely aware he cannot move his hands because
his character has no hands to move, and Edward’s little looks of surprise
and wonder are telltale in convincing us of his sincerity, since the “scissor
hands” fell to him, far from being a result of his will and operation. I am
here, I am trapped in here, there is little I can do but I will throw myself
into doing at any rate. Johnny Depp sacrifices his personality entirely here,
disappearing inside Edward.
But throwing oneself into doing: there are ways of doing that, and ways
of doing that. David Lowery told Eric Lavallee at the Fantasia International
Film Festival the ironic story of shooting Casey Affleck in a ghost costume
for his film, A Ghost Story (2016). The principal actor is in the costume for
the entire movie save the opening few minutes:

It was very clear that it was him—and it was almost surreal how much the
sheet exaggerated his physical traits, because he has a very specific way of
walking, a very specific way of hanging his head, he slouches a little bit,
and the sheet just magnified all those things so even though we didn’t see
his face it was very clearly him. But the other thing that happened was
that it was very clearly an actor with a bedsheet over their head. And it
felt too corporeal. It felt very clunk and, to be honest, quite silly. So from
that point forward we started refining the way in which the costume was
utilized and the way in which he acted underneath it. And by and by we
just sort of removed every bit of his body, which—and every bit of his
performance, and once we had done that it became clear that we could
put someone else under there, which we did do from time to time.

A case of the self effusing through the costume and making a leakage that
threatened the continuity of the viewer’s belief. It was necessary with the
camera and costume together to “just sort of remove” every bit of his body,
and then every bit of the performance that was his. Not the performance
the actor was giving, but the performance that, intentionally or not, he was
appropriating.1

1
I am grateful to Brandon Cronenberg for pointing me to this interview, available online at
https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=0YJ​​​08840​​jhY
152 THE FILM CHEAT

Because Karloff, Chaney, Lugosi, Nakajima, and others—and, later,

actors such as Badejo and Depp---carried off performances in “deep
costume,” because their work underneath was so stellar and so convincing—
that is, because they didn’t seem to be there beneath the highly decorative
character—it became possible after the late 1970s to film puppeted monsters
that would be taken for granted in superficial terms exactly as these actors
led audiences to take their characters. Servo-mechanical devices don’t need
to be fed lunch, after all, and they don’t claim residuals. If, because Nakajima
made no efforts to show himself onscreen Godzilla the giant reptile could
seem a reasonable fit with his environment, a character figure ostensibly
being mounted without an actor’s help, it at first became possible, and then
more and more popular, to make monsters that really didn’t have or need
actors’ help.
To become a characterological transform is to lose oneself inside the
makeup. The makeup, the plastic, the latex prosthetics are doing the
performance with the help of one’s nervous and muscular system. The actor
becomes a motor, then a motor principle, then finally a ghost in the machine.
 Of Cameras

{21} Corral
Richard Chalfen; Pillow Talk; Bullitt; Poltergeist; Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?; Funny Games; The Guilty; The Bourne Ultimatum; The Circle;
Zabriskie Point

{22} Show Me
Wolfgang Schivelbusch and light; Impressionism; Nestor Almendros; Claire’s
Knee; Pauline at the Beach; Rebecca; Greta Garbo and William Daniels;
Suspicion; Day for Night

{23} On the Road

Parker; They Live by Night; Baby Driver; Lady for a Day; Collateral; Family
Plot; Legend; A Stolen Life

{24} “Good Cinematography!”

Academy Awards, 1970–2018; Chinatown; The Revenant; Close Encounters
of the Third Kind; Vertigo; Pauline at the Beach; Sweet Smell of Success

{25} “Picture This”

Regression

{26} The Angle Angle

“Dutch” angles; The Thief of Bagdad; On the Waterfront; Inside Daisy
Clover

{27} Moving On
Panoramic perception; the coup d’oeil; Baudelaire

{28} Behind the Camera Behind

Linwood Dunn; optical printing

{29} Peek-a-Boo
Psycho; Mon oncle Antoine; The Lady in the Lake; The Naked Kiss; Up in
the Air; Alfie; House of Cards; acousmêtre/optimêtre; Walker Gibson
154
 21
Corral

FIGURE 21 Kristen Stewart and Jodie Foster in Panic Room (David Fincher,
Columbia, 2002).

The camera’s biography is simple: it has always been able and ready to
go anywhere the light is sufficient, has always been a creature of curiosity
preferring not to face obstructing walls. And yet, regard! There are walls,
and the camera cannot go everywhere. When, as in Pillow Talk (1959) and
Grand Prix (1966) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) the editor makes
use of optically printed camera mattes to create the “multiple screen” that
at first enchants by the multiplicity of its views, by the hint that we can be in
more than one place at the same time, we realize too soon that every looking
requires a boundary, and we cannot apprehend without some selectivity of
concentration. One is reminded of Richard Chalfen’s curious dictum that we
can photograph anything anywhere anytime, but we don’t.
156 THE FILM CHEAT

The camera does not see everything that takes place in the realm of the
narrative:
●● It cannot see—and so we cannot see—at one and the same time both
the outside surface and the interior wellspring feeding it; and in fact
we do not see that interior quite generally. It is well known that
surfaces can be misleading, that appearances do not always convey
or completely convey motive. It is the surface that makes it possible
for us to discern an objective form: a leaf on a branch, a rolling ball,
a body in conversation. Everything seen by the camera is a surface
except that:
●● The shadow is neither surface nor interior.
●● The camera, and we, not only can see but must see. Since we must
see, we must be enabled to see. The camera is there to see, and
therefore no action that does not have a clear visual component can
be subjected to it. Make the implicit explicit. The camera cannot see
(a) belief, (b) fear, (c) adoration, (d) fascination, (e) meditation, (f)
forgetting, (g) excitement, or any other emotional state that humans
claim to be feeling. It cannot see someone’s anticipation or drawing
to a conclusion. What the camera can see is movement, action, and
gesture that can be claimed to be pinned to some internal state: a
sign of belief, a sign of doubt. The camera does not see happiness
but when a little girl is giggling with her eyes atwinkle we can say
we are seeing it. Running to, running away—the camera can show
these, although in point they look exactly the same (like sunrises
and sunsets) unless some further information is given by editing.
Chewing we can see, digesting we cannot.
●● Thought we cannot see, but words inking their way onto a page
we can.
●● The camera is always pricking or pinioning the viewer’s
consciousness. The bathtub dialogue in Pillow Talk (between Rock
Hudson and Doris Day) is an attempt to articulate both sides of a
telephone conversation at once, the speaking face on one side of the
screen and the receptive hearing face on the other, and then the two
persons switching.1 As we do not with surety determine motive as
the conversation gets underway, both faces are incessantly puzzling.

1
As in the conversational behavior with “flappers” using “bladders” that Gulliver describes in
regard to his voyage to Laputa (Swift 172): “It seems the minds of these people are so taken up
with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others,
without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing . . . [the
officer makes] gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right
ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself . . .”
 CORRAL  157

With each character a moment arises when we are to notice a

disconnect between a vocal gesture and a facial expression, as if to
say, “This person does not mean what is being said.” But in order to
catch this—it is purely visual, as any acoustic hint would leak into
the telephone—we must watch one side of the screen. Any subtle
nuance provided simultaneously across the gap, to the effect that
the listener is actually hearing one thing while pretending to hear
another, is hard to catch clearly at the crucial instant. In car chase
scenes, we flip from the lead car to the pursuer (Bullitt [1968] is
a textbook example) but every moment we spend in the lead car,
watching the driver and his thug accomplice, say, is a moment we
cannot spend in the chase car, watching the good-natured cop.
●● But there are also dramatic “privacies” enacted for good social
form, the camera in this case standing in with just enough bravado
to cover our own squeamishness. We can visit a salon or dining
area but we do not typically visit closets, bathrooms, basements in
normal usage, the dry cleaner taking a stain out of a shirt, that space
under the covers. (On this, see Chapter 15.)

When cinema points to a space we are forbidden to enter, a certain problem

of engagement arises. Seeing the forbidden space—the room at the top
of the stairs in Poltergeist (1982) stared at by little Carol Anne (Heather
O’Rourke)—and noting how it is closed to us, we detect, more than the
space, the forbidding itself. We are made suddenly self-aware as persons
presumably yearning to go where going isn’t permitted, yearning, then, and
being held back from yearning. The viewer is not only aware of herself
desiring, she is aware of herself being taken as someone who desires,
someone who is or was expected to desire. If I don’t suspect you of wanting
to sneak into my private locker, the one the camera has put in front of
your face, I don’t mount a KEEP OUT sign on it. Such a sign would index
not only the privacy of my tabooed space, the space I don’t want anybody
but me to be in, but also, and more importantly, my presumption of your
curiosity about it, that you have a will to invade. Without some correction,
the audience, now implicitly accused, could easily be provoked to fixate on
exactly the forbidden zone, even on nothing else, because it has been pointed
out as the kind of taboo that tantalizes. The audience now being caught up
with wondering about this blocked-off zone, it may fail to catch something
far more relevant, and in cinema, the audience’s attention and calculation
are always organized and pinpointed.
●● As to going: the camera cannot go everywhere, but this fact must
be cheated if the illusion of plastic movement is to be preserved.
The audience must have the sense that there is nowhere the camera
does not go, because they are offered what seems like an unbounded
158 THE FILM CHEAT

collection of views. As everything we see is replete and promising,

filled with potential, we are content to see it as we do, from this
point of view, at this distance, with this clarity, rather than through
the kind of denial that would propose different views not made
available. The surface we see is all there is.

The framing may include at its margins passages and spaces to which
the narrative does not explicitly take us—the dark alleyway—but the
cinematographer can have his gaffing team light these spaces in such a way
that they pass essentially unnoticed in a shot centering on something more
brightly lit (and therefore more dynamic). The set designer can collaborate
by planning and building a story space where some aspects are toned down
through coloring or embellishment and some are keyed up. The screenwriter
will take caution about mentioning places we do not see, so as not to permit
distracting disappointment in the not-seeing. The point is that generally
speaking we go where the story makes us feel the need to go, and our
attention, satisfied, is drawn away from otherwheres. In Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1966), a drama taking place largely in a domestic living
room, there is a point when one resident prods the other about the bedroom,
and in fact this bedroom is “upstairs,” in a zone to which we have hitherto
had virtually no access; but in a subsequent scene we do go to this bedroom,
and we can even recollect how we did swiftly and casually go there near the
beginning of the film to watch a woman changing but were so fascinated by
her (Elizabeth Taylor at her frowziest) we may not have paid much attention
to the space.
The camera is summatively generous. No treasure is hinted at that the
camera does not hold out for us to grasp. The camera itself is never (never
to be seen as) held away from treasures available somewhere within the
diegetic world. The camera is free. The camera is supple. The camera is
magical.
To put this obversely: an Aristotelian unity holds sway, in that all the
nooks and crannies opened to our view turn out (magically) to be important
for the story (and what is not important is made to seem nonexistent). But of
course this is a grand cheat, a method of reducing the potential complexity
of a tale to the more limited range of what can be shown: what the producer
can afford to show, what the designers can manage to configure, what the
viewer can be presumed willing to tolerate.
●● More than uniform diegetic importance, the various visible endroits
in narrative space must compose and hold, together, a certain
uniformity of reference. The designer knows that once he or she has
commenced imagining and drawing out plans for any set at all, that
set will offer certain reference to a fictional “reality,” whether that
reality is intended to be phantasmal or reportorial, whether of a
 CORRAL  159

wonderland or of an everyday. In whichever direction the design is

to move, it must move with a uniform bearing. For a tiny example:
the carefully crafted bedroom of an apartment will have to look
like the sort of bedroom that would be in the sort of apartment
where the living room and kitchen, if the bedroom looked like that,
would look like this. The representation will need to seem to stretch
into a coherent whole space, and also to continue as (narrative)
time goes by (as production time went by) to appear more or less
reasonably the same. There is a fictional world and in it the parts
are logically coherent. If we are in the African veldt and we meet a
tribal king (as in Yeelen [1987]), his throne will be something like
a comfortable boulder. If we are visiting the residence of Dr. T., his
personal suite, brazenly colored, will have been imagined by him no
more or no less than the room in which his five hundred little piano
students play on the one great keyboard (1953). Further, various
limited designs (to be built in different corners of a soundstage,
or on adjacent soundstages) will relate to one another in not only
a proportional but also a tonal way. A set designed to represent a
grand reception area, for example, will have to seem just as real—
no more or less real—than sets designed earlier to represent hotel
rooms, train stations, and so on. A much blunter way of seeing this:
all the settings in a film will appear to have been designed by the
same (nonexistent, invisible) hand—not designed at all, in fact, yet
extremely believable in juxtaposition, as the editing will put them.
Once the design process begins for a film, the designer is making a
kind of commitment to consistency.
●● Often in dramatic films, when characters name locations the
story visits them subsequently, else the dialogue will be worked
to dispense with the location’s importance as soon as the place is
brought up. The naming in fact typically operates as a preparation
for narrative movement. Behind the scenes: when the script is
approved, agents for the design team and the camera crew go
through it and calculate what particular settings and views will be
needed, exactly in the way that the casting people come to be aware
what roles will need be filled by them.
●● A principle and ongoing cheat is that with the actor’s intelligent
involvement characters proceed through stories behaving with the
utmost casualness as though certain unseen spaces simply aren’t
there; as though the diegetic world the characters inhabit is fully,
coherently, obviously the world they see and know, just as it is fully,
coherently, obviously the world for us. Characters do not have more
curiosity than the fictive world they inhabit would subtend. The
space into which a character enters seems to be:
160 THE FILM CHEAT

(a) ideal for the event that is to take place there—that is, nobody
feels cramped or swimming in the sea unless the cramping or
extreme openness are intended (the red room in Red Desert
[1964] is a tight space but excitingly so);
(b) elegantly designed to hold and feature that event, a space that
for the characters must be an optical wish fulfillment (as it is
for us), regardless of how “shabby” its surface;
(c) uninteresting in itself as a narrative space anticipated by a
character for later use, excepting for meticulous inspections
that are part of the dramatic construction, as when Michael
Caine visits Laurence Olivier’s labyrinthine lair in Sleuth
(1972) or when Vera Miles visits the upstairs bedrooms in the
Bates house in Psycho (1960). Characters very often tend to
move into a space and relate to other characters as though
the space itself has no vital qualities that touch or distract
them: we can be touched and distracted while they pay no
heed; or they are sent into a space with spectacular visual
qualities and forced to exploit these as part of the action,
exploit them immediately on being present (Harold Lloyd and
Jimmy Conlin on the skyscraper with the lion in The Sin of
Harold Diddlebock [1947]; Audrey Hepburn fearful at the
Palais Royal in Charade [1963]; John Alexander repeatedly
chasing up the staircase (à la Teddy Roosevelt) in Arsenic and
Old Lace [1944]). However it gains use or attention, the space
in which we linger to watch the action is put forward as the
singular and only space appropriate, available, and existent at
this moment. There is no need, and no urge, to peek around
and find attached secret spots, improvements, unless, again,
that very peeking around is the substance of the drama. A
limiting case might be My Dinner with Andre (1981), in which,
aside from a very brief opening and very brief closing phrase,
both involving the streets of Manhattan, we are settled for the
entire film at one table in a corner of one restaurant, listening
to two people converse; yet we are made to feel absolutely
comfortable, quite as comfortable as they are with their roast
quail. Indeed, many viewers of this film swear they have
journeyed to the sites mentioned in the tales that comprise the
conversation.
●● Narrative space shows dramatic coherence, in that whatever we see
happening here is just the sort of thing that could happen in a space
like this, or else, with an irony the film intends us to receive and
enjoy for its own sake, just the sort of thing that would never happen
in such a space (a direct inversion): the gigantic Waterloo station at
 CORRAL  161

rush hour is exactly right as the place where Jason Bourne (Matt
Damon) would flee and hide in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Or,
in a flipped situation, without knowing where he is Jerry Lewis’s
nerdy yet very male Jerome Jerome arises, gets dressed, and goes
to breakfast in a gigantic girls’ sorority house in The Ladies Man
(1962). These are examples of Kenneth Burke’s “scene-act ratio.”
The action must not be such as to compel presentation of some other
space, to which we do not go. But the naturalism of the fit between
action and place (the straight fit/the ironic misfit) is a cheat against
our virtual confinement where the action is. The appropriateness of
setting is so rich we do not notice how it is our cell.
●● All of these principles, including the cheat mechanisms, can
themselves become the substance of dramatic exploration, as
happens for instance in Noises Off . . . (1992), theatrical characters
fleeing from our sight but then suddenly appearing backstage, and in
Synecdoche, New York (2008), where filmic fiction is the subject of
the filmic fiction. In The Magus (1968) domestic environments are
lifted away in an elaborate fabrication.
●● There are three kinds of fictional spaces, and film constructions
work by invoking and arranging them: (i) places a character desires
to visit: idylls; (ii) places a character is forced to visit: dungeons;
(iii) public spaces that people move through both conversationally
and physically in order to get to (i) or (ii): neutrals. All these have
corresponding cheats.

Typically (i) the happy destination, the idyll, will be set up as the solution to
an apparently irresolvable problem that confounds characters for whom we
have already been made to feel an enthusiastic affinity. They are not quite in
the “right” place, but if they can find a way to get there all will be resolved.
The earlier moment—a passing phrase, a whole scene—establishing the
character(s) as lovable, and the attached moment in which the problem
is presented in all its daunting complexity work together to make travel
to and arrival at the esteemed destination a matter of course. Often we
will be brought in during the journey (for instance, in Michael Haneke’s
American remake of Funny Games [2007]) to find people (played by star
actors we already know and love, Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in this case)
on the road in their car, chatting, joking, or arguing about the problem they
need to solve. The set designer and cinematographer might collaborate on
the characters’ arrival to show the destination as architecturally notable,
marvelous, special, ideally located, and so on. But what does not happen,
what the cheat makes unnecessary by framing the place as a mere waystation
on a longer route, is any pointed reference to the place of arrival as a
singular destination which is itself the whole subject of this film. We merely
162 THE FILM CHEAT

arrive there, merely make ourselves at home but not with such imbrication
as to block us from proceeding with ongoing action. The arrival of Aziz
(Victor Bannerjee) and Adela Quested (Judy Davis) at the monkey temple in
A Passage to India (1984) is, at first, a similarly wondrous, promising event
showing off a space that is marvelous. Dr. Meecham’s (Rex Reason) arrival
by auto-piloted aircraft at the research facility in Georgia gives a warm,
welcoming tone near the beginning of This Island Earth (1955). Dorothy
landing in Oz (1939), amazed Anna’s visit to the palace of the King of Siam
(1956), the travelers’ chancing upon the hidden Shangri-la in Lost Horizon
(1938) . . .
Clearly the idyll can function in romantic and in terrifying films, in
fantasies and in nightmares, as long as it presents itself, at least initially, as
a happy find. In Ransom! (1956) an idyll is converted by the action into a
dungeon as a cozy home becomes the inutile haven for two people whose
child has been abducted, and then reconverted to an idyll at the conclusion
when he is returned safe and sound.
Or:
(ii) Characters suffer capture, imprisonment, debilitating discomfort,
torture, degradation. The cheat here is doubled. The script implies over
and over that there is another place we are not seeing, the normal zone of
freedom outside these constricting boundaries, the “better place.” In prison
escape films, we are given references to a “world outside,” and prisoners use
the word “inside” to define their cloister, the prison. Beyond this general
reference to a freeing exterior we have little or no time to take note of the
space itself as a space because of the horrifying, wounding, or nauseating
events that take place here and, for the information of the viewer, negativize
it. Nor in the face of the horrors do we calmly examine the creatures who
by making an appearance constitute an event: Jabba the Hutt in The Empire
Strikes Back (1980), Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) in The Bridge on the
River Kwai (1957), the giant spider in the terrifying dank basement of
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), or the horrifying kidnapper (John
Goodman) in 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). As to unpleasant events and
unpleasant spaces, it is especially interesting to consider how a thoroughly
confining and undesirable situation can be produced in a routinized working
environment. The Guilty (2018) posits an emergency call center where an
operator (Jakob Cedergren) trying too eagerly to help a young woman
phoning in becomes embroiled in something shockingly bad. In Panic Room
(2002), Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart escape home invaders in what they
believe is a specially designed safe space, but because it is insufficient to
their needs they are forced to visit the outside, that is, their own (fancy New
York) apartment and thus the invading thugs who are lurking there with
extreme malevolence.
(iii) A neutral space can be immense with respect to the size of the
protagonists who go there (the cornfield in North by Northwest [1959]) or
 CORRAL  163

cozy and gemutlich (the restaurant in Little Italy where Michael Corleone
carries out an assassination in The Godfather [1972]), but it is always used
by the characters without belonging to them. It can be painfully nondescript
(the nocturnal plaza outside Lincoln Center where Laurence Olivier stabs
Roy Scheider in Marathon Man [1976]) or so elaborately filled with event
that it merits a special set piece inside the film (the rainy square filled with
umbrella users in Foreign Correspondent [1940]). The protagonist will
be split apart from the space, briefly or totally, either discernably edging
through a crowd there or engaged in a special way that makes the place
irrelevant (Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo limping through the streets of
midtown in Midnight Cowboy [1969]). The public neutrality leaks into
the diegesis as diegetic neutrality. Hotel rooms are particularly useful as
public spots—spots that only some character(s) can be found in, but that
anyone can theoretically rent and visit—and when significant action takes
place there it is the action and the actors committing it that gain attention,
not the room itself (even, finally, in a setup where the room gets explicit
identification, as in the two adjoining hotel rooms we finally visit in The
Conversation [1974]).
In the idyll, a key cheat is the act of rendering the space instantly, naturally,
unquestionably hospitable and right, even more for the characters than for
the viewer. The character does not have to take dramatic time to make the
place comfy, so that if we see a character actually taking time for this we
know that the activity itself has, or will have, signal dramatic import. In
the dungeon, the space provides an ominous pathetic fallacy, oozing with a
foreboding darkness or “darkness” that acts as an unrelenting warning yet
not actually warning the viewer to “stay away” by shutting the eyes. Neutral
spaces are carefully constructed and photographed so as to give signs of only
appropriateness, never welcoming warmth or ominous darkness, so that
the action can stand out. If we watch a film like Spielberg’s The Terminal
(2004) we see the enormous lengths to which the visionary filmmaker, the
scriptwriter, and the key performer must go in order to make rational a
distinctly individualistic and much extended use of a space intended for vast
publics and speedy movement.
●● These spatial types are not fixed in a drama; a fictional
development or turn can metamorphose any of them into one or
more of the others, as with Ransom!. The space capsule in Apollo
13 (1995) begins as an idyll and becomes a frightening dungeon, as
does the Chunnel train from Paris to London in Personal Shopper
(2016) or the 15:17 to Paris in Clint Eastwood’s film of the same
name. For a few very piggish little folk, Willy Wonka’s magical
chocolate factory becomes anything but a wonderland. To reverse:
Lord of the Flies (1963) concludes with a warming transformation
of a war-scarred island into a haven of safety. A computer hacker
164 THE FILM CHEAT

helps Emma Watson turn a silicon valley nightmare into a promised

land in The Circle (2017). In Zabriskie Point (1970), one kind
of neutrality becomes another as the (anti-)hero takes off in a
single-engine plane from an airport that seems to him a gateway
to paradise; but landing there hours later he is mortally assaulted
by the LAPD; two radically different kinds of human action in the
same diegetic space. With neutral space, the vital cheat is to shift
attention to its appropriateness for containing the action, in this
way rationalizing, normalizing, and naturalizing the background
as the only or most ideal possible locale, the place we are watching
as a place “because it is obvious”—in short, the place we are not
really watching.

If the neutral space is counterperformative, in that it recedes in support

of the character’s attitude, feeling, and movement, and in that as action
proceeds we focus our attention on what is being done rather than on the
appropriateness of what is being done to the setting, idylls and dungeons are
both highly performative in themselves, enunciatory, bold. Whether the space
is nurturing and comforting, as in the idyll, or threatening and terrifying, as
in the dungeon, it articulates its qualities openly and directly without being
dependent on, or underpinning, action. In this way, idylls and dungeons not
only help amplify what actors do there but also release the actor from the
obligation to be extreme in gesture. Since the scene does some of the work,
adds distinctive flavor to every twitch and gaze, the actor can “shrink” the
performance into very small postural expressions or expressive nuances. A
small number of telling examples:
●● In The Fugitive (1993), there comes a moment when the fleeing Dr.
Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford), with the contemporary Javert,
Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), hot on his tail, comes out of
a dank dark tunnel and finds himself staring down a mammoth
precipice, the fall of water dropping into the base of a dam. The
only extremity required of Ford here (actually required of his
double) is a formal posture in diving forward into the air. As to
facial response when he sees the height, the Dutch angle of the
water dropping away accomplishes a great deal for him. The
moment is galvanically frightful, but if we concentrate on the
performer not the character we see that he is curiously relaxed. In
addition, any extreme gesture he made here would subtract from
the power of the scenic background, a power not to be disregarded
as the producer has made expensive arrangements to have shots that
convey it.
●● Or we can look at the secret lair of Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) in the
first James Bond film, as designed for the screen by Ken Adam. A
 CORRAL  165

vast lateral space, walled by arrangements of stone boulders, softly

lit, accessible by elevators through copper-sheathed doors, set with
specially lit modern sculpture. Here is a brutal announcement of
capacious wealth and the illusion of an unconfining space, although
the script has prepared us already for the owner of this place being
the villain (thus, of course, a dungeon keeper). All this conspicuous
wealth will be used for nefarious purposes; and movement for Bond
(Sean Connery) and his girlfriend Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress)
will hardly seem (to them or to us) unconfined. The glow of the
space is an antithesis of the dark inscrutability of Julius No himself.
When the man makes his entrance, the performer is enabled already,
instantly, to walk only with calm steps and to avoid facial gesture
beyond the probing gaze. He is always already at home in a scene
that bespeaks his attitude, and the visitors are always already
amazed by the place, and therefore by him: amazed on scene, yet
also cuing us to amazement.
●● But if we look instead at the little Tennessee homestead in which
Alvin York (Gary Cooper) lives with his aged mother (Margaret
Wycherly) and young brother (Dickie Moore) in Howard Hawks’s
Sergeant York (1941), especially at the moment Alvin bids them
farewell and mounts his steed to head off to war, we find the
main character isolated in a spreading landscape, a road running
off and downward, rolling hills, huge trees, all this dappled with
sun, and the mother, brother, and girlfriend (Joan Leslie) waving
from the house on a hill. The scene fairly radiates off the screen
with a naturalness, a sense of a paradisiacal American countryside
untouched and untrammeled. This is God’s land, a place that is all
promise and all future, an opening into a better world. As Alvin
rides away there can be no doubt, no felt hesitation, that he will
return to this bucolic world, that his war experience will be a safe
one. We can focus on him as a character type well developed, rather
than a fighting agent entering a scene of conflict, which scene would
be seen as the true heart of the film. The true heart is this filmic
Tennessee Eden, designed by John Hughes and effected, for this
sequence, through a matte shot part of which is made at the Warner
Bros. ranch and part of which is a painted picture. Cooper does not
need to enunciate his comfort and good feeling at this homestead,
or his regret on leaving it, since the idyllic setting conveys both ideas
fully. His (somewhat normal) taciturnity is at home, and in no way
dysfunctional here.

When as viewers we have the sense that we are rightly in a place,

rightly because along with the characters we wish to be—or realize the
appropriateness of being—there; rightly because along with the characters
166 THE FILM CHEAT

we cannot (but also would not, at the moment) free ourselves to be

elsewhere; rightly because it is as good a spot as any for what is being done,
simply a facility that permits action, we do not have the sense of being
intentfully placed, of being corralled by the camera, though every image is
a kind of entrapment.
 22
Show Me

FIGURE 22 Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Day for Night [La nuit
américaine] (François Truffaut, Les Films du Carrosse, 1973).

Wolfgang Schivelbusch details a problem associated with seeing how

you work:

As long as the work that needed to be lit up was tied to individual

craftsmen and only the winter morning and evening hours required
extra light, the glow provided by traditional candles and oil lamps was
adequate. This changed with the introduction of industrial methods of
production. Work processes were no longer regulated by the individual
168 THE FILM CHEAT

worker; they became integrated, comprehensive operations. The new

factories needed new sources of light. Artificial light was needed to
illuminate larger spaces for longer periods of time. In the factories, night
was turned to day more consistently than anywhere else. (8–9)

So much emotionally founded reification attaches to considerations of

movies and movie production that it has become very easy to overlook
the factory production mode through which films are produced. Indeed, as
with assembly in the computer industry, sophisticated medical practice, and
robotized manufacture of all kinds, film production is an intensified model
of “integrated, comprehensive operations.” But cinema has a particular
fondness for, and hunger for, light. Schivelbusch notes that the theater was
“the place with the greatest appetite for light in the nineteenth century” (50),
but we can see rather easily that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
that place is the movie set, especially in the twentieth century, I should add,
when high-definition video and super-fast stock were not yet available and
processes like Technicolor required immense amounts of illumination.
Regardless of the technical issues in obtaining any particular film image—
managing shadows, encountering reflections, warping space, balancing
colors, effecting camera movement, and keeping focus clear with movement
in front of the camera—an image will not show space and the objects inside
it unless light is provided.1 Everything that appears on film appears because
it is lit to do so. Even the shadows. Without light, the film stock gets no
exposure at all. The slower the stock (the lower the ASA—a rating system
from the American Standards Association) the more lethargically it drinks
up light and thus the more light required to get a decent exposure. Early
Technicolor three-strip was produced through Kodak black-and-white
recording film that had a very low ASA. The more light you put in, the more
depth of field you can get, but also, the more unpleasant become working
conditions for people being lit, since lights produce not only glare but heat.
Cinematographers have been using a number of interesting light(ing) tricks
to enhance the visual quality of film while somewhat depreciating the agony
of shooting:2
●● Sourcing. Following from Caravaggio (1571–1610), Vermeer (1632–
75), Turner (1775–1851), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919),
cinematographers have learned to be meticulous in unifying set

1
A thorough discussion of camera movement and of film lighting can be found in two books
by Patrick Keating, The Dynamic Frame and Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film
Noir; and in John Alton’s very helpful Painting with Light. Nestor Almendros’s A Man with a
Camera is eye-opening.
2
Including, Kino Flo, a high-output fluorescent system designed for Robby Müller by Frieder
Hochheim and Gary Swink in 1987.
 SHOW ME  169

lighting according to a single-source plan. The diegetic scene has a

presumable main source of light: the sun in the sky at a certain time
of day in relation to the window(s) of the set, for example. When all
the light replicates the angle of approach of the diegetically invoked
light source, the scene must be lit to take on “natural” shadows in
order to seem real. This “natural sourcing” is one of the principal
tactics intensified in what is called noir film.3 Directors have to block
actor movement with a “main light source” in mind, since otherwise
an actor might end up delivering a key line of dialogue while moving
through shadow and for the cinematographer to brighten that
shadow area enough to show the actor would ruin the scenic effect.
●● Diffusion. The plein-air lighting of the Impressionists—Pissarro
(1830–1903), his pupil Cézanne (1839–1906), and Sisley (1839–99)
in particular—offered visions of a uniformly lit outdoors with a vast,
seemingly unbounded array of color and an even, soft light suffusing
every aspect of the space (Pissarro’s canvases from Pontoise;
Cézanne’s from Provence, Sisley’s from Bougival). Keenly struck by
their methods, Nestor Almendros invented for Claire’s Knee (1970)
a technique for diffusing sunlight that he continued to use on films
afterward, perhaps most notably Pauline at the Beach (1983). His
idea was to seam together some white bedsheets and then suspend
this makeshift canopy by attaching it at the corners to four long
poles. The canopy would be erected above the area being filmed.
The light flooding down from the sun would be diffused through
this scrim, losing sharpness, passing a soft and evenly intense bubble
of light over the whole area. Almendros was particularly happy
about this invention for its extreme utility in removing weather
conditions from the shooting equation, since earlier it had been
vitally necessary for assistant directors to arrange all the shots taken
under any particular outdoor weather conditions (cloud types and
movements) to be staged with a view to lighting match; but weather
is so variable it plays havoc with shooting schedules, and invariably
a great deal of money is lost in waiting for the right kind of day.
The canopy spread light in the same way no matter whether the sky
was blue or gray, cloudy or not. A tremendous amount of freedom
of movement is accorded the performers, too, since everything they
do under the canopy, every pose they take, receives uniform soft
lighting.

3
For a clear comparison between patterned shadows created for single-source lighting and the
same created for noir expressivism, see first Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), the opening
train sequence or the shots inside the new atrium of the Aysgarth home, and then John Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
170 THE FILM CHEAT

●● Speed. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, new and considerably
faster stocks made it possible to shoot on the street with available
light, even at night (on technical matters such as this, see Salt). All
the potentially expressive glare, and the detectable formal sculpting,
of artificial light is banished in the name of situational realism.
Where are we? What does it really look like here (really: not in
a movie)? Using available light, whenever possible, is a boon to
filmmaking for other reasons. The production becomes a smaller
picnic, with fewer pieces of bulky equipment to move around, less
reliance on electrical sources. Nestor Almendros’s nocturnal street
photography for Paris vu par . . . (1965) is a good case, as is Raoul
Coutard’s shooting for À bout de souffle (1960). Shooting with
available light can produce more splotches of darkness in scenes,
relaxing the designer and decorators’ need to fill in all the spaces.
As well, the available light cheat might lead viewers to associate
more comfortably with screen images as similar to what they see in
the everyday, with, among other effects, the result that personalities
teasingly remote from their audiences (Gloria Swanson’s Norma
Desmond in Sunset Blvd. [1950]) are now lowered from their
heights, brought close, brushed up against (Monica Vitti’s Giuliana
in Red Desert [1964]).
●● Arcs. The arc lamp, invented early in the nineteenth century by
Humphrey Davy, operates through an electrical current leaping from
one rod to another, in filmmaking rods made of carbon. The light
is extraordinarily bright (thus, if not modified by filtration or other
tactics, something of a giveaway), very useful in noir cinema for
giving the harsh highlights needed to make the contrasting shadows
especially ominous. It also produces a very high-temperature blue
light equivalent to daylight, thus being exceptionally useful bare,
or suitably filtered through gels, for simulating outdoor sunlight on
an indoor shooting location. The “outside world” is a generalized
cheat in cinema, almost never being a true outdoor space. Space
outside the window(s) of a room or a car when we see action inside,
is created by either arc lamps or skypans aimed at flat-lit painted
backings.4 Arc light angled through a built window-frame on a set
will photograph as daylight.
●● Barn doors. The various forms of tungsten (yellow-balanced)
light used on sets can be fitted with metallic “barn door” shutters
that allow for precisely directing the angle of incidence. As we see

For an exceptional case of lit painted backings used as the “outside world,” see my The Eyes
4

Have It, Ch. 4.

 SHOW ME  171

the world “naturally,” all objects are lit with angularity, so that
uniform lighting can look false unless distractions are provided by
subjects with interesting features or those engaged in dramatically
vital activity. The screen world seems molded and shaped, because
objects are not uniformly lit. This is just one type of mechanism that
provides for precision in lighting control. It is one thing to supply
light to a scene, another entirely to sculpt it so the right things
(including actors’ faces or parts of them) are “properly” heightened.
●● Cookies. Decorative or especially evocative shadows are created
by a device known as a “cookie.” This is a piece of cardboard or
Styrofoam that has been cut into a particular shape and then affixed
to the end of a long slender rod of some kind. A stage hand holds
the cookie up stationary or with movement between a light source
and the scene itself, thus effectively sculpting the shadow. Examples:
light flickering off the windshield of a “moving” car (shot on set
with a breakdown vehicle on gimbels); or the notable shadows
of noir, trees, poles, silhouettes, which have invoked such a wide
appreciation among fans and critics. To see astounding and very
beautiful, very large and complex cookie shots, made to emphasize
single-source lighting, see the “West Wing” sequence of Hitchcock’s
Rebecca (1940).
●● Bounce. As with diffused light, reflected light casts no shadow, and
can thus be very helpful in bringing soft and uniform illumination to
the star face in a portrait shot. Selective reflection, carefully aimed,
can help a cinematographer create the roundnesses and contours of
the celebrated star face, as William Daniels did with Greta Garbo.
A sheet of card stock or other pallid substance (nowadays often
Styrofoam) is held by a camera assistant below the performer at
such an angle that light from above aimed down at it will bounce
back into the face. This “bounce light” is singly responsible for much
of the celebrated star images of the classical age, a significant part of
what made the star seem to be beyond the human, closer in form to
a Greek sculpture.
●● Radiation. Photographing the close-ups of Grace Kelly for Rear
Window (1954), George Barnes created a variation of a trick that
had long been in use: rubbing a thin film of Vaseline on the lens in
order to obtain a diffuse, softened shot of the female face. Instead
of doing that, he stretched a nylon stocking over the lens and then
burned a tiny hole in the center with a lit cigarette. The light on
Kelly’s face (considerable bounced light) now gave crystalline focal
clarity directly in the center in a very small area, and then spread
radially with more and more diffusion. The stunning facial portrait
as Lisa leans over Jeff to awaken him shows the effect.
172 THE FILM CHEAT

●● Taking sides. There are no humans whose left and right sides are
perfectly isomorphic. Any one of us looks like one person when
photographed in right profile; and like someone else shot on the
other side. This effect is modulated considerably when the camera
shoots frontally at an angle. For profile shots, performers may have
sound professional reasons for wishing to avoid certain possibilities
and may even, as did Claudette Colbert, insist on contract clauses
which would stipulate profiles from one particular side only. But
the script supervisor has to keep careful notes of the angles used on
principal players, so that shots taken at different times but meant to
be edited together will match. The matching of two shots, discussed
in film theory as “suture,” is part of what conveys to the viewer
the illusion of being enmeshed in a coherent multi-dimensional
space where moments are real, but this conveyance depends on
film being shot in such a way that an editor can piece it together
reasonably, much later. The matching of shots can’t be created in
the editing, then, if it is not effected before the lens first. The “fit”
has to be arranged in principal photography, through pose, through
positioning, through camera placement and movement, through lens,
through lighting, and through careful notation.
●● Keys. The “key” light is a tightly focused and intense light (usually
tungsten-based) that concentrates on a principal object or on
some especially important feature of the performer’s body (almost
uniformly the star’s eyes, producing that telltale twinkle). I was on
a set once where the lighting of each shot took an extraordinarily
long time. The scene was “the Oval Office.” A long table with chairs
all around and papers, both crumpled and flat; coffee cups; pens.
I was told by an insider that the Japanese crew was using normal
Japanese lighting techniques: first bulk-lighting the whole area, then
spot-lighting various key areas where performers would be standing,
and then carefully keylighting every single object that would be in
frame, with a separate keylight for every single crumpled piece of
paper, each keylight separately controlled for intensity, coloration,
and sharpness.
●● Props. In two ways most set lighting in cinema is arranged to be
invisible as such, with the exception of “practical” lights such as
table lamps, candles burning in candelabras, chandeliers, and so on,
which typically do not actually light the scene. Light sources are
hidden off-camera, but also the light produced by the light sources,
fashioned to seem only realistic for the scene, has no more discrete
visibility in itself than any light does for us when we use it. Light
is noticed when it gets in the way: a reading lamp too glary or
not angled ideally. Sun coming through a window and getting in a
 SHOW ME  173

character’s eyes. But it can be necessary or useful to have a diegetic

light, present merely as part of the décor, functioning as production
light, too. An especially high-powered bulb put into a table
lamp or a lighting fixture outside a residential door. In Suspicion
(1941), Hitchcock offers what has become a celebrated example
of diegetically internal keylight, as Cary Grant mounts a staircase
holding a glass of what seems to be irradiated milk. It was important
to direct the audience’s gaze to the milk, more than to him, since the
filmmaker wished to implant in his viewers the suspicion that the
milk contained something like poison. Wiring ran from a battery
pack on Cary Grant’s body through his sleeve and up the bottom of
the tray to power a lightbulb that was inside the glass. Truffaut pays
a small homage to this in Day for Night (La nuit américaine [1973])
as Jean-Pierre Léaud marches slowly with a candle on a set for a
film-within-the-film. As part of our trip behind the scenes into the
magic-land of filmmaking, we are bluntly shown the tiny electrically
powered light making the radiance of the candle possible.

Aside from specialty cases such as the milk glass above, where a light
effect is designed to be expressly visible as part of the storytelling (the
studio catastrophe scene of The Day of the Locust [1975] is another good
example), it is more generally the case that lighting is subjected to a blanket
and paradoxical cheat: nothing will show without it, yet it is always effected
so as not to show. Not only could a glimpse of a lighting fixture at the edge
of the frame ruin a shot and dispel the narrative illusion but so might a too
noticeable splotch of light inside the scene, something that seems not to
accord with the place as posited. In what follows next, I address one special,
and especially tormenting, lighting situation for filmmakers.
 23
On the Road

FIGURE 23 Tom Cruise (l.) and Jamie Foxx in Collateral (Michael Mann,
Paramount, 2004).

Particular camera, lens, and lighting problems are posed by the narrative
trope of characters driving in cars, a feature that goes back to before the
1930s. In Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) we see a dark car moving through
the rain, with the driver dimly lit inside. The central function of the car
shot or sequence is social realism, the depictive recognition that we live,
and dramatic events occur, in a world filled with automotive transit. That
people use their cars in many ways, inhabit them, furnish them, perhaps
most importantly relate to other people in them. It is rare that a car
sequence appears depicting action that could not possibly have been shot in
a stationary location elsewhere, and indeed the most typical use of the car
in our culture, a means of getting from one place to another (as is shown
climaxing The Graduate [1967]), is among the less frequently depicted uses
 ON THE ROAD  175

onscreen. In movies, things happen in cars, and in such a way that they seem
heightened for being placed that way.
Here are some of the problems in car shots:
●● The car interior is relatively cramped as spaces—certainly typical
diegetic spaces—go, and must now fit two or more characters,
a camera operator, and perhaps an assistant, as well as all the
necessary lighting equipment. Bus interiors, such as we see in Speed
(1994), have more room but it is almost impossible to get a clear
shot that blocks off the lighting fixtures.
●● The car interior is dark on the face of it. For night shots it will
seem cavernously so. The cinematographer does not want to ruin
the realism by bringing in too much light, but unless there is light
nothing is going to be seen.
●● The world outside, through which the car is passing, must look crisply
focused and colorful, sufficiently that it does not seem to exist on a
different planet from that of the interior. The story will sometimes
depend on some particular person or object seen outside, from within
the vehicle. But: too much clarity can produce too much interest, so
that as the vehicle passes, a distal place or object suddenly becomes
more pressing to the viewer than a character speaking a key line of
dialogue up close. Elia Kazan manages the crucial back-seat-of-the-car
conversation between Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront
(1954) by eliding views of the outside altogether, and replacing them
with flashing light (as from other cars).
●● For action scenes the car must appear to move quickly through
space. 6 Underground (2019) is a paradigm. Often precarious and
aggressive action is required as well, such as a character in one
car attempting to kill a character in another at full highway speed
(Bullitt [1968] or some of the cavortings in the early car chase
of Baby Driver [2017]). There is considerable inspiration for the
photography of such activity—with sharp axle blades anticipating
the guns of oncoming “millennia”—in the stunning chariot race of
Ben-Hur (1959).
●● Sometimes very precise control of star lighting and sound recording
are required while the set (the vehicle) is “in motion,” and outdoor
location shooting is out of the question for getting precision shots
of this type. Further, sound stages, even back lots, are not large
enough to accommodate fast-moving cars, although of course there
are legion film moments where slow-moving cars have been filmed
indoors. Nina Foch’s green limo in An American in Paris (1951),
Fred Astaire and company showing up at the log cabin in Swing
Time (1936), for just two cases.
176 THE FILM CHEAT

Here are some pain-killers for these production headaches:

[1] For cramped interiors. Various types of camera rig are in use. In one
type the camera is in a metal harness bolted or strapped onto the hood of
the car so that shots can be made of the driver and passenger as the car
moves, with characters’ eyelines facing the camera. There are also tow rigs
in which the entire (fictional) car is affixed in a rectangular steel grid, a
kind of trailer being pulled by a camera truck. The wheels of the car do not
touch the road, but the rig has wheels. From the back of the truck a camera
crew films the car, which is low enough to the road to be made to appear,
through an angular cheat, as though it is on it. Some film shots have been
made with hand-held equipment operated by a crouching cameraman inside
the vehicle. It is almost never the case that actors are actually driving the car
they appear to be driving, and there are indeed stunt cars where the steering
is handled from the passenger side or from the rear seat.1
[2] For darkness. Special lighting rigs are employed to highlight the star
faces without changing the structure of the image by illuminating so much
of the car interior that other aspects of the interior become distractingly
interesting. The body lighting can be filtered to modulate the strength, and the
typical outcome is a car in which the driver and passenger receive uniform—
but also diegetically nonsensical—light. So much cinematography has been
done with body lights inside cars that the trope comes to seem normal,
although it can never be entertained as wholly logical, the only “real” light
bouncing up at such a driver being dashboard light, increasingly dim and
LED originated in the contemporary age. The cheat here is essentially a
trade-off. The car does not require illumination, dramatically speaking, but
the characters do and they are in the car. Further, the bodies being lit are star
bodies and the fact of their being lit, as we apprehend it, brings notice of the
star structure and thus the status of the present experience as movie-going
(if not driving). To go for stark, dark realism and lose the performer seems a
greater price to pay than permitting an eerie glow to run through the space
as the car moves. Daylight sequences can of course be made without this
effect. In Taylor Hackford’s Parker (2013) Jennifer Lopez pulls her car up
one night and stops it next to what we are led to believe is a street lamp; cool
halogen illumination floods over her face to identify both her character and
the scenic situation at once.
[3] Outside. The world outside will be seen in either of two different ways.
First, it may be photographed naturally with the car seen in an exterior as
it moves through. This kind of photography is done from some stationary
perch that the car passes; or from a traveling car acting like a fast-moving
dolly, or from a rig (as above). Or from a helicopter (in a shot that originated
with Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night [1948]). The camera vehicle will

1
Steve McQueen did almost all his own stunt driving in Bullitt, however.
 ON THE ROAD  177

either have larger softer tires than most vehicles, or be traveling on a special
track, or have a camera setup on gimbels, so that bumps in the road do not
affect the shot. Usually for a driving sequence it is not necessary to have the
driver or passenger visibly identifiable in every shot of the group, as long as
key shots make very crisply focused reference to the stars. Stand-ins can be
used for distant shots.
In place of exterior shots, or used intermittently to accompany them,
are shots from within the vehicle where the outside world is seen to pass
by the windows. When a lot of traffic is involved, the assistant director will
be completely in charge of all the personnel and vehicles and will more or
less direct the movement by which cars on the road creep up and pass the
central vehicle or lag behind, or whatever. In driving emergency sequences—
Baby Driver has extraordinary footage of this kind, as does The Bourne
Supremacy (2004)—the A.D. has a crew of stunt drivers, and the action
is broken down into tightly choreographed very small shots where, with
the help of catapults, springboards, and pull-aways vehicles and bodies can
seem to twist, spin, flip, and fly through space catastrophically.
The most frequent technique for capturing the outside world through
which a car moves is rear-projection photography, in which footage of the
scenery, from some particular point of view meant to simulate a position
in the vehicle, will be shot considerably in advance and then, on a special
soundstage, projected from behind on a screen outside the window area of
the partial car rig. That vehicle is most likely to be only a “car,” nothing
more than a cursory frame, steering wheel, seat, and window structure,
often on gimbels, springs, or moving platforms. Process plates (as they are
called) need to be made early on, and are usually effected by a special effects
camera unit on a location. Views through the back window or the windshield
of the car, angularly through the rear windows, or laterally through the side
windows need to be shot with the special-effects camera car moving at a
different speed for each (sixty percent of forward motion for lateral; eighty
for angular; one hundred for full rear).
Rear projection can lose effectiveness the more it diverges from the main
photography in terms of image quality: focus, saturation, illumination level,
and blur. Yet it need not. What makes rear projection difficult to achieve
with brilliance is the fact that there are legion difficulties inherent to the
process no matter what kind of film story it is being used to fake. With
cars, a poor quality rear-projection screen can diffuse light badly from the
center to the margins so that there seems to be a hot spot (Lady for a Day
[1933] gives a good example). The film stock used for the plate will affect
the saturation and brightness, not to say the color balance. But the most
perplexing of problems is the maintenance of dramatic balance, since the
better the rear-projection plate, the crisper, the more colorful, and the better
lit, the more clearly audiences can see outside the vehicle as well as inside,
and the more likely, then, that their attention will be taken up by some
178 THE FILM CHEAT

extraneous but momentarily interesting feature of the landscape, while it

is almost always necessary to maintain the audience’s attachment to the
characters, not the place.2
[4] Action. Cars in action sequences are driven far less quickly than
appears to the eye, the cheat here being principally acoustic. The sound of
the growling motor, the squealing tires, the shrieking brakes, the gunning of
the engine—all these give a direct sense of impending threat and a racing
attitude. Shoot drivers at 35 or 40 mph, or less, and fill with an intensified
sound track, especially squeals of rubber, and the viewer picks up a sense
of speed. The speed of the motion will seem to increase if the pace of the
editing does, too, so the briefer the average shot length the speedier the
action appears. For 6 Underground, very terse lines of dialogue very quickly
spoken between driver and passenger aid in the fast editing and production
of “speed.” In The Bourne Supremacy much of the chase driving is shot on
location from within the vehicles, but there is no dialogue; the thundering
and fast-tempo motor sounds of the music track assist in “speeding up” the
action.
[5] Featuring the star. The optimization of lighting control and sound-
recording quality by using the vehicle rig and the rear-projection apparatus
is important mostly for star scenes, so that exterior shots are used principally
where the character does not require mic’ing or careful facial photography.
The better (and more authentically) we see the cars on the road, the less
dramatically central are the people in them. When we have a complex
narrative involving car travel at its center (the going-to-work sequence in
Zabriskie Point [1970], shot on Wilshire Blvd.), or one in which the star
protagonists will be present throughout the driving sequences (Michael
Mann’s Collateral [2004] for instance), a special lighting and recording rig
will be used in real space, designed to make shooting possible from virtually
any angle.
With studio-made rear-projection composites, what is constantly on the
filmmaker’s mind, but is hardly noticed by audiences unless things go wrong,
is that the live portion of the action, what is being shot on set, must be lit
in such a way that the levels match the lighting of the background properly.
If a car is driving at night, for instance, there will not be a lot of ambient
illumination flooding in through the windows, and street lighting will be
distinct. So the inside of the car will have to be dim, or the radical brightness
will fail to fit the picture. However, the difficulty with all of this is that the
lighting of the outside was set long before the studio shooting, and is fixed
in the background plate. There is thus a great deal of constraint on the set.
In car shots there may be a mixing of key dialogue bits with key visuals. In
effect, the more principal characters enunciate their lines, the more attention

2
See further Pomerance, “Bells.”
 ON THE ROAD  179

is devoted to them at the expense of the scene. The less they talk, the more
we fixate on the scene. And the longer we fixate on the scene the more likely
it is that we will see some slight disjunction between the background and
the foreground—a disjunction that in non-vehicular scenes we are less prone
to seeing. One of the cheats of car scenes is to keep the protagonists talking
enough to be a distraction in themselves.
But linguistic utterance need not be articulate. In the downhill car scene
of Hitchcock’s Family Plot (1976), where Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris
are trapped racing at about forty-five degrees downhill, inside a car the
brakes of which have been tampered with, we find intercut with the driver’s
point of view and external shots of the car on the road dozens of shots of
Harris trying to climb on top of Dern to save herself and Dern trying to
throw her off so he can keep eyes on the road. Many of the close-ups—his
foot interfered with on the brake pedal—are made in studio. The shots are
cut together rather quickly, so that the viewer, like Harris’s Blanche, bounces
around desperately (a carnival ride). Artfully intermixed here are perfectly
lit shots of the car interior seen from below and beside the driver with rear-
projected outside, and location shots of a stunt vehicle. The vocality is so
aggravated and fearful that it takes our attention from the seam that joins
the rear plate photography to the live footage.
Photographing car scenes faces a far different challenge today, as the
car culture has become more rabid and where the car shot signals, among
other things, the regularity of the everyday. Sometimes an action, especially
a dialogue, heightened in believability because vehicular, will be diminished
in dramatic power exactly because the car is a casual, almost too casual
conversational setting, the sort of place where people go to “just talk.” In
police procedurals now—typically cop duo films—much more attention is
paid to the types of conversation and the conversational content inside the
police car, between partners, than to the car as an agency of travel: in fact,
it is taken entirely for granted as an agency of travel, but the quirkiness of
the partners inside it is demonstrable most succinctly through their banal
conversations. The car would seem to transform all conversation into
banality.
In the classical era the car signaled social class and functioned principally
to convey class-bound action forward. Car scenes today are ornamental to
the mechanism of the story and do not move the action forward as much as
they imbricate us with the action. The realism of car shots, a popular myth,
dissolves some in actual viewing. When we see people driving cars on film
we know full well they don’t really look like people in real life who, driving
cars, don’t tend by posture or gesture to proclaim that they are doing so.
If on the road today one finds plenty of rude, aggressive, and incompetent
driving, when any of this kind of thing is performed on film it is carried
to an extreme, becoming almost comedic (Margot Winkler does a notable
car-bound riff in New York, New York [1977]). As it is not troublesome to
180 THE FILM CHEAT

discern how unlike the everyday a car routine is, car scenes must be cheated
through the inclusion of brazen distractions inside and outside, no matter
how dramatically probable. Driving down an expressway on the wrong side
of the road and heading the wrong way . . . driving near a precipice . . .
driving next to a car that is trying to bump you off the road. Driving with
gunshots fired. Driving wounded, as one bleeds. Driving against helicopter
pursuit. And on and on. All of these eccentricities of staging wrap us so
deeply into the momentary action we forget that we are being steered.
Steered, too, onscreen, and in a way that no one could accomplish if the
world were caving in. Perhaps the ultimate car-in-extremis moment comes
with John Cusack in his limousine in Santa Barbara in 2012 (2009), racing
to save himself as the urban geography comes apart under his wheels. An
ultimate moment of a more tightly composed, and entirely parodic kind is
the ambulance chase in Frank Tashlin’s The Disorderly Orderly (1964), one
of cinema’s great action choreographies involving Jerry Lewis putting his
foot to the floor.
Substitute driving is but one of the attractions of car scenes. A tender
moment, designed for romantic flavor, can be worked by means of a car, too,
and through an interesting substitution. There is a culminating brief scene in
Parker, where the eponymous hero, an action figure with a strict moral code
and a thoroughgoing sense of decency (Jason Statham) is parting from Leslie
(Jennifer Lopez), a young real estate agent in West Palm Beach, who has
been helping him revenge an especially filthy crime debacle. They are in a car
together, she at the wheel. He patiently explains what she must do with the
huge cache of jewels he has stolen from the robbers, and that in following
his instructions she must be very patient. She listens. It is a quiet Florida
night. He looks at her and gives a respectful nod. This could have been,
perhaps even should have been, a smashing romance, but he is with someone
already (she is not, haplessly) and love isn’t in the cards. As he stands on the
pave looking through the window she gives him a genuinely tearful smile
of goodbye. He responds with a tiny, but genuinely profound nod. The car
draws away, and we can see the regret, the release, the Weltschmerz in her
posture and touching expression. CUT TO: a shot from behind as Leslie’s
white car disappears into the night. The scene works only if we accept the
offer of sense and sensibility that is being offered onscreen, namely, if we
continue to feel Leslie moving away, moving away forever, into the long
dark night of time—and this after a very involved and swellingly sincere
relation with the person being left behind. Parker gets it, as we see from
his pose. And we get it, too. But a little cheat is in progress. Lopez is at the
wheel as in the lateral shot she moves the car away from him, off right. In
the ensuing long shot, the money shot, it is a stand-in driver. Yet we feel her
there. We feel what we wish to feel, yet at the same time the wish will have
to satisfy on its own.
 ON THE ROAD  181

[6] But Brian Helgeland’s Legend (2015) illustrates a further, and

fascinating complication. In the back seat of a car we are to see the two
infamous Kray brothers (Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy) in conversation as
their car is driven forward on the road. They are frontal to the camera, the
world passing by through the rear window and rear side windows. The
technique here, inspired by Sol Polito’s work on A Stolen Life (1945) with
Bette Davis, involves combined in-camera split-screen and rear projection.
The twinning is accomplished with one actor on one side of the visual field
playing out a scene; then the film being re-wound to the starting point, the
same actor in different costume and make-up playing the same scene—the
brother’s part of it—on the other side. As long as the balance of content in
the shot is rather dark, as in this car interior it is, the duplication in the final
shot will seem clean. In what way, however, can a shot be re-wound and
made twice if the world is really gliding by outside the windows? Things
out there would change. Thus, a rear projection is used outside a car rig,
a strip of film that can also be rewound and projected again, identically,
making possible both “genuine” passage in a vehicle and “twinning.” Here
and in other effects work of the kind, two issues are examined by the viewer
for veracity—the viewer never stops examining the world for veracity: the
doubling of personality as authentically believable, a problem for the actor to
confront as he invents his tactics for handling each brother’s distinctiveness
of appearance and manner and as he works the complexity of the two-
sided gab; and the believable presentation of geophysical reality in its own
right: the car interior, the outside passing by, the bodies placed on the seats.
To emphasize the curiosity of the sequence: Reggie and Ron could have
this conversation in a sitting room. And the decision to set it in a moving
vehicle, while it does little to make the actor’s work more difficult, is far
more complicated photographically, far more expensive, far more finicky to
get absolutely right (because more takes would have been required, each of
them costing money). To go one tiny step further: The Krays actually seem
more believable as living beings who beat other people up, when they are in
stationary locales—a sitting room at the mother’s, a pub. The car trip does
make them seem able to scoot around town, although for the viewer the
ability to use a car for scooting is, by 2015, entirely received. A complicated
scene, then, presumably about the viewer’s incurable itch to be on the road.
 24
“Good Cinematography!”

FIGURE 24A (Top) Big Basin State Park in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount,
1958). Photography by Robert Burks; (Bottom) Amanda Langlet (l.) and Arielle
Dombasle in Pauline à la plage (Éric Rohmer, Les Films Ariane, 1983). Photography
by Nestor Almendros.
 “GOOD CINEMATOGRAPHY!”  183

Viewers who are not in the business of making pictures often credit a film
they have seen with having “Good cinematography!” The images brought
pleasure. The images had clear (enough) focus and interesting subject
matter. The pictures taken as a whole gave the viewers a “good” feeling,
morally speaking, and through their appraisal the goodness of the feeling is
projected outward as a feature of what is on the screen.
{READER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS}
Virtually everything that cinematographers do—all cinematographers—
has elements of the extraordinary, and the fastest way to learn this
is to take up a camera and try to make beautiful pictures of the world.
Yet, to win accolades extraordinary accomplishment is not required of
cinematographers: an astutely written, or exceptionally witty script can do
the trick; or a set of well-crafted performances; or someone’s celebrated
stardom plainly shown; or eye-catching set design and decoration, a haunting
musical accompaniment, an editor’s genius. Good producing is almost never
credited, like good hairdressing or good continuity, but it’s amazing how
much a producer can do to foster the development of a film (or to stifle
it). Viewers may be struck by a director’s infusion of pace, the feeling that
events are rhythmically ongoing. And as to the cinematography, it may be
evidence of nothing more than the most routine aspects of professional
accomplishment on the part of cinematographers, camera operators, grips,
and gaffers. Providing adequate lighting, handling the camera in movement,
undetectably getting and shifting focus, using a film stock that will ideally
capture the situational light and movement: all these are the bread and
butter (gluten-free or not) of picture-making, and virtually any filmmaking
crew will manage the challenges at all times, whether they are doing “good”
work or not. What is difficult involves variables most viewers neither notice
nor think they care about: depth of field, lateral movements, eccentric
camera placements, focus maintenance in motion, and sometimes the color
of lighting (for a startling example of which see Coppola’s One From the
Heart [1982]).
The “good cinematography” cheat, fostered in informal discussion, in
media reviews, and officially by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences by way of the Oscar competition (the World Series of film), often
offers a sense of Marvel!! and WONDER!!!! at what cinematographers
would consider normal for film, the day-to-day that goes along with the
territory. An equivalent posture might be raving ecstatically about a RADA-
trained British actor’s crisp enunciation, or giving immense admiration to a
concert pianist moving her fingers very rapidly upon the keys to play, say,
Chopin’s Grand Polonaise. If you can’t do fingerwork like that, you don’t
play Chopin. If you can’t enunciate you get off the stage.
The presentation of an Academy Award for cinematography (since
1927) is a firmly grounded incitement to audience admiration, yet admirers
often neglect to take into account the salient truth of the Academy Award
184 THE FILM CHEAT

in general, that, beyond the commercial intentions of producers to make

still more money at the box office with an “Oscar winner,” it tends to be
given only in cases where films are believably special; the award plays to
a pattern of viewer assumption and expectation and is not awarded where
the uninformed cannot see a reason. Reason is crucial, if an audience is
to be had for next year’s show. Triumph must meet comprehension. If we
look at winners, to see what underpins viewers’ easy comprehension of Best
Cinematography, we find that in almost every case the amazing mastery
of some arcane photographic challenge is missing from the list. Instead
there are films with very famous and much beloved stars; films depicting
(“accurately”) archaic situations of historical interest (and fantasy);
films containing well-framed but very conventional majestic landscapes,
seascapes, or cityscapes; and films much adored because of witty or devious
scripts, bizarre plots, and adorable characterizations. The untutored viewer
can easily love the comedic fool, for example; the view from a mountaintop;
the elegant portrait of ancient Egypt; the Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio
vehicle, without being able to grasp whether any of the images that appear
onscreen were serious accomplishments. Given that members of the
American Society of Cinematographers (the A.S.C.) make nominations
for it (unimmune to studio blandishments), The Academy Award for Best
Cinematography will seem to be a professional acknowledgment of superior
worth, but will also be comprehensible as such to non-professionals. More
than touting the work of a particular cinematographer the A.S.C. is in effect
selling itself by way of the Award, since the giving over of the Award will be
seen by an enormous audience worldwide.
Here are the winners for the past forty-nine years (at this writing), with
my parenthetical comment as to characteristics that would have made the
work in question easily readable to the multitudes as “evidence” of “good
cinematography,” notwithstanding that all of these cases are of course
splendid examples of what cinematographers can do. It is to be noted that
there are genuinely brilliant moments in these (and other) films, in some of
them more than in others, and even on occasion cinematographic work of a
pioneering nature (see 1975; 1979; 2009; 2013), but it remains broadly true
that in accepting the award-winning as sensible in itself, the eager popular
audience did not then, and does not now need to recognize authentic
cinematographic challenges and difficulties. It is worth noting how many of
the characteristics I note are essentially non-photographic in the first place:

1970: Freddie Young for Ryan’s Daughter [pure, untouched landscape;

cultural charm]
1971: Oswald Morris for Fiddler on the Roof [adorable characters,
archaic situation]
1972: Geoffrey Unsworth for Cabaret [adorable characters, archaic
situation]
 “GOOD CINEMATOGRAPHY!”  185

1973: Sven Nykvist for Cries and Whispers [hyperintensive color

design]
1974: Fred Koenekamp and Joseph Biroc for The Towering Inferno
[spectacular setting via effects]
1975: John Alcott for Barry Lyndon [shooting by candlelight]
1976: Haskell Wexler for Bound for Glory [evocative landscape]
1977: Vilmos Zsigmond for Close Encounters of the Third Kind
[landscape, situation, pioneering effects demands]
1978: Nestor Almendros for Days of Heaven [landscape, effects]
1979: Vittorio Storaro for Apocalypse Now [landscape, characters]
1980: Geoffrey Unsworth for Tess [landscape, characters]
1981: Vittorio Storaro for Reds [characters, effects]
1982: Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor for Gandhi [landscape,
powerful central performance]
1983: Sven Nykvist for Fanny and Alexander [characters, situation]
1984: Chris Menges for The Killing Fields [landscape, situation]
1985: David Watkin for Out of Africa [landscape, powerful central
performance]
1986: Chris Menges for The Mission [landscape]
1987: Vittorio Storaro for The Last Emperor [landscape, characters,
archaic story]
1988: Peter Biziou for Mississippi Burning [situation, characters,
“dangerous” story]
1989: Freddie Francis for Glory [landscape, situation]
1990: Dean Semler for Dances with Wolves [landscape, characters,
archaic story]
1991: Robert Richardson for JFK [characters, “dangerous” script]
1992: Philippe Rousselot for A River Runs Through It [landscape]
1993: Janusz Kaminski for Schindler’s List [situation, rare b/w usage,
“dangerous” archaic story]
1994: John Toll for Legends of the Fall [characters, situation]
1995: John Toll for Braveheart [landscape, situation, powerful central
performance]
1996: John Seale for The English Patient [landscape, script]
1997: Russell Carpenter for Titanic [effects, situation, characters, pre-
established fame of plot]
1998: Janusz Kaminski for Saving Private Ryan [landscape, war
situation, realistic battle scenes]
1999: Conrad L. Hall for American Beauty [script, characters]
2000: Peter Pau for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [newly welcomed
foreignness, effects, situation]
2001: Andrew Lesnie for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
[already popularized fantasy story, landscape]
2002: Conrad L. Hall for Road to Perdition [characters, situation]
186 THE FILM CHEAT

2003: Russell Boyd for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the
World [landscape (seascape), archaic situation]
2004: Robert Richardson for Aviator [script, characters, powerful
central performance]
2005: Dion Beebe for Memoirs of a Geisha [script, situation]
2006: Guillermo Navarro for Pan’s Labyrinth [script, surreal effects]
2007: Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood [script, characters,
powerful central performance]
2008: Anthony Dod Mantle for Slumdog Millionaire [script, “exotic”
situation, and setting]
2009: Mauro Fiore for Avatar [effects, (CGI) landscape]
2010: Wally Pfister for Inception [effects, (CGI) landscape]
2011: Robert Richardson for Hugo [effects]
2012: Claudio Miranda for Life of Pi [effects]
2013: Emmanuel Lubezki for Gravity [effects, situation]
2014: Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of
Ignorance) [witty characters, situation]
2015: Emmanuel Lubezki for The Revenant [landscape, situation]
2016: Linus Sandgren for La La Land [characters, “behind the camera”
landscape]
2017: Roger A. Deakins for Blade Runner 2049 [effects, situation]
2018: Alfonso Cuarón for Roma [characters, rare b/w]

If the cheat of “great cinematography!” is achieved through the production

of images the audience will predictably appreciate, that audience will have
seen similar imagery enough beforehand to have learned the appreciation,
to have found and developed the taste. With fabulous landscapes, for
example: given that we are more and more an urban society, and the capital
development is frenetic in the city, relief would come from seeing some
vast, virginal territory—Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, in fact—by way
of sweeping topographies uninterrupted by real estate development, dense
natural growth as in forests, jungles, or rock formations, or even urban
scenes rendered smartly topographical and alluring by being photographed
from the air, looking straight downward, or at night when the lights look
like diamonds in the dark. A situation will seem visually stunning if it
involves behavior that is morally stunning. Effects—by which we tend to
mean computer graphics or other special effects, but not camera effects
themselves—will grab attention if they resemble effects, in short, if we have
learned already to detect and value them for their own sake. Any abnormal
character, photographed in close shot or medium shot with a wide-angle
lens will seem unbearably interesting and unforgettable, especially if played
by a known star.
Actual cinematographic masterpieces, however memorable, may not
strike the same chord as do stunning pictures. Many of the above-listed
 “GOOD CINEMATOGRAPHY!”  187

pictures that were sold as stunning photographically were photographed

competently, but the drama of the pictures came from acting, from setting,
from quirkiness in the script. Two quick examples of cinematographic
masterpieces that languished in hiding: in both Mystic River (2003) and
Chinatown (1974) cinematographers had to shoot long important scenes
in extremely cramped space, thus being forced to utilize the wide-angle
lens; but to shoot without distorting the image so much that the lens choice
became visible. The most difficult shot in a film might pass too quickly to
gain notice (about which, more to come). One might have stunning success
in only a scene or a sequence, and perhaps not a scene in which the drama
has built to an audience-absorbing climax. And very often what makes for
difficulty in shooting is a trick or two of the light, something about the
challenge of rendering light on film, not a composition showing interesting
objects together. Jump back for a signal illustration to the still lifes of
Paul Cézanne, where we find arrangements of apples, oranges, pitchers,
tablecloths, sometimes plants. It is not the objects that make the pictures
awe-inspiring, it is the way they are painted. In great cinematography the
content of the shot, as composed and balanced as it may be, is often less
important for valuation, and less interesting for contemplation, than the
inherent difficulty in using the camera to effect it.
What the Academy Awards celebrations help foster, as part of their grand
(and celebratory) cheat, is the illusion of the “magical image,” the screen
presentation that stuns, evokes, persists, even endures because of some
arcane formula no one can quite put a finger to but that underpins all of
the film images that we cherish most strongly as a culture. As a culture: the
idea that fantastic cinematography is widely and uniformly appreciated, not
dependent on more idiosyncratic variables. And also, the idea that with such
broad-based support such imagery must gain for its superiority a kind of
definitiveness. In actual fact, beyond certain prerogatives and limitations,
say the requirements of the story (what should and should not be carefully
shown); beyond the requirements of the director (what kind of image should
be crafted for this particular film); and beyond the requirements of the
producer (what it costs to set up the shot in the way the cinematographer
claims is best), cinematography works essentially in two often disconnected
dimensions. It is aesthetic: how the picture should best be framed, what
the depth of focus should be, how color could ideally be organized (or the
gray tones), what kind of light, harsh or soft, should be used, where and
in what way(s) it should be modulated, and what film stock would ideally
render a certain type of pictorial beauty. But cinematography is also, and
very substantially, technical, involving matters well known in the trade but
not part of the vocabulary of the general filmgoing public: how to go for an
ideal ASA in particular circumstances; what exact types of lighting to use,
Moles, arcs, etc.?, given that there are rental prices involved; how many
assistants including the chief gaffer will be needed to idealize the production
188 THE FILM CHEAT

(and at what cost); the sophisticated challenge of lens choice, given all the
variables effective with this one or that one; the nightmare of focus pulling,
especially in very long or in moving-camera shots; the relationship between
technical equipment required and physical location, with its restrictions
and limits (for The Player [1991] schlepping cameras, lights, dollies, and
other equipment up the vertical slope that leads to Whitley Heights); special
working demands of the director or performer; the need to make visual
continuities within each shot (this happens, then this, then this, then this)
so that later on shots can be cut together by someone else.1 How to balance
the aesthetic demands of the shot with the labor demands of the producer
and the unions, since everybody working to achieve the moment of aesthetic
beauty is a contracted employee with guarantees and obligations arranged
in advance.2 All of these technical contingencies point to a working
environment much more than to a magical one, all would show a canny
audience that what is onscreen results from a complex and sophisticated
arrangement of labor and does not spring spontaneously out of the blue. But
audience engagement—which sells tickets—is favored when attention is kept
away from the technical, and the celebration of “good cinematography” is a
useful way of setting this distance.
For just a few examples: When Emmanuel Lubezki gets the (much
deserved) Oscar for The Revenant, nobody says in public that almost
the entire live-action portion of the film was shot with available light, an
achievement that put onerous demands on both crew and performers. When
Vilmos Zsigmond is rewarded for Close Encounters it is not part of the
publicity that he had ongoingly to make live location shots that would work
in combination with extremely high-resolution and high-illumination effects
mattes; that the human characters encountering extra-terrestrial life should
not diminish in stature visually when they did. What we see touted instead
is Leonardo DiCaprio struggling in the wilderness and looking dirty; and a
visit to earth of a cool alien starship that perfectly calls up 1970s lightshows.
To illustrate extremely difficult work finely done I choose three examples
(none of which earned an Academy Award), knowingly passing over a very
great deal of material that could just as reasonably capture our attention
here.

1
It is well known about Alfred Hitchcock during his combative days at Selznick International
that he retained artistic control (in the face of the aggressive and manipulative David O.
Selznick) by “pre-cutting” the film; the shots were planned in advance then made in such a way
that there was only one way to cut them together into the final sequence. For more on this see
Leff.
2
One example of the constraint placed on cinematographic work by collaborative labor
arrangements is Cary Grant’s standard contract (he was an independent contractor): it
mandated that he would leave the set promptly every day at 6:00 p.m. no matter what, and this
sometimes meant working very quickly to complete a shot on time.
 “GOOD CINEMATOGRAPHY!”  189

[1] Vertigo, the redwoods sequence. An uncanny voyage shown as

though “by available light” but filmed in a place where available light did
not exist since in Big Basin State Park, where this sequence was made, the
trees are roughly three hundred feet high and very little light drops down
to ground level to become “available.” Artificial light had to be used both
for figuring the protagonists (James Stewart and Kim Novak) in medium
shots and close shots, and for creating the effect of ethereal light rays
angling through the giant trunks that recede from view. For creating such
effects, only arc lamps would be strong enough and the only way to get arc
lamps powered was by means of a portable generator. But once powered,
carbon arcs are exceedingly hot, enough to produce a fire hazard (here, in
a protected National Treasure). The scene could be photographed only in
very brief spates of time, with (expensive) cooling periods between, these
long enough to riddle efforts at continuity. We have a scene that might have
come straight out of Albert Bierstadt—realistic and utterly stunning, but
also an outcome of extreme artistry. It would be easy (and facile) to love the
redwoods sequence because it is so beautiful (that is, because viewers were
visiting an exotic locale) without seeing labor under stress.
[2] Pauline à la plage. Éric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (1983) required
a deeply inscribed summer seaside atmosphere: brilliant, hot, glaring sun;
vast sandy spaces; lush Normandy-coast vegetation (hydrangea bushes); a
bleaching effect upon the color, as though to see clearly one would need to
shade the eyes (a replication, then, of the exact optical experience of being by
the sea in the heat of summer). In this place interaction would occur between
a small group of young people, ranging in age from about fourteen to about
forty. All of them healthy, with fruity skin. The challenge was getting proper
exposure on the faces, enough to show not only the identities but also the
visual textures (the deliciousness of which motors the plot), in balance with
the overexposed backgrounds (yet not so overexposed as to bleach out
entirely): to get a sense of radiant, hot airiness, pure Impressionism. Nestor
Almendros’s (1930–92) work here belongs with that of Boudin (1824–98).
With this film it would be easy to revel in the story, the characters and their
escapades, the erotic ballet, without ever looking seriously at the light.
[3] Sweet Smell of Success. In Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of
Success (1957) it was urgently necessary to show midtown Manhattan as a
place both enchanting and threatening at once, saturated with “vermin” in
the shadows but holding everlasting promise in the highlights. James Wong
Howe used a high-key (high contrast) mode of black-and-white photography,
with a light bar attached to the camera mount so as to produce precisely
aimed glare (which works to special effect on Emile Meyer, Tony Curtis,
and Burt Lancaster). The main protagonist (Lancaster) is a master Narcissist
and a hawk, seeing everything that lies around him and everything that is
buried beneath it as his rightful kingdom. To get J. J. Hunsecker’s relentless
opticality across to the viewer, Howe rubbed a small amount of Vaseline
190 THE FILM CHEAT

onto the lenses of the eyeglasses Lancaster wore, so that his lighting would
produce some glare and bring emphasis to his eyes as agents of a surveilling
gaze. Since J. J.’s dialogue was written to be sharp, pithy, and aggressive,
hearing the voice speak it while being unable to take one’s gaze away from
those glary eyes made for an unforgettable effect. But at the same time
the camera and lighting rig had to move with the character in such a way
that no light would fall extraneously on the surround. The film needed to
look expressionist, without ever going so far in that direction that it veered
detectably away from realism—even though the Manhattan being portrayed
was more a fabular than a realistic Manhattan. One could watch this film
being wholly impressed by the play of power without giving a thought to the
cinematographer’s inventiveness.
As one can see by the awards given over the past ten years or so, a taste
has developed for cinematography that points to itself in some way, as the
recording of elaborate visual effects surely does. This kind of flashiness is not
a guarantee of quality, but it does ensure the viewer’s non-stop excitement,
especially if CGI artists can manage to produce an explosion, a wound, a
fragmentation, a firestorm, a whirlwind, or a crash freshly every second.
 25
“Picture This”

FIGURE 25 Ethan Hawke in Regression (Alejandro Amenábar, Mod Produccciones,

2015).

Here is a camera challenge that is made to look effortless.

We commence with a cozy wooden shelf in a cozy, softly lit den, and
on this shelf a tiny lamp is burning golden. The camera slowly glides to
the right. As we move we begin to see, at the extreme right, like a beacon,
flames. These become discoverable soon as the flames of a fire burning in a
hearth, spiritedly. Between the hearth and the camera, at the right, is an easy
chair, and in this chair our friend the detective (Ethan Hawke) is slumbering
. . . thinking . . . meditating . . . daydreaming, what have you. We can see only
the distal side of his face, the near side dark because the light is emanating
from the fireplace on the other side of him and has cast its brilliance there.
The shot is about him, not the fire; him, not the chair; him, not the little
lamp; him, not the room. The room shows how comfortable and at peace
he is at this moment, but the peace is irrelevant next to the fact that it is his
peace.
192 THE FILM CHEAT

In making this pan shot the cinematographer (Daniel Aranyó) has this to
consider:
●● Every object across which the camera passes—not all of them
at the same distance from the surface of the lens—must register
clearly as itself, and must do so quickly enough that in the camera’s
glide it does not vanish offscreen before being known, in this way
depositing in the viewer’s mind the trace of a disturbing blur, a
“what-was-that?,” and “I’m-not-absolutely-sure.” Consider that
in the finesse of viewing, any “What was that?” would obstruct
sight by turning the reception, the viewer’s alert sense, backward in
time toward a vision, already gone, of something that was not only
not lit or focused sharply enough in the first place but also is now
recognized in retrospect, swiftly, as being deficient this way. Every
object must register instantly and clearly as itself. This means that
the rapidity of this pan—let us say, how many seconds it takes us to
travel through an arc of ninety or so degrees—is part of the shot’s
“equation” and is to be calculated in advance. Once the speed is
known, or known roughly, the objects in the room can be placed
in such a way that the amount of motion-time resting on each will
be known. While we have come to learn of the flash-pan, in which
space will appear to blur, by design, as it flies by until we hit upon a
desired object of focus, this is not intended to be such a thing at all,
but something else. Something meditative, relaxed, and dreamy.
●● Dreamy, that is: we are already, as viewers, mentally occupying
the state of mind we will soon discover our subject is occupying.
Perhaps he is taking the lead from us, through some kind of
sensation because, as we shall discover, his eyes are closed.
●● As this room is a normal room (a normal-looking room of its
sort), it is imperative, too, that a proper appearance be given. The
place must look (very much) like what it is in the story, a cozy den:
there has to be enough light on the set, correctly modulated in
every possible nuance, for showing this: showing, that is, making
discretely visible. A tiny lamp could be glowing golden on a simple
shelf. A healthy fire could be ablaze in a welcoming hearth. A man,
presumably at home, could have dumped himself into his favorite
chair, and from where we are positioned he would have gained
light on only half his face. The composition begs for rational
construction of this kind but, as well, the viewer has no problem at
all constructing it.
●● But it is also true that this picture looks like a picture, and while
every shot in cinema is in fact a picture only some are “pretty as a
picture” and of these only a small number, usually, are intended to
 “PICTURE THIS”  193

declare themselves as such. This shot I point to, its resolution upon
the detective at the end of the pan, this shot that is starkly pictorial,
is not pretty, however. It merely looks as though some force has paid
attention so that the place will show itself, and anyone in it, off well.
This task no user of his own den would set for himself in the real
world. One would be comfortable, but would not strive to give off
the appearance of being comfortable. (We can think back to neurotic
Larry Renault [John Barrymore] arranging a dramatic light upon
himself before committing suicide beside a fireplace in a hotel room,
in Dinner at Eight [1933].) Had we magically found ourselves in
this man’s den with him, very nearby so that as he slouched in his
chair before the fire we could share his peace and his daydreaming
state of mind, were we to be inside that space, it is interesting to
note that we would not see such a contrast in the fire-lighting with
our eyes, the hot, hot, hot glare on the fireplace side of his face
and the shadow over here. Our eyes would adjust to even out the
discrepancy between the two sides of the face. Given a second or
two, the eyes always adjust. The far side would be the brighter still,
but not nearly as much more than the near side, as we see in the
picture. The camera can be spoken of as analogous to the eye, it can
be called The Eye of the Story, it can be thought an “optical” device
(not only a device aimed at our eyes but a device that is itself eye-
like), but it is not. It does not make this adjustment.
●● In order to expose the film stock without adding bounce light to
even out the scene, the cinematographer has to take note that the
flames will overexpose in relation to the shadow areas; that if one
lights and focuses to obtain a clear and realistic portrait of the face,
the flames will take over the shot, both being slightly out of focus
and being so very bright they offer luminous threat. The shadow
areas would be overwhelmed. In this case it would be the fireplace
getting the attention (for its brightness), with the result that the
man in the chair, brightly enough lit to be visible, would also be
insignificant and not so inviting.
●● Our picture here looks like a picture because it looks as though an
artful accommodation has been made by the cinematographer to get
a reasonable rendition of the person (detective = central character) in
line with a clear and rounded representation of the (difficult) room.
Vermeer was an expert at this. Gainsborough.
●● However, the cinematographer has used a signal cheat. He has seen
to it that the film plays not to our knowledge of the world (our
knowledge of what we would see were we there) but to our myths,
myths that can be seen to organize our expectation and perception
far before we experience:
194 THE FILM CHEAT

(a) that the face is essentially a divided one, a space in two,

especially in signal cases, such as with a film’s star at a critical
plot juncture; the dark, the light, the evil spirit, the good one.
(b) that fire is intrinsically interesting in itself and flames here
and always make for allure, fire being elemental, fire being
Promethean. In practice, flames make a neat photographic effect
in themselves, so can reasonably gain focus;
(c) that when we are alive to reality through consciousness, the face
brightens; and when we withdraw into meditation, we are in a
“darker” mood, because more inward, away from the sun (the
fire). Given this mythology, the split face, the crisp flames, and the
meditative quality of the dark portion of the face all make sense.
The shot is sensible, yet pictorially so, quite as though painted.
Were we to be there, we would see merely a man lounging next
to a fire, and both the man and the fireplace would be noted
as connected somehow (this is his fireplace; it is warming his
cold doubts). But looking at the picture we get both diegetic
information and pleasing harmony and touchstones upon the
ancient wisdom (or “wisdom”) of our world.
●● Cinematography thus concocts and shows off an image of what the
story looks like, even more, what the story looks like as we see it, not
an image of the pro-filmic reality. Not the story, but the appearance
of the story. We are meant to absorb the image within the framework
of a proposition: It would be like this. Even that proposition is
fabular, one of the fundamental tales the cinematographer must tell.
The pan shot is from Regression (2015). But the shot is not of Ethan
Hawke on a fireplace set, it is of his character at home. Say that
visually speaking the shot is its own fiction, just as what it displays
is part of the film’s fiction, and just in the way that when a character
opens his mouth the words that come out, although part of the
English language, have meaning only in make-believe.
●● Everything in film is meant to seem to be, a mountaintop to seem
invigorating (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [2001]),
a sewer system to seem dank (The Third Man [1949]), a library
to put one at ease (Atonement [2007]), a dinner table to invoke
etiquette and propriety (An Age of Innocence [1993]). And the
photography that makes film is lit to effect that desired and desirable
seeming, not to illuminate the facts of life. The camera not being an
eye, it is for the viewer only a stand-in. The living eye would stand
in the den with Ethan Hawke’s detective and see both more and less
than the camera shows, more light, compensated for by the iris, yet
less information, less enthusiastically hefting a shopping basket filled
with all the goodies the storytellers would like us to have.
 26
The Angle Angle

FIGURE 26 Natalie Wood and Christopher Plummer in Inside Daisy Clover

(Robert Mulligan, Park Place/Warner Bros., 1965).

Writing of the Dutch still life, Erika Langmuir is brought to consider the
height from which objects are seen: “Someone who ‘looks down’ at us is felt
to be supercilious; we ourselves feel superior to whoever ‘looks up to us,’
while ‘to look someone straight in the eye’ is to demonstrate sincerity and a
desire for intimacy” (54). The cinematographer’s so-named “Dutch” angle
is not really Dutch but somehow “Dutch” is easier to say than “Deutsch.”
German Expressivism used this technique frequently, and so when it came
into American usage the German word for “German” became part of it. But
word pronunciations are brick walls all over the world. In practice now, the
“Dutch angle” encompasses a wide range of camera placements in which
the world appears to be twisted, flipped to the side, in some other way
disoriented, or seen from very high above or below (tilts). When characters
are seen through twists, we have through our own projection a sense that
196 THE FILM CHEAT

their view of things is warping. Drugs, beatings, experimental techniques

dramatized will produce “resultant” shots in which we see the world as
the affected character presumably does. Shooting characters from on high
tends to objectify them through distance, as though we step back to gain a
less affected and more clinical view. Usually, further, looking down always
seems at least a little dangerous, a view that is chilling. Shooting up can
produce figures who seem to loom over the action, dominant controllers
such as the Genie (Rex Ingram) in The Thief of Bagdad (1940) or the heroic
longshoreman (Marlon Brando) defying violence as he marches to work at
the end of On the Waterfront (1954).
But there is another delicate and wholly cheating use of the upward Dutch
angle. This is to shoot an actor, either alone or in shots including others—
sometimes even portrait shots—in such a way as to camouflage the fact that
he or she is remarkably shorter than the performers around. As women are
expected in North America to be shorter than men, and very typically are, it
is for shorter male actors that the angle is most frequently used. The tilting
camera, especially with a wide-angle lens, changes space so that a second
character coming up near, but behind the principal can easily be made to
appear the same height. For a fascinating example of a case where this cheat
is not used, but its absence reveals the presence of a complementary cheat
elsewhere in the film, examine the relationship between the body of Barbara
Bel Geddes and the body of James Stewart as, in the “alternate” (UK) ending
of Vertigo (available on the DVD), she walks up and stands in front of him.
She is very very short by comparison with him, but throughout the film
this disparity in heights is reduced by artful camera placement and image
framing.
As to the “Dutch” angle and body disparity, especially when contrary
to Western cultural ideals the male in a gendered pairing is shorter than
the female: consider the shots involving (shorter) Christopher Plummer
and (taller) Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover (1965). As Plummer is
playing the mogul heading a major Hollywood studio and Wood is one of
his ingenues—which is to say, an object he markets for cash—he cannot
believably play argument scenes with her if he is looking up either physically
or metaphorically. She, in fact, must be reduced in size (and status) just as he
is expanded. Shots of (shorter) Claude Rains in wedlock with (taller) Ingrid
Bergman in Notorious (1946) had to be made this way, too.
While there is an actor/character cheat in play for viewers here, the size
of the performer being radically different than that of the character being
played, it is not a rare one but occurs throughout cinema in legion ways,
inspiring many corrections by lens or CGI touch-up. Increasingly in the
age of CGI and mo-cap, actors are not hired on the basis of their size, not
that in the case of major stars they ever were. What makes the “Dutch”
cheat special is a presumable character/character cheat—that the physical
world two characters are seen perceiving together, uniform for the two of
 THE ANGLE ANGLE  197

them in diegesis because singular for us, has been manipulated without their
apparently knowing so that it will play “naturally” both with and around
their bodies. This needs a little slow unpacking:
●● We have a perception of every scene from without. We are looking
at the dramatic space from some point of view, in the “Dutch”
cheat typically from way above or way below. The action spreads
and looms up there or down there, a thundercloud or a Lilliput of
possibilities. But at the same time:
●● We recognize the characters as they have been spelled out, and part
of the spelling is their social status relative to one another. In Clover,
we know Plummer’s Raymond Swan is the studio head and Wood’s
Daisy is his creation to be used—he thinks--as he pleases, so as we
look upward and see him dominating her we also get a social view
that accords with the expectations we have borrowed from him and
from the Hollywood system.
●● Daisy, however, operates differently. She may be a studio
employee—a salaried worker—but she is also a major star. She
doesn’t kowtow to Swan when she interacts with him, she faces
him and has at it directly, as does he with her: directly—she being
a little shorter (as we are shown it) turning her chin up; he being a
little taller turning his chin down. For Daisy, Swan is automatically
and naturally the man that the camera with its angling has led us to
know, the Big Man, whom the system that is exploited in the diegesis
has privileged. Yet she is not quite obedient, not quite his slave, not
quite not-herself.

We can appreciate her invisible attitude (her looking up some) without

her having to gesture it; and she is free from gesturing that attitude only
because the camera has (invisibly) gestured it for her by means of a “Dutch”
angle. The angle invites us to firmly believe that Daisy and Swan are actually
no more different from one another in height than a “typical” male and a
“typical” female. If there is notable upward-gazing signaled in the view, a
dramatized “look up,” it is her angry deference and demeanor: her view.
Shot from below with a wide-angle, a character can dominate
monstrously—Orson Welles’s Kane (1941) destroying Susan’s bedroom,
and watched almost from floor level. This same technique is used by Steven
Spielberg to give views of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park (1993), just to cheat
any tendency in the audience to rationalize it as a mere audioanimatronic
effect (which is what it is). Seen from above, characters can be diminished in
stature or power, made vulnerable, without the actor having to work up an
expression: vulnerable Eva Marie Saint in Vandamm’s living room in North
by Northwest (1959), seen by Roger from the balcony above and behind.
What we see of characters in these acute views we echo in sentiment, feeling
198 THE FILM CHEAT

ourselves loom and teeter or shrink helplessly. In the skewed stairway shot
in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) where Jim sees his mother upside-down
as she comes downstairs, we share his confusion, disorientation, imbalance,
and vulnerability.
The Dutch shot does some of the performer’s work, in that striving with
tone or posture or elocution to establish deference or dominance isn’t really
necessary if the image does that for you.
 27
Moving On

FIGURE 27 Yves Montand in Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, MGM, 1966).

Cinematographers know that in one special way, and regardless of content,

every shot they make will function as a cheat: it will be seen in motion, not
only because to show it a strip of film will move through a projector but also
because it will be embedded among other shots in a chain the outlaying of
which constitutes the film. Every shot will travel past, and with, the viewer’s
appreciation. One can experience the illusion of presence in a shot where the
action is rather tranquil and there is no camera movement, but in film there
is no present. In film, as Takeshi Kitano says to Tom Conti in the finale of
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), “We go on and on.” This brings up
two considerations to which cinematographers respond, some of them with
reflective spontaneity and some out of educated reflex:
●● I. Panoramic perception. In his masterful treatise on railway
travel, Wolfgang Schivelbusch takes special note of a new kind of
200 THE FILM CHEAT

perceptual organization that became both necessary and habitual for

travelers on trains in the middle of the nineteenth century—roughly
in the 1840s—a way of seeing to which, beforehand, they had had
no need to accommodate themselves. It is essentially a kind of glance
to the side, a view of terrain possible only as one moves laterally
through it. Schivelbusch names it “panoramic perception,” after Dolf
Sternberger:
Sternberger uses this concept of the panorama and the panoramic to
describe European modes of perception in the nineteenth century—
the tendency to see the discrete indiscriminately. “The views from the
windows of Europe,” Sternberger says, “have entirely lost their dimension
of depth and have become mere particles of one and the same panoramic
world that stretches all around and is, at each and every point, merely a
painted surface.” (Sternberger 57, qtd. in Schivelbusch, Railway 61)

In the train one could see neither where one was going nor where one had
come from but only, instant by instant in an unbounded fragmentation, what
was here now. “The dissolution of reality and its resurrection as panorama,”
Schivelbusch writes, “thus became agents for the total emancipation
from the traversed landscape: the traveler’s gaze could then move into an
imaginary surrogate landscape” (64). The signal argument in Schivelbusch’s
book relates train travel and its mode of perception to modernity itself.1
Film is, in a way, like a train;2 and as we watch it (cinematographers all
know) no matter our construction of the experience we actually see without
recognizing a beginning or an end but only a fleeting ongoingness.
Given that we are not fixating on the image but only glancing at it, the
image may work quite well if it contains less information than is supposed
by the viewer. A single telltale feature, nicely lit, may suffice entirely. The
cheat, then, is that the images invoke, imply, or suggest a field and mode of
attention they do not take pains to serve with detail, that they seem to offer
a picture of things while in fact offering a glance. Instead, the onward thrust
of the story’s increasing probability sweeps us forward on a kind of hunch.
●● II. The coup d’oeil. Ortega discusses the act of looking in modo
obliquo, rather than in modo recto:

The impression of concavity is derived from the modo recto. If we

eliminate this—for example, by blinking the eyes—we have only oblique

1
I am grateful to Ann Kaplan for pointing me to Schivelbusch’s book in London in 2005.
2
François Truffaut to Jean-Pierre Léaud, in Day for Night (La nuit américaine, 1973): “Les films
avançent comme un train, tu compris?, comme un train dans la nuit.”
 MOVING ON  201

vision, those side-views “from the tail of the eye” which represent the
height of disdain. Thus, the third dimension disappears and the field of
vision tends to convert itself entirely into surface. (123)

The cinematographer knows he is making images that will be seen “with

disdain,” obliquely, in a series of blinks. To follow what is “spelled out” in a
film the viewer must be alert to the flying image, able to grasp.
But the grasp is already an accomplishment of a certain kind, one that is
tied, wrote Balzac, to the artist (Séraphita, qtd. in Benjamin, Baudelaire 41).
The artist seizes the world in an instantaneous regard.3 Film makes every
viewer an artist in that sense.
The problem of the quick grasp for those who seek to have telling
information is that if concentration moves speedily only some aspects of
the image can be caught. Cinematographers know that some details will
pass unnoticed. And further, in final effect any shot however carefully taken
in the first place will be edited in a flow of shots, at some regulated pace
(perhaps a very fast one). The viewer of the film will be seizing glances,
stitching them much as the editor does, fabricating a somewhat independent
view of the continuity. The pictures help, and even go out of their way not
to block helping this fabrication, yet when cinematographers, directors, and
editors look at assemblages of scenes they all think about what will be most
likely to show and what will be likely to pass. One prepares for accident.
The shot being a passing vision, every showing is a potential hiding, every
point in the field a potential show.

A fascination exploration is undertaken of the in situ landscape painting of Frederic Edwin

3

Church, in Gould 90ff.

 28
Behind the Camera Behind

FIGURE 28 Two lap dissolves. Above, Gregory Peck with Ingrid Bergman in
Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, Selznick International, 1945), effect by Jack Cosgrove.
Below, Jessica Tandy in The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1963), effect by Bob
Broughton.
 BEHIND THE CAMERA BEHIND  203

The optical printer was developed by Linwood Dunn. Taken at its most
essential, it is a pair of devices fixed near one another in absolute registration
within a solid, metallic frame structure. One of these is a standard camera,
typically 35 mm although other devices can be subbed in. The second is a
projector. The lens of the projector is pointed straight into the lens of the
camera. What the projector projects, the camera can record on film. And
the two devices can be regulated to operate at variable frame rates—24
fps, which is the Academy norm; 36 or 48 or higher fps for producing slow
motion; 18, 12, or lower fps to produce speed-up—as well as being set to
count frames; to easily shift movement forward or backward one or more
frames at a time; and to accept inserted blocks ahead of the film plane, such
as black cards.
Fade. If as film unspools in the projector—any scene at all—the aperture
on the camera side is made to close in a smooth progression through the
frames, until it is completely closed, what is recorded on film is the fade to
black. Clearly, this can be done swiftly or slowly, as called for. A fade-up
would be made by starting with the camera’s aperture closed, turning on the
units, and as the film unwound ahead slowly opening the camera aperture
(again, at variable rates).
Here and in other maneuvers with the optical printer special care will
be taken to meticulously clean the two lenses, that of the camera and that
of the projector. In final effect, what is produced by the camera is a second-
generation record, a film of a film, and it is sometimes possible to see the
shift of generation onscreen at fades and so on, since only the tail end of the
outgoing and incoming scenes need be used to make the transition and in the
print the recorded transition will be spliced in. With optical printer moves
that were worked through at the Technicolor laboratory, the transitions
were made in the original black-and-white records so that in the final print
there was no perceptible shift. With Eastmancolor films processed in studio
labs (DeLuxe, Warnercolor, Metrocolor, and so on), this purity was absent.
Dissolve. Scene A is optically printed as though for a fade (see above). The
system is stopped. Both the camera and the projector are wound backward
to the starting point. Scene A is removed from the projector and replaced
by Scene B. Now a fade-up is made on the same receiving stock. The effect
will be a dissolve from A to B. By varying the rate of film movement in the
projector, or the rate of aperture closure or opening, the disappearance of A
and appearance of B can be symmetrical or skewed either way. Hitchcock
took pains to arrange for dissolves that would remarkably add layers of
implication to his stories.
Split. The scene being projected onto the film stock can bear manipulation
at the hands of the operator (and many operators in the studio era were
exceptionally accomplished). A small black card can be inserted in a slot
between the passing film and the lens. The operator can make the card block
any part of the frame, and as the projected image moves forward the rate
204 THE FILM CHEAT

can be controlled, even to one stop-frame at a time so that the card can be
adjusted. In this way, only half of a scene can be recorded. When camera
and projector are rewound, on a second pass the operator can block the
other side. To make films in which a performer exists beside himself or
herself onscreen, “double” films, two pieces of film are used in the projector,
A with the performer on, say, the right side of the set; B with the same
performer, perhaps costumed differently, perhaps not, on the left. When the
film is shot on set, clearly the camera has to maintain strict alignment for
both sequences A and B, keeping an exactly measured distance from the
performers. The material on the set that will appear in the very center of the
frame is important and will typically be some kind of vertical structure that
is built into the setting, such as the edge of a bench or a tree trunk.
Design. By affecting the projected film with a variety of blockers of
different shapes, and controlling the blockage one or two frames at a time,
an effect can be created of scene B moving into A and taking over by means
of circling, dropping, popping up, arriving through venetian blinds, and a
very large array of other possibilities.
Given that both the projector and the camera can be set to turn at variable
speeds, and that both have apertures that can be opened or closed to whatever
degree, the final effects on the recording film are consummately varied and can
be achieved with great clarity. All of this constitutes a cheating mechanism,
technical in its base yet used by artists of extreme skill and inventiveness
to produce effects that can only be called creative in their falsity. In the
dissolve, for example, the viewer is intended to actually “see” one scene
wiping, fading, or dissolving into another as though in a world of the dream,
where images can transpose in such irrational ways. The cheat is necessary
here because although the experience of watching film is dreamlike, it is not
a dream. Part of the delight of watching film comes exactly in unpredictable
transpositions, and in our ways of interpreting these transpositions in line
with our appreciation of the whole. Digital transpositions have their own
variety of flexibilities, but both digital and non-digital forms come to life
especially in color shifting or grading, such as we find in the Lord of the
Rings films (2001–03).1 Optical work allows us to unknowingly see more
than the pictures shot by the cinematographer, and although their names do
fly by in the credits (usually under “Special Photography”) the matte artists,
optical printer operators, and color specialists who fabricate what we call
“the film” from the filmic materials originally shot, tend to go unheralded
and unknown, if they are not simply forgotten.

I discuss one very complicated visual morph effected through non-digital color control in
1

Cinema, If You Please, Ch. 2.

 29
Peek-a-Boo

FIGURE 29 Audrey Totter in Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, MGM, 1947).

Perhaps no screen myth addressing the story or the labor behind it is more
prominent and also more taken for granted than this: figures of the screen
do not know the audience is there watching them. They act, as it were, in
a world cut off, a private and untouchable zone, a territory into which we
peek at our peril and for our pleasure. The “invisible” effect, if we might
call it that, is produced by actors maintaining sight lines that are generally
guided away from the lens. When the actor doesn’t see the camera, the
character doesn’t see the audience (whose camera it finally is, by adoption).
206 THE FILM CHEAT

The actor knows of the existence of the audience, of course, because it is

only by virtue of that audience that he eats dinner. As the character only “eats
dinner,” but never actually eats dinner, nor actually does anything else that
might erode a self, she has no need for the box office or the audience who
flock there, and thus does not need to understand that she is being watched.
For the viewer, there is initially a shocking discontinuity between the active
sense of being in a position to watch these characters, their continually being
watchable; and the retiring sense of peeking in on people who are behaving
only in their privacies. The film, all its protagonists, all its events—all exist
in a privacy we invade (with delight). As one gets older and older watching
movies, the hesitancy dissolves and we concentrate on the many wonders of
the peephole.
There is always a subtle, only indirectly evoked sense of the screen world
being conscious of the audience, of action emanating from characters who
vaguely intuit that they are not alone—a sense that, as Wheeler Winston
Dixon suggests of cinema, “it looks at you.” And certainly as viewers we
have a keen sense of that subtle sense, an ongoing awareness that all of
what is so elaborately being played out here is being played out for us to
see, played out in that strange marriage of voyeurism and exhibitionism
(challenged so beautifully by Psycho [1960] and Mon oncle Antoine [1971])
where the peephole appears to work only one way. Our film watching is
mobilized by the tension between, on one side the free gaze, the seeing
without responsibility or the obligation to recognize that something is being
provided for us to see, and on the other the culpability that comes with
knowingly invading the Other’s space. Every piquant glance at the facts of
production melts away and transforms into a rapturous engagement with
the action itself, the action that binds us deeply, as though even without our
participation it really exists.
It is essential that the flashing awareness of acting dissipate and resolve
into a committed bond with fictionality. It is part of the camera’s cheat, as
much as the writer’s and the performer’s, that the character’s gaze is averted;
that no frame be included in which that gaze finds us and shows us that it
is finding us. Yet:
In some works of cinema, the character knowingly and pointedly does face
the camera and stare directly into the lens, not en passant while meandering
down an alleyway but for some protracted spate of time, definitively,
unmistakably, confrontationally, as though to say, “I do not just deeply know
you are there, viewer; I here affirm that knowledge, and pointedly extend
it to you. You know that I know, because I give you a demonstration of my
knowing, a demonstration you can avoid only if you also avoid anything
else onscreen.” Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) is a classic
example, with continual camera reference by character after character, scene
after scene, so that one has the sense of the filmmaker wanting at once to
create a film and also to tell us he is there creating one—to bridge cinema
 PEEK-A-BOO  207

to theater. The tension is hard for Montgomery to keep up, and without
the murder-divorce-duplicity story and its peculiarities the gazes do not
work to fashion a new engagement, except perhaps with the screen bodies
taken in themselves. Le Trou (1960) commences with a very brief address to
the camera by Jean Keraudy about his friend Jacques Becker’s film (telling
a “true story” in which he was involved); that film we are about to see.
Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964) is structured conventionally but at a
climactic moment a central character, Kelly (Constance Towers), confronts
the lens and dramatically removes the stunning hair that has captivated us
all along to reveal that she is in fact bald. Something of an homage is given
by Steven Soderbergh in his The Laundromat (2019). Jason Reitman’s Up in
the Air (2009) leaves us with the principal character standing at loose ends in
front of an airport departure board unsure where his future lies. Swiftly, in a
half-blink, he looks at us for guidance. Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966) is a first-
person narrative in which our beloved (and belovedly naughty) hero Alfie
tells the story by looking into the camera and addressing us, with a tone of
great personal warmth and confidentiality: the confiding is conspiratorial,
and from the outset we are cozily wrapped into the conspiracy. The same
intermittent cozy attachment is shown in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones
(1963) by Albert Finney. An even more conspiratorial, and finally diabolical,
affiliation with the audience is produced in the original House of Cards
(1990) by Ian Richardson as Urquhart, winking at us sideways, smirking
into our privacy as he makes defamatory comments about other characters
strolling blithely around him. It can hardly be that as these characters “see
the camera” they also “see us watching,” since even if one passes from the
character to the actor one can admit only that the actor knows what a
camera is, and can have no expectation of meeting any one of us in the dark.
This is, then, a curious, even idiosyncratic form of affiliation: the character
recognizes himself or herself as a character, not a person; a being put on by
a person who works to a camera. That person, as far as we are concerned,
recognizes only the “form of” the audience, the audience as a construct.
How can the character’s confrontation be understood in light of the
tension between our presence and our absence as viewers: between presumed
innocence of the production on one side and the production’s explicitly
catching our eye and ear on the other? If the fleeting knowledge of actorial
presence—of our presence onlooking the character’s1—swiftly flies away
in most cases, how can we entertain the experience suggested in the films
above, where such flight doesn’t seem to happen at all?
The answer to the dilemma is both simple and profoundly troubling.
The onlooking character, that screen figure who “turns to the audience”
and winks, emits in seeing us a kind of transubstantiating ray that converts

1
On the audience member’s capacity as “onlooker,” see Goffman, Frame Analysis Ch. 5.
208 THE FILM CHEAT

us, not only as we watch and listen but by virtue of our watching and
listening, into someone else, another character in the screen extravaganza
but one who goes without a name and without an image, one who is a
participant not a mere outsider/peeker-in. I might coin a word to match
Michel Chion’s acousmêtre (which functions in the sound by speaking and
audible speech from off) and suggest that the viewer becomes an optimêtre.
Sound is something we should not produce in any event, as it would be
unconscionably (impossibly) rude to interrupt the proceedings. But we
can stand silently and nearby, the servant who makes entrance with the
Queen. As optimêtre we have full rights to inhabit the place of the drama,
to position ourselves anywhere and to move in any fashion, and this, surely,
with any filmic arrangement, yet somehow much more particularly, more
intelligently when a character gives us the eye. The recognizing, approving,
welcoming eye. The optimêtre knows what it is to be there, through the
secret illumination that comes to him and to all characters by virtue of their
placement in the drama. When I am an optimêtre, the Queen can talk to
me, can confide in me, can whisper endearments or scathing critiques to me,
can use me to share her ribald jokes. Because in sharing herself this way the
Queen has identified the proximity of her confidant(e), that charged and
eager watcher knows her as no other character does, sees and hears the
silent soliloquy hiding in every comment she makes.
When one character speaks privately and directly to another character,
makes a kind of “inside soliloquy,” the same charge is not invoked. We are
special, as we watch.
The difference between the optimêtre and the onlooker:
The onlooker is part of the actor’s world of awareness, a creature invoked
by the performance, akin, in a direct way, to Walker Gibson’s “mock reader.”
The “mock reader” is a persona of the reader’s, someone I become when I
approach a text; and in order to make such an approach I act as though the
language of the writing is familiar enough to me, as though the presumptions
made by the author can be taken by me for granted, just as required, and
as though my fascinations are those implicit in the textual address. As to
the onlooker, who exists in the act of cinematic spectatorship, the character
neither knows him, nor recognizes him, nor sees that he is there, nor believes
in the possibility of him, nor admits him to citizenship in his world. For the
character, it happens that, without consciousness of it, he lives his expressive
life in register with the onlooker’s knowledge and expectations: again, by
happening but not a happening of which he is aware. If he were asked
about it (but who could ask?) the character in all sincerity would be entirely
oblivious to how this happens. The actor, however: well, she does know
how this happens, being in league with a writer and aiming her performance
to a viewer’s reception. The actor knows she has created the onlooker, in
a way, and created, too, by invocation, another character who is not in
the know about onlookers. That character, the optimêtre: this “person” is
 PEEK-A-BOO  209

known to the character, likely very well known, known and recognized as
known, although a being to whom, until the moment of the direct gaze to
camera, when the figure of the optimêtre is expressly summoned, neither the
character nor the viewing audience gives a thought. He is one of those who,
in Starobinski’s words, “can see to it that his name no longer designates
himself. Rather ingenuously he dreams of placing himself in the position of
one who sees without being seen” (81), ingenuously because also hopelessly,
since at the moment of the character’s gaze to camera it is evident that
trying to peek without being seen peeking is doomed to fail. The optimêtre
is a bunkmate, a bosom pal, no matter the tone adopted by he or she who
looks straight forward to address him or her. Not a creature who is involved
in the action of the drama but a creature in whom the actor’s character can
confide. The confidant(e) has been in the room all along, silent and standing
to the side, and now that he or she is invoked by that character gaze there
is felt and assumed a response, an attitude the character can have predicted.
(Certainly not an attitude that could shock the character looking out at it.)
When I say “invoked” by that character gaze I am of course tilting the
scale a little toward the character as active being when, of course, it is no
more than a put-on. Michael Fried writes in Absorption and Theatricality
of a shift

from the primacy of absorption toward the primacy of action and

expression—more accurately, from the representation of figures
absorbed in quintessentially absorptive states and activities toward the
representation of figures absorbed in action or passion (or both). The
shift, in other words, was in the direction of the values and effects of
pictorial drama. (107)

Notwithstanding that Fried is moved to write by the painting of Greuze and

other mid-eighteenth century artists, we may find in his thought inspiration
to wonder about the character who regards the lens. He may well be
scanning us, reaching out, understanding, sympathizing with our plight in
being caught up with his appearance; but he may also be absorbed in an
entirely private moment of reflection, reflection about something that is not
at all, anywhere in the film, brought for our consideration.
Yet, there does seem to be a voice that emanates. “Well, of course you
know what it’s like when things like this happen,” the character whispers
to the optimêtre, and the optimêtre conjoins, “O, yes, I see what is going on
with you, what has been going on, what you saw, what you were seen seeing,
and also what you intended me to see, and you can feel reassured that I see
it your way, ‘through your eyes,’ as it were, and not by way of any other
character. Your eyes opening to me lead me to see everything your way. You
are my friend. I am yours.” I see through your eyes.
Your eyes, now opening only to me.
210
 Of Scenes

{30} No There There

Credibility and incredibility; Changeling; Avatar

{31} Where Are We?

Yi-Fu Tuan; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; The Adjustment Bureau; To Catch
a Thief

{32} Walk on the Wild Side

The Man Who Knew Too Much; Kenneth Burke; Henry Bumstead

{33} Happy Trails

Bringing Up Baby; Six Degrees of Separation; The French Lieutenant’s
Woman; Bigger Than Life; The Courtship of Eddie’s Father; North by
Northwest

{34} The Thing

Forbidden Planet; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Alien; War for the Planet of the
Apes; Star Wars; Jurassic Park; The Stepford Wives; Life; 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea; Jaws; The Blob

{35} Heist
Moral implications of watching

{36} The Reality Effect

Stanley Cavell; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Detour

{37} Stand-ins
Barbra Streisand; Rebel Without a Cause; F for Fake; Kevin Costner

{38} The Superuniverse

Twentieth Century; Spider-Man 2; Darkman
212
 30
No There There

FIGURE 30 Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso
Cuarón, Warner Bros., 2004).

Either by extraction from the flow of the normal, or by artful concoction, film
is made in the stream of everyday life, sometimes secretly on a soundstage,
and sometimes relatively openly on location (if with direction signs for the
cast and crew that have fake titles on them). Quotidian routine is an essential
element in the prepared broth: routine that is either filmed directly (sidewalk
crowds, trees in a park) or “directly” (as in documentary—an epitome being
Frederick Wiseman’s High School [1968]), or imitated for fictional realism
(JFK [1991]), or used as a substrate on which some fantasmal invention
rests (Marriage Story [2019]). But sometimes a filmmaking team will need
to realize an image that cannot be made in the stream of everyday life, a
picture of something fabulous and mythical, else a picture in a dangerous
circumstance, else a picture of the actor’s body yet showing a body that does
not look like the actor’s actual body to fans who recognize it. And many
other things.
214 THE FILM CHEAT

Call these “impossible pictures,” and consider how making them

successfully represents not only a triumph of skill and technique but also
a triumph of dramaturgy, since by virtue of these sudden revelations of the
extraordinary the audience’s sympathy can be very specially engaged. The
matte technique is one way of making “impossible pictures”—long in use
(since the days of Norman O. Dawn), considerably developed over time, and
quite extraordinary in range and power. Very often matting involves a point
of dramatic placement, convincing viewers that they are watching events—
action in true space—when they are not.
There are essentially two kinds of reasons that motivate the use of mattes
in picture-making. I say mattes generally, referring both to hard mattes and
in-camera mattes (including, among the latter, mattes produced exclusively
in the optical printer). In a matte, some figure or object X appears in a scene
set in location L, and moves around the place with some normality. X lives
in L. X is visiting L. X is passing through L. X is singing and dancing in L. X
could be a person of any type; a non-human figure or object; a sculpture; a
yacht; a supersonic aircraft; anything. Any object X in a scene L.
X is in L, but X is not in L.
How? X may be shot in such a way that the recording film (or material)
can be manipulated to isolate him or her in the frame, isolate so that
everything else shows up with no exposure at all. (Typically the recording
material is a very high-contrast film that can be processed to eliminate one
end of the contrast range.) Or, two spaces—one a partial studio set, the
other a photographic or painted scene—may be conjoined by way of two
exposures on the same film, with part of the film blocked off each time. For
in-camera matting the object X is positioned against an immense blue screen
or green screen or sometimes sodium yellow background. X may stand, or
be suspended by cables designed not to show. By use of color correction
in camera (typically with filters), everything but the figure can be reduced
to an optical nullity on the recording stock. This piece of recording stock
is eventually “married” to a second one containing the location. Camera-
manipulation matting is complex, yet fascinating: X stands against a neutral
ground, usually black, and is caught on high-contrast film processed to render
him or her as nothing but a black silhouette with the ground eliminated.
This piece of film is sandwiched against another piece containing the scene,
in an optical printer, the resultant being a scene with a black human-shaped
spot gesturing through it. The original shot is now counter-processed so
that the ground does not register and the figure is clearly shown. This is
sandwiched against the composite already made and now the figure appears
to move through the space against the background.
X and L: Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) aboard a Hippogriff flying over
a Loch. Harry is on the Hippogriff. But Harry (Daniel) is actually not on
the Hippogriff. There is no Hippogriff. Daniel is hanging by wires from a
grid at the top of a sound stage. The animal, the Loch, the mountains, the
 NO THERE THERE  215

sky—all these are matted in. Daniel is not above or even near a Loch, he is
in a soundstage near London, in the air but not necessarily far off the floor.
A by-product: if he is a child actor, he is most likely having the time of his
life “flying” in the green world.
The two motives for matte usage are these:

[1] Credible tale, impossible production. X being at L not only makes

sense in the drama, it makes sense in real life, since people like X
really do go to places like L. But there is a serious technical problem.
It would be too costly to actually have a shooting day with actors at
L, because L is so distant from the general shooting site(s) that flying
a crew there with one or more performers would be prohibitive or
because L looks marvelous as a possibility but is a very dangerous
location, and the insurance wouldn’t dream of covering actors
working there, or because specific nuances of lighting and sound
recording are needed to capture X, the sort best accomplished in a
controlled studio setting, and so X must be in studio but L, being
so vast, cannot be, or because X(1) is playing a twin, X(2), and
both twins cannot be on camera at the same instant, although they
must seem to be, or because the actor playing X has refused to
travel to L, and his contract insists that all photography must be
done within a few miles of the studio, or because the availability
of actor X is extremely limited and the most economically efficient
and convenient way to get him or her to L is to photograph L
far in advance and then do a matte on whatever day(s) the actor
can be free, or because a very complex and elaborate set has been
envisioned—a long busy street in Los Angeles in the 1920s for
Eastwood’s Changeling (2008)—and it is far more economical, not
to say aesthetically interesting, to shoot only part of the image on
a stage and matte in the bulk of the design. This last procedure has
been in action since Norman Dawn’s glass mattes in the early 1910s.
For all of the above, dramatically speaking it makes sense to think of
X and L being united in a picture, but such a picture cannot be made
except through the matte cheat.
[2] Incredible tale, unthinkable production. Here there is nothing
sensible about the merger of X and L, but if it could be
accomplished the effect would be astonishing and alluring. Say the
film requires a group of figures to be injected by hypodermic into
the body of a stranger. Or the film requires a group of hunters to
climb into a forbidding cave with a horrifying monster. Or the film
requires a person to do extra-vehicular activity in outer space. In all
these dramatic situations, and legion more, the locational ground
must be both invented and constructed since in the world as we
know it there is no place like this, or if there is a place we do not
216 THE FILM CHEAT

have a way to go there, or if we can go there we would never find a

venturing figure such as must be shown onscreen. The protagonist
X and the filmmaking team are acting in a strange world together.
This means there are no direct models in the extra-diegetic universe
for what we are to see onscreen, except in the loosest possible sense
(e.g. riding the flying dragons in Avatar [2009] is somewhat like
riding a horse in a cowboy movie and something like hang-gliding:
one can imagine a designer being urged to imagine hang-gliding on a
bucking bronco).

A number of interesting features of the matte cheat:

●● Very frequently the actor must move, gesture, and enunciate
as though other people are present, or as though there is a real
narrative space in which she stands—an overarching tree, a
precipice, a castle rampart, an airport tarmac, what have you—when
she is really positioned alone, often in a sort of vacuous nowhere.
The acting must be accomplished on the soundstage without scene
partners, who will act later, perhaps also alone, and be matted in
themselves. The actor must therefore not only be prepared to be
the character in a setting now invisible—already a challenge—but
also to imagine the setting and the other players, based on sketches.
When a battle is in progress, the protagonist must fight a nobody
who will later be matted in as a somebody. One saws the air,
promise-cramm’d. This form of acting, akin to mime, is not the
talent of all those who work in front of the camera.
●● The character is either in a space he or she knows, or in a strange
space entirely unfamiliar, and the matting must convey these
relations. The exact position of the actor’s body in relation to
the ground, the color match between the actor’s costume and
the painted ground, the form of movement and its style, all these
contribute to a quality of familiarity or alienation. And these aspects
of the performance are frequently planned well in advance. It is one
thing to walk into a familiar space, drop one’s keys upon the table,
put on the coffee, draw out a munchie, take a phone message; but
quite another to do all this in an empty green space with nothing at
all around except, perhaps, markers on the floor. The rehearsal of
action when a number of live actors are at work is a choreography
involving timing, posture, and precise placement, but one works
against the bodies of one’s scene partners. In matte work one very
often rehearses with “phantoms.” It would be a somewhat similar
exercise for actors to rehearse with living teammates who in final
production will be wearing elaborate make-up and costumes they
are not carrying now, so that one has to shape the enunciation of
 NO THERE THERE  217

dialogue toward these presently non-existent figurations. We are

considering here a kind of acting by displacement, including voicing
animated characters and recording off-camera speeches.
●● And the character must ideally seem really, fully, indubitably to
belong in the space; indeed, to be part of the space as we watch.
Any evidence of the matte procedure will ruin this illusion. A
notable problem was something called the “minus,” a very thin
but visible line running around the matted-in figure in early matte
work. Computer-generated in-camera matting has removed the
minus, helping to give the impression that the body of the actor fits
perfectly into the space containing it.

Special visual effects are no longer the public secret they once were. Books
are in print detailing them with splendid illustrations that will call up
fond memories of screen moments one had thought to illustrate one thing
when in fact they were based on quite another. The matte technique has
been explained in detail, and nowhere better than, in Raymond Fielding’s
The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (1965). But after 2000
public interest really peaked. From Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron’s The
Invisible Art (2002) to Richard Rickett’s Special Effects: The History and
Technique (2006) to Editing and Special/Visual Effects, ed. Charlie Keil and
Kristen Whissel (2016), and much more, effects techniques such as mattes
are explained, illustrated, discussed, and mused upon. Everyday viewers,
not making claims to professional status, continually voice opinion about
effects and claim to see failures. They look back with hollow charity on the
now disregarded early techniques with which they grew up.
What the matte cheat finally provides is one or the other of two opposing
results: a coherent, apparently seamless, aesthetically unified image in which
the protagonist seems perfectly to fit and harmonize with the space, quite
without the effort of any special construction; or only a hapless attempt to
convince viewers that the protagonist perfectly fits and harmonizes with the
space without the effort of special construction, hapless because a canny
audience, already appreciative of the delicatessen affectionately known as
sfx, search for, measure, evaluate, and compare the technique they claim to
see in use: see baldly for what it is. When the matte works, the character is
there. When the matte doesn’t work, the character isn’t there. But in both
cases, regardless of the success or failure of the technique, one finds a place,
a there, to experience and point to.
They are really there, they aren’t really there.
But . . . where is there?
There is no there. In front of us is only a “there.” Yet the inducement to
accept the true thereness of the “there,” to think of a there there, is the cheat.
And this is, of course, the same cheat as applies in filmmaking that does not
use the matte technique, filmmaking altogether, albeit the matte technique
218 THE FILM CHEAT

when discovered as such raises the cheat to our observation most distinctly,
most blatantly. In cinema there is never a there there but to follow along we
must surmise that there is. When we watch it is impossible to see the image
without conceiving of a there that is not there, without falling for the effect
even if one thinks one is watching the magician employ it.
 31
Where Are We?

FIGURE 31 Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock,
Paramount, 1955).

For ages we have conspired together, with startling uniformity, to envision

the human universe as four-directional, with the compass points arranged in
fixation, and in physical space we have composed with six vectors, left, right,
forward, backward, up, down. All of this is of course entirely arbitrary, but
perfectly functional. Yi-Fu Tuan shows how a great deal of this supposition
comes from ancient celebratory and declamatory ritual, centers for which

were oriented skyward, to the sun, moon, stars, and other hierophanies
of the sky rather than, as in Neolithic times, downward to the spirits
of the earth. With the ritual center, and later the city, human horizons
220 THE FILM CHEAT

expanded beyond the local and the fleeting to the cosmos and its orderly
cycles. Not only that, priests and kings believed that they could mediate
between heaven and earth, impose the former’s stabilities on the latter’s
propensity for chaos. In form, these cities were rectangular, with the four
corners oriented to the cardinal points, as with Dur Sharrukin (721-705
BCE) and Borsippa (604-561 BCE), or with the four sides oriented to the
cardinal points, as with the historical cities of China. (114)

Our cities and our landscapes, our religions and our sciences have all
pointed themselves with regularity in the same “cardinal” ways. More, in
The Return of the Vanishing American, Leslie Fiedler uses the northern, the
southern, the eastern, and the western as the four principal narrative forms,
at least in American literature.
Yet cinema is different. It is always a case of, “Where are we? Here.” And
“Where are we going? Onward.” “Where are we coming from? Before.”
There are no cardinal points, the left and the right of the picture are vacua,
above and below simply do not exist and never did, behind the picture is
nowhere and in front of it is the unspeakable us.
At the same time, those who view renditions on the screen finally leave
the theater and go off to live conventional lives, in which they have dutifully
learned the rigors of conventional geographies, a learning by means of
which they traveled to the cinema and then traveled home again—even
though the map that connects “home” to the “screen world” is nonexistent.
When space is designed to create a cinematic place, a setting for a story,
homage must be paid to the everyday grid, notwithstanding that shapes
may be freely reconfigured to slide away from the limitations of that grid.
(Designing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920], Walter Reimann and Walter
Röhrig built city sets in modulating proportion, so that buildings would
seem to stretch away from the eye.) When we dream, we enter and move
through a space that is more like the space of the screen narrative than the
space of the territory outside. When we watch film, we move through a
space that is like the space of a dream.
Two cheats become evident as laws of design. First, any set design that
is intended to call up—to summon—thoughts of any realistic world known
or knowable to the viewer will include, however minimally, some tag that
connects to everyday perception. A highway marked with road signs. A
bathroom with a roll of toilet paper next to the toilet. A conference room
with a telephone. A kitchen with a frying pan. We are very often so swayed
by the pungent realism of this tag that we neglect to see the plasticity of
the overall design: a highway with no vehicles on it (shot on a location, by
the aid of a police license for stopping traffic flow); a toilet with an odd
figurine standing on its basin (shot on a soundstage, with the help of an
artist’s construct); a conference room with picture windows giving out upon
a prospect of the stormy sea (a stage set, with a stunning rear projection
 WHERE ARE WE?  221

or CGI ground); that frying pan sitting on a stove that has no power. The
real tag signifies a real place. When the real tag is withheld from the design
we find ourselves in a purely fabular place, somewhere we can admit only
through imagination, somewhere we can travel only by imagining. A good
example would be that cityscape in Wiene’s Caligari. It is possible to strike
a dramatic unfolding that hovers between dreamscapes and reality, either
by using a realistic design and structuring unrealistic action there; or by
using an unrealistic design and having characters behave in an ordinary,
recognizable way. In Caligari, for example, the characters have conversations
which model, in their form, their tone, and their linguistic structure the kinds
of conversations people have all the time everywhere. In The Adjustment
Bureau (2011) we move from one to another very precisely photographed,
realistic Manhattan location, following people who behave as people do on
the sidewalks of New York, while entertaining the thought of secret agents
moving through secret doors into secret tunnels that magically connect
distant points as though they are adjacent. It is easy enough to see the trouble
expended in mounting believable signs over banks, restaurants, hotels, and
the like; in painting up police cars to look as though they properly belong to
the NYPD, the LAPD, and so on; in decorating the building fronts of studio
backlots so the street will not look like only a “street.”1
In a scene with characters, how do we find ourselves, self-locate as the
being we must become to apprehend and appreciate what is shown?
Those characters we follow are in front of us only because they are being
screened, occupying there what is depicted as a recognizable sort of place,
behaving in a way consistent with at least our imagination of how people
like that would act in a place like this (not that we base that imagination on
knowledge). The actors are using their bodies persistently to aid in shaping
the place, producing angles, stretches, extensions that match the lines of the
design: thus, while in an actual setting such as this people might use their
bodies much more haphazardly, paying less attention, here the body of the
actor is treated as part of the scenic design. The actor as a presence never
disrupts the image design. (For an elaborate demonstration, see the ballet
sequence in Singin’ in the Rain [1952]).
And there is to be seen a responsiveness—perhaps even an odd
responsiveness—to the qualities of a place in the specifics of performance:
a character not just turning off a table lamp but standing beside it for a
moment to let a dramatic beat emphasize the gesture, or resting a hand
upon a doorknob to give weight to the instant of turning it and walking in.
The characters not only fit the place, they become of the place, relating to
the locus, local. We sense appropriateness, belonging, order. A very extreme
situation, where, miraculously, there is still fit: in Cries and Whispers (1972)

1
Usually the giveaway is the kerb, not forefronted in the shot.
222 THE FILM CHEAT

women in sparkling white gowns move slowly around rooms designed

entirely in carmine red. In Le Trou (1960) the jailbird characters have furtive
postures, furtive eyes, so that they seem to have inhaled the darkness we see
when they dig beneath the floor of their cell. In The Greatest Show on Earth
(1952) the many circus performers working under the Big Top with exotic
animals and in glittering sequined garments of rich midnight blue and grass
green and tropical fuchsia and many other colors are themselves, as it turns
out, richly varied emotionally, strongly performative offstage just as they
are onstage, and interactionally irregular, just as denizens of the circus are
“supposed to be” and just as, beautifully encircled by the three rings of the
three-ring circus, they look.
Note that character/place adjustments are cheats. People do not harmonize
with the rooms in which they live; they do not sit in a chair so as to reflect
in their posture the shape, the familiarity, the appropriateness of the chair
here, just here, just for them. Stanislavsky wanted his acting students, in
fact, to break with the achievement of harmony I am describing implicitly,
and just sit in a chair. They found it difficult, having already learned too
well, perhaps, how to demonstrate fondness for the “carpet” beneath their
feet, how to indicate sitting. On film, characters are continually making
indications, and these indications are appropriate, that is, in the right place.2
A provoking case:
There is a scene in To Catch a Thief (1955) that has become much
celebrated, mostly because viewers associate it with a tongue-in-cheek sexual
reference, a naughty joke, thus gaining an opportunity to laugh freely and
later on remembering the opportunity with pleasure. Cary Grant and Grace
Kelly are ensconced in a fabulously lush hotel room on the Côte d’Azur, at
night. (We are told in the plot that it is the Carlton in Cannes, a small city
not more than a few kilos from a larger city, Nice, where, at this time of
year, the Bataille des fleurs is annually celebrated near the flower market,
that also plays in the film.) The place and persons: a small sea of turquoise
and lavender light, with shadows at the margins; allure, romance, mystery,
exoticism. Pale turquoise French doors giving onto a balcony fronting out
to the Mediterranean, with a little bouquet of white chrysanthemums in a
vase. A sumptuous loveseat, in the Louis XV style with an elegantly curving
polished mahogany frame and luscious silk upholstery. Francie (Kelly)
is seated, a pithy diamond necklace beaming from her neck and chest, a
diaphanous white gown spread over her. Behind her back, on a high table,
stands a Sèvres vase. Her hair is white as the beach sands, her eyes blue

2
The ticquer can be thought of as a person who makes numerous inappropriate indications, as it
were signaling out of context and for no appreciable reason. In carefully designed “catastrophic
situations” (such as in A Night to Remember [1958] or World Trade Center [2006]) people
frantically gesturing do not seem out of place.
 WHERE ARE WE?  223

as truth. She is talking to Robie (Grant), who stands patiently nearby in

a tuxedo, a tuxedo that is burnished lavender by the light, his tanned face
a study in concentration. She is teasing him that she knows he is a jewel
thief and is obsessed with the necklace he is staring at, but he, of course,
is staring at her. Fireworks explode magnesium white in the black sky (to
an unnecessary but thrilling musical cue). He comes to sit beside her and
continues the unrelenting gaze. We should note:
●● Any possible doubt or viewer hesitation about the social status
of the place is quickly resolved by our view of the vase and the
qualified light. Darkness is one thing; turquoise or purple darkness is
quite another. The tuxedo and the gown also testify. Ceramics from
the Sèvres factory are rare, exceedingly valuable.
●● The loveseat upholstery, very slightly restrained, is what one would
find in an elegant hotel but not, say, in the home of an elegant
person such as Francie or her mother, as they would have arranged
for a decorator to be expressive on their behalf (being able to afford
the luxury) and the fabric would have enunciated more. Here, it
must not enunciate, both to seem realistic for a hotel and also to
avoid drawing our eye from Francie or Robie. The two of them, too,
must not enunciate as they play at each other.
●● She sits at left, facing screen right, in a lovely pose, her right arm,
long and silky, literally draped at her side, and her left arm resting
on the curvature of the wood and, once he is seated there, too,
extending behind Robie’s neck. In her arm position there is a literal
mocking—through imitation—of the curving wood, not only as
though she is accustomed to sitting like this in furniture like this
in places like this one but also as though she and the loveseat are
indistinguishable. Her loveseat for her love, the loveseat that is love
but also is Francie at the moment, and he is sitting on it/her.
●● As he leans over just slightly, to gracefully bend his head
deferentially her way, the line of his back echoes the line of the
loveseat, too. He is a little less accustomed, a little more sheepish,
yet also a body in the act of belonging. Now it is his loveseat just as
much as it is hers, they are sharing furniture. Not a bed, perhaps, but
furniture. And sharing with extreme grace, the kind of grace we see
all over this room.
●● The fictional hotel room is reified for us by the continuing visibility
of the Grace Kelly face, the Cary Grant face, the gleamy necklace
far too twinkly to miss, so that we can hover between realist and
oneiric readings. The dream reality includes the exploding fireworks
that are manifestly outside but that are easily—perhaps too easily—
readable as inside the consciousness of at least one protagonist here.
224 THE FILM CHEAT

The fireworks are not only white but also purple, suggesting that
the purple in the room comes from some slowly dying ember of
passionate radiance that flew off the explosions.
●● The fireworks function diegetically as well as aesthetically, and
so the open French doors through which we can fully see them
and the explosions themselves were requirements, given the story.
The Bataille is in progress not so far away. The fireworks are in
celebration of that, and thus work to evidence the geophysical
setting of the story. Much else in the film works to do the same, as
though constant reiteration of our presence on the Riviera is part
of the deeper meaning here. The Riviera as The Riviera is a central
player in the film (from the opening shots onward). The Riviera
= glamour = wealth = sophistication = exclusiveness: Francie and
Robie, glamorous, wealthy in their two ways, sophisticated beyond
belief (especially from the cinemagoer’s point of view), exclusive in
that they are exclusively ours, just as this room is.

* * *

I have argued above that in watching a film scene like this one from To Catch
a Thief the viewer becomes an onlooker. I ask now, how has the place been
arranged to help the viewer in her effort to become that onlooker? It is clearly
a transformation that has to be learned, and that bears constant support and
incitement. Here the viewer is an onlooker floating on The Riviera, a peeper
who has crept into a private hotel room, a seeker after romance. We need
hardly stress that this onlooker is not attending the Cannes Festival while she
is watching this film; she is not on The Riviera at all. Three obstacles must
be cheated successfully, or the love duet—that is floating near us—will ring
entirely hollow from start to finish, top to bottom.
[1] Stolidity. The viewer is and remains comfortable and satisfied to be
here, both “here” as an onlooker watching and here as a cinemagoer alive
in the theater showing this film. There can be no anxiety stemming from the
lack of a compass. Bringing a self to the theater, the viewer did not at any
point expect to take, and did not make necessary preparations for taking, a
voyage to the South of France. (We see the large colorful travel poster in the
travel agency vitrine, but we do not have our passports.) We are “staying
put.” We wish to be in France watching all this happening in France, but
basically not be in France because that would be troublesome and expensive.
We are reticent to move, in a certain sense. Our reticence to move must be
addressed, and it is addressed, by virtue of the seductive glamour with which
the shots are composed. (Of all the opulent settings we see, this is by far the
most opulent.) At this moment, however, the viewer has been infected with
no realistic need to be shown a hotel room in turquoise and/or purple light,
 WHERE ARE WE?  225

with mysterious shadows. A hotel room could have any kind of light, any
kind of furnishing, and the scene could be late in the afternoon. Further,
sexy as Kelly and Grant are together, this story could be told with any two
actors if they were sufficiently competent. Kelly and Grant bring value-
added allure.3 And the romance being sparked here, possibly, is something
we are not just eager but very hungry to see, so that we are willing to be
where we must be to catch the action from the beginning and willing to stay
with the characters, follow their actions, to see what will develop. We come
to cinema with a stolidity, an idea of a compass, but the film cheat must
tease us out of it. To tease us to feel at ease shifting around without palpable
direction. As we sit looking at the screen, where is France, after all?
[2] Modesty. It is unconventional, to say the least, to sit in observation of
two people in an actual or potential lovemaking situation. Desire to see as we
might, we really tend not to put ourselves in the embarrassing situation of being
caught peeping. Conversations, glances, mutterings, and gestures like theirs are
considered private. While it is the case that in some ways the entire depiction
onscreen is a privacy opened to viewer inspection, this scene is a privacy within
that privacy and, again, a privacy without shape, with no up or down, no left or
right. But the glimmer and glamour seduce the eye, so that reticence flies off. We
can feel reason, in fact, to believe something else is happening with these two in
this place, and it is entirely reasonable, not to say sensible, for us to pay it heed.
The fireworks alone are a spectacle we yearn to watch, and for doing that this
room provides such an ideal vantage point. Or the jewelry, especially against
that exceedingly idealized Kelly skin. The calm sophistication of the dialogue
and poise of the postures, a nice lesson for the imitative spirit. Not to say the
much noted (and much exploited) screen modesty of these two stars, who by
this point had teased audiences plenty of times so that audiences got used to
leaning forward and entering the tease. This scene might get sexy, even naked,
with some actors, but with Kelly and Grant in 1955 there is no way it will be
anything but properly dignified and properly filled with implication. It is safe to
be here watching. We are in the presence of those who observe Decorum. But
that presence: where in space is it?
[3] Class. These are exclusive coordinates: Cannes, the Bataille season, the
Carlton of all hotels in the world, a huge suite inside it, two rich American
women visiting France, a suave man who knows how to handle himself
anywhere. The entire construct here is beyond the class of most film viewers,
who are principally working-class and middle-class citizens of modernity. The
very rich, like Francie’s mother or the aristocrats she is imitating, don’t go to
see movies like this. The Carlton they know inside and out because that is
where they stay. They know the Riviera altogether, in the 1950s haunt of the

3
For Kelly’s last time onscreen, since while shooting this film she met, fell in love with, and
subsequently married Prince Rainier of Monaco (but a short hop from Cannes).
226 THE FILM CHEAT

jet set and the mega-rich, Juan-les-pins, Antibes with its yacht basin, Cimiez
high above Nice. The chic clothing: Grace Kelly ain’t wearin’ schmatas. The
knowing dialogue. The jewels. The casualness of the seduction, as though it
were part of a repeated routine. Here, as in other depictions of wealth in
movies, we will be known to be watching out of a kind of resentment, a
paining regret that we don’t have the resources these two do.
But in the avidness of the watching, cannot our being lost in space be
cheated in itself? Is there a doorway out of here? If so (and we don’t see
one), where does it lead? How far off, and in what direction, is the lobby
and the hotel’s front door? Does that door face the Mediterranean or away
from it? And so on.
Seeing Francie and Robie occupying this room as they do, we have nothing
but a firm conviction in their belonging here, nor anything but the very
firmest conviction in the fullness, the completeness, and the unquestionability
of this here. Her hand comfortably, possessingly on the wood framing of the
loveseat, his graceful body leaning toward her amicably, the opened French
doors behind them, the sparkling tranquility—all these are made to appear
not so much fabulous, exotic, and exclusive as natural and right and proper.
The designer, J. McMillan “Mac” Johnson, has made certain that his hotel
room set will have just this kind of space, extending on both sides (but to
where?); room for just this kind of furniture as placed by the decorator Hal
Pereira; and a coloration scheme that when lit with color filters will produce
an ineluctable attraction to the eye.
If, by sharp contrast, we examine the design of a film like Alfonso Cuarón’s
Roma (2018) we find a domestic residence that sprawls shapelessly and in
which the camera—the narrative—will be (will have to be) in very constant
motion. The home is filled to overflowing with objects appropriate to the
bourgeoisie, continually speaking a motto, “Wealth, Privilege, Possession,”
but the film is about the characters only, mostly servants, this place and its
design being onscreen only to identify some of them and designate their
social positions. We move from character moment to character moment,
passing through the carefully packed and rather generally lit domain but
never really taking it in as a domain except in the most general way. The same
kind of optical unconcern attaches to other film places designed to show off
wealth, the home-castle in Firewall (2006), the cabin in the woods in Leave
Her to Heaven (1945), the actress’s home in Imitation of Life (1954), the
New York apartment in Rosemary’s Baby (1968: our protagonists live in
The Dakota!), the Minifer residence in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
These depictions contain in their design an implicit axiom, that we already
know the kind of life represented here, know it and are eager to see it, so
that in effect it needs only the most general kind of representation, only a
cue. In To Catch a Thief, the design is the film; the place is the action, yet
east and west, north and south are utterly confounded in the image. We can
know the directions, perhaps, but we cannot see them.
 32
Walk on the Wild Side

FIGURE 32 Two angles from the restaurant scene of The Man Who Knew Too
Much (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1956). Cinematography by Robert Burks.
Design by Henry Bumstead.
228 THE FILM CHEAT

It is interesting, if not mind-twisting, to think, “I am but I am not.” Sometimes

the graphic design of a scene takes us to such a thought.
We are invited to join our protagonists for a special dinner in Marrakech—
something “exotic”—by a traveling Frenchman who appears to know his
way around the really good spots. (How blissful to find such a person, or to
be found by him!) But at the last minute the man begs out. We go anyway.
And what a sumptuous place! Very very low tables, people seated on
enormous softly cushioned divans. Ornate hand-made tiles literally paving
the walls. Sedateness, good taste, even spicy intoxication. As our guests
position themselves (James Stewart and Doris Day; an extraordinarily tall
man and a glamorous woman), she sweetly placing herself on a divan and
he struggling mightily with his gangly legs to find a seat next to her, in which
he has no real backrest(!), we watch the buffoonery from, effectively, the
matching divan on the opposite side of their table. (This is good; we will be
able to smell the food!) We get the following view:

Close-focused long shot of the entire restaurant space with tables

stretching out to the back of the shot, the high airy ceiling, the hanging
chandeliers, the low table, the cobalt blue and white soft divan on which
our friends sit, and the tiled wall stretching on our right all the way past
them and alongside all the diners as far back as we can see.

The narrative and physical attractiveness of the two stars is plenty of reason
to concentrate on them at any rate, but if we need more reasons we can
count on (a) Day and Stewart holding principal status in the Hollywood
constellation; (b) Stewart’s magical show of stumbling, almost tripping, as
he steps over Day with us looking between his spread legs, as well as his
innocent Midwest, drawled bumbling as he moves; and (c) the magnificent
white and teal dress and matching cape Day is wearing out tonight. We are
concentrating on them, nice tidy shot, and thus taking the setting more or
less for granted once we quickly verify by sweeping inspection that it is the
Moroccan restaurant we have been promised.
Very pleasant. Some slight education about foreign climes. A private
entry to this tight American marriage.
A little time goes by.
Now the McKennas, our new friends, meet another couple who are sitting
back to back with them, the Draytons. Rather than trying to converse by
twisting their backs out of shape, they invite the Draytons to turn around and
take their seats, and they move across the table, now occupying the position
that the camera (that we) occupied previously. Sharing with strangers—the
epitome of hospitality and friendship. The two couples chat amicably.
But . . .
In order to get a better view, to see one couple at screen left, the other at
screen right, all in profile and all cheery as pie, we suddenly move to take
 WALK ON THE WILD SIDE  229

up a position where just earlier we saw a tile wall. We become, in fact, that
wall, and from the position of the wall look down the length of the table
to see the McKennas at left and the Draytons at right. Fun to watch them
break the bread, try to eat the roast squab in the tajine. And the Draytons
are as thoroughly British as the McKennas are thoroughly American, so this
is a friendly trans-Atlantic summit.
I here forego all discussion of the content of the discussion and what it
might come to reveal in turning the plot of The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1956), in order to focus on the subtle shift of perspective that has occurred,
already, twice in the scene. In the first instance, the camera traded places
with two characters. In the second, the camera is trading places with the set.
But in both cases we are implicated.
In both cases we are both viewers who can see and viewers who are
blocked from seeing. Early on, watching Ben and Jo, we cannot see where
Ben and Jo are soon to be sitting. Later, watching Ben, Jo, Lucy, and Edward
(“a big noise in agriculture”), we cannot see the restaurant wall that defines
the limit of their space.
As to that wall: when the camera (when we) become the wall (take up
the position where the wall was) we are caught in a conundrum, because
as agents of the film vision we can appreciate the shot composition but
as onlooking believers in the restaurant construction we are momentarily
stymied. Being positioned where we have just seen a tiled wall we are
obliged to occupy its dumb, uncalculating attitude, to be as neutral as it
was. Yet because a vision is offered to us here, by the camera, we must also
occupy the onlooker’s consciousness. Thus, we see (objectively) and we see
(personally, because we know the McKennas) simultaneously and at once, in
a puzzling stance that opens us to a wholly non-rational, wholly equivocal
kind of sight. Four tourists in Morocco; or two people with whom we have
bonded and the strangers they have just met. As to the soft divan: when
the camera (when we) occupied it and got a long shot of the restaurant
stretching past the McKennas, we used our eyes to see the full frame—as
much as the film camera ever allows viewers to see. But then the McKennas
take up our seat and we must “hop” to the wall (the aisle on the far side
being for the waiters to use, not for us).
The view to which we move is produced through a particular design cheat
called the “wild wall.” When a wall in a set is “wild,” it is built so as to be
completely, or partially removable, so that the camera can be placed where
that wall stood. There are other distinctive “wild” shots like these restaurant
shots to be found in Hitchcock, another in the Marrakech hotel room when
Dr. McKenna begins by unpacking clothing from a dresser backed up
against a wall and continues his action as perceived by us from that wall.
The legendary Rope (1948) is substantially dependent on wild walls that
are on rails, able to “swing back,” as Hitchcock said, “And the furniture
was mounted on rollers” (Truffaut 183). When a filmmaker expressly wants
230 THE FILM CHEAT

to work without wild walls, as is the case with Clint Eastwood, the camera
team must figure a way to use squeezed positions and wide-angle lenses to
shoot scenes inside small rooms.1
Another feature of the wild wall is that it claims a double identity. As a
floor-to-ceiling array of decorative tiles, for example, the restaurant wall is
part of the story-scene, an element in a setting declared openly by the story
and one that is shown to “establish a kind of realism,” inspiring the viewer
to think of what she is seeing as a representation of an actual place.2 At the
same time, and in a wholly contradictory way, the array is a pre-designed part
of the production, present to the view at one instant while always prepared
to be removed at another, but removed not only from view: removed also
from story-space and re-placed in production-space. When it is moved the
wild wall is part of the production, invisible to audiences. This wall is thus,
at each moment whether we are seeing it or not, both present and absent,
both a challenge to us and nothing at all. These antinomies make for a very
confounding, not to say disorienting mode of vision, and the secrecy of the
wildness helps audiences slide (wrongly) to the side of believing they are
simply always placed in the ideal position for taking a view.
To be noted: When first we see the tile wall—more accurately, when first
we are exposed to it—it functions casually and entirely unobtrusively as
a highly ornamental part of a highly ornamental interior design, a story
element helping to identify our surround. We do not gaze at it, but we do
recognize it instantly, and it belongs to the world of the story, the Marrakech
world, the exotic. But when, having taken the second camera position, we
think back in realizing that we are positioned where the wall was seen, it
has become something that could be manipulated at will, something to do
not with a story but with a set design. The divan that the McKennas move
over to occupy began for us, an assumed if not quite a presented audience,
as a camera position and became the McKennas’ seat. As in retrospect we
realize that this is where we were positioned to look at the restaurant the
divan becomes, now, a signal of the production of the film.
Why, one might reasonably ask, does the viewer typically not pause to
see this “many-sided” wall, not pause to consider how the story and the
production of the story are intertwined? Because a cheat has been made
to glide over the duplication of tasks. But how could such a cheat have
worked? To answer this we must briefly look at the restaurant as a good
example of Kenneth Burke’s grammar of ratios. Here is a scene in which

1
I am grateful to the late Henry Bumstead for sharing some of Eastwood’s preferences with
me, in 1998.
2
The restaurant, entirely fabricated on a Paramount soundstage, was intended to reproduce
an actual Marrakech restaurant and, secondly, all the tiles were hand crafted by the designer,
Henry Bumstead, after local patterns. More on the film can be found in my The Man Who
Knew Too Much, and the arrangements for the restaurant are described in detail in DeRosa.
 WALK ON THE WILD SIDE  231

some vital act takes place. We are thus confronted with a scene: act ratio,
for Burke a declaration that this act is (always already) properly the kind
of act to be observed (set) in a scene like this one; and that this scene
is (always already) properly the kind of place in which one easily and
reasonably finds such an act. A unity of movement and place. But the Burke
scene: act ratio is not even-sided. In a story film, especially a suspense film
like The Man Who Knew Too Much, action must always be set in the right
place but also always take precedence over that place in the perceptual
routine. The place is quickly registered and laid away, so that the behavior
can take the spotlight; indeed, the action becomes dominant in this scene,
and after we register the identity and nature of the restaurant as a space
we dismiss the place from attention. Filmmakers know this pattern. When
he designed the restaurant for Paramount’s Stage 1, Henry Bumstead was
fully aware that he could make a wild wall for Hitchcock, and that if the
wall as an object would at first be enticing yet soon it would recede, taking
its wildness with it.3
Were viewers fixated on cardinal directions and the absolute definition
of diegetic space, they would have to map out that restaurant, and the wild
wall would be impossible as part of that map since features on non-fictional
maps do not toggle between appearance and disappearance. That tiled wall
is only to Ben and Jo’s left (which is nothing but screen right) and then their
right (nothing but screen left); screen right and screen left, not right and left.
And then it vanishes, and then it is nowhere.

3
The restaurant sequence was made June 27, 28, and 29, 1955, the first days at the studio after
a substantial filming voyage to Morocco and London.
 33
Happy Trails

FIGURE 33 James Mason (l.), Christopher Olsen, and Barbara Rush in Bigger
Than Life (Nicholas Ray, Twentieth Century Fox, 1956).

So compactly and coherently are filmic action and filmic setting unified,
when the artists at hand are expert, that one thinks of the two as being
not only interrelated but mutually generative in an ongoing way. When, at
the end of Bringing Up Baby (1938), Cary Grant’s David has finally found
his cherished dinosaur bone and is climbing up a scaffolding to place it
in the culminating position on that massive skeleton, the massive skeleton
happens to be there waiting for him, and so does the scaffolding: the latter
looks just flimsy enough to give us the barest hint that it might not be as
sturdy as poor David would like, and the former looks like a catastrophe
waiting for its moment. When, in Six Degrees of Separation (1993) Flan
(Donald Sutherland) wants to impress his guest Geoffrey from South Africa
(Ian McKellen) by taking him aside and showing him a transparency of a
Cézanne he intends to have, the warmly lit study is there for them to be
 HAPPY TRAILS  233

alone in, a haven, silent, plushly lit, and the Cézanne transparency, provided
by props, looks perfect when held up to the light in this place: so perfect,
in fact, that when Flan says he plans to have it and turn it around for a
quick sale, anybody who loved Cézanne would be chagrined. When, in The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), the nineteenth-century Dr. Grogan
must be presented in his private study, the study is there for Leo McKern to
walk into, jammed with skeletons, glass cases, weighty tomes, magnifying
glasses, and such like, and all of the furniture looking as though it has been
there forever inside these sanctified walls that, bordered by nicely painted
trim—trim lit by candles—treasure the deepest past. One has the feeling of
the designer and the director confabulating in a corner, the actors fully made
up in role standing by patiently yet with extreme eagerness to inhabit the
scene, though of course the confabulation happened long in advance of the
actors’ presence, possibly before they were even hired.
What could it mean to speak of a unity of action and scene, in film?
Proportion, for one thing. That the space in which characters move seems
to fit them, and they it; trees larger than humans, but not so much larger
that the humans become insects (unless, as with the Vertigo forest, that is
the effect). Rooms appropriate to a social class. Modes of transportation
believable for the characters at the moment, containing within them a
believably sized space. Further, spaces that are “designed” in the diegesis
should fit the character’s apparent taste. All of this is carefully done in such
a way that it is clearly and variably photographable, in short no touches
that cannot show up on camera. And a scene, as well, magnificent enough to
apprehend, so that it captures the viewer’s attention; yet not so magnificent
that it abstracts the attention away from the character at a key moment. A
character can stand at a plate glass window, for example, looking out upon
a splendid lake with mountains and a sunset, but all of the terrain must
recede when we see the side of the gazer’s intentful face.
A collaboration of filmmaker and film designer. But this collaboration is
largely cheated. Audiences are not to detect it. The scene is “naturally” this
way. The character is here, but the here is merely present for the character to
inhabit. Nor the place itself but its face. Not the redwoods as used for Kim
Novak and James Stewart but the way those redwoods are made to look,
since, like a place, a scene is not a space (see Tuan, Space and Place). The
awesomeness of the Vertigo redwood forest is distinctive, even unforgettable;
but it is not the same as the awesomeness of the actual redwood forest, what
Novak and Stewart would actually have experienced in making Madeleine
and Scottie experience the “redwood forest.”
In practice, the director-designer arrangement tends to work this way:
Having carefully read, annotated, and thought about the script, the
designer knows what diegetic “locations” will be needed. Let us take Nicholas
Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956). (1) An elementary school classroom where
Ed Avery (James Mason), finishing up a day’s teaching with a sweet but slow-
234 THE FILM CHEAT

witted student, prepares to leave; also set here will be a night-time parent-
teacher session later on. (2) The teachers’ lounge in the same school, where
he meets a few colleagues and reminds them about the party at his house
tonight. (3) The Avery house, with a front yard, a back yard grassed over
(in which some action will occur), a living room, a den, a kitchen, a hallway
with a staircase up to the bedrooms, an upper landing. (4) The Averys’
bedroom upstairs. (5) The upstairs bathroom. (6) The taxi depot where Ed is
moonlighting. (7) A medical consultation facility with, among other things,
a fluoroscope. (8) A doctor’s office for discussions. (9) A department store
where Ed can buy his wife an expensive dress she protests she does not need.
(10) A church for a Sunday morning service. (11) A hospital room where
Ed, seriously overdosed with cortisone, lays in agony and finally recovers.
(12) The hospital corridor outside this room. The designer is getting a rough
idea of places, not exact behavioral movement that will occur in them and
how broadly that will be choreographed. He will build every space to be a
choreographable space and the director will use it as he will.
The designer is thinking, which of these are interior spaces and which
exteriors? Translated: how many scenes can be shot on hunted-out real
locations, how many will require sets to be built on soundstages? And
regarding the latter, which soundstages, that is, which studio? The designer
is familiar with all the soundstages at the major studios and many at the
legion minor studios in the Los Angeles area, the New York area, the London
area, the Vancouver area, and so on, and what he doesn’t know he can
fairly easily learn, since the studio will offer up a map with specifications
for each stage: height, length, width, grid structure, whether or not there is
a removable floor, whether there is a pool. Bigger Than Life is a Paramount
production: will the set-building be on-lot at Paramount (5555 Marathon
Street, Los Angeles) and if so, which exact stages will be rentable for the
designer’s use (the designer will have preferences)?1 For each interior “room”
in the diegesis: is it connected to any other space and must passage between
the spaces be possible for the actors or will those movements be handled
through matching edits (in which case the two sets can be miles apart)?
For making exterior shots that include part of the house, how much of the
house will have to be built, and what arrangements made so that this part
matches against interiors built elsewhere?2 How big will the location appear
to be in the story, measured, say, in feet, and how big would the set have to
be so that the camera could give the impression of that diegetic size, using a

1
The floor being removable there to yield an extra ten feet of height, Paramount’s Stage 18 was
ideal for the single set of Rear Window (1954) and later for the sorority house of Jerry Lewis’s
The Ladies Man (1962).
2
In North by Northwest (1959) the memorable Vandamm house (in the Frank Lloyd Wright
style) is a matte painting. The on-set build included the very lowest beams only and a separate
piece for a balcony and a railing. Cary Grant never gets very far off the studio floor here.
 HAPPY TRAILS  235

50 mm, a 75 mm, a 100 mm, a 40 mm, a 35 mm, and a 28 mm lens? (The

designer will not have been forewarned about lens size.) How big would
the set have to be (each set) for accommodating the camera and necessary
crew? Since usually in advance one cannot know whether the camera will be
stationary or moving or both, how much room should be “reserved” for it?
Can any portions of the sets be joined so that a single construction allows
for movement and shooting in more than one place in continuous action?
This last because it costs money to rent a studio soundstage and saving
unnecessary expense is always a concern.
Now the production manager is called in to see the set list and two sets of
estimations are made in writing. The cost of each construction and of each
outside location rental; and the ideal way of scheduling use of all the built
sets in one phase of the shooting process and all the outside locations in
another. This latter calculation tends to have little to do with the designer’s
needs directly except that it will dictate the order in which sets need to
be used (thus, built). It is more dependent on the actors’ required scenes
(alone or with others) and work contracts. Typically all the scenes involving
one particular supporting player (in this film, Walter Matthau, flown in
from New York) will be scheduled back to back on as few shooting days as
possible; but how many, and which, different sets would be needed to make
that possible? Those would all have to be ready for camera on the specific
dates that have been arranged for him to be in Los Angeles (at a hotel the
producer is paying for), and given that it takes time to build sets the building
would have to start considerably in advance of the actor’s presence. Will
any diegetic “damage” be done to the set in any part of these scenes? If so,
and if the set is to be used “clean” later on, how much time and cost will be
involved in undoing the “damage”—that is, how can the “damaging act” be
set up so as not to really antagonize the design? As for set construction, one
feature the producer has to worry over is the sound stage space needed for
building each set, since all the stage costs—a portion of the studio’s heating
and electricity; a portion of the film budget’s total overhead—need to be
absorbed in the budget, and they vary with stage size. Can the Avery living
room and the Avery dining room, one on either side of the central hallway,
all be built together on one stage? What proportion of the stage is needed
for this—could the schoolroom be built in another part of the same stage?
Studio charges are for the entire sound stage, with all its built-in amenities
(listed for producers’ consideration).3
Then design sketches, benefiting from the work of the studio’s Research
Department (“What does a hospital corridor in a small town look like?”);
consultation with the producer as to cost and the director as to feasibility

3
MGM’s “Munchkinland” occupied only one corner, about one sixth, of their Stage 27. The
village of Brigadoon took up the whole place.
236 THE FILM CHEAT

for the storytelling and the cinematographer and costumer in terms of colors
and textures. Then calculating the time required in the studio’s carpentry
shop, the materials, the labor for building, the labor for delivery to the stage
and erecting, and also the labor for striking and removing when the shooting
is done. Is it possible that all the scenes of the classroom can be shot at one
time (regardless of cast), so that after a few days that set can come down and
be replaced, on the same stage, with another one?
But now a more delicate, more penetrating problem, once all of the
carpentry cheats have been accomplished, all external locations have been
spotted and legally arranged for (a written contract for each one with
the owner or supervisor of the property). Where will the director put his
camera? What will the camera see and not see of this interesting place? That
is, what has to be made perfect for camera, what can be left undone? (Will
the bedsheets be pulled down?) Sets can theoretically be built only partially,
to work for the scene the camera will frame. (Most Hollywood sets are
built without ceilings, for just one example, but doorways can lead nowhere,
tables have nothing in their drawers, the kitchen cupboards, like Mother
Hubbard’s, be bare.) Some set designers work with meticulous knowledge
of where the camera will be for every shot made on a set they are building
and what will and will not be seen there, the director having thought this
through long in advance and given consultation. In other cases the director
comes onto the set, often alone, and figures out what will be done today,
and how, right in the space itself. On top of all this, if painted backings are
to hang behind portions of the set (viewed through windows or doorways,
for example: an extremely typical tactic, used considerably also in television
and made-for-tv movies), what colors will the scenic painters use for those
backings and what adjustments to the colors on set will be needed—or, for
economy, will preexisting skyscraper or other backings be used? Such things
are available. What film stock will the cinematographer be using and what
will that stock do to shift the colors as finally printed: Technicolor (before
1956), Eastmancolor, Fujicolor, Agfacolor—these all work differently.
Some designers work on the basis of an overriding principle: that they
do not know now, and will never know, what the director will want to see
or what the actors will want to do, so the entire set must be made for show,
including the backs of doors, the area behind furniture, the inside of desk
drawers! Nothing—but nothing—left out. The director has freedom to go
where he will, show what he desires, no limit. The designer knows that he
will not be at the director’s side.
He will not be at the director’s side because he is several days to a week
ahead of the director all through the production, busy planning, making,
and setting up designs that won’t be used until later, by which point he
will have moved on again. The director and actors, the cinematographer,
the support crew will arrive for work early one morning and find the story
 HAPPY TRAILS  237

world they need ready and waiting for them to inhabit. It will be built to
work, and they will work it.
So effectively will the designed world seem to have been arranged, so
considerately designed, so artfully crafted, so tastefully surfaced and
textured and painted, and so easily will the characters move about there as
we watch, that the thing seems nothing less than real, and real, too, seems the
characters’ involvement with the place. In The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
(1962), a kitchen with paneled cabinets filled with tea cups and food items.
In The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and E.T. (1982), a kitchen equipped
with a modern refrigerator that will teem with food and drink when the
door is dramatically opened. It is certainly part of the actor’s talent to give
the impression of comfort and ease in a place never known until now, and
she will walk around and rehearse if necessary in order to “learn” the place;
but unless the place is designed to offer comfort first, the actor cannot do
the work.
North by Northwest is an excellent example of set cheats, because
Robert Boyle, the designer, had a keen eye for realistic detail and because he
intimately knew Hitchcock’s framing. The lobby of Roger’s office building
on Madison Avenue, a built set. The Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, a built set.
The Townsend mansion interior, a built set. The Plaza Hotel’s room 796, a
built set. The lobby and delegates’ lounge of the United Nations, built sets.
The dining car of the 20th Century Limited, a built set. Eve’s sleeper, a built
set. Parts of the cornfield recreated on the rear-projection stage. The Shaw
& Oppenheim auction house, a built set. The interior of Midway Airport, a
built set. Portions of the Mt. Rushmore monument, a built set. The interior
and close-up exterior of the Vandamm residence, a built set. The viewing
platform and visitors’ center of the Mt. Rushmore monument, built sets.
Roger’s hospital room, a built set.
The cheating designer, hard at work building what will seem a real place
of one kind when in truth it is a real place of another, must have fidelity, and
show that there is fidelity, in two matters:
First, making the specially built nature of the set disappear behind utter
conventionality of design, so that instead of looking like a design the set
looks like an actual place: in short, faking style. In Billy Wilder’s Sabrina
(1954) we are treated to an executive boardroom with attached kitchenette
and high windows looking out at the Hudson River. Hal Pereira and Walter
Tyler give us a mammoth polished table (ideal for William Holden to
go sliding on after Humphrey Bogart lands him one on the kisser). The
kitchenette is used briefly, but not centrally in frame. The window plays
urgently, but we never get a good enough look outside to determine the
fakery of the painted backing that hangs there. The whole place is dressed
“expensive,” as it belongs to a corporation run by a fabulously wealthy
family and they apparently spare no expense: viewers have likely never been
238 THE FILM CHEAT

in such a place and so if it is large enough to hold the action, the engaging
action by major movie stars who take our eye, it will be fine.
Secondly, the designer is completely covering up the fact of the faking, a
matter of key importance, just as actors cover up the fact of the acting. The
picture in all its aspects seems to flow off the screen in a golden aura of not
just authenticity but spontaneous authenticity. Albeit there are times when a
film set looks somewhat like a film set, because it has been designed to look
precisely that way: one will find this frequently in the Hollywood musical,
where ongoingly the set supports the action and the action is more oneiric
than practical.
 34
The Thing

FIGURE 34 Life (Daniel Espinosa, Columbia, 2017).

It may well be that the fighting forest in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900) gave inspiration to Walt Disney for his 1932 animated film Flowers
and Trees, but it certainly led to the forest sequence in MGM’s 1939
film. The inanimate (or imperceivably animate) becomes—surprisingly—
animate. The trees sprout mouths and make language of a kind, using
their branches as arms to encircle our friendly quartet. Here is a primary
example—though, given Lang’s Metropolis (1927), not the first example—
of the object becoming characterological. Think of The Mummy (1932)
rising from the dead, the dinosaur bone at war with the terrier in Bringing
Up Baby (1938), the controlling, perhaps malevolent power of the “dingus”
in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the unholy power of the box in Kiss Me
Deadly (1955), the living playroom in Tom Thumb (1958), the mobilizing
force of the slab, a font of intelligence, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),
the creature disguising itself as conduits and storage space in Alien (1979),
240 THE FILM CHEAT

the talking stone wall in The Princess Bride (1987). I avoid mentioning the
numerous occasions in the Harry Potter saga when some thing behaves as
though it is an embodied consciousness, a significant object upon which
canniness, motivational design, and purpose have been inscribed. The thing
made “flesh.”
Less disturbing somehow but equally products of the systematic animation
of matter are robots, advanced computers, and alien tools: HAL in Space
Odyssey, Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956), Gort in The Day
the Earth Stood Still (1951), the velocitor in This Island Earth (1955), R2-
D2 and C-3PO, bless them. A smartness, a power, and a plan that gain
dramatic potency by apparently superseding what human agents can do.
Achieving the hybrid characteristics of these creature-devices, these
device-creatures, requires a design cheat. The object in question must
be made to look on first examination like a product of human or alien
engineering, and this examination, as choreographed in the flow of narrative
cinema, is not likely to be slow and patient. A surface of metal, usually
polished (a signal that atmospheres will offer no resistance). Controls, often
illuminated (the power room of the Krell in Planet is a spectacular array
of lights). Mechanical (rhythmic, unstoppable) agencies: arms, grapplers,
magnets, emitted rays, moving parts (Robbie the Robot being quite hilarious
because of the contradictory direction in which some of his parts move
simultaneously—a sign of delightful confusion). Essential is that the Thing
be conveyed as fully and swiftly as possible in the form of the inhuman,
a being that was born of no mother—this orphanage, so to speak, being
the root of the affecting pathos in the finale of 2001 when HAL sings his
“kindergarten” song and introduces his “parents.” No human birth, at least
not a normal one, yet also nothing spiritual in the sense that we accord in
legends of Jesus, also not born of mother in a normal way. This inhuman
birth makes for a coldness and inhospitability, a calculation, a mathematical
soul. The thing as machine, then. The machine as un-alive.
But also the Thing as touchingly animate. A discernable personality, a
spirit of good or evil to mobilize action, a ferocity or gentleness that sensitive
human characters find affecting. Also, a diligent capability that trumps
human skill: objects can be hurled at greater speed and frequency, chemistry
can be converted, sinews can be manipulated, a ringing metallic voice can
issue commands impossible not to follow. To get at this we must see some
simulacrum of the dominating face, or an arrangement that we can willingly
and pleasurably choose to interpret as a face. By presenting the mechanical
surface first, and in some telling detail, the photography allows for the
animated qualities—the suddenly appearing control surfaces—to be seen in
light of mechanism, thus, not life per se but a machine that seems “alive,” as
well as seeming to seem. Yet also consider the formula exercised in reverse,
something first seen in light of the fully human, a person who turns out—
that turns out—to be a machine. Consider the death of the science officer
 THE THING  241

Ash (Ian Holm) in Alien, as, his head struck off by a fierce blow he continues
to flail, finally making it clear that he was, all along, (only) robotic. This is
a human become mechanical, a degradation. The machine become human,
like the animal become human(oid) (Caesar in War for the Planet of the
Apes [2017], who, as we all know, is mo-capped by Andy Serkis), is climbing
the “ladder,” doing what evolutionary theory tells us we all did a long, long
time ago. Doing what we did, the Thing becomes like us, conspecific in a
way, recognizable. “This thing of darkness I/acknowledge mine.”
The animate mechanism as graphic subject runs the risk of bringing
laughter or dismissal. Robbie the Robot works powerfully because, although
his plexi head allows us to see desperately whirring mechanisms (puppy
learning new tricks) he is still a major player in more than one scene of
violent aggression where he shows amazing brute force. But the animus,
the spirit of what had been a stationary, immobile thing is tricky because
it can seem to come out of nowhere, which means, of course, out of some
designer’s toolbox off-camera. If sympathetic characters fall under machine
power and are threatened there; or if they accept benevolent but “living”
machines as friendly forces, we can be persuaded to take the things very
seriously indeed: this happens over and over, both for good and for trouble,
in Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequels. It is a recurring trope in war films
where an endangered flyer seizes the controls of a damaged aircraft and
saves the day (this apotheosized by Luke in the starfighter at the climax of
Star Wars [1977]).
What considerations come into play when mechanism or solid objectivity
comes “alive” believably onscreen?
●● In effect, the now living thing will become a character, like all other
characters in a fictional zone. One danger is that, only because of
its physicality, it might come to seem much more interesting than
human characters, more compelling even than the stars of the film.
The viewer is therefore, quite intentionally, given limited access to
this Thing, and access only at dramatic points when the involvement
of the creature is central to the story either as action continuity or as
comic relief. The Thing is given an introductory scene of its own, so
to speak, but then relegated to secondary status. Even in conflictual
conclusion sequences, where a heroic human must battle the Thing,
the human gets more camera time, which means that the shots of the
Thing must be very carefully calculated to be specially informative.
Arnold Schwarzenegger concluding his battle with the alien in the
finale of Predator (1987).
●● But what we will be encouraged to forget or dismiss as irrelevant
is this: that before it was characterized, the Thing was part of the
setting, a kind of mass ornament, mass in the sense adduced by
Kracauer describing telltale cultural formations (as he writes, of
242 THE FILM CHEAT

Weimar culture) that arise but not from the people and are without
a “current of organic life.” There is in the character-object a kind of
“linearity”:

The more the coherence of the figure is relinquished in favor of

mere linearity, the more distant it becomes from the immanent
consciousness of those constituting it. Yet this does not lead to its
being scrutinized by a more incisive gaze. In fact, nobody would
notice the figure at all if the crowd of spectators, who have an
aesthetic relation to the ornament and do not represent anyone,
were not sitting in front of it. (77)

The Machine-Thing was an element in the place, finally turned in nature so

that it could ground a principal (but also wholly human) action. Now the
set itself has come to life. This thought alone is so potentially disturbing, at
least so confusing, it is easier for the viewer if the camera pulls in from the
set to concentrate (in close shot) on a particular item ready for conversion.
In the brain-dismantling scene of 2001, the pull-in gives us to view first
small arrays of white information cells, then reveals, closer, only a few. But
the computer is the entire room, totally surrounding the hero. The fading
voice gives accompaniment to the diminishing size of the array made visible.
Yet, too, the non-organic white cells are already, if only vaguely, like any
human, in that a keenly directed touch can have profound effect on them.
●● In being characterized, the Thing will have attributes similar to
those of other characters, attributes just such as characters in film
dramas possess generally. Yet on balance it can never be quite
the magnet the human characters are. It will be motile. It will be
“conscious.” It will have particular dexterities (and, useful for plot
termination, particular deficiencies as well). And it will have—or
through audience invocation will be read as having—personality.
The distinction between human and non-human characters being
a central maintenance problem, the personality of the Thing will
be described in much more limited, much more superficial (again,
“linear”) terms. If at crisis moments the robot seems precisely as
human as human characters do, it actually is, functionally speaking,
never quite a human character. Robbie the Robot can hilariously
make bourbon for Earl Holliman, but he never understands what he
is doing, why he is doing it, or what the effects will be, even though
he suffers some of them! HAL-9000 is not at first shown to be as
manipulative, as conniving, or as confused in motivation as the
astronauts he taunts, and he has a cajoling, persuasive voice (thanks
to Douglas Rains) but finally he is a cipher-brute. In The Stepford
Wives (1975) the suburban women finally discovered as much less
 THE THING  243

human than they looked are reduced qualitatively by inclusion in a

massive group of such beings, all of them more or less identical and
thus only superficially personal.
●● Often the Living Thing will ultimately suffer degradation at the
hands of human characters, being relegated in that way to a status
closer to that of objective matter than that of human life. Or (again
in reverse) it will come out of extremely elemental, simplified (say,
amoebic) matter and grow into a “personality,” as we see in Daniel
Espinosa’s Life (2017). Moderating during the film between the
elemental and the mature, the material and the sophisticated, it
will conclude in regression to its origins, or at least notably in that
direction, as happens to the alien Thing in Alien at the very end,
when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) triumphs over it; or to HAL when
Dave (Keir Dullea) dismantles him; or even to Robbie, who becomes
wholly (and happily) a pet aboard the starship when Altair-4
disintegrates.
●● Yet, too, the pure Thing-ness of the Thing is hardly sufficient to
mobilize audience fears, and at some critical moment in the story
it will show itself more venomous, more irrational, more capable
of negativity than any other character around, if inexplicably so.
Structurally in the story the final victory over the Thing is achieved
as revenge for some earlier destruction, when it abuses, degrades,
tortures, and dispenses with a disposable human character,
beloved to other characters. This theme of vengeful destruction
and unbounded Thingish capability is carried to exciting extremes
in Life, where the initially tender and innocent cell grows into a
giant and malevolent Entity, horrifically terminating crew members
aboard a spacecraft in which it is running loose.
●● A general testament to, even paean to technological progress typifies
Thing stories. Very typically, first deployed as a machine or device
created by people but magically gaining more power than they
accorded it, the Thing proceeds along a destructive line growing
in stature and malevolence as the story unwinds. Finally, however,
the human capacity for invention—the same capacity that gave
birth to, that animated, the object in the first place—stands over
the Machine’s power, either destroying or stalling or freezing or
expelling it. We can always go further, the film says. We will build
a better Thing next time. But there will surely be a next time, and
when it happens we will be there. Technological advancement as
eternal life.
●● Or wholesale disguise. The Thing, immensely powerful and a Force
of Nature in itself, made into what it is, perhaps, through ignorant
human agency (Godzilla) or by an organic world far more complex
244 THE FILM CHEAT

than man has understood (Prometheus [2012]), never appears at

all as an object to be transformed; but meets our gaze instantly
and wholly as a fully articulate Golem, promising to control the
world. I have in mind that splendid special-effects creation, the giant
squid in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), a matter of
puppeted tentacles detached from any clearly visible central body.
Or the now much celebrated (and much dismissed) shark in Jaws
(1975) which appeared when the film was released in a bubble of
such terrifying presence that audiences tried to recoil in their seats.
Irvin Yeaworth’s blob worked much this way in The Blob (1958),
particularly because, as was arranged later by Spielberg for his
shark, the Thing got very little, and only the most dramatically
significant, camera time. Things like these are objective and material,
but are not presented that way at all, the illusion (cheat) being
effected upon (and for) us that the animation we see is real, that in
truth the Machine is alive. Thus is sung and sung again the ballad of
material progress, the melodic reassurance that once the Things have
us, once we are converted, we will find immortality.
 35
Heist

FIGURE 35 Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (Mike Nichols,
Lawrence Turman/Embassy, 1967).

Especially—but not only—in contemporary cinema (adventures, action

comedies, etc.), we experience something that could easily be morally
perturbing. Extreme violence, for example, including radical depictions of
dismemberments and bodily fragmentations (worked through, we are not
always comforted to know, with expensive makeup). Medical or other death
scenes. White collar crime of a high order, say drug cartels holding hundreds
of millions of dollars and more (and associated bloodshed). Vituperative,
hateful, scornful, demeaning, and unpoetic language used with staccato
repetition, to “simulate real social conditions.” Extremely direct portrayals
of sexual encounters.
It is not a matter of prurience to consider the moral implications of
such material, since in our everyday lives we do so all the time, at least by
implication. From extreme gun violence we turn a moral eye, or, enacting
246 THE FILM CHEAT

both self-preservation and morality, we flee; from bombs we keep distant

if we can, and we do not condone their usage excitedly, notwithstanding
the aesthetic “fireworks” effects we might imagine. Deaths of strangers we
respect by not watching. Sex we relegate to our imaginations, and eschew
opportunities to visit and observe those engaged in it. Crime we neither
see nor expect to see when it is managed at a high level, since part of the
management is evasion of detection. Mary McIntosh: “When he is working,
the thief aims not to be noticed by his victim and to look, if he is seen at all,
as if he has other and legitimate business” (105). As to abusive language,
when it races in torrents we might attempt to shut the ears against the flow:
is this a person in desperation? Is this a ticquer?
Yet in cinema we avidly attend.
Attend with ongoing fascination, expanding feeling, expectations of
climaxes that never quite come. One might easily have the impression that
the climax has actually not been slotted into the shooting schedule: the
actual effect of gunshot wounds; the actual outcome of death scenes; the
actual big payoff in big-time crime; the orgasmic pleasure; the effect on user
and victim of vituperative language. These fulsome factualities are elided,
but the scenes invoking them are played out, again and again, always with
the same conventional structure and only slight decorative variation. Even
drug highs are pointed to only obtusely, as with Peter Fonda in the relatively
spectacular LSD scenes in The Trip (1967); but withdrawal, coming back to
the norm, can get extreme treatment, as in the long “cold turkey” sequence
with Gene Hackman in French Connection II (1975).
Such blissfully painful, penetrating, provocative, private moments: how
is it that while modesty, shame, or dignity prevent us from watching them in
the everyday, should they present themselves, and hold us back from seeking
to find them, we can be so ready to see them depicted onscreen? Moments
of the loss of self.
[1] One argument, essentially a psychoanalytical thesis, is that we do
very much wish to watch, deeply, madly, truly—scopophilia—but repress
the desire in the name of civilized propriety, propriety as to behavior with
other people, propriety as to approvable seeming. The gawking urge is
always there, but held back, held down. As the film we are watching doesn’t
constitute behavior with other people, not really, not exactly, here in the
cavern, our deep desire can be released in the dark. In watching filmic sex and
violence, we are doing what we secretly wish we could be doing all the time
everywhere—watching, digesting the world’s culture—and one signal value
of cinema (such an argument maintains) is that it offers this opportunity for
undoing the repression in a safe, which is to say controlled, environment. As
different people with differing life backgrounds have different buried tastes,
film scenes that reveal the interior of life, as it were, will not be universally
appealing; some may even put some viewers off while turning other viewers,
a few seats down, on.
 HEIST  247

[2] Another argument is that nobody takes any of these direct intimate
scenes, as they are portrayed on film, the least bit seriously in the terms
they offer. We recognize that we are being given only passing nibbles,
leading us to a sensible moral resolution in which the good will end well,
the bad unwell, and the world will remain intact. We must witness a very
dirty moment indeed so that the hero can be in a position to appear heroic
by making things clean. This is essentially a dramaturgical argument: the
violence is structurally necessary as a set-up for the sanctified retribution.
Sanctification, order, permanence—these are the principal targets, not
characters, feelings, or storylines. And not hidden drives or pathologies.
[3] A third argument, very popular in the second decade of the twenty-
first century, is that sex, violence, hard language, wounding, death, and
rampant crime are quotidian attributes of the world in which we live.1 The
world has become this way, wake up and try to smell the artificial roses.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s the world was an entirely different
kind of place (say viewers too young to have been there). The film is merely
reaching for realism in the spirit of not hoodwinking its audience, telling
a truth, revealing the everyday to us in a light that will help us see it more
clearly. Call this the pedagogical argument. Without scenes of hardness and
cruelty, without dark penetrations, a film would be only juvenile fluff, indeed
hype. Fluff, I should add, as abounds, these critics claim, in purportedly
discardable Hollywood films of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Fluffy,
nonsensical, unreal.

              Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
(T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”)

These three arguments about the depiction of the secret, the blistering, the
agonizing, the violent, and the private onscreen can all be countered, and
without making roundabout voyages.
• The educational argument [3]: First, the world in which we live actually
doesn’t look as things do onscreen, not at all. The participants are far less
ably choreographed in everyday life and far less distinctive to look at, since
unlike screen performers, who must labor to be where they are, the folks
we see on the street haven’t worked with a choreographer and haven’t

1
A world, Bertrand Russell told Romney Wheeler in 1952, in which (already) it was very
difficult for an old man (he was approaching 80) to live. He said, too, that he thought no one
who was born after 1914 could possibly understand what it had been for him to grow up (in
the late nineteenth century).
248 THE FILM CHEAT

sat in the make-up chair. Further, everyday action is subtler in most cases,
harder to grasp quickly and easily (as we must be led to do by the cheats of
the camera). Action is subtler, more unresolved, often unresolvable, often
unclear, but onscreen each instant must have clarity, even the instant of
narcotized unclarity. Another way to put this: the viewer must never be lost
at the point of the punch line. But then the punch line and what cacophonies
lead up to it are not so very much like our lives. The images of life given on
the daily news are constructed to appeal the way film images do, directly,
bluntly, in high contrast. Life is not life dramatized.
• The dramaturgical argument [2]: Taken alone, this is not off-center
but is finally too simple. Film stories don’t follow a single roadmap, nor is
the screen giving over only a story. A film can be structured in many ways,
including a hypermoral situation leading to a criminal one, not the other
way round. Nor, in cases of holy retribution, is our nobly vengeful hero
ever shown to experience serious pleasure, release, or moral contentment
for having erased the dirt. That the hero would redeem a sacred world in
eliminating evil—that the dirty evil is placed in the film to permit this—is an
assumption that makes for a difficult reading of, say, The Godfather (1972),
or even, examined closely, The Wizard of Oz (1939).
• The psychoanalytical argument [1]: The proposition that we gawk only
or principally because we deeply want to see what we “should not” has a
deep (yet untestable) logic, but those who support it make the mistake of
taking representational realism as a given, the dirty image onscreen as a
double for some dirty display in the everyday. Their case always rests on the
idea that outside the theater, just as inside, violence and darkness are what
we secretly wish to look at, that going to the movies only heightens, polishes,
and extends the action in which we are already always engaged. But the
screen image isn’t quite a window on things, and the relentlessness in the
presentation of screen violence belies a social world in which many kinds of
activity take place, not all of them enticing our secret desires. If scopophilia
is engendered very deeply in the human condition, this insatiable craning of
the spirit toward sight, it is hardly directed only at the taboo, only at the
prurient, only at the shameful, and is therefore hardly always problematic.
The hunger for vision applies to even the most casual and peremptory
seeings, the ornamental lights in the lobby of the movie theater, the screen
depictions of grass growing. Yearning to see is not elementally bound to the
urge to discover what has been held back.
What if we acknowledge that as settings for film stories, violence and
sex are fake, and palpably so? Either viewers in the know see the open
duplicities, or ignorant viewers realize that what they see is part of a film.
No one watching a murder onscreen, for instance, believes (a) that a real
murder took place before the camera and therefore that (b) they are, by
watching, accomplices. No one watching what is purported to be sexual
intercourse feels moral qualms, thinking that what’s onscreen is reality, since
 HEIST  249

the framing, the timing, the rhythm, the musical treatment, the lighting, and
the specific viewing angles are far too contrived. What if instead of claiming
to be hoodwinked by the fake, taken in, robbed of the real by illusion, we
confess that we know all along we are getting paste? More: getting a paste
is what we adore. Then:
Secondly, what if part of the appealing fakery, as we see and appreciate
it, is the very sophistication of its production, the sheen, the high-resolution
frame captures, the gorgeous lighting? What if we come to believe we are
seeing not merely a fake but a fake of the highest quality, the kind expressly
designed to deceive hapless others who do not have the perceptual acumen
that we do? It is a deception, but for them. We are not deceived because we
would not fear deception. In this way we become virtual appraisers of art,
priests who offer (or hesitate to offer) authentication. Knowing the screen
image is fake, but also recognizing it is such a magnificent fake we have no
compunction admitting to being pleasured seeing it, we become cognoscenti,
true connoisseurs of the new visual high cuisine. Yet this is cynical. It is
possible that in accepting the cheat for what it is we are making a profound
acknowledgment, coming to a fuller appreciation of the cinematic process.
A third term in the equation. We not only know fakery when we see it,
and have learned to appreciate first-class fakery, but then, growing into film
watching by way of screenings and discussions online and offline we come
into the desire to catch the best fakes possible, like getting the best pizza in
town, snagging the put-up shows that come closest to what we call “the real”
without actually going all the way. We are not only connoisseurs; we are like
art thieves whose great pleasure it is to nab from the grandest museum, in the
thick of night and amid confounding truckloads of buffoonish police, some
utterly refined sculpture that is the museum’s great treasure, worth a fortune
but also—and only we have the advantage of knowing this—a complete and
utter fake, made originally as such and placed on the pedestal to replace an
actual treasure so priceless no one is given access to it. This action is spelled
out through the mythology of “the story” in William Wyler’s How to Steal a
Million (1966), but the assumptions behind it, the way it mirrors a possible
general attitude, is left unexplored there.
What if cinema has made all of us appraisers, specialists with an eye for
fakes and especially brilliant fakes? Or if not an eye, a heart?
If the cheat is a theft of credulity, a kind of heist, rather than clinging
to “the authentic,” whatever that is, we can admire the cheat; become
aficionados of all those delicious heist movies with an adorable crew—not
only George Clooney but George Clooney and Brad Pitt; not only them but
also Matt Damon; and also and also—aiming for the gargantuan gleaming
emerald, the last painting of the great French Impressionist Henri-Charles du
Parc de la Vallée, the contents of the casino vault, the storehold of the Bank
of England, the night’s take in Las Vegas’s five biggest casinos all at once (as
in the original Ocean’s 11 [1960]). In fact, we can come to see, by way of
250 THE FILM CHEAT

admiration for the skill involved in cheats, that all movies are heist movies.
And that authentic treasure, that treasure that was authenticity, stored by so
many viewers diligently in the secret vault inside the vault inside the vault,
has no ultimate value at all.
The cheater’s greatest challenge: images that only look as though they are
only trying to look real.
 36
The Reality Effect

FIGURE 36 Mickey Rooney as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Max

Reinhardt, Warner Bros., 1935).

“What happens to reality,” Stanley Cavell pithily asks, “when it is projected

and screened?” (World 16). But later he has a more worrisome comment:
“We do not know what our conviction in reality turns upon” (189). One
conclusion is that “In screening reality, film screens its givenness from us; it
holds reality from us, it holds reality before us, i.e., withholds reality before
us. We are tantalized at once by our subjection to it and by its subjection to
our views of it” (189).
My question—born, I sometimes think, of Cavell’s (and of William
James’s) and born, too, I think at other times, of some stormy condition,
252 THE FILM CHEAT

doubt or wonder, that originates beyond mankind and has affected Cavell
and me (two students, at different times, of the same teacher)—is this: not
“What is reality?” but “What is it that motivates, urges, presses us to consider
certain qualities and experiences ‘real,’ in the first place?” James wanted to
know under what conditions we call things “real.” I want to know, with
Cavell, what moves us to do so, conditions notwithstanding. For James, we
do not consider something real because it is real before we consider it. What
it is, is indeterminate, and we sometimes use the word “real.” If the name
sticks (if many others use the name this way) a thing becomes real, at least
to those who speak about it, and the world that subtends it becomes reality.
Names stick when they are applied by the forceful, the deeply respected, the
dominant agencies of power.
But why do we find it necessary or helpful to use the word “real,”
especially when we think of film? Surely the candy can be sweet, the poison
bitter, no matter how real. “Everyone,” writes James, “knows the difference
between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing
a proposition and acquiescing to its truth” (283). What is the profound
ontological pleasure that flows our way when we aver that something we
see onscreen bears a striking resemblance to, copies, faithfully represents
“reality”? It is to be presumed that when we see something unworthy of
this claim—take as a good example Mickey Rooney cavorting in the spangly
ferns as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)—at
least the sane among us would grasp that it is not to be called “real” and
that the world of the film is not to be believed as “reality,” yet does such a
categorical denial actually describe, arrange, clarify matters in some vital
way? Our seeing “reality” in movies is not as simple as film reconfiguring
onscreen, to some marked degree of exactitude, what we have already
configured somewhere else in the eye, both because much of film is not for
the eye alone and because only using a 50 mm lens makes it easy to roughly
approximate the form of normal ocular experience. To pin everything of
film to our prior experience is to take ourselves more seriously than the
films we watch and also to not carefully watch those films. Further, finding
“reality” in experience would seem to privilege the experience of the finder,
if it is indeed worthwhile to make such a call; and once the privileging is
in place, once we find reality on the front lawn, claiming the existence of a
replicating agency, film, is wholly unnecessary. In Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy
Pieces (1970), we can see Jack Nicholson’s “smartness and sarcasm” at a
diner table when the waitress won’t bring him whole wheat toast, but as I
have sat at such a table and had trouble getting whole wheat toast myself,
the “reality” of his experiencing the problem is not value-added for me, does
not elevate what I see by likening it to my own experience. And surely my
experience is my experience whether we call it “real” or not.
What I have called “the reality effect” sums to our accepting and labeling
depictions as “real,” as well as our fierce penchant for doing so, with all
 THE REALITY EFFECT  253

the circumstance that flows after. “Reality” is a hot topic. There are legion
films now where some character’s “sense of reality” is seriously challenged
(he suddenly awakes to find that he is not where he thought he was, and
so on), sometimes by means of mechanical arrangements that are arcane
and indescribably complex, yet always the resolution of the riddle is the
“ground” of the everyday, always he finds where to put his feet in a world
that is called “real,” and furthermore, usually at the point when he finds this
“sacred” ground, the story is over. Why need that ground be “real” in order
for it to be resolving or culminating or apotheotic? Why the apparent need
for a double tag, “real ground,” when one might think “ground” would be
sufficient in itself? Why does a place need to be real if it is to be somewhere
that, when a person can neither remember nor find it he searches through
legion difficulties, and finally, with a glow, “really” discovers again? That is
a serious question, but it misrepresents the query I pursue. That question
stands upon the presumption that something can be—is—real, that such
a condition as reality exists, and asks why the label tagging it should be
applied in a present instance. I am not interested here in whether reality
exists or not. I want to know why we wish to use the word (as though it
does) and what the outcomes are.
I am not meaning here to follow strictly in William James’s steps and
ask of the attributes of the “real,” the features of an object or situation that
would lead us to place it in the category of the “real,” which category we
already believe in, fundamentally. I mean instead to ask how it serves to
believe in such a category enough that we will speak of it. How by virtue
of belonging to the “real” an experience gains elevation and importance it
apparently did not have to begin with, quite as though experience is not
enough. What I am calling the “reality effect,” then, is not an attribute of
things or happenings that leads us a certain way, but a condition of our own
experience, a kind of addiction to a form.
Do we believe, as Cavell has suggested, that we have a wish to be
present—not only present, I might add, but authorial!—at Creation?
Cavell’s Cartesianism: when we are present at Creation, we believe in it
fully, we acquiesce to its truth, because, like Descartes (and Cavell would
agree, I think) we do not think a Great Deceiver has constructed a Great
Deception in order to waylay us. James was meticulously describing a
kind of “mechanism of realization,” the operative psychological gearing,
whereas Cavell seeks the spirit within, our reaching toward occasions we
can understand as real. We can note that at least in popular discourse to
see a filmic moment as real brings a special treat: not only, perhaps, that a
moment of creation is before us and we are, as Cavell suggests, present but
that this present moment is made special by being thought, not creation
alone but, “real” creation, so finely danced, so sumptuous, so radiant.
(For instance, the “real Creation” at which we might be “present,” a
purity of purities, would not be a movie set.)
254 THE FILM CHEAT

A commonplace understanding of cinematic cheats is that they help

convince the viewer that what she sees onscreen is real, when it is not. Or by
contrast, that the cheats detail and define ways (as we find in the Reinhardt
film) that something is not real, thus by omission citing, bounding, and
arguing some presently absent real. A man is bleeding from the neck, but he
is not really bleeding from the neck. Well, if the bleeding looks authentic do
I not respond in either case? (Or do I stand and test the reality until the poor
person collapses in front of me?)
The cheat artist—make-up person, set designer, cinematographer, acting
coach, costumer, publicity agent—works against film’s limitations and flaws,
and also against the suspicion viewers can harbor when they watch. I am driving
down a highway with a man (say, Ulmer’s Detour [1945]) but at the same time I
am not, except I am waylaid from paying attention to how I am not. The cheat
dresses up the cutaway car, the background set, the lights, and by dressing them
converts them to a vehicle, a passing landscape, lamp posts. But let us take this
little example a step further. The artistic cheats work together to “put us” in
the car on the highway, say, at twilight, and we see lights, and passing cacti,
and what have you. (a) The actor pretending seriously to be handling a steering
wheel when he isn’t. (b) Rear projection showing passing territory, which isn’t
there. (c) A fake partial structure pretending to be a car interior when it isn’t. We
are “in the car.” At that point we see all of the following:
●● the wholesale appearance of a car interior;
●● driver-like and/or passenger-like behavior, “realistic” because a
“faithful copy of” what we know having ridden in cars;
●● a time of day (consistent from shot to shot, ideally);
●● a territory, possibly quite beautiful, possibly lonely, surely made
through pathetic fallacy to jibe with the action of the moment;
●● concerned, devoted, serious facial expression and body posture;
●● the car consistently remaining itself over time;
●● the landscape in motion, or us in motion through the landscape.
●● all of this rendered for the eye in very accomplished black and white,
with profound shadow, eerie highlight, modulations of surface—a
picture that we can never think anything but a picture while we
consent to forget that it is a picture.

(Once again, every single one of these elements is worked at least partly
through a cheat.)
The moment brings a certain satisfaction, a certain doubt, an eagerness
to keep watching, a keen attention to the setting, a matter-of-fact acceptance
of the maneuvers made upon the car’s steerage. “Yes,” we can say with
enthusiasm, “a car scene!”
 THE REALITY EFFECT  255

Yes, a car scene. Yes, a conversation in a car. Yes, two people conversing.
Yes, the car moving forward. Yes, the sun setting. Yes, the steering wheel
controlling the car.
We can see, approve, even find some delight in this. Certainly the humdrum
normalities of car driving do not surprise or engage us in themselves, not the
way they did the very first time we were taken somewhere in a car.
But given the scene in Detour, so fulsome, so present, so detailed, so
engaging, so exciting, so mysterious . . . then . . . then . . . why do we take
one step further and claim it all looks “real,” and then, thinking through
the manner in which it has been made to look this way, think to ourselves,
“It was the cheats that made for the look of ‘reality.’” The word “reality”
couched in such a shroud of sanctity the word “cheat” now looks abysmal.
Why does the cheat achieve “reality” rather than a pleasurable delusion?
Pleasurable—more pleasurable, considerably more, than would be possible
without the cheat. Thanks to the cheat, this is gorgeously fake. The driver, let
us say: he sits woodenly at the wheel doing nothing and saying nothing. We
get it, he’s there, we’re there with him. But somehow if he turns the wheel a
little, stares through the windshield, talks to the passenger, we like it more.
Do we (have to) like it more because now it seems real?
Do we not trust our liking, in and of itself?
Consider the driver’s action here—I hope it is clear that each element
of this exemplary picture could be examined this way. The driver’s action
brings delight, and we could examine the mechanism of that transaction,
his movements, our experience. The moving body portends a future, we are
more easily wrapped into an event when we think it is going somewhere. If
the hand moves the wheel the driver is gesturing: presence, thought, reaction,
sensation, even desire. Seeing this movement we see ourselves. We have come
to the birth, the creation of the gestures, the moment of their inspiration
(and then perhaps the moment of our own inspiration, too). The humanness
and the impending futurity the performer suggests by “acting like a driver”
bring a peculiar thrill of recognition, a release of doubt, a quickening of the
breath. Let us go so far, even, as to suggest we might come to feel fear, chills
up the spine, desire for union, eagerness to find a coffee shop, anything at
all. Feeling, emotion, commitment, and delight. In a package.
In a unified package.
But how does it add to think of that package as “reality”? Everything
we see of the driver is what it is, surely, yet by invoking some “domain of
the real” and positioning our current experience there, do we add a layer
of identification, a bringing the driver into our presence and a bringing of
our presence toward the driver? Even if we know we are watching cheats
artfully applied, still we are brought to yet another, higher-order “reality,”
the truth behind the false image, and like other “realities” this truthful one is
worth a visit. How and why? For whether we name this place of residence,
256 THE FILM CHEAT

where the image shines and we are shined upon, “reality” or “unreality,” the
same cheats brought us there. We could call it art.
Once we have raised up the “reality” tent, regardless of how deliriously
colored its stripes, the guy lines assume command: proper dispensation of
resources, of living beings, of space, of time. Inventive transformations—
dirt roads into railways. Proper enunciation of principles, reasons for living,
pathways to success, what to hope for After. Another tent will go up nearby,
to be sure, and soon enough we will have struggles of “reality” facing off
against “reality,” struggles followed by skirmishes, skirmishes followed
by wars, all in the name of whose “reality” should be officialized as truth.
Breakdowns in the method for examining reality: chemical reality, historical
reality, dramatic reality, political reality, psychological reality, biological
reality. And we have indices and representations, which by our compulsion
to adhere to the structures of “reality” use “proper” proportions, in order
to acknowledge instead of expressing. Hence the weight of (“unreal”)
caricature to dismember elites and forms and institutions that could be
called pernicious. And the desire for a glowingly “true” and “real”—as we
take it—vision of the way things are.
Reality gets in the way of experience, however. Cheats could be understood
as leading not to something pretending to the real but to something avowing
the beautiful:

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
 37
Stand-ins

FIGURE 37 Barbra Streisand with chorus in Funny Girl (William Wyler, Columbia,
1968).

When we touch one particular and delicious rose, do we find in it a discreet

and lonely thing, a creation only to itself, possessed of its own identity and
history and life cycle as distinguished from all others? Or do we take seriously
the familiar, generalizing epithet, “a rose,” familiar because familial, because
belonging to a category by which this one blossom and “all blossoms like
it” are to be named; and do we use that epithet to abstract away everything
that is peculiar and unique in order to locate, elsewhere, in a formal zone,
the “essential” traits and probable futures this thing—as a thing of its
kind—shares with a wholesale collection, called, if you like, members of its
genus and species? Is this flower a member of the category of roses, or is it
itself? To me it seems plainly evident that holding the flower between our
fingers we are first experiencing a thing in itself, but our way of organizing
language promotes the category. Our conceits, linguistic and otherwise, are
258 THE FILM CHEAT

advertisements for generalization, for advantageous multiplications, for

building edifices.
At issue is the problem of substitution, which plagues dramatic
representation to the heart, because in categorizing we make what is diffuse
substitute for what is specific. We do this by mentally traveling away from the
moment of action to what we would prefer to think a discerning (objective)
remoteness, not a perception but a reflection; but this new position denies
the most complex aspects of what it purports to examine. I am walking
down Tottenham Court Road and two young men, approaching me, are
having a chat. They come within hearing and one of them literally bursts
into laughter, his whole body thrown into the spasm of pink delight. I have
no idea what they have been talking about. It is certainly easy enough to say,
“That was a laugh,” and then to say, “A laugh that will take up only two
seconds of the eternity that is this man’s life,” and then, “Therefore a laugh
that seems bold and emphatic but is actually, in the course of things, trivial,”
and finally, “What a show of enthusiasm that fellow allowed himself to put
on, given how perfunctory the whole thing must have been.” But of course
for the two interlocutors that laugh was, at the moment, everything. For
them, nothing could substitute for that laugh, and my substitutive disclaimer
thankfully does not exist. My analysis—any analysis—is a substitute for
conditions. To sail from Yi-Fu Tuan’s port, analysis is the space in which we
live; conditions form the place we make of it. This place. Here. Now.
Substitution. Every performance is given by an actor pretending to be—
substituting for—a character, to our manifest delight. And every dramatic
scene is shot in a particular space substituting for another: a soundstage for
a restaurant, a manor house for an embassy. The location scout will find a
postmodern building, a museum, say, with an exit to the street that looks
very much like the doors to an arrival hall at an airport, so he tells the
designer to put up the sign ARRIVALS and the museum is converted. In the
film for all the characters involved, and in the audience as we are involved
with the film, the building is an airport, never less than an airport, never
hinting at a museum. In One From the Heart (1982), Francis Ford Coppola
plays with this substitutive removal by making an airport out of stage
flats and having a cardboard airplane take off overhead. Most buildings
lack an intrinsic being-in-the-world. A museum may look very much like
an airport terminal, an airport terminal like a museum. Nothing about the
look of museums designates them, classes them inevitably as museums; their
character as museums isn’t common, save that they bear a public name. If a
bank is to be diegetically robbed in a film story, the management may take
a dim view of a film crew shooting their actual facility in connection with a
robbery; and so another building will substitute. In a similar manner, stunt
personnel will substitute for actors, as will musicians and athletes. In biopics
actors substitute not only for characters but also for other people living
now or in the past. Barbra Streisand isn’t the movie character Fanny Brice;
 STAND-INS  259

but she is also not the person Fanny Brice who is being mocked up by that
character. Of course neither was Fanny Brice, the performing phenomenon,
this or any character or person, as Fanny Brice, because historically she was
a woman named Fania Borach. “Fanny Brice” was a product she sold, a
substitution with which she came to identify.
In substituting one shooting location for another, filmmakers need only
take care to ensure that any specific reputation attaching to the substitute
does not read over into the drama, or a quality of the actual place leak
through the curtain of the substitution. Caution will be exercised in
proximity to recognizable landmarks, lest they creep into the shot. Or, by
contrast, caution will be exercised to include the landmark if it can help
seal the identification of a location that is actually disconnected from it
(against the dictate of the fiction). In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), for
one example, the concluding sequence calls for the three protagonists to
assemble at night at a huge mansion adjacent Griffith Park and within short
running distance from the observatory. But the sequence was shot at the
Getty Mansion at 6th and South Irving, quite a long way off and with no
particular view of the observatory at all. But thanks to careful framing and
careful editing the diegetic connection can be made. The edit as a geographic
join is all over cinema.
When the viewer experiences an accomplished substitution—one place
for another; one person for another—the principal effect is an unrecognized
but calculated misdirection. One could gain considerable insight here from
a viewing of Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973). The ersatz is exchanged as
the authentic, a situation considered seriously problematic in the economy
of material acquisition (the art world) but somehow not only permissible
but entirely regular in the economy of fictional transaction (the world of
film). In watching film, we never really expect the goods on offer to be what
they claim to be, indeed the irony produced by the gap between what they
seem and what they are (what they are identified as elsewhere, by those in
the know) is a major source of our thrill. We relish fabrication, knowing all
along that it is fabrication but being held away from a view of the technique
in the wings. “I am fooling you,” is a trumpet call we love to hear, but “Let
me show you how I’m doing it” is a threat of ruin.
An elementary question: How is it that we can entertain such pleasure at
the patently inauthentic? What is the relationship between our consciousness
of inauthenticity and our devotion to the presence of the moment?
The conception of a visual narrative is a process different from its
reception and appreciation, in that a different scale of values is invoked and
a different mode of consciousness implied. The material effect being worked
through in both production and viewing is the same effect: a showing of
the crowd of the everyday, the myriad minute articulations that are life
itself (as “conceived” by the characters) at the same time as they are the
substance of rational cataloging (for those seeing the surface). In the act of
260 THE FILM CHEAT

conceiving, it is necessary to block out character types, on the presumption

that instead of an uncountable variety of characters viewers should find a
far more limited collection of sets, each member of any set being, for all
intents and purposes, interchangeable with the others. Sam Spade, Mickey
Spillane, Phillip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot are all the same as types,
but differ radically as personalities. If one can manage to apprehend the
shared performative characteristics of set members one can replicate them
easily, and a recognizable1 character can emerge—a character observable
and comprehensible in terms of the “telling” qualities of the set. This makes
not only casting but also direction more fluid and less time-consuming (time
having economic weight and thereby constituting a central problem for
filmmakers). If one hired Kevin Costner, for instance, to play a pitcher on a
baseball team, one would not have to give him the full experience of being
one so that he could play the role: anxiety, sleeplessness, arm pain, the rigor
of constantly keeping in shape, the difficulties of memorizing statistics on
all the opposing batters, and so on. He would need to be thinking of himself
as (a) an athlete (type); (b) a baseball player (type); and then (c) a pitcher
(type), all of these being generalized and available for inspection on many
fronts, not to mention inspection in the files of his own memory since he
has played one. Any actor knows there is no way for him to become a
particular individual other, but he can establish the form, and this is true,
more crucially, even in biopics. There the claim is made and, with labor,
supported that the being we watch is either the person who is the subject
of the film, or an acceptable representation, in short, that a specificity is
being performed when the actor and writer are really contriving to effect—
since in creating any character for the screen there are no other options—a
diffuseness, a generality, a decorated type.2
The viewer’s moment of appreciation and involvement is of another,
more discrete and more incomparable quality, enthusiasm, perhaps, linked
to a pervading relaxation into being, a more or less non-conscious devotion
to feeling at the moment, even in those odd somewhat cool moments when
inspired to distanced rational observation. The viewer becomes enflamed.
Norman O. Brown:

The apocalyptic fire: “Meditate on the make-believe world as burning to

ashes, and become being above human.” (Dante, Inferno I, 118–20, qtd.
in Brown, Body 179)

We sense a world fluttering around, and ourselves in motion there, each

passing breath a direct and uncalculated simulation of our sense of presence.

1
The ease of recognition is profitable, and the ease of replication is cost saving, two principal
effects of genre filmmaking in the 1930s and onward. See Schatz.
2
As used here, the terms “specificity” and “diffuseness” are borrowed from Parsons.
 STAND-INS  261

The actor must do the same. By virtue of infusing generalized thoughts about
a character’s type with his own spirit of temporal presence, his pulse of
sensitivity, a spirit he always carries about, the actor jettisons the technical
categorization scheme out of which he began to fashion the character and
now by both reaching and relaxing brings the character to life. That is,
“life”: fleeting sensibility with all its foibles and snorts.
We are enthused by performance because of this liveliness, exactly. We
accept our knowledge of its categorical construction, but then eclipse that
knowledge by touching the manifest expressiveness of a being who is tasting
time.
 38
The Superuniverse

FIGURE 38 Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, Warner
Bros., 2012).

Production cheats have the power to modify intelligence. An example: one

of the fashions prevalent in 1930s Hollywood filmmaking, something that
made it delicious and imitable, was a recurrent snappy, smart, ironically
angled, and poetically flip “patter” dialogue, something born of the (New
York) stage. When you are dealing with a stage production there are
no close-ups. Some of the viewers are a long way off. What happens of
dramatic significance must be made acoustic, and in order to keep up a pace
(a tempo) one strikes certain notes with force in imitation of the staccato
 THE SUPERUNIVERSE  263

chain of terse, pregnant, linguistically ornamental speech.1 Stage writers

were brought west to write for Hollywood. In a case like Howard Hawks’s
Twentieth Century (1934), one is sped downriver on a thrilling torrent of
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s histrionic jabber.
Film lovers might well try talking in a pithy staccato in everyday life.
Language becomes more and more colloquial over the decades, saturated
with caustic metaphors and bouncy circumlocutions. The increased pace
of social change, broadly speaking, lends to a curtailment of enunciation,
a jargonizing and telegraphy. Everyday life soon dominates over the arcing
romance of fiction. And fuggedaboudit.
If we consider the Superhero Universe, the Superuniverse, now
unboundedly popular by virtue of Marvel Productions, we find a world
in which feelingful experience is systematically abbreviated or curtailed; in
which commentary and visuality marry—body hurled against plate glass
window; face chemically distorted beyond recognition; eyes glued to LED
monitors. Heightened contrast is pervasive: dark dark dark dark darkness,
bright bright bright stunning brightness. As with patter dialogue and so many
other felicities of film production, this universe and its attributes constitute
a colossal cheat, one commercially packaged as such, an alluring distraction
of thought away from the recognition that (a) as they live people really do
feel; (b) there is very often, and not only onscreen, an ironic disconnection
between what things look like and what people say; and (c) the world is not
a high-contrast zone, broadly speaking. Regarding the last, in working with
color cinematography it became necessary for filmmakers to abandon any
simplistic ideas about the dark-light black-white contrast, and this is why
when we look at neo-noirs (like Chinatown [1974]) we find moral extremity
embodied in characters and character responses whereas in noir, moral
contrast could be expressed instantaneously through lighting (a wondrous
example is Sudden Fear [1952]). In watching superhero films over and over
(as many people do), and gradually becoming so accustomed to, addicted
by, the Superuniverse—whichever Superuniverse one would care to cite,
since structurally they are similar—one picks up these three assumptions
about feeling, disconnection, and contrast and begins, as a way of adding
weight to one’s predisposition, to think of the world as conforming. Politics
starts looking like a comic book story, a battle to the death between cold
and unfeeling, morally black or white, lying myrmidons. Those who take
action seem to do it as feelinglessly as the heroes and villains onscreen. Irony
is replaced by incongruity.

1
Reflecting on the casting process for Six Degrees of Separation (Vivian Beaumont Theatre,
November 8, 1990) John Guare wrote, “We used that time of casting to discuss the play, to
understand the rhythm of the play, to hear what the play wanted to be. All I knew about the
play was that it had to go like the wind” (xi).
264 THE FILM CHEAT

The Superhero cheat is effected through a combination of optical design

and scripting; and since a great deal of Superhero cinema is made through
CGI, the optical design is seriously saturated, intensified, extrematized. If
you have lots of money you can get a computer with enormous memory,
and if you have that you can make pictures with a vast number of pixels,
and once you can do that you can animate virtually anything, including
the reflection of a face in a teardrop. In Stairway to Heaven (1946), there
is a very, very, very significant teardrop, shown in close-up, and there is no
animation of reflections in it, and it touches the viewer to the bone. Because
CGI springs from a technology that every day becomes more expensive (as
well as more efficient), the rule of thumb is, if you can do an effect you
should. That is, use the technology: what else is it for?
Felt experience. Because the superhero story is an action story, it can
contain as subject only action that flows toward action, events that flow
swiftly by, that are themselves transported at starcruiser speed. While a
character may be required to show emotion—Bruce Banner (Eric Bana)
blowing up in greening anger until he becomes The Hulk (2003)—the film
will avoid the obstacle of delving into the subtle aspects of feeling, the
complications, the troubling contradictions, the unavoidable costs, except
as any of these can be compacted into a tightly visualized descriptive glyph.
Anger>>{morph}>>Hulk. Angry Hulk >>>> Fist-smashing Hulk. Clark Kent
has conflicted, confused feeling about being raised on a farm with gentle
people unrelated to his own parents now distantly dead, but we are given
to see him only in a cartoonish reference: he stares into the twilit sky, but
there is no elaboration of his farm boy’s life, a life of chores accommodated
to; nor of the city life he will lead at the Daily Planet (the planet that is
invented daily; the news as planetary; a body that revolves around a non-
solar star, Superman). The simplest way out of addressing the felt experience
of the character is by way of concentrating on power, usually some technical
capability that can be publicly tested and splendidly revealed. Doc Ock
(Alfred Molina) in Spider-Man 2 (2004) scaling a skyscraper with his
tentacles in full public view. He touches the building but the viewer does not
touch him. A pose chain thus replaces a tactile exploration.
Visual talk, spoken image. The superhero-film character, most assuredly
the villain, will speak in language especially crafted for pungency, shock
value, metaphorical twist: heightened expressivity. But this heightening
is shaped to balance the extremity of the visualization, not in order to
reveal the confounding depths of the character (as happens in Sophocles
and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill). Much is left unsaid, so that the
audience is forced to imagine fill-ins, such as explanations, stabilizations of
placement in context, motives. We catch repetitive use (artful syntaxing) of
proper names, created for this genre of filmmaking with special attention
to musicality, oddity, articulatory sharpness. SPYYY-derr-MAAAAANNN.
Peter Parker (picking a peck of pickled peppers profitably). In the superhero
 THE SUPERUNIVERSE  265

film, much as the picture is sharpened for bizarreness of content, angularity

of structure, and density of configuration so is language sharpened for
percussive, tonal effect. The sound overall might seem Wagnerian.
Contrast. Both the image and the spectrum of evaluation are pushed to
extremes, notably stuffed and running over with: blinding incendiary bursts
of all sizes (a relatively early, very comely one in Darkman [1990]); flashing,
even outlandish saturated colors leaping out from bits of muscularized
Spandex (see Green Lantern [2011]); monstrous shadows lurking around
monstrous corners (Batman [1989]); looming objectivities—mechanisms,
flying bodies—racing toward the viewer’s face (Star Trek Generations
[1994], Avatar [2009]); a tightly defined and highly publicized system of
honor and social justice (Sin City [2005]); a face with seemingly unbounded
expressive powers, made hideous for some spectacular reason or entirely
obliterated from view in a “brilliant darkness” that reveals covering but no
essence (Watchmen [2009]); demonstrations of exceptional strength, agility,
endurance, and couth (Superman [1978]) or the stark opposite, debilitation,
degradation, weakness, and fear (Batman Begins [2005]); bloody
victimization of well-behaved and wholly unmilitaristic civilians (Superman
Returns [2006]); possession and ostentatious use of exorbitantly expensive
high technology (X-Men Origins: Wolverine [2009], Avengers: Infinity
War [2018], Deadpool [2016]); uniformed social control teams disabled
or revealed to be insufficiently smart (The Dark Knight Rises [2012]); bold
transformations at once miraculous and scientific(!) in which organic forms
are radically altered temporarily or permanently in massive machines that
radiate colored light (Hollow Man [2000]); and so on. Dreams of power, yet
power beyond the human. Never the power to understand, but the power to
keep a jet aircraft from falling out of the sky by holding it by the nose or to
vaporize buildings or to brainwash.
There is a preponderance of gloom, depression, and panic proudly
disrupted by the hero’s entrance in high illumination, rampant color, shapely
form, sonorous voice, and with a smile to win elections. The darker the
scene the more the hero glows in it.
The cheat in superhero movies is strict sidestepping of a colossal truth,
the open telling of which would malform or destroy the pleasing process of
watching: namely, that there are no superheroes, the Superuniverse does not
exist, there are no giant machines injecting a purple fluid that turns some
everyday bloke into a musclebound masked Agent of Good. In these so
very palpably hyper-theatrical stories, these evidences of arbitrary decision-
making and expense, with people obviously addicted to dressing up, flying,
swinging, emerging garishly from flames, and clawing the world apart as
well, the production conceit works hard to keep viewers from losing interest
by focusing expansively and urgently on the figures as constructs and
keeping away from the deep logic that supports them. Action flies past in a
half-breath, advanced modes of transportation on earth and in space race to
266 THE FILM CHEAT

a problematic future, the superhero’s ultimate prettiness (beneath the mask)

fills us with admiration. Yet, too, it is all throbbing toward a finale. Finale is
everything. Finale as apocalypse.
All this ranting and racing takes place in a tailor-made setting where
gimmicks will always work.
The reminder is offered that the Superuniverse is created for children,
that it delivers the sharply delineated moral spectrum as a pedagogical tool,
that the color and speed and flash are for uncultivated delight. Yes, but. But
it is not because of the ticket-buying children that the Superuniverse nets in
untold hundreds of millions of dollars.
 Of Joins

{39} Believe in Me
King Kong (1933); King Kong (1976); The Seven Year Itch

{40} Over Thames

Location selection and usage; plot contrivance and setting; setting and plot
fills; Survivor

{41} Sequitur
Edit as cheat; spatial/temporal transitions and continuous or discontinuous
movement; Hitchcock and Kuleshov; the cheat of causation; Rear Window

{42} Veni creator spiritus

L’Avventura; viewer consciousness of the filmmaker’s presence

{43} “Bite the Dust”

Actors and stunt shots; facial recognition as code; acted characters as
individuals; Baby Driver; The Train; Gravity

{44} Reflect On That

Editorial control of shot length and character formation; Bette Davis;
Empire of the Sun; perspectival shift and involvement

{45} Presence and Presentation

Presence without presentation; presentation without presence; Eyes Wide
Shut; Spider-Man; Robert Walker and My Son John; E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

{46} By Contrast
Complexity and simplification; The November Man; resolving moral
muddles; resolving resilience muddles; Shane; Body of Lies

{47} The Blood Effect

Leave Her to Heaven; The Wild Bunch; The Godfather; Sabotage (2014);
the “blood is everywhere” effect; Carrie; Hamlet

* * *
268 THE FILM CHEAT

{Epilogue: Our Cheating Heart}

Escapes from reality; rejection of performance; The Thief of Bagdad; being
taken for a ride; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; An Affair to Remember;
screen “here” and screen “there”; getting lost; dance; boundlessness; The
Red Shoes
 39
Believe in Me

FIGURE 39 Jessica Lange in King Kong (John Guillermin, Dino DeLaurentiis

Productions, 1976).

A momentary exhalation in Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong (1976) when

the young and very beautiful Dwan (Jessica Lange), having been seized and
carried off by him, stands tremulously in the palm of the megalithic hand of
the Great Ape.1 Start with proportion: were she standing in the palm of my
hand and I Kong (I permit myself this odd fantasy) she would be roughly as
tall as my index finger is long. That means I would be several times her size,
and our Kong is at least that. Very large. Quite hairy. One could imagine
rather odorous. And with a face so far up in the clouds she would not really
be able to see it well.

1
A July 2019 conversation with Kat Zabecka prompted this meditation on Kong.
270 THE FILM CHEAT

As this creature gazes down at her she is a Lilliputian daydream, save that,
being no Swift reader, he has no education to help him recognize Lilliput
or to imagine whether instead he might be in Brobdingnag. She is both
small and quaint and delicate, let us say a kind of doll, yet alive. (As with
George Lucas having his Princess Leia emerge from R2-D2’s projection,
a holographic miniature, this is something of an homage to the projected
Altaira in Forbidden Planet [1956].) Dwan excites Kong’s curiosity, even, if
it would not be too bold to imagine this, his quasi-scientific curiosity—and
why not fully scientific curiosity—because he concentrates on her frame,
her movement, her coloration, her size as though she is a specimen he has
recovered. With the other hand he stretches out an index finger to feel her
butterfly surface. The fiction of the tale (here and in the earlier King Kong
[1933]) is that capitalistic adventurers have journeyed to the hidden, remote
island where Kong lives in order to follow hints of a mysterious Other; but
here it is evident Kong himself is journeying to follow at least the smell of
his own mysterious Other, that he is as bent on discovery as his pursuers are.
He teases her by bringing her close enough to a waterfall to get soaked. To
him Dwan is ineffable.
Are we to suspect, as pop theorizing insists, that he is harboring a
throbbing sexual motive? The wild beast and the tender maiden, the
nouveau dragon and the princess? He would have to come down in size,
an unthinkable challenge not only because of his nature but also because
the story of strange monumentalism would collapse if he did. It can only
be a fascination that leads to Pure Love, the love that brings adoration and
surpasses the flesh, a sanctified dream. She has become his beckoning spirit,
although it is clear enough that from her point of view beckoning is quite
out of the question.
Now, a coup de grâce. The ape exhales, and his warm breath shudders
downward and flutters her clothing so that we have a brief echo of Marilyn
Monroe (another blonde) in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Monroe is on a subway
grating, Lange is on a leathery palm; for Monroe the air comes from below, a
subversive tickle, while for Lange it drops from above, something of weather. The
breath, the flutter, the contact, the deep and unforgettable knowledge.
How on earth did they persuade Jessica Lange to stand in the palm of a
giant ape this way? Without visible fear, with only hesitation. How did they
find an ape, indeed, whose hand was so large—the palm alone about six feet
long or more? Where could such a creature be found? (We might remember
with ironized pleasure that the hunters in Kong are seeking to make a movie,
too; so the thought of our own movie-makers seeking an exoticism for their
camera to eat is not such a strange thought.2) The answer, of course, and in
a word: cheats.

2
The eager, hungry camera is taken to exciting extremes in Pirandello.
 BELIEVE IN ME  271

This is not Kong’s palm. (An incredible statement, because this is Kong,
always forever, and here we have his palm.) It is not any kind of palm,
medically speaking. It is a large plastic and fabric device with an internal
system of hydraulic tubes all powered from without, puppeted. The fingers
twitch on command. As she stands there, she is in a set, not a hand. The
wrist, the forearm extending upward are parts of the mechanism. There is
actually no Kong face exhaling Kong breath. A fan flicked on and off will do
the trick, Lange will competently fill in with the appropriate response. Today
a realistic palm would be created digitally, and the Lange image matted onto
it. In 1976 such a process was as yet unperfected and the mechanical palm
was a crest-of-the-wave effects form. A special-effects hand, at any rate,
masquerading as a living one. Not so very hard to do, assuming the audience
is unfamiliar with giant apes and their hands.
The potential trouble with such a cheat lies in a bent for denial
confronting any viewer’s deep conviction and belief in the story—the
willingness to believe is part of the lure that brings viewers to the theater—a
denial insistently affirming that in our world, the world pictured onscreen,
there are no giant apes and Kong is nothing but a fabrication for narrative
purposes. This hand we see cannot possibly be a real ape’s hand. Yet at the
same time the viewer takes the position, easily and without consideration,
that the girl is a real girl, youthful, vivacious, hungry, radiant. Thus a reality
and an unreality are combined for view, the oil not quite mixing with the
water. A jarring dysjunction keeps separating the female figure from the
mechanical support. She is effectively jolted into hyperperception with every
tiny indication falsely imported to the hand: the line of the hand embedded
in the leathery “skin,” the thing’s magnitude and its radical disproportion,
even the caution with which the fingers move in a kind of robotic learning
curve. How to overcome these subtle yet not so subtle challenges?
The shot will not be long enough to permit objections to mature into
arguments. Here, on the page, they can mature a little, but the shot doesn’t
even last as long as it took you to read these two sentences. Also, Lange’s
clothing will be designed not only to feature her admirable body but also to
appropriately cover it, to offer rags that seem, in their weird way, fashionable
upon her at this instant, and also teasing, both a revelation and a secrecy. She
will become, for only the spate of Kong’s breath, a fashion model, a figure
who arrests the eye and brings focus.3 Next, the “breath” fluttering that
garment will seem to touch her skin, too, a thrilling glaze, and any reaction
to this on the viewer’s part will take attention away from doubt. The same
can be said for the marvel of the disproportion as it fully hits, since in all
of the interaction between Dwan and the ape we have never yet seen a
measurable comparison like this. And then a factor that effects artists can

3
Not strangely. In the early 1970s, Jessica Lange was a fashion model in New York.
272 THE FILM CHEAT

always knowingly count upon, that a voice inside the viewer beckons her
to go along with the story development no matter what, to move forward,
to push aside any looming obstacles to such motion, else the pleasure of the
entertainment will be hopelessly lost. Believe in Kong. Otherwise the dark
tunnel of doubt that leads to the depressing daylit realization that one was
a fool buying a ticket to be here. One can see easily that with the advent
of widespread and intensified exhibition outside of theaters, on a basis that
does not call for quid-pro-quo payment film by film, the problem of belief
and denial is exacerbated, and effects must be hyped.
Indeed, all of King Kong requires that we believe in Kong. Wonder
about him, love him, care for his future. Consider now, just for a quick
juxtaposition, the final moments in the 1933 original. Having escaped
from the Broadway stage(!), the ape has rampaged through the city (fifteen
blocks in reality) and climbed the tallest tree he can manage to find in this
jungle, which is, of course, the Empire State Building.4 Perched at the top
vulnerably, proudly, in torment, he can do nothing but succumb to the air
force. And although when he falls the long shot utterly fails to mobilize
sympathy, since it is only a scientifically calculated demonstration of an
object taking a long fall through space, the body upon the ground stirs us
to the heart, not just because Kong has been killed by modern civilization
(what else could happen?) but because here and all along he was our pet. We
were attached to him, artificial as he seemed, and so we believed. We loved
the artificial-and-living Kong, or the toy that simulated life, much as when
we are children we loved our own favorite mechanisms and endowed them
with both life and consciousness. Speaking to our toys we believed in them,
and when he lies dead we finally speak to Kong. When he lies dead, having
returned from the dead and died again, we speak to Kong.

4
In the 1976 film, the setting is updated from the Empire State Building to the World Trade
Center, a technical problem for Peter Jackson and crew making another remake in 2005. They
again used the Empire State Building as a model of triumphalist height.
 40
Over Thames

FIGURE 40 Aerial view of the Thames over Waterloo Bridge in Survivor (James
McTeigue, Millennium, 2015).

James McTeigue’s Survivor (2015) is an elaborate wild goose chase, with

an international assassin of high social standing(!) hired to knock off a
young American intelligence officer working in the Visa Department at
the Embassy in London. The handsome Pierce Brosnan, being evil for a
change; the charming and purposive Milla Jovovich. Neither her pals at the
Embassy, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster, and Frances de la Tour nor the
American ambassador Angela Bassett prove of any help—of course. We jitter
around Bloomsbury and the West End, mostly at night, and Kate Abbott,
our smarty-pie but wholly innocent heroine, narrowly escapes explosions,
bullets, knives, and what have you. All this is somehow in aid of a master
plot to make use of a profoundly disgruntled, vengeful European scientist
(Roger Rees), whose wife died because the Americans kept insisting on more
paperwork before giving the visa that would permit her to have proper
274 THE FILM CHEAT

medical treatment in the United States. Dr. Balan (anagram: banal), as he

is known, is an expert in mixing gases, and we discover to our presumable
chagrin that he plans to pump full the twinkly ball that descends in Times
Square on New Year’s Eve. Think of all the death!!!!
It therefore seems inevitable that the action must speed by air—through
airline checkpoints not a single one of which manages to filter strangers
as they are intended to do—from London to New York. The pretext was
present from the beginning, since we learned then, from Kate and her chums,
that “tomorrow” is December 31. New Year’s is presumably synonymous in
the domain of movie terrorism with Times Square (“There are a million
people there! You saved all of them!”). Thus, we can hardly expect the finale
to take place (not that it actually does take place) anywhere else. We can
hardly expect the matted-in footage to show any other mountaintop.
Why, then, so much action in London (“She was assigned to London—
that’s a high-ranking post!”)? Why so much at night (when visual details are
hard to pick out)? Why is the rehearsal (the killer has a long-range rifle he
can use to shoot at the target “bomb” from anywhere) set in London, not in
New York? Why the presence of the London police (abysmally inept)? Why
the constant invocation of the Home Office?
All of the footage is tidily scenarized, competently photographed,
straightforwardly it not even musically edited, and, as may be expected
of such films, generous as a handsome travelogue for those interested in
London (New York does not get such treatment): but the production could
have been set anywhere. Even in New York itself.
Producers will often push scripts to define locations in which it is both
convenient and inexpensive to shoot; in which closure of streets and perhaps
subway tunnels (a long tunnel scene occurs), crowd control, and location
transformation are all possible with relative ease and in which the shooting
fees are minimal. New York is not such a place. Indeed, very little footage
was needed there to invoke the place. And shooting London by night makes
it easier for the designer-cinematographer team to hide revealing signs, alleys,
windowfronts, etc. that could intrude on the action. Moreover, there has been
developed and broadcast a certain teleological cachet about London: a place
where meticulous language will be used consistently by slightly pompous
bureaucrats who prove inutile; an imperial sedateness that makes a perfect
background for disruptive action; a high-tech communications dreamspace,
with CCTV cameras ready to record on every corner (yet not catch the
villain, who always knows how to stand out of view, else the film will be
done in fifteen minutes). In America, for all its cultural alertness, things are
slacker and more haphazard, not a proper setting for the erudite Brosnan
and the athletic Jovovich to play in. To ice the cake, the American never quite
belongs in London in the way that the British do (and all British persons here
are typically considered and dubbed Londoners); the American is too casual,
too energetic, too brash, too inventive, too disrespectful of formality. Thus,
 OVER THAMES  275

the home secretary, whoever he or she is, will be wholeheartedly disattended;

the British police barked at; the calmly ordered London streets (London is
a paragon of social order) strewn with explosive detritus or raced through
with no concern for the rules of the road. In placid Hyde Park a nice murder
can take place, with the astute British population standing around filming it
on their cellphones.
When I note that the production could have been set anywhere I am stymied
by one startling shot, that works to wash away that hypothesis and propose
London as not only an ideal but also an essential site. Between two sequences
of differing action, we have a simple transitional shot, something intended—
as are so very many shots of this kind, in films these days—to vaguely suggest
the passing of time, languidly and serenely, in a notable, beautiful place while
turmoil and angst jitter anxiously in hiding all around. This one is taken
from the air at pitch of night, looking down onto the Thames from the East
and gliding from the City toward the South Bank, with the twinkly cobalt
blue chain of the Jubilee Bridge at screen-top, the London Eye all blue-lit at
left, and Waterloo Bridge far off, blanketed by light from Westminster. The
Embankment is a strand of genuine pearl. This shot is the edit cheat that
stitches London tightly into the picture, makes London instantly identifiable
and inevitable as the scene of action, even though we flit off to Manhattan for
the explosive—or not-quite-explosive—finale. To be noted:
●● Diegetically speaking, this transition shot is as entirely unnecessary
as London is to this film. It moves us from one time of day to
another, from one place to another, in an abstract, contemplative
way, yet virtually any shot made for aesthetic consideration and kept
onscreen for a few seconds could accomplish this purpose.
●● It establishes our presence in London, but in a way that all of
the action scenes heretofore have not managed. We have been
relentlessly caught up in action, and to the end of following action
we have taken our views of London navigationally: what sort of
place is this?, how might we flee from here to safety somewhere else
(but not necessarily in a location we can be expected to recognize)?
This transitional shot says London . . . world capital . . . withdrawal
into perspectival stability. Withdrawal, as in pulling away, lifting
up, ascending over the fray, looking down on the battlefield to
estimate the tactical advantages here and there. Yet also reveling in
the dark of night when no battle is in progress, quite as though one
were scouting the terrain of a performance—a set—before stepping
onto it. Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, and cinematographer Daniel
Fapp originated an aerial perspective-as-stable-withdrawal shot at
the beginning of West Side Story (1961), giving over a very peaceful
and meditative shot of the Bronx where, once we zoomed in, teenage
angst would dance. Here there is no such zoom.
276 THE FILM CHEAT

●● More than a place of potential action in the dark, this twinkling

urban space suggests pure meditation, light arrayed against the
absence of light, geometrical form (the Eye; the river) for the
appraiser’s evaluation. But also:
●● A place unmistakably in London, thus unmistakably in the United
Kingdom, and removed from America. The watcher can easily be
persuaded that London is important to the story—London, the
Royal imperative, the withheld insult, the cuppa tea—whereas
ultimately it is not. Even if we examine the action in London we
find that the settings are arbitrary, as though economically sensible
from the producer’s point of view more than diegetically sensible
from the writer’s. English spots, English manners, English characters
are all written in, but we could be seeing Americans in Chicago, just
as well.
●● Our principal hero, Kate, is an American citizen and American-
trained specialist discovered at an American embassy working visa
applications. Why London, there are American embassies all over
the world? Because she has been seconded to London, a prime
appointment, for her special expertise. Special, expert, careful,
responsible, meticulous, now “British”—verrry nice cuppa tea! We
could as well find her in Paris, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Toronto. Are
the rates good in London? Further,
●● The London connection allows the film to ring with both British
hierarchical stiffness and decorum and British elegance, wealth,
power, and stiff lip. Brosnan, not only a much experienced player in
action cinema but a fine character actor as well, hails from Ireland
and spent his youth in England. He echoes a suave European flair,
self-transforming into a Man of the World with inestimable cultural
groundings and devotion to refinement and precision. A dangerous
enemy. The battle between him and Jovovich will be a traditional
USA-UK match, her feisty no-nonsense can-do against his polished
technique and diabolical perseverance. European types like this
villain can be found sipping their cuppa anywhere, though. Clive
Owen plays an interesting one in The Bourne Identity (2002)
and Vincent Cassel in Jason Bourne (2016). The stand-off could
occur in San Francisco, Mexico City, Hong Kong. But not with the
accompaniment of:
●● A dignified, tranquil, patiently reflective, and deliriously distracting
sense of being in London, London to which the world comes in wait,
London Queen of the Empire, London historical, London classical.
Espionage London, torture London, labyrinthine London. Ye olde
London. And therefore,
 OVER THAMES  277

●● Not—America. A film that is (a) about America and American

iconography, (b) a military threat against American interests, (c) a
reminder of 9/11, the American Tragedy, exponentially larger than
which the finale will prove to be, if it is not heroically thwarted,
(d) fueled by American intelligence and military power, that is,
the ambassador and the president and other invisible types who
communicate by omnipresent telephones, (e) arranged to depict,
finally, a quintessential American scene, Times Square on New
Year’s Eve; all this, and yet at the same time a film that gives all
appearances of being about Britain. Gives appearance because of, yet
not only because of, this transitional nighttime reverie, a reverie that
brings to focus, assembles, conjoins, even melds all of the English
references in the film thus far into a single coherent—if also rather
empty—image of sedate, orderly, long-enduring cultural thrust.
 41
Sequitur

FIGURE 41 Claude Rains (l.) and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (Michael

Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1942).

Edmund Husserl wrote of time in 1905, the year Einstein published his
Special Theory of Relativity:

From an Objective point of view every lived experience, like every real
being [Sein] and moment of being, may have its place in the one unique
Objective time—consequently, also the lived experience of the perception
 SEQUITUR  279

and representation [Vorstellung] of time itself. . . . It may further be

an interesting study to establish how time which is posited in a time-
consciousness as Objective is related to real Objective time, whether the
evaluations of temporal intervals conform to Objective, real temporal
intervals or how they deviate from them. (22–3)

Françoise Dastur observed that for Husserl, time “constituted the most crucial
problem for philosophy. This problem marks the limits of its enterprise of
intellectual possession of the world” (179). As we attempt to apprehend
cinematic time, thinking back to Husserl, we can note not only that the
cinematic work is ongoing in its essence but also that within it, through
editing, various manifestations of contextually external time are offered for
consideration. One is causality, in which some B eventuating after some
A is considered to result from it, to be caused by it, even to be impossible
without the prior eventuation of A. There is an instant in Jim Jarmusch’s
Dead Man (1995) when William Blake (Johnny Depp) is struck in the chest
by a bullet, and what happens thereafter is a sequence of journeys he makes
into the wilderness that end with his expiration. Here is a separation of A
from B by an intermediate parade of events, but we never have doubt that
his death, B, eventuates from his being shot, A, although the intermediate
events accrete upon one another in fascinating arrays and overlayerings.
Causality may come up as a thought, then. That B comes from A. And this
can be nicely confounded if by means of a flashback technique we do not
actually see A until after we have seen B. In diegetic exposition B leads to A,
but we take the exposition to be in reference to an Objective time in which
A of course preceded B. Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest (1942) gives a
very beautiful example. But causality is a relatively determinate calculation,
a thought that has limited utility.
Eventuality itself is another possibility. The arrival of things after things,
the ongoingness of the world. When Merleau-Ponty writes,

If time is the dimension in accordance with which events drive each other
successfully from the scene, it is also that in accordance with which each
one of them wins its unchallengeable place (457)

he does not specify, but with his antimony clearly means, that the placing
of events is provisional, that any event winning an unchallengeable place
will later be driven successfully from the scene by another event winning
another place. The ongoingness of cinema, perpetual, is its sense of time,
its acknowledgment of eventuality. That B appears after A, and that in
seeing the movement from A to B thanks to some method of editing we
can have the sensation of a flowing forward, with or without causality. It
is the “afterwardness” that strikes us, the sequentiality. Time in the film
seems to be unspooling just as the film itself does, moving forward so that
280 THE FILM CHEAT

events precede and then flow after each other. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and
Renault (Claude Rains) stride across the gleamy tarmac by night, heading
for a new friendship, and this happens, this can only happen, after Rick puts
a bullet into Col. Strasser (Conrad Veidt) who is trying to make a phone call
(Casablanca [1942]). Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) confides to Daphne and
Josephine (Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis) in her train compartment after she is
seen by them striding down the platform to get onto the train (Some Like It
Hot [1959]). Even two eventualities posed as “temporally contiguous” need
not bear an implication of causality yet there is flow: spoiled Veda (Ann Blyth)
doesn’t want her mother Mildred (Joan Crawford) to kiss her goodnight,
“It’s sticky,” and then she turns away to sleep but with her eyes hungrily
open (Mildred Pierce [1945]). And when in a diegesis a configuration is
put forward of two eventualities happening “simultaneously” in different
locations (the desperate radio conversation at the beginning of Stairway to
Heaven [1946]), there is no way for cinema to offer the simultaneity other
than a flowing forward, excepting arbitrary use of effects (like split-screen)
seen through the viewer’s knowing assumption that without them, simple
forward progression would have been the only way (Pillow Talk [1959]).
Even in the split-screen, the sides of the “simultaneity” have to be optically
curtailed, one following the other, to aid focus.
Yet also, the production of editorial sequencing, indeed of filming itself,
occupies a time quite separate, a time lived in the editor’s or cinematographer’s
experience and quite prior to the existence of the filmic sequentiality that
can affect us. When we watch a film, we do so without consciousness of the
temporal relation between watched eventualities in the Objective time of the
filmmakers. Which scene was shot before which scene. Which scenes were
cut together before which others. Which performer, indeed, was hired before
which other performer and was waiting on the set to give a welcoming hello.
Our opportunity while watching film to assess temporal flow, sequence,
eventuality, even causality, is all produced through a cheat.
Every edit is a cheat of sorts. It is a way of joining two pieces of film,
which amount to two fragments of experience, so as to make them seem
intrinsically bound in a continuity which stands upon a unity. Even the
tactic of cutting across space and time, as cinema is so pronouncedly
capable of employing, brings together vastly separated zones into what is
felt as a harmonic and fluid march. Film’s unspooling makes every advance
a continuity.
Every discontinuity a continuity.
We have all heard the Hitchcock hymn to Kuleshov:

You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The
second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts.
This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea. [Vsevolod]
Pudovkin dealt with this, as you know. In one of his books on the art of
 SEQUITUR  281

montage, he describes an experiment by his teacher, [Lev] Kuleshov. You

see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately
followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you
read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you
show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he
looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his
face was exactly the same.
In the same way, let’s take a close-up of [James] Stewart looking out
of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket.1 Back to
Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in the place of the little dog you
show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you
go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man!
(Truffaut 214–15)

Here, speaking into the ear of François Truffaut, Hitchcock is being puckish
as well as informative. His clear fascination is for the exact effects a filmmaker
can cause through shot manipulation by editing: the placement of shots in a
linear row, one before another. Eyes>>baby>>Eyes: Eyes>>soup>>Eyes for
Kuleshov (fond, perhaps, of babies and soup) and Stewart>>doggie>>Stewart:
Stewart>>half naked girl>>Stewart for Hitchcock (fond, perhaps, of both
doggies and half-naked girls). What Hitchcock does not trouble to elaborate,
but what calls urgently for elaboration, is the very principle implicit in the
forward movement of the edits.
This is a matter of huge interest to those who make and those who
study “slow cinema.” A subsequence can seem no different than what it is
subsequent to.
Normally we are given to read any B as ensuing from, reacting to, even
caused by an A that preceded it, even when B is a retreat to an earlier diegetic
time and therefore diegetically the cause of A. (Coming diegetically first, our
B is truly an A.) As we read forward, all the words that emerge from the text
refer back to, take their meaning from, and keep the rhythm of the words
that came earlier. The Kuleshov “experiment” works exactly because we
are prepared, or willing, to think that if we see a man looking and then see
an object, that object is the thing that man is looking at. Immaterial that a
crafty writer-editor team can fool the audience’s calculations by breaking
that formula sleekly; the point is that there is a formula to be broken.
There is a formula dictating that one thing leads to another. One thing
has been led to by another.
(Continuity is a requirement for cinema because frames come one after
another.)

1
Hitchcock is here chatting with Truffaut about Rear Window (1954).
282 THE FILM CHEAT

Except that one thing does not lead to another. Experience is hardly so
simple. In the realism of cinema we reduce experience to simple, digestible
arrangements. A woman reaches out to a door handle, turns it, opens a door
and walks forward. After a cut we see her emerge from a doorway (from
the other side of that door: that door, the door I have just mentioned) into
another space. The rationale of editing would teach us that the two rooms are
contiguous, that the door leads from Room 1 to Room 2 straightforwardly;
but also that in making that move, nothing at all is happening for the woman
beside taking herself out of one place and inserting herself into another.
Since movement is all we see, movement is all there is. Cute narrative games
can be played here. When she arrives in Room 2, looking the same, in fact a
year has passed and all the conditions of her existence have changed. Or in
Room 2 she loses her whole memory of Room 1 and cannot figure out how
and why she is here. A forward edit: being somewhere, then later forgetting
that one was there. Or in Room 1 she forgets why and how she is there,
but she reaches forward, turns a doorknob, and moves into Room 2, where
suddenly she remembers being in Room 1.
The logic of the forward edit is meant to apply to the viewer more than
to the character. When in Rear Window Stewart looks out of his window, we
look out of his window. And when “Stewart sees” a half-naked girl dancing,
we see that girl. We look, we see. As though nothing else intrudes, nothing
else is subjected to consideration, no daydream, no reflective thought, no
sideways glance, no retrieval of memory. Look>>see>>be. We look before
we see. Or do we see before we look? Is it possible to look without having
seen?
Considerable work has been done by filmmakers who are broadly
considered “experimental”—Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits, Maya Deren,
Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, R. Bruce Elder, to name only some—to the
end of producing cinematic motion with edited pieces but without building
in the essentially formulaic dictate of causality, eventuality, process; or,
more broadly, to the end of invoking a greater process, more poetic and
less journalistic, more natural and less arbitrary. But the narrative edit is
always a kind of cover blinding us to the world of happenstance, reflection,
consideration, dream, by offering a direct map to eventualities, forthcomings,
finales. A map cheat.
Hitchcock uses Rear Window to explore its own system of cheating at a
crucial moment when Jeff (James Stewart) becomes so enraptured watching
Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the courtyard (a man he suspects strongly
of having butchered his wife) that he takes his eyes away from another
apartment down below, where Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn), a middle-
aged woman he was spying on a moment before while she was disappointed
on a date, has now apparently downed a bottle of pills. Hitchcock’s point at
this instant, yet also throughout the film, is that many things are going on at
the same time all around, the apartment structure (elaborate and expensive)
 SEQUITUR  283

mainly a mechanism for setting before the camera (before Jeff, who uses a
camera, too) a manifold spread, manifold but at the same time a spread only
a part of which can be taken in at any one moment. With every act of gazing
we may establish connections, discover clues, as Jeff does; but with every act
of gazing we are taking our eyes away from something else, possibly equally
potent, possibly dire. To do otherwise we would need a greater eye, the eye
that is shown in close-up (to our horror) in The Fly (1958).
Anyone would know that the solitary reality under consideration at
any moment is not the only reality, that one’s logic does not stand alone
in the world. And yet the cinematic process, by way of the editor’s cheat,
makes us sense ourselves bearers of such an omnipotent logic, sole, solitary,
independent, floating, unless (as with Rear Window) some direct notice is
given that we are not. Always, with or without notice, something vital is
happening here, now, that I do not see.
 42
Veni creator spiritus

FIGURE 42 Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti in L’Avventura (Michelangelo

Antonioni, Cino del Duca, 1960).

And indeed, something is happening directly before my eyes, while I am

watching, exactly while I am watching, and it escapes me. Evades my watch.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) has a small group of
wealthy familiars escaping for a while to a little volcanic island. Rocky,
boldly sunlit, in a tranquil Mediterranean. A very little island, this; “the
volcanic stump of Lisca Bianca” (Sinclair 107). Certainly as old as 4000 BC.
They clamber about, like so many happy crabs. Our principals: the beautiful
Anna (Lea Massari), her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), her chum
Claudia (Monica Vitti). We follow the action, sparkling black and white, hot
blazing afternoon, prehistoric rocks. Anna is suddenly gone.
 VENI CREATOR SPIRITUS  285

Anna is gone.
Where can she be, Anna? Anna? Anna?1 An aggressive search, every
crevice, every sea-washed nook, the foamy waters all around, the blazing
sun. Can she have gone into the water to swim away? Away where? To
death? Is there a hidden cave?—no, there is no hidden cave. Anna has gone.
This is early in the film, within the first twenty minutes or so. The story
continues for about another two hours. Anna never reappears. Is Claudia
concerned all this time? Is Sandro always everywhere endlessly searching for
Anna, no matter what else comes into his life?
Might Anna have been an illusion in the first place, an illusion considerably
more potent than the illusions of cinema, even? The film seems grounded in
the practical, not in illusion. Sandro has his feet on the ground, physically
if not morally.
We ride the boat. We come to the island. We hop onto the rocks. We
explore. We laugh. We tease. We run and we climb. Always forms, shadows
from the hot sun, glare, more forms, old forms, rocks from a billion billion
years ago, the sea, the everlasting sea. Where and when can she have
disappeared? She was here, before our eyes, and now she is not here.
There is, then, a Force beyond the social forces at play in the story, the
class, the attitude, the aspiration, the regret. Name the force Antonioni;
name it God; name it Creator Spirit. Veni creator spiritus! This force is in
action over and above—entirely independent of—our seeing the results; it
causes happenings and it erases happenings; it places before us, like so many
gifts to the emperor laid out on a fabulous carpet, all the creatures we need
to see, with their anxieties, their questions, their hopes, their abject fears.
Vitti’s character (as so very often in Antonioni’s work) is a notable case of
pent-up anxiety covered over by smooth grace. Everything is forcefully (if
calmly) laid out, all the conditions carefully spelled, the whole temperature
of the afternoon’s fun dictated firmly by the quality of the sunlight and the
forms of the rocks. If everything is here, if everything has been given, then
...
Then Anna’s absence is also here.
The emptiness is also given.
But here Antonioni executes a masterful plan. He does not play with the
conventions of the edit, the way one shot leads to another, the way we are
led first to feel expectations mounting and then to make a detection on the
basis of those expectations. He simply waits for a shot to terminate—any
good reason: the film runs out, the sun hides momentarily behind a solitary
cloud, a wind comes up blowing the women’s skirts, anything—and when

1
“Massari suffered a heart attack and was unable to complete a swimming sequence. The
assistant director, Franco Indovina, pulled on a petalled cap and bikini to double the passage
between pleasure boat and shore” (Sinclair 107).
286 THE FILM CHEAT

the camera is off he simply rescues Massari from the film. Ultimate Force,
he reaches into the narrative ongoing before him and he withdraws one of
the beings, simply. “Grazie. That is all for you.”2
Anna/Massari vanishes not behind a rock, not in the waves, not on the
far side of the island, but in a pause made by the Creator Spirit, a pause
placed off-camera. Her vanishing makes us starkly aware of the camera, the
island as setting, the Creative Force operating all this while at the same time
lingering before our sensibility like a vagrant perfume. So: not everything
that happens in a film needs to be seen happening. Not everything we see is
a happening. There are two worlds, one before the lens and another behind
it, two worlds, two horizons. Anna not only exists in both; she moves from
one to the other. And for the filmmaker, conscious of the twinning of his
world, she never dies.

2
“And please remain nearby for twenty-four hours so that we can be assured no re-takes will be
necessary before you fly off,” would be the typically understood farewell on a real set.
 43
“Bite the Dust”

FIGURE 43 George Clooney in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Warner Bros., 2013).

When the action gets swift the body almost always disappears. The editor’s
problem when the story launches into a hot-blooded pursuit, a precipitous
dangle, a fight, a horseback chase, an extra-vehicular activity, the climbing
of a construction crane—the problem and the challenge is to find a way
to do two things, apparently at the same time, although in practical effect
different shots are made and very skillfully cut together. First, quite beside the
long shot that will show the terrain, the complexity, and the challenge—why
fear has a place here—be certain to feature the principal character, clearly
identifiable, and heroic in deed. Next, keep the actor who is playing that
character from having to do anything at all, since a recognizable character
doing something is intrinsically interesting in herself but here it is the pulse
that is important.
Why must the actor be kept out of the stunt shot? A question that has
become too innocent for words in the wake of the 1983 death of Vic Morrow
288 THE FILM CHEAT

while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie for John Landis (and not staying
out of a stunt shot). Stunt work has a dangerous edge. While it is true that
in any movie shot accidents can happen, in stunt shots special safeties are
put in play:
●● Stunt performers are expert at what they do, and can be
differentiated according to expertises with different kinds of action.
They have performed the actions in question more than anyone else
on the set; they have learned the inside tricks.
●● Stunt performers work with directors and cinematographers to plan
out the precise action of every single shot, so as to place maximal
advantage on their own safety.
●● Crew members are generally sensitive to stunt work and its inherent
difficulties, and work hard, if necessary with numerous takes, to get
a shot right, injury-free.
●● Stunt performers are insured differently than actors are, and part
of the complexity of the stunt shot is the producer’s need to have
it accomplished with no untoward extra costs to the production,
beyond the specialized equipment needed.
●● Given the planning, the detailed labor, and the knowledge involved,
generally speaking stunt shots are not at all as hair-raising or life-
threatening as they appear onscreen. Much (cheated) exaggeration
can be produced through lens choice, camera speed, and filming
angle; as well as through sound editing. We tend to see what we
hear. Sound editing is a fascinating aspect of the driving shot,
because cars move much more slowly than they are posited as
moving in the story. The sound of revving motors covers (cheats)
the actual movement. Where there is no reason for diegetic sound, a
music track works effectively as cover.

Stunters and stand-ins are selected for reasons of physique: in a medium-

long or long shot, dressed in matching costume, with a wig if necessary, the
performer will be indistinguishable from the star as long as he or she is in
motion and the shot is relatively brief (Karen Sharpe supposedly climbing
out of the window of a moving city bus, in high heels, in The Disorderly
Orderly [1964]). This leads to a dialectic worth considering. Seen up close,
we have a star persona with recognizable features supporting the affection
of a fan base (eager to buy tickets). The character has already, by this point,
become identical to the star, identical at least to some modulated (made-up)
version of the star playing this particular role. Because of the star identity
more than because of the writing, we are moved to love the character, feel
for the character, engage with the character, and care about the character’s
life chances and safety. In this way we are set up to be concerned about the
 “BITE THE DUST”  289

character moving through quick action and courting danger. The courting is
performed by a stand-in, that is, comes from the behavior of not an actor/
character but a stranger/character we can reasonably believe to be the actor/
character; yet at the same time reasonably hope is not, since the actor would
get hurt and this stranger is inviolably magical in talent and stamina.
While the action flows—and typically the editing is accomplished with
very short pieces of film, running as briefly as a quarter of a second—we feel a
certain comfort in relaxing away from the screen and mapping the movement
(for which process designers assist us by dressing the protagonists in either
especially visible colors or easily detectable body suits). We sit back, we
ease into the rhythm of the action, we generalize the antagonism, drawing it
further and further away from Hero/actor vs. Villain/actor until it is wholly
morphed into the moral panorama of Good vs. Evil. As long as we find
ourselves watching a competitive “sport” between two discernable teams,
and as long as we are comfortable rooting for one of them, we can lose our
anxious fear that the hero will be hurt as an individual. Any wound produced
will be diegetic, a “hurt” that facilitates the plot (Luke Skywalker losing
his forearm in The Empire Strikes Back [1980]). To keep stoking that fear
between moments of release, to produce a fearf​ul-re​laxed​-fear​ful-r​elaxe​d-
fea​rful-​relax​ed pattern, an ideal pattern for hooking the suspicious eye,
editors will cut back and forth between medium-long or long shots of the
motion (including vehicles, stunt actors, and background with intensified
scenic illumination) and matching very close shots meant to indicate that the
player we have been watching is “really” the star we love. The star we love,
now amazingly a race driver, a mountain climber, a skydiver, an acrobat.
Some moments of performer disappearance are without intrinsic threat.
The character and some associate are to be seen driving swiftly down a road,
with enough of the road visible that the car and the passengers are very
small. Here, stand-in stunt drivers are used (they cost less per day than the
star does). In car chase scenes, we move back to the close/distant paradigm
I discuss above, some particularly challenging and, for many, pleasurable
examples being the car chases in Paul Greengrass’s Bourne films. In these,
the intercut shots of Matt Damon as Bourne are very swift, sometimes of a
hand on a gear knob for only eight or nine frames. The head shots typically
show expressions of extraordinary intensity, but only to lead into long shots
of a vehicle operating entirely outside the rules (such as driving against
oncoming traffic on the wrong side of a busy road).
The action sequence tends to be arranged in such a way that the viewer
must make a trade-off. To get the full value of the attractions phase, the
shots of cars flipping or exploding, mountains crumbling, helicopters
bursting into flame, shots looking down on dinosaurs or on faces smashed
in or on marksmen grimacing as they eye their scopes . . . the payoff must
be a thrill, not a recognition: one temporarily relinquishes a hold on the
star/character as a discrete individual. One must be ready to do this, and a
290 THE FILM CHEAT

common strategy for handling the cognitive dissonance (as Leon Festinger
called it) is to deny that the star/character is being taken away. The denial is
effected through wholesale acceptance of the stunt substitute as character,
this allowing for a continuity of belief that the same person we see behind
the wheel in a close shot is the one driving the car off a cliff. “The star
vanishes.” = “The star cannot vanish.” In this curious way, stardom with
all its accompaniments is congealed with attraction, the flamboyance of
personality with the flamboyance of the screen as a whole (because that
screen flamboyance is essentially what the action sequence achieves for the
viewer’s pleasure).
Ansel Elgort’s spectacular driving sequences in Baby Driver (2017)
perfectly exemplify the action problem, while at the same time humorously
mocking stunt driving itself, since Baby drives as though his dream in life
is to be a stunt driver in the movies. Here we must cut between clear shots
of the actor at the wheel, or using his hand to yank the emergency brake
as he turns, and shots of the car speeding down the road balletically with
“Baby” at the wheel, Elgort here supplanted by a stunt driver. It is possible
nowadays to photograph inside a moving car with a hand-held camera
so that rear-projected backgrounds are not needed, but the car cannot be
moving so quickly that the world outside becomes only a blur.
The conventions of action design and editing notwithstanding, a very
elegant ornament can be played upon the “disappearing star” theme. Given
our expectation, once it has been cultivated, for seeing star portraits and
action long shots in alternation, and for knowing or suspecting that doubles
are being used in the long shots, a filmmaker might try something daring,
something we may think a cheat of a higher order. The star could be asked
to shoot the entire passage, yet in such a way that, relatively invisible in
them, she appears not to inhabit the long shots and be replaced by a stunt
double, while in fact this is not the case. (For obvious reasons this couldn’t
be done in shots posing actual danger.) In such a construction, the star-
character identity does dissolve in the longer shots, to be replaced by a
stunter-character identity, except that the actor is the stunter. Given poor
visibility (strategized in any number of ways), the star face is not visible as
such. The viewer thus experiences the same alternation between recognition
and calculated observation, recognition of the star up close and calculation
of the trajectory of the act seen at a distance, as in conventional action
sequences, without realizing fully that there are no substitutions being made.
Again, the viewer is tricked.
One can see this system in place very dramatically in the locomotive
sequences of John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), in which Burt
Lancaster does all the engine-driving shots himself. Lancaster was an athlete
before he was an actor, however. He had the training for moving skillfully
in undoctored space, such as the cabin of an engine or the river area beside
a railway track. But a very elegant passage illustrating the apparent absence
 “BITE THE DUST”  291

but continuing presence of the star is the Kowalski death sequence in

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013). Here, the extensive and complex use of
animation effects, elaborate body rigging, and flexible camera movement
make possible stunts that are only “stunts.” I use the asterisk (*) to indicate
character moments that will seem to be played by stunt doubles, since the
identificatory face is not sufficiently visible; yet the entire sequence was shot
with the principal stars:

[1] A long shot (14 sec.) of Ryan Stone* (Sandra Bullock) in full
spacesuit outside her capsule, black space in the background, as she
plummets toward the camera writhing desperately. (Treble high-
tech static soundtrack.) As she somersaults her leg is caught in some
floating cabling attached to the vessel. She comes toward, then past
the camera, moving swiftly so that the face inside the helmet is not
identifiable. She flies off screen-right as the camera turns to show the
earth beneath her. She comes to the end of the tether and is drawn to
the side, first across a land mass and then across several strands of
cloud. CUT.
[2] Picking her up on the return, as with the earth below she approaches
us again. When she is close, and we can see the Bullock face inside
the helmet, she is reaching forward (toward us) with her extended
right hand. Her hand fills the upper left of the screen. (7 sec.)
[3] CUT TO her view, with that hand at screen right reaching. The vessel
is in the background with *Kowalski (George Clooney) heading her
way on his own tether as the camera rotates. He is upside-down to
her alignment, and their hands graze each other but do not connect.
Upside-down he moves away as they still reach. Her extended hand
grasping nothing signals the desperation of the moment. His tether
extends from lower screen left. He becomes smaller as, with one hand
and then the other, she keeps reaching. (8 sec.) CUT.
[4] MATCHING SHOT, her hand at screen left, *Kowalski twisting
against the background of the earth in the distance, flailing. Her
hand, foreground, has his tether. (2 sec.) CUT.
[5] *Him appearing to glide off. (1/4 sec.) CUT.
[6] Ryan has his tether in hand, ship behind her, being drawn forward
across the screen. (2 sec.)
[7] EXTREME LONG SHOT. Fragment of capsule at left, fragment
of earth at right, black space filling the screen. **Two very tiny
creatures, the left one tethered to the ship and holding the tether of
the second. (2.5 sec.)
[8] With tether extending from screen left, Kowalski looking forward at
Ryan and both twisting and yanking with a shout. (1 sec.)
292 THE FILM CHEAT

[9] With tether at right, Ryan’s reaction, being yanked. (1 sec.)

[10] Closer shot of Kowalski, looking up at her. He is muttering, as he
fills the screen, and is being pulled toward us. (3 sec.)
[11] AS IN [9]. She is being pulled toward and then over camera. As
torso disappears we see the tether wrapped around her left foot and
lower leg. (4 sec.)
[12] AS IN [10]. “Hold on,” she says off. “Going to bring you in.”
[13] AS IN [9], with camera further back from her so we see full body.
“Just hold on!” (2 sec.)
[14] AS IN [10]. “. . . pull you in!,” in continuing voiceover from her.
KOWALSKI: “Ryan . . . Listen . . .” She says again, “Pull you in.” He
is serious. “You have to let me go.” (3 sec.)
[15] AS IN [13]. “No!” She hears him argue, “I’m pulling you with me.”
(2 sec.)
[16] AS IN [10]. Reaching up to the hook to untie himself. “You have to
let me go. Or we both die.” (1.5 sec.)
[17] AS IN [13]. She is being tugged past camera, grunting. “Not letting
you go, we’re fine!” She flies past camera, which turns to show both
of them, *Kowalski quite far away, Ryan moving off. (4 sec.)
[18] AS IN [7], EXTREME LONG. Ship at left. Earth curving across
screen bottom. **Two tiny figures floating. “Ryan, let go,” we hear
him say, although they are hundreds of yards away. (5.5 sec.)
[19] Face-on to Ryan in her suit, filling most of the screen. She is shaking
her head. (1.5 sec.)
[20] Close on Kowalski. “It’s not up to you.” Unfastening himself. (1.5
sec.)
[21] Close on Ryan, shaking her head. (1.5 sec.)
[22] Close on Kowalski, unhooking, staring at the hook in his hand while
clasping the tether with his other. (5 sec.)
[23] Closer on Ryan. Shaking her head. (3 sec.)
[24] On Kowalski. “You’re gonna make it, Ryan.” He lets go, with her
calling after him, off-. Looking into camera he recedes into space.
(11 sec.)
[25] MEDIUM-LONG on *Ryan, as she recedes back toward the ship,
the tether waving after her. (6 sec.)
[26] LONG on *Kowalski, alone against the blackness, slowly turning,
receding. (9 sec.)

Whenever a stunt performer “bites the dust” in order that the star’s character
may appear to do so, a fundamental postulate of cinema is invoked, one well
 “BITE THE DUST”  293

known to insiders and camouflaged from the public by cheats: that a star
is not always a star. Effectively others may appear in the star’s place, not
only adequately filling in but fully appearing to be the star in action. Thus,
the action sequence does not augment or diminish the star persona nearly
as much as transmogrify it. The actor and character become together a new
creature with and without a face, with and without gestural skill, technically
adept while being innocent.
 44
Reflect On That

FIGURE 44 Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, Amblin, 1987).

A wonderful editorial cheat of classical cinema:

The film tended to be written by one or more craftsmen, members of
an exclusive cadre of former stage writers or fictionalists who had a
particular flair for characterization and dialogue. When their characters
spoke, every line echoed and was something to reflect upon. Very often the
talk was happening not to rationalize or support some rapid forward story
movement, to effect an action cinema, but to round out both personae and
moment, to socially embed behavior so that it would mirror, simply and
directly, broader social structures enduringly present.
 REFLECT ON THAT  295

The speech was to hear and think about, but one could do this only when
some still riper riposte did not instantaneously follow onscreen (as happens
incessantly in His Girl Friday [1940], thanks to the sound work by Lodge
Cunningham). The principal agent controlling the pace of story procession,
instant by instant, was the editor. When an actor had been shot in close-up
uttering a precious line, film would be exposed before the utterance and
after it, making a head and a tail. It was finally up to the editor (here, Gene
Havlick) how much of either to use in the cut.
By controlling the “space” around a speech, the editor can modulate
the pace at which the actor’s body would seem to move from one point
to another, and the juxtaposition of talk against that movement, thus
fashioning a character for which the actor had provided only working
material. Assuming, for a quick example, that a portrait shot of a woman
saying something while she sits in a chair is made with a longish tail, the
“tail” being continuing silent footage as she remains where she is after
delivering the line, the editor can make her seem to reflect on what she
has just said, and urge us to reflect, too, by using two or three seconds of
that tail. When Bette Davis was encountered by Rudi Fehr, the man who
had edited most of her pictures, she said, “Rudi, you’re it!” (Bell 139).
She knew with surety what he had done to the work she had offered in
front of the camera to give it pace, duration, echo, and pause. The editor
is also in control of how long we will wait before a speaking companion
rejoins in a conversation. And of much else that we see and hear. The
impression generally given in cinema is that, magically and unseen, the
lens has recorded all of what happened before it, that what we catch here
happened as recorded. But the editor systematically cheats that impression,
and cheats the real action on-set in order to produce, to sculpt, to create
the scene as we see it.
Let us look at a very moving scene in a late 1980s film made with a
classical grammar, the moment in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun
(1987) when young Jamie (Christian Bale) witnesses the United States Air
Force attack on the Japanese prison camp in which he is interred. Shot
after shot shows planes racing across the sky, sometimes heading for the
camera and swooping away, other times seen in lateral motion across the
screen, and with quick cutaways to all the principal protagonists: Julianne
Moore and Peter Gale staring up through a window; John Malkovich and
Joe Pantoliano doing likewise; Nigel Havers coming into the fresh air and
staring up in shocked anxiety; Masatô Ibu, the commandant, looking up
with fear and concern. Jamie has been seen already racing up the staircase
to the balcony of a building, suitcase in hand. He has reached the balcony:

[A] (Camera at floor level, looking up at Jamie, full body, standing at a

red-painted railing.) Jamie’s mouth is agape with wonder. Excited he
races off, screen-right, dog tags jingling from his neck. He moves all
296 THE FILM CHEAT

along the balcony (as camera pans), arriving at the [our] right end
and staring off-right. CUT TO:
[B] (A longer shot from behind Jamie, seeing the camp beyond him.)
He runs back, to his right again, back where he came from, staring
out intently. Then runs halfway back left. A plane coming left-
to-right down the runway strafes it. Plane moves off-right and
Jamie runs right to follow it with his gaze. An explosion in the far
right distance. A plane soars toward him, up and overhead, motor
buzzing. CUT TO:
[C] (Medium-close shot of Jamie) He stands at the railing, seen face-on,
with his hands raised to his temples and a look of anxious fear on his
face. Eyes furrowed. (Theme music strikes up extra-diegetically.) Jamie
crosses his arms over his chest as he steps back. Another step back. A
step forward. A smile beginning to crease the boy’s face. Stepping to
his right (screen-left) with the smile growing. Turning to look to his
left and stepping a little that way. (Theme ascending.) CUT TO:
[D] (Long shot. Fighter jet coming our way, very low, flying at the same
height as Jamie’s balcony.) (Vocal humming in the sound track,
ethereal, magical.) Wings tilting the plane comes forward. THIS
SHOT HAS BEEN FILMED WITH CAMERA CRANKED UP AND
PROJECTS IN SLOW MOTION. CUT TO:
[E] (Medium shot of Jamie staring off at the plane.) (Vocal music
continuing.) Frame cuts off top of boy’s head but he ducks down
squinting forward. CUT TO:
[F] (Close-focused long shot, Jamie’s back in foreground, jet at left
moving to pass him.) CUT TO:
[G] (Medium-long of Jamie, with camera lower than in [A], looking
up at balcony and boy with arms out excitedly at his sides.)
THE CAMERA SWOOPS IN SOME, AND SWIFTLY GLIDES
LEFTWARD (imitating the plane’s movement). CUT TO:
[H] (Medium-close of plane passing left to right.) Pilot is looking at
Jamie, giving him a brave wave of the hand.1 “Tugboat” is written
behind the propeller. THIS SHOT IS MADE FOR SLOW MOTION
(with vocal humming continuing). CUT TO:
[I] (Extreme close shot of Jamie, frontal.) His eyes explode with joy, he
stretches out his arms, he throws back his head, and yells at the top
of his lungs: “Wowwww! (Music harmonically echoing his voice.)
Go! B-51! Cadillac of the sky!!!”

The shot was created using a miniature plane with the flyer matted in. My thanks to Linda
1

Ruth Williams for pointing this out.

 REFLECT ON THAT  297

Note these fascinating editorial effects, each presenting an opportunity and

a situation apparently intrinsic to the story but in practice created ad hoc
through an editor’s decision:
●● Between [A] and [B] we shift for a fluid storytelling rhythm, but in
the reality of the situation as configured here, the diegetic detail, we
have no clue how long Jamie “stares off right” before moving back
to where he was. The move back does seem to flow logically from
spending himself in the stare, and yet the extent of his suspension
in staring is entirely editorial. The shot runs a second or two longer
than it needs to if all we need to learn is that in [A] Jamie has gone
to the end of the platform for a good look. And at what point in the
photographed action of [B] does the editor choose to pick the boy
up? This is a matter of shaving one frame, two frames; very precise
to catch a hesitation in his movement. Shot [B] does not begin with
him serenely standing, as we see in [A].
●● When as [B] ends we see the plane soar above us (Jamie’s
perspective), up, up, and away, how much does he think, consider,
meditate, worry before, jumping to [C], we catch him standing with
hands to temples? (His hands were not at his temples as we left him
in [B].) Again, the story moves ahead fluidly, but through what kinds
of possibly jerky contractions and expansions of “time”? Are we
looking at realistic time or at dream time, given that evidently Jamie
is in a reverie on this balcony?
●● When at the end of [C] we cut to what Jamie is staring at “out
there,” and find the fighter jet approaching in slow motion, we might
well have the impression that, as though in swift order, as with an
invocation, he (i) reaches the end of the balcony, (ii) looks out, and
(iii) presto!, a fighter jet is approaching just as he hopes here and
always. (Jamie has been carefully established in the story so far as a
kid obsessed with airplanes.) But is that plane answering his desire
in the diegetic reality, or is he conjuring it? It cannot be flying slo-mo
in diegetic reality. If Jamie is slowing it down through his diligent
examination, might he not also be slowing down the entire sequence
of events, stretching out and unfolding each part as a glorious
shawl of momentarity? The editor’s question: he has Bale in portrait
staring out; how long to hold on the end of that shot [C] before
cutting to [D], the plane? The plane is going to instantaneously
resolve the unresolved probability of the end of [C], so how long to
hold off that instant of resolution? (How far should the boy’s desire
be shown to expand onscreen?)
●● Movement from [E] to [F]: he ducks and squints forward, then we
see the plane passing. The speed of the cut from [E] to [F] suggests
298 THE FILM CHEAT

that the plane passes just as he catches his breath, that one needs—
that Jamie needs—to race if he is to see it. That racing feeling, added
in by the editor who would have had plenty of film to work with
either way, allows us to share Jamie’s eager sensibility. Many have
written about Spielberg’s career at this point being one in which he
relishes the pleasures of his child characters; but the editing here
shows precisely how he displays that relished pleasure and entices us
to share it by means of the viewing we are given to have.
●● When we cut to [G] we are suddenly below Jamie again, looking up
in wonder at him looking up in wonder (the Wondering Boy as cause
for wonder). He stands in for the thing he is looking at (he looks up;
we look up at him looking up) and our looking at him becomes a
sympathetic adjunct to, or substitute for his looking. [G] is a more
exciting, more stimulating shot than [F], the long shot from behind;
the rapidity with which we are brought from [F] to [G], from behind
Jamie to a low spot in front of him, is an indication of the editor’s
decision to bring us a thrill without making us wait for it. It is as
though Jamie is whispering, “Hurry, love this!”
●● [H] is an interesting shot technically, because once the film has
been exposed with the camera cranked up it can be worked in the
optical printer to project at virtually any desired rate: a normal 24
fps projection of film shot at, say, 48 fps would lead to conventional
slo-mo; for film shot at 36 fps, say, slightly faster if still slow; 20 or
18 fps notably slower; or any number of frames per second at all.
That is, the hovering, floating, dreamy slowness of the thing as the
pilot waves is under aesthetic control. This shot directly addresses
and mirrors Jamie’s feeling as he sees the plane. The longer the shot
can last, the longer the boy’s thrill of contact with the pilot, for him
a true hero of the sky, the person he has dreamed of being. Jamie is
meeting his dream self.

However, the technical virtuosity hides itself. Given that [H] is a matte, there
are actually two pieces of film that must be composed together, in the optical
printer, one of them a shot of a model with the camera’s reverse motion
simulating the plane’s forward motion; the other a shot of the pilot making
his move. To make this matte seamlessly is a challenge to begin with, but
here and now it must be done at an accelerated frame rate—for both pieces
of film—thus giving the optical printer or digital compositor more frames
to work with (and potentially more frames with which to make a mistake).
●● The cut into the close-up portrait [I] can come at any point during
the plane’s movement in [H] as long as the pilot’s wave is registered
first (and that wave can be calculated, given the length of film
exposed and the speed of projection). It must interrupt our reverie
 REFLECT ON THAT  299

with the plane (Jamie’s reverie) as an explosion of joy no longer

containable.2 The precision of the dialogue just evidences the boy’s
detailed knowledge of planes (matched in the film by no other
character, not even the pilots we see).

* * *

If one saw this tiny sequence again, but in a re-cut form, say with all of the
shots [A] through [I] in the same order but cut so that each ran the exact
same number of frames (with [H] multiplied by two, to get the slo-mo effect
but for no longer than any other shot), the impression of the scene would
be radically altered. Our emotional attachment is struck, shaped, modified,
heightened because of the way the editor, Michael Kahn, is lengthening and
shortening the shots, our experience, and film time.

2
Joseph McBride offers an astute comment about Jamie and airplanes: “Preparing Bale for Jim’s
separation from his mother, Spielberg said, ‘I think the reason I want you to have a plane in
your hand is because you need to make a choice between your mother’s hand or your airplane,
which drops, and you choose your airplane. You let go of your mother to get the airplane and
your mother is swept away in this force’” (397).
 45
Presence and Presentation

FIGURE 45 Rick’s American Bar in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros.,

1942). Design by Carl Jules Weyl. Decoration by George James Hopkins. Humphrey
Bogart at right. Dooley Wilson left of him.

For a breath, let us return to Jamie on the balcony with that slowly passing
B51, “Cadillac of the sky!!!” It is plain enough that a passing aircraft is
being presented, that is, shown to a character and in such a way that it is also
shown to us. But as the item was filmed as a miniature, authentic B51s being
unavailable, with a pilot matted in, one could argue the plane was never
 PRESENCE AND PRESENTATION  301

present: not for Jamie, not for Spielberg, not for us. Screen presence—as in,
the condition of being directly present—involves the entirely extra-diegetic
relation an object or person can have with a camera, beyond simply existing
in and of itself; whereas presentation involves the entirely diegetic relation an
object or person can have with a character’s eyes (and with ours--sometimes
in film we see what a character sees, sometimes not).
Spielberg’s diegetic “airplane” has presentation but not presence.
We could imagine a condition in which something or someone had
presence but not presentation. In Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, the painted
canvas of a bucolic scene hangs on the wall in almost every other shot of
the film, always decorating the space but never featuring in it. This canvas is
entirely present in itself, but is never actually presented. A nice equivocal case
occurs in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982) as Rupert (Robert
De Niro) entertains Rita (Diahnne Abbott), a girl he wishes to impress, at
lunch by paging (ostentatiously) through his autograph collection for her.
They are at a table very near the camera. His boorish straining to catch her
whim takes our attention, as does her somewhat interested (in the names)
but also somewhat disinterested (in him) attitude. Far in the background,
at a table all by himself, sits a man who has obviously been watching these
two and who is entertaining himself by mocking all of Rupert’s gestures in
sync (Chuck Low). There is no presentation shot of this man, yet he is very
evidently present. One could appreciate the nuances of the scene without
noticing him at all. The Hitchcock wall decoration works in the space, too,
but its working is never made part of the show.
Thanks to the “magical” cheat of special effects the bulk of what appears
on camera is a presentation without presence. We are meant to think—
encouraged to think—of such material as having presence, most notably by
the care with which it is shot in order to convey the effect of realism. One
important presence that is established with care but almost never made the
subject of presentation is what could be called “design tone.” When a number
of different sets must be constructed for a film, the reality “tone” established
in the first one we are to see in the final edit will call for replication in the
others, and designers know that by establishing the scene at first in a certain
key they will be required to keep “in harmony” in succeeding sets. For a
good model of this “key retention,” see Blade Runner (1982), designed by
Lawrence Paull. The apartment interiors could be exterior alleyways, and
vice versa.
But painted backings open another possibility for presentation without
presence. When a film scene is shot in studio in front of a large painted
backing the seamed canvas, sometimes more than 40 feet high and as much
as 180 feet long, is drawn and filled in such a way that from a distance the
eye sees it as real. The paint used is specially manufactured at the studio not
to suffer under intense illumination. And for illuminating the field, gaffers
use round dish lights called “skypans,” mounted at the top of the backing
302 THE FILM CHEAT

and uniformly lighting it. The cornfield in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the
poppy field are painted backings; the surface of the moon in Destination
Moon (1950), seen in numerous differing shots, is one, too. The Scottish
hills around Brigadoon (1954); the atmosphere and mountains of Altair-4
in Forbidden Planet (1956); the Triboro Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy
Bridge) visible through the windows of the delegates’ lounge at the United
Nations in North by Northwest (1959); the black star field in 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968); much of “Las Vegas” in Coppola’s One From the Heart
(1982); that spreading city one so frequently sees through the plate glass
windows of skyscrapers. The painted backing, expertly done, gives a very
strong sense of presentation and works to convince the viewer (falsely) of
presence, too. Painted mattes work similarly, as we see in numerous films
from Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940) through
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and An Age of Innocence (1993)
and Titanic (1997), to the Lord of the Rings films (2001, 2002, 2003) and
onward. As we believe the action to be occurring in a place, and believe
ourselves to share that place, we must accept the presentation as flowing
from direct presence if we are not to witness an artisanry that, being explicit,
yanks us out of engagement.
Obviously fill-in performers of all kinds affect to give a presentation
without announcing an actor presence, although we are usually tricked
(cheated) into finding presence where there is little more than physical
occupation of a space. When in Tootsie (1982) we see in long shot Dustin
Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels stumbling on high heels through a sidewalk
crowd, Hoffman is present and also presented (via Michaels). But the
thousands of streetwalkers moving around him are only presented. While
we recognize that of course those people must have been there, their being
there does not register as a palpable fact for us in the way that Hoffman
does; they are merely streetwalkers (that is, the diegetic characters they are
playing to crowd the scene).
Two paradoxes:
●● Presentation Without Presence. That everything presented cannot
always be present was true as far back as the Keystone Kops and
Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin and continued forward through
sci-fi space epics and highly charged, but in the everyday world
impossible, action sequences. Tricks of one kind or another are
unavoidable, even at the very most basic level in dramatic film. An
actor plays a character who delivers a pungent line—“Here’s looking
at you, kid”—and his character seems to reverberate in our screen
consciousness as he speaks. But a real presence is hidden here, as
neither Rick nor Bogie composed that line, although both of them
act to animate it, Bogie with his embodied self and Rick with his
coherent surface. The line actually comes from Julius and Philip
 PRESENCE AND PRESENTATION  303

Epstein, who do not make an appearance of any kind save by way of

the melody that they wrote to come out of Bogart’s mouth. Certainly
in its enunciation the line is present, but as a composition it is not.
We could say the presence is partial, since the Epsteins have presence
only through Bogart’s agency.

Increasingly, film stories have been challenged to include displays of the

impossible or improbable, events that took place a long time ago now
reconstructed (say, in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling [2008]) or events that
have not taken place nor could they. A space ship descends from the sky
(The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951]; Invaders from Mars [1953]; Close
Encounters of the Third Kind [1977]) or a gargantuan monster emerges
(Frankenstein [1931]; Godzilla [1954]; Alien [1979]). These eventualities
are designed to arouse, shock, confront, and finally threaten with their
apparent presence in elaborated presentations often costing enormous sums
and employing legions of workers to achieve. But neither flying saucers nor
monsters have the presence we are offered in science fiction and horror.
Even the complacent and tedious will be subject to unseen transformations
that subtract or radically alter the presence behind presentation. In Stanley
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Tom Cruise strolls the sidewalks of New
York, but no. He is walking a treadmill in front of a rear-projected image,
largely because Kubrick, who lived in London and did not fly, refused to
work in America. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), James Stewart
and Doris Day walk a treadmill in front of a rear-projected noontime
Marrakech not because the filming could not happen on location—in fact
it did—but because getting the kind of control of sound and lighting for
an adequate portrait shot required studio shooting. Day and Stewart seem
present and are present, along with their characters. But Marrakech’s Place
Djemaa el Fna, which also seems present, is a presentation (it is there for the
characters, but not for the actors).
With more contemporary extravaganzas comes a curious twist on
presentational trickery. Take Spider-Man, the first version (2002), with
Tobey Maguire gooing his way through Manhattan by using stickum to
hook up to the top of one skyscraper after another as he zooms up the
avenues. Viewers may watch a scene like this wishing they were flying along
with Spidey, catching glimpses of his thrilled excitement and noting with
respect his gradually improving talent, but they do not believe it. What
they believe, if pressed, is that an actor has been dangled in front of a
green screen in a harness attached to cables; and that the whole panoply
of gestures has been matted into separately photographed footage of New
York or even into a computer-generated artist’s version. For viewers who
see the film this way, the presence is special effects, which can still remain
romantic and mysterious—just as for decades acting was thought to be,
before the age of Capitalist Realism (when characters mumble and gunfire
304 THE FILM CHEAT

for Big Profit replaces speech). Special effects are mysterious because though
it is widely known they are there it is widely not known how and through
what combination of labors they work.
Presentation can be separated from presence in another, more chilling
way. Between October and December 1950, Hitchcock filmed Strangers on a
Train (1951), using numerous locations some of which were in Washington
D.C. A principal shot shows the villainous Bruno (Robert Walker) standing
on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial looking out to eye another character.
The film, assembled by Rainbow Productions, was released by Paramount.
Walker was signed to film Leo McCarey’s My Son John (1952) afterward,
mostly between August and October of 1951. This was also a Rainbow
Productions film, released by Paramount. But on the 28th of August 1951,
Robert Walker died (from an improperly administered drug, in hospital),
thus being unavailable to film all his scenes for McCarey. Some of the
footage of Strangers is copied into John with the diegetic context entirely
altered. The copying was unobstructed because the footage was owned by
Rainbow and was available from Paramount, both companies having made
both films. When we see the Jefferson Memorial shot from My Son John, for
one example, we are watching a presentation without a presence.
While it was not a secret, the death of Robert Walker also did not gain
broad publicity, and the edit substitutions in My Son John were not broadcast.
A far more notable and popularly recognized case of presentation without
presence was the opening, October 29, 1955, of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel
Without a Cause, starring the meteoric James Dean. Dean had been killed
in Cholame, California one month before, when his Spider was demolished
in a road accident. As Dean’s reputation was already keenly established
because of his electric performance as Cal Trask in Elia Kazan’s East of
Eden (April 10, 1955) the news of his death spread, so that with Rebel and
then with George Stevens’s Giant, which opened in November 1956, the
stark mismatch between a vibrant character scuttling through the drama
with intense emotion on one side and the entirely absent performative spirit
on the other could not have been more evident. Viewers at the time were as
saturated with news of Dean’s untimely death as they were deeply moved by
the performances they saw. Vivacity married to morbidity.
When I say “viewers at the time” I am touching on the tip of what seems
to me a very great iceberg indeed. When today we watch a film that has
been made “today,” that is, within the past year or so, in the great majority
of cases we read the actor beneath the character as a living person, just such
as we are, presently at work on some other film or at home with family or
friends somewhere: enjoying a life. We acknowledge that we have no access
to the privacy of the actor, yet also that there is such privacy and it coexists
with our own in time. There is thus a kind of depth to the screen images we
see, a penetration from the surface characterization through to the working
actor through to the citizen under-standing that actor in society. Presentation
 PRESENCE AND PRESENTATION  305

and presence inextricably coupled. And in cases where a performer suddenly

leaves the scene, where presence is severed abruptly from presentation,
there is a kind of chill (that produces waves of reverberation in, say, social
media). Our viewing of films from the past works quite differently, however,
albeit that when those films opened in theaters they had the kind of vitally
engaged spectatorship I have just described. For us now these are bygone
presentations—long bygone—supported by the work of actors not only not
present but altogether forgotten outside of the fact that they are seen in a
film like the one we are watching. The world in which they had current
presence is as relinquished, as left in the wake of time, as their lives in it.
Only legends support a belief in the actor as present; biographical accounts,
historical acknowledgments, the living memories of old-timers who
sometimes go public (and feed the scripts Ben Mankiewicz speaks on TCM).
When more than sixty years afterward we see an uncannily vital spate of
screen acting—Dean in Rebel—the vitality leeches onto the performer
construct; we imagine to ourselves now that Dean was the sort of person he
embodied in that film, or at least the sort of person who could embody that
Jim Stark. But this is a kind of imagination on the part of the viewer quite
different from the imagination in play when she watches, say, Ben Affleck
and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (2014), imagining a living Ben Affleck and
a living Rosamund Pike who made the film. We know Dean only was alive,
whereas Affleck and Pike are. The past world Dean inhabited, as seems to us
today, and the present world we inhabit with the living actors of our recent
films, taste differently.
All of what we call “old film,” “classical film,” “historical film” constitutes
presentation without presence in that whatever “presence” is involved
is nothing like the presence we can feel knowing that an artist is with us
somewhere in the world. “Former presence” is not exactly “presence.”
●● Presence Without Presentation. Further, it is not the case that
everything that is present can be presented. The screen is bounded,
not only informationally but also aesthetically. When the eye looks
at the screen rectangle in a fictional film, two conditions come into
play at once:

[1] The optical rectangle of the screen image is brought into both technical
and cognitive focus through a differentiation of the relative values of objects
(in this case, bodies and things) in sight. A selection is made that establishes
something as central, crucial, important, special, valuable against other
things that necessarily recede at the same time. The camera’s focus is almost
always a guide to meaning, and when the focus changes during a static
shot our “composition” of the screen is altered to fit—that is, we follow
the guide. Following means, among other things, not reading presentational
status onto every presence before us. Fixation of vision can be aided by a
306 THE FILM CHEAT

sharp musical cue, too—a kind of downbeat, but one sounding a torturous
orchestration so as to alarm.1 As to the problem of rectangular boundary,
when they are worrying about what might be sliding over the edge or kept
out of frame the default tendency among film viewers is to trust that the
camera has captured the relevant rectangle inside the broader diegetic space.
Innumerable rectangles are theoretically possible, but this rectangle is the
optimal one, here, now. (Clearly, in horror film a very great frisson can be
produced by the filmmaker who is willing to play with this formula.)
When we concentrate on two bodies engaged in conversation, put before
us in medium shot, say, we take anything either of them says as being
centrally relevant to the moment; and we let our concentration bleed away
from the walls, the curtains, the hung pictures, the fireplace, the door. One
cannot see everything.2 Yet at the same time a set will be fully decorated so
that no telling lacuna gives away that singular dispiriting fundamental fact,
that this is always, and always was, only a set built of plywood and painted
up, an emptiness filled in with décor. Unless the camera picks out some
design element for us to focus on, we take the whole as a coherent presence
without expecting a highlit presentation of detail. And if there is a highlit
presentation of detail, we fold the detail into our consideration of diegetic
value and importance. The little piece of notepaper on the desk . . .
[2] But in addition, the cinematographer’s lighting crew will select out
some particular features of the scene for special highlighting in circumstances
where a shot is to be made that will later be adjoined in editing to another
one, in order that a pulsing sense of plot movement be given. Since screen
shots are complex to begin with, and since they last but a very short time, the
viewer must be given aid in selecting out the feature that will most relevantly
afford a sense of direct continuity when connected with a design feature
upcoming. The chase sequence at the end of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
gives a brilliant illustration. We see shot after shot of chase vehicles (from an
unidentified federal agency, possibly the F.B.I.) racing after a pack of kids on
dirt bikes through the unfinished construction of a hilly Los Angeles suburb.
The action is fast, and the cars are meant to be speeding, swerving, jamming
to a halt at a sudden precipice, and so on. But the screen is continually
composed using the flashing front bumpers of the cars, as they race across
the screen, to catch our eye and lead to the next flashing item in the next
shot. In effect the screen is an empty canvas on which Spielberg and team
are inscribing first one sweeping abstract line (the front of the car moving
in), then another but contradictory one (with another car on the other side;

1
The limiting case here is Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins during the shower scene in
Psycho (1960), inspired, I am reliably told, by the sound of a violin tuning up.
2
Those who work with pausable media, able to stop on a frame, back up, and repeat several
times see, at least, more than their predecessors.
 PRESENCE AND PRESENTATION  307

or a low shot of the bicycles speeding away, the pumping feet constituting
the match). Pretty much everything else has to be taken as read, since the
eye is taken up following the brightest parts of the screen: the bumpers, the
bike fenders, the dirt base.
And in this E.T. sequence the screen composition is gracefully managed
so that by looking straight forward at the screen the viewer can be offered
all the relevant moving objects seriatim, each swooping into a fixed field of
vision in turn. The filmmaker constantly reminds us that he knows we can
only look straight ahead in the theater. There is no other field. Therefore
what he needs us to see, what he needs to present, must be arranged so that
it will be seen directly and frontally, will have a presence that dissipates the
presence of other things that are also there and not being presented. The
scene itself, taken as a diegetic space, has presence; but only what is relevant
to the story at each instant will be presented there.
 46
By Contrast

FIGURE 46 Charles Gray in Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, Eon

Productions, 1971).

Since the mid-1990s, it has become fashionable to create action stories

overflowing with characters, many of whom look like one another, share
talents for whipping out cell phones, changing SIM cards, tossing “burners”
into trash cans (in cities where there purportedly still are trash cans),
downing copious amounts of alcohol, using a firearm brutally, and running
almost as quickly as a camera can move on a dolly track. The multiple
storylines, multiple locations, multiple encounters, arcane (e.g., “smart”)
dialogue, esoteric motivations, gleamy technology, perfectly coordinated
movement, and, of course, spurting, dribbling, oozing, blanketing blood
make following the line of action in detail something of a challenge, not to
say a wild goose chase, since the story as surfaced almost always turns out
in the end to have been a mere subterfuge for something darker and more
hidden, plain clues to which were supposedly offered at the very beginning
(and too casually disattended).
 BY CONTRAST  309

Roger Donaldson’s slick The November Man (2014) has Peter Devereaux,
a cast-iron CIA man (Pierce Brosnan), brought out of retirement by Hanley,
an old friend (Bill Smitrovich), so that he can seek out and handle Arkady
Federov, a Russian bureaucrat waiting to become president (Lazar Ristovski).
On the way we meet a Russian contract killer (a woman with long hair)
(Mediha Musliovic); a much-violated Serbian woman whose family were
exterminated by the soon-to-be president and who was for two years raped
by him (a woman with long hair) (Olga Kurylenko); a young CIA officer
trying to show the older one how good he is (Luke Bracey); an American
case officer, more or less impotent (a woman with long hair); a newspaper
reporter, sweet-mannered and doomed to a hideous death (Patrick Kennedy);
a CIA director, taciturn and slimy (Will Patton); and countless nameless
Slavic-looking thugs not one of whom can shoot straight. Who is on what
side here? What, in fact, are the sides? Will Brosnan’s Peter Devereaux
manage to escape from all the different sorts of folk who want to kill him?
Will he be reunited with his twelve-year-old daughter (a very young girl with
long hair) who has been kidnapped to keep him at bay? Will the would-be
president become president? To get an extremely vague sense of the quality
of this film, a film which is in so many ways like countless others of its type,
all of them starring actors like Pierce Brosnan, travel back to the beginning
of this paragraph and read it aloud as fast as you possibly can. When you
come to the end, stand on a pretty parapet overlooking a beautiful river on
a nice, sunny day and deeply inhale.
The filmmaker and his team are trying to do two somewhat contradictory
things here, of necessity. First, make a story both involving and complicated
enough to convince even the most cynical viewer (in an audience now filled
with cynics) that the picture has something to say, was worth making, and
deserves both attention, the restricted rating it will most surely be awarded,
and fifteen dollars at the box office. Secondly, take this exceedingly
complicated and heavily ornamented tale and find a way to simplify it, in
a way that is undetectable (because the cynics will be put off by simplicity)
but also indelible (so that viewers unaccustomed to the form, viewers half
sleeping, viewers with much else on their minds can manage to follow well
enough to be satisfied—or at least think they ought to be satisfied—by the
conclusion, and thus willing to pay at the box office still again for more fare
like this). Signpost it, but subtly.
If you don’t signpost it, the viewer may get lost or lose interest—certainly
sit back without involvement and watch the thing rather like a kaleidoscope.
If you signpost it too much you risk giving away the show.
There are two major muddles:
●● The moral muddle: Who is ultimately on the side of Good, who
ultimately on the side of Evil? Imperative that the nature of the
Good not be explored in depth. Goodness must be taken entirely
310 THE FILM CHEAT

for granted (thus showing off its hegemony). The good characters
die sadly, the bad ones perfunctorily. The good shouldn’t die and the
bad should (just as Oscar Wilde suggested1). What is involved here
politically is the problem of economic and military alignment and
the power imbalance that must occur when alignments shift. At this
writing, for instance, Turkey is threatening to “unfriend” America
in the name of a “bond” with Russia. In the sense that the film’s
characters will be spread across a moral spectrum they in effect
constitute opposing teams, teams each suffering the possibility of
infiltration by spies pretending to be bona fide members. The action
film, the western, the crime film, and the adventure film all work
by aligning the viewer’s moral compass and desire for satisfaction
with the heroic side, but the game will be all the more extensive and
challenging if the villain and company are not just threatening but
interesting and also in disguise.

To clear the moral muddle, any or all of these cheats will be employed,
part of the basic language of writers, directors, and producers but entirely
unhighlighted (as cheats will be):

[1] Have the hero brush his or her teeth. Only good characters brush
their teeth. Brushing the hair doesn’t work: liars brush their hair
sometimes. Another equally effective ploy is to have a sensitive
character (almost always a woman, although in Kiss of the Spider
Woman [1985] a man) tend to a heroic character’s open wound.
Heroes must be guarded from infections.
[2] Have the hero spare a critical moment to look upon some severely
wounded innocent, as though showing regret for stray bullets or, in
the case of a compadre, as though trying against all odds to prevent
a death. The key here is that time must slow almost to a halt as
the hero bends down to look, to touch, to care, to speak, to press
on the wound. “Stay with me! Stay with me!” Thus, when we have
a hospital scene with doctors and nurses caring for the brutally
wounded, these medical folk are not defined as good by virtue of
their occupational action; they are not taking time out. Goodness
stops the clock. And “bad guys” never stoop to comfort fallen
comrades. Humaneness is entirely a property of The Good.
[3] Have the hero avoid sexual culminations, or, for that matter, sex
altogether. The hero must be reserved for instantaneous physical
combat, and the exhaustion produced by orgasm is disempowering

1
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means” (The Importance
of Being Earnest).
 BY CONTRAST  311

in that regard (Samson and Delilah). The hero may be shown to be

on the cusp of having sex, and this kind of show works best at the
very end of a film (the standard finale of James Bond films); and
if, for viewer titillation, the hero does have a sexual engagement
it must never be exhausting. More simply: the hero must never
experience exhaustion, period. When asleep, he or she must
awaken like a sprite, very often with pistol under pillow. “I am
ready!”:

           If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be

not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
(Hamlet V.ii.221–4)

[4] If the hero becomes engaged in romance it will always, definitively,

be a heterosexual one, usually with a partner who begins by being
eminently distrustful but whose life is saved by the hero and who
slowly warms. The deepening goodness of the hero is indexed by
the gradual warmth of the romantic other. Homosexual encounters
are permitted onscreen, more and more frequently now, but are
reserved, typically, for secondary characters or, as has long been the
case, villains, unless the hero pretends to a same-sex affair in some
kind of tactical subterfuge.
[5] The hero eschews ornament in general, so that any piece of jewelry
or fancy piece of clothing will be rationalized as necessary to the
action or as a sentimental treasure rescued from a horribly tortured
past. The dandy cannot be heroic (a condition Wilde’s writing
twists).
[6] The villain will smile at inappropriate moments. Some off-kilter
internal mechanism causes this person to find humor in bizarre
situations that others would cringe at. Thus, the villain’s smile
is not only not to be trusted, not only malevolent, but also
psychopathological (a nice case being Donald Pleasence’s 1967
performance as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice).
[7] The villain will speak volumes, showing either a verbose or a
hyperpolite self, or both. The vocal etiquette will rise in proportion
the closer the villain comes to hurting the hero. That is, torture
is unthinkable absent elaborate discourse. The lesson for young
people here, unfortunately, is that verbal articulateness is to be
shunned as morally questionable. Very unlike what happens in
Shakespeare, the hero will be incapable of making long, prolix,
shining statements.
312 THE FILM CHEAT

[8] The villain will typically manifest clearly demarcated (brilliantly

lit or focused) signs of control and power, thus rationalizing his
or her reign over a realm of thugs. Movement in a slick limousine,
access to live, in-the-moment computer scanning and tracking,
accompaniment almost everywhere by a specially unctuous factotum
who is designed to be unforgettable (bald with scars, overdressed,
linguistically odd). In Die Hard (1988) the flunkie Karl (Alexander
Godunov) flashes extremely long, flaxen, Goldilocks hair.
[9] When the hero makes demand for something technical—
information, equipment, backup—it is almost always unavailable
or insufficient, thus forcing innovation, strain, and ennobling sweat;
while the villains are instantly satisfied by (hyperloyal) servant types.
[10] If at film’s end the villain should end up in the back seat of a police
car, he or she will be given a close-up for a remarkably ironic and
pointedly ugly facial display; and should the villain die, the death
will be spectacular in its own right, something especially and
unimaginably horrendous. The hero will seem—because heroes
are—immortal.
[11] Except in parodies (“I do it for Her Majesty!”), the hero will avoid
explicitly naming the moral source on behalf of whom or which he
acts. The villain will proclaim a desire for world domination but the
hero will not stand as representative of a nation or tribe.

•• The resilience muddle: The hero and villain (and their separate
crews) must seem radically different not only morally but also
because of the strengths they possess and demonstrate, physical,
spiritual, or intellectual. Thus, heroism cannot be claimed simply
to exist as a principle but must be demonstrated ongoingly, must
be claimed to flow from a cultural base widely acknowledged
and accepted; ditto villainy. In Shane (1953), to take a good
example of a morally bifurcated universe onscreen, the hero (Alan
Ladd) rides into the picture from the East, locus of high culture,
connector to Europe and the Old World. He makes not only his
cleanliness but also his origins clear in his tailored clothing and
in his mannerly dialogue with Marion Starrett (Jean Arthur). The
archvillain Wilson (Jack Palance), by contrast, also attired with
taste and at expense, thus perhaps also from an Eastern city, has
not picked up sociability. We see him excluded from the group,
leering at others, smiling obnoxiously, without grace. He is a man
bought on command, a mercenary type, whereas Shane has solid
working-class values as well as couth, knows how to ask for a
job and how to work hard for his pay. Wilson uses his tricks but
never works hard. Yeoman vs. charlatan.
 BY CONTRAST  313

Here are cheats for clearing the resilience muddle:

[1] The hero will not only tolerate but appreciate cultural expression
(expression, not over-expression), even showing an ability to drop
a significant keyword. In November Man, again, Devereaux is
resting in her apartment with Alice Fournier (Kurylenko), and at
one point she sits at her grand piano and begins to play one of Erik
Satie’s “Gnossiènnes.” He stands beside her, focused and patient,
his ears open. “Satie!” he says quietly. She admits Satie is one of her
favorites. We quickly imagine him as a teenaged boy, studying music
in a conservatory!
[2] While villainous display of etiquette will be oily, overcooked, and
often out of place, heroic etiquette will be precise and appropriate
and quiet. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is in flight with Marie
(Franka Potente) (The Bourne Identity, 2002), and it becomes
necessary that her hair be changed. We see him gently massage
color into her hair in a sink, his technique exceptionally tender
and considerate. When he uses scissors on her, he touches with the
most exquisite combination of affection and care. The villainous
Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul) in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008)
speaks with false, troubling quietness and a pleasant (too pleasant)
smile as he interrogates Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) chained to a
table. Slowly, pacifically he walks up. Then in an abrupt move takes
a hammer and slams it down to break Ferris’s finger.
[3] The villain will have recourse to nefarious weaponry all through the
story but the hero shows goodness by using weapons only as a last
resort or when in an equivocal situation, facing a small army to be
cleared through. When he does become physical, however, regardless
of how evenly or unevenly matched he is against his opponent, it
becomes startlingly evident that he is straining more, urging himself
toward some superhuman (divine?), hitherto unattained goal. Tries
harder. He will escape, for instance, from a cloistered imprisonment
in a secret, dark place or from a lethal stranglehold being laid on by
a very muscular, much bigger enemy. Or he will have to realign or
reorient some physical construction, a door, a safe, a wall, a builder’s
crane, an aircraft, showing remarkable ability to handle almost
any equipment without training (as though before being a hero he
held odd jobs as a crane operator, an elevator boy, a paver of roads,
a pilot, etc.). The hero will be notably less than successful until
the finale moment, when his “spontaneous” success will “save the
world.”
More than handling equipment, heroes and villains have signal
contact with their immediate environment, working the world.
314 THE FILM CHEAT

For the Good Man, the whole is malleable, giving, yielding, a true
material out of which salvation can be forged: cell phones without
service suddenly have service, door locks can be jimmied, shackles
can be opened and knots untied, light can emerge into darkness.
By contrast the Evil One, the one under whose command the
mechanism of the story is at some key point shown to operate,
finally cannot save himself, cannot escape the all-consuming
explosion, cannot find an escape through the forest of the city.
Stubborn to the wicked, kind to the beneficent is the world. An
ambiguous environment. Unless (as in Alien [1979]), a sequel is in
the works . . .
[4] The “world,” indeed, becomes a salient locus for the villain, who
almost invariably has concocted an expensive and tricky plan to
control Everything, to “Take Over the World,” to “DOMINATE.” At
the end of November Man the villainous Hanley lectures Devereaux
on how elevating Federov to the Russian presidency will “change the
world” because Russia will be joining NATO! This because Federov
(along with all the commitments and engagements to which Federov
is attached) is under his thumb. All James Bond villains are World
Dominator wannabes. The hero demonstrates goodness by “saving
the world” but this is, in a way, inadvertent; he holds back, stymies,
or defeats a villainous type who wants to “endanger the world” and
thus the world comes into question. Beyond that the hero’s concerns
are always local and situational. The hero is local, the villain is
global; the more global the more villainous.
[5] At a critical story moment, the villain will bluntly insult, deprecate,
and verbally diminish the hero, whom we know already to be of
superior mettle and thus a very model of dignity easily sloughing
off the insults as empty and inappropriate. At the end of The Train
(1964) the neurotic and desperate Nazi commander Von Waldheim
who has been trying to run a train filled with the treasures of French
art to Germany (Paul Scofield) confronts the French resistance hero
(Burt Lancaster) with a blunt sneer. “Labiche: You are nothing.” This
comes at a point when we have already seen, as has the bitter Von
Waldheim, that Labiche is anything but nothing.2

* * *

2
The villainous deprecation of the hero works as well in historical epics. The King (2019) has
a brief confrontational moment between King Henry (Timothée Chalamet) and the Dauphin
of France, who wishes to antagonize him. He comments that the king has big balls but a tiny
 BY CONTRAST  315

What is worth noticing about all these cheats, the cheats that join the two
sides of the moral coin into a cubist treasure, is not their identity, since
in effect these, and other cheats, constitute nothing other than the generic
identity of a kind of film. What is significant is the filmmaking team’s ability
to employ these flags without permitting them at any point to actually look
like “flags,” a possibility only partly because viewers know the formula.
With ever more sophistication and richness as time goes by, the hero covers
his exquisite etiquette by saying, “Umm.” The villain covers his covetousness
in myriad silent macro-close-ups where he is evidently pondering: a thinker,
a philosopher. And so on. The effect of the secretion of cheats is a kind of
glorious brilliance. The film takes on the quality of a rich and energetically
charged story (failure to follow along with which would be unthinkable) but
not what it more practically is: a necklace of repeatable tropes (stemming,
often, from melodrama) expressed through gestural dances of intent and
poetic songs of regard. We may find pleasure in remembering that while the
villain will feel free to slur the hero—“You and your preposterous attempts
. . .”; “You will never have the stamina . . .”; “I pity you”—the hero does not
slur the villain at all, much like St. George, who did not curse his dragon.

penis, and he wiggles his pinky finger. Henry looks at him quizzically, as though to ask, “What
on earth can you possibly mean?” but says absolutely nothing.
 47
The Blood Effect

FIGURE 47 Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl (David Fincher, Twentieth Century
Fox, 2014), with Rosamund Pike.

Ironically, while the cause of a blood loss tends to be painful—bullet hit,

knife slash or stab, organ puncture—the loss of blood itself brings no pain
at all. Indeed, medically speaking, the rupture is one thing and the bleeding
another, since the rupture involves skin breaking, thus nervous, muscular,
and/or dermatological stimulus (and likely degradation), while it may signal
internal malfunctioning as well, whereas bleeding affects blood pressure,
respiration, consciousness. In most medical addresses blood loss, unless very
minor, will be treated as a priority. The circulatory system, in effect the
flow of blood itself, is concerned with oxygen transfer; unless there is severe
organ damage as well, breaks in the skin of one kind or another can be
treated in first aid, washed, made antiseptic, bandaged, but lost blood needs
to be replaced, leaks in the circulatory system swiftly patched.
The issue is the violent act and its way of joining the victimized body.
 THE BLOOD EFFECT  317

Early film violence involved, principally, the strike: a character subjected

to a punch or series of punches, a slap, a swat with an object, or even a
structure crumbling on top. The body, if trampled, was, if broken, still,
largely uninvaded, and actors would indicate wounding through mockings-
up of various debilities: staggering, collapsing, holding the self. Bullet hits
in 1930s and 1940s westerns are like pantomimes, yet perhaps sincere as
such, since when a person is hit by a bullet the energy for dramatic display
of the arms and torso is usually absent; but these pantomimes were read
by audiences, and taken seriously, as real enough. Since other subjective
experiences also needed to be demonstrated in drama, one wanted to be as
sure as possible that one’s “pantomime of complaint,” as Jonathan Miller
named it, was somewhat idiosyncratic, unmistakably the result of an attack
from without, rather than, say, inebriation, which a wounded staggerer
might seem to be experiencing instead. (There are plenty of scenic “gags” in
which a character stumbles in drunk, but is soon discovered to be, instead,
severely wounded.) In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, bodies were still treated
integrally, however, generally woundless as far as things looked, and after
violence some pantomime of debility or recovery was required for cogency
and continuity. In 1930s westerns, “cowboys” would shoot marauding
“Indians,” and one would see a body fall from a swiftly racing horse, hit
the ground, and perhaps roll, but nothing more (special stunt performances
from horse wranglers). In Leave Her to Heaven (1946), Gene Tierney throws
herself down a flight of stairs but the major wound is the early abortion of
a pregnancy—entirely internal and thus offscreen. When he is gunned down
at the end of White Heat (1949), Jimmy Cagney folds into himself and
collapses dramatically. At the conclusion of Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953),
we see a husband and wife both killed by gunshot, each giving a simple
bodily collapse. Even in the celebrated shower scene of Psycho (1960) one
sees rivers of blood, and also a naked body, but a naked body without
wounds through which that blood has flowed.
It was 1969 before, in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, gun shots to the
body were depicted with make-up squibs electrically signaled by a technician
offscreen. Tiny explosions burst hidden “blood” packs and one saw “blood”
spurting out. It was the first time the bullet was indicated onscreen as a
projectile that would penetrate the body, leave a distinct hole, then most
likely damage an artery or vein thus causing bleeding. Blood swiftly became
an element de rigueur in shooting scenes, the challenge for make-up artists
being to solve the problem of showing gunshot effects to uncovered body
parts (where squibs would have to be hidden under some form of makeup),
like the head, as we see with Sterling Hayden in the restaurant scene of
The Godfather (1972). It is commonplace now that the word “violence”
associated with a film means quite specifically “bloodshed,” a feature
effected, of course, without the actual shedding of blood. For blood, a dye-
glycerin mixture is used, made up to order and variably viscous depending
318 THE FILM CHEAT

on how much flow the director wants. David Ayer’s Sabotage (2014) has a
large number of sequential, bizarre, unimaginably brutal, and exceedingly
bloody killings, in which whole or partial slain bodies are shown swimming
in, caked in, dripping with, or altogether saturated with blood; there are
also countless lesser killings where much blood is shed, but rapidly. If the
bloodshed is to be put on camera, the viscosity could help determine the
required length of the shot. It would not be an overstatement to say the
shedding of characters’ blood has gone rampant in film, with the blood
effects swollen more and more as time goes by. In military or quasi-military
plots, a member of a tightly bonded fraternal team takes a bullet hit and
bleeds profusely (from a vital location, such as the point where the neck
meets the shoulder); a compadre rushes up and presses on the wound, but
through the helpless fingers blood fountains out. Or a noxious villain is
machine gunned, half a dozen or more bullet holes being produced in the
torso. Blood is everywhere. In Some Like It Hot (1959) the Mafia hits are
intended as comedy (the entire film is intended as comedy) and so explicit
blood loss is avoided.
Two considerations:
●● Blood isn’t actually anywhere in the peridiegesis, the production
area surrounding the photography space, at least not as a matter
of routine. At the same time, within the diegesis it abounds. Blood
simultaneously present (to extremes) and absent. This of course
raises the issue of dramatic conviction and audience engagement,
fertile ground for planting cheats, and raises it with special acuity
since the loss of blood is potentially lethal, thus serious, and bloody
circumstance must therefore be sharply set off as fictional. Indeed,
climactic or semi-climactic. Of all fakeries onscreen, the blood fake
has a special power because when we see blood flowing from a
character we know instantly that it cannot be real (unless injury
was intentionally produced on set: unthinkable). The dramatic
fiction—involving the dissolution of the actor’s presence and the
actor’s habitation of the character—is vulnerable variably but
never so much as when blood flows. Blood in our lives is not
only distinctively real; it is life-sustaining. And, of course, from a
cinematographer’s point of view, especially in color, quite a visible
substance.

This vulnerability may well be one reason why in an age where filmmakers
strive harder and harder for social realism, efforts are undertaken to make
bloody scenes as extensive as possible. Extensive, as in “beyond the bounds
simple fakery could achieve.” Every stretch of the ribbon, every extra bullet
hole increases the odds of a moment of credibility. The viewer’s “How did
they do that?” has to be rapidly multiplied with numerous grotesque bullet
 THE BLOOD EFFECT  319

hits, and finally becomes lost, therefore moot. One buys into the fiction by
default, since the labor of calculating the multiple effects is just too great
to achieve speedily. The helicopter massacre in Brian De Palma’s Scarface
(1983) nicely illustrates, as does the Nice car chase in John Frankenheimer’s
Ronin (1998).
One diegetic strategy that adds reality to the blood effect is a character’s
“sudden” discovery of a blood-saturated victim and shocked withdrawal in
disgust. “I’m OK,” protests a character, who then collapses and is seen to have
sustained a massive and fatal abdominal wound. This is a variant of the play-
within-the-play, in which however mocked-up the performance (the victim’s
body) may be it gains authenticity by virtue of the belief demonstrated by
on-scene watchers.1 In Sabotage there is a scene where Olivia Williams and
Arnold Schwarzenegger discover the body of Sam Worthington folded up
inside a refrigerator. The throat has been slashed, and the entire figure is
saturated with red. Williams jumps back in horror, and the shot is held so
briefly we do not have time to rationalize the “corpse” as either a posing
actor in make-up or a latex model. Coroner scenes are played obversely: the
doctor examines the (now somewhat cleaned) body of a brutally murdered
character, but instead of pulling away physically exhibits professional
rationale, a much experienced and well-trained calm objectivity, often using
ambiguous humor as a way of pulling “back” without pulling back.
●● In “bloodbath” scenarios, blood is everywhere, or so it seems, and
the audience is meant to take the presence, the quantity, and the
spread of blood seriously as indicative of gravity, that is, as actual.
(Consider the character who calls himself a “painter” in Martin
Scorsese’s The Irishman [2019].) But viewers know that movies are
made by people and that all the people one ever sees onscreen are
always already full of blood. Even in film stories where no blood is
shed, one is watching “blood everywhere” all the time, yet it does
not manifest itself. A good deal of the horror of diegetic “bloodshed”
is thus not the simple presence of blood in the world of the scene,
but its actual appearance outside the body in clearly specified
spots we think to be blood free: on clothing, furniture, walls, floor,
ceiling. Blood has come out of hiding in the body and now stains
the setting. Macula as drama. But not: blood has come out of the
body and therefore the body cannot support life. That is true but
insufficient. What is needed is blood as a stain in the fictional world,
leading us to imagine it as a stain in the everyday world, too. Blood
as optically rendered substance, not only red but slick, not only

1
On audience belief and the play-within-the-play see Goffman, Frame Analysis 475 and my
discussion of Gone Girl (2014) in Virtuoso 241–5.
320 THE FILM CHEAT

slick but contaminating. Other “problematic” substances work in

roughly similar ways, without having the added charge of vitality:
mud, sewage, polluted swamps. There is a scene in Joe McGrath’s
The Magic Christian (1969) in which a bevy of London City
stockbroker types, in bowler hats and with umbrellas, jump into an
enormous vat of ordure to collect some pound notes that have been
scattered there: a distinct quality of pollution for the viewer. In On
Chesil Beach (2017) Saoirse Ronan reacts on her wedding night by
withdrawing in abject horror when her young husband’s seminal
fluid touches her thigh; this is something of an homage to Candy
Clark’s catatonic withdrawal under similar circumstances with
David Bowie’s alien character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
In Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Sissie Spacek is mocked at the
school prom by having porcine blood dumped on her.

The “tactility” of screen blood both adds to its realism, helping to induce
us toward belief, and makes for good screen business, indicating a material
actors can have their characters attend to and react against.
●● Part of the emotional thrust of bloody scenes has to do with
the abject nature of blood in Western society, its confinement,
both physical and cultural, to proper embodiments; its use, say,
substituted by wine, in ritual celebrations; the broad-based sense
of its vitality and preciousness, its symbolic representation of life.
Violent bloodshed in drama breaks with social form, aggravating
conditions in the name of drama. In Hamlet, bloodshed, signally
diffuse in the dramatic population by story’s end, elevates the
tragedy to heroic proportions. The violent police thriller or criminal
adventure film uses substantial blood flow for the same elevation,
lifting shooters above victims and the force of authority who finally
shoots the shooters, above everybody. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. writes in
The Sirens of Titan:

Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have
showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a
plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance
and horror that usually follows bloodshed. (176)

The religion is, of course, action cinema’s neoliberal capitalist patriarchy,

very typically celebrated through a close culminating portrait of the heroic
savior’s satisfied, now peaceful face positioned in a beautiful composition,
as far away from the bloody world as possible.
 Epilogue:

Our Cheating Heart

FIGURE 48 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, Amblin, 1982).

Hip, penetrating, extensive, articulate, and persuasive, if also superficial,

have been endless critiques of movies and other popular imagery as “escapes
from reality.” This “reality” from which we purportedly “escape” is almost
always interpreted as one or another socio-economic formulation with
political overtones and undertones, a particular hegemony which rules the
everyday experience of vast multitudes in order to aggravate the benefit of
the very few and in the wearying process alienates, frustrates, angers, and
certainly disenfranchises the audience who become (quite sensibly) eager to
escape. Escape from this by all means. Escape truly and wholly, if only for a
few hours. In this light, a film like Escape from Alcatraz (1979) or one like
Escape from L.A. (1996) becomes a shining allegory. Who in his right mind
wouldn’t want to get out of here?
But escape to where? And with what consequences, particularly? And
gaining access to the forbidden territory along what pathway, using what
passport, with what kind of duration, toward what quality of what new
experience? So much has been unsaid.
322 THE FILM CHEAT

Can it be thought the same thing, escaping from reality by way of Gene
Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate (1948), as by way of Joan Crawford
in The Women (1939), or Laurence Olivier in Richard III (1955), or Monica
Vitti in La notte (1961) or Brando in The Godfather (1972) or Wallace
Shawn in My Dinner With Andre (1981), or Minnie Driver in Good Will
Hunting (1997), or Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1966), or Tilda Swinton in I Am Love (2009), or Armie Hammer in Call
Me By Your Name (2017)? Is there only one tunnel of escape, no matter the
painted hieroglyphics on its walls? And when we go, if we go, do we head
into a substitute present or a substitute past, and if a past, whose past, what
kind of a past, a past that is liberating how?
The argument that cinema offers an “escape from reality” may or may
not have genuine weight, but even if it does it goes only part way toward
an understanding of our experience with the screened image. Cinema does
many things to many people, as many people do many things to make
cinema. The implication throughout these pages has been that one of the
most serious allures of film, taken for granted and thus unheralded, is its
absolute guarantee of offering pleasing lies, by means of which, of course,
it comes around to offering unspeakable truths (secret truths, perhaps, or
truths for which words do not suffice, or truths that cannot be sung). We
are attracted to, enchanted by, always hungry for more of cinema’s many
cheats, those devious little workings that, knowably false still put forward
an inviolable presentation of life, coherent and apparently seamless,
angled for participation and lensed for startling clarity: clarity of the clear,
clarity of the less than clear. It makes no difference to be aware that the
pictures we watch are pictures only, instead of the things they are pictures
of, because we have no difficulty substituting the pictures for the things,
which is to say, believing that the pictures picture things reliably and fully,
and more: that the pictures are for us, as we watch them, better than the
things. It makes scant difference to know that moving pictures are made
through fakery of one kind or another as long as we wish to gaze at them
and in gazing find some hitherto undiscovered territory in ourselves. As
long as we wish.
The cinematic cheat is one of cinema’s principal attractions, then:
●● That all these lively characters, seeming to be intensively present, are
not really there, that the characters are only “such stuff as dreams
are made on,” made round and given flesh by the unseen actors who
bring them before us. We follow characters, we accept the premises
of their experience, we note the circumstances of their lives, we are
caught up with their fates, although they are nothing, we know;
and knowing they are nothing does nothing to displace us from our
satisfaction, nothing to prod us away from the vital path they lead
as we follow. The character is through and through a cheat, but
 EPILOGUE  323

not only a cheat we would not wish to do without; also a cheat we

choose to love.
●● That the happenings we see played out are very often concoctions
made up through the use of expertises we neither recognize nor
understand. It is raining on Gene Kelly as he dances, but it is not
really rain. And the puddles he steps into, so rhythmically, have been
created in advance—concrete depressions that will hold water and
also give solid footing. That Harry Potter skimming through the air
upon the Hippogriff is really a boy hanging by invisible guy wires
from a grid against a green screen. That a splendid drawing room,
such as we see in Dinner at Eight (1933), for example, is painted
plywood flats and antiques from the MGM prop house set in place.
That in the back seat of a Rolls Royce in the underhold, Leonard
DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are not really aboard the Titanic as it
hits an iceberg; nor are they in an actual Rolls Royce; nor are they
really making love.
●● That the fluidity of process by which we glide onward from place
to place, gesture to gesture, instant to instant, light ray to light ray
is entirely and arbitrarily constructed, for our delight—a delight we
feelingfully experience—by way of an artful combination of camera
placements, lighting arrangements, and editorial moves. We go to
the movies and lose our sense of regular time (say, that we will be
in the dark for roughly two hours) picking up instead a procedure
of fictional time, a formula of “this-and-then-this,” outplayed in a
variable tempo that has been pre-designed. (A director will know
how long he wants a scene to play, how speedily he will want the
actors to respond to each other’s agency.)
●● That the very look of screen reality is artfully effected to entrance us
(as it does). The sets are painted or decorated a certain way to look
like this and not like that under particular patterns of lighting. The
very paints used are selected for endurance and reflectivity. The film
stock (about which viewers remain blissfully unaware) is chosen to
register light and color in one way rather than another, on a shot
by shot basis. The cinematographer thinks about historical models,
in earlier film, in painting, in sculpture. The lens is chosen to shape
screen space with a particular stretch, bloating the faces or thinning
them, spreading objects outward or bringing them together.
●● The viewer’s expectations, on the basis of which much judgment
may later be made to stand, are cultured, even dictated to, by
advance publicity: the graphic image of the star(s), the coloration
of the narrative space, the explosiveness of the action shown
in fragments in trailers, the topological placement meant as
attraction—the swamps of Florida, the peaks of the Alps, a
324 THE FILM CHEAT

starfighter in outer space, a submarine beneath the Pacific—and

also the spicy and somehow mystical language, not unambiguous,
not plain, not everyday, especially when discourse is abruptly cut
into or out of. A group of decisions will be made when a film goes
into production to shape it one way rather than another; but after
the rough cut is available, another group of decisions will be made
about how to sell this thing, even, perhaps, what to call it. What
manner of beast shall we say it is, because it can be twisted (spun)
this way or that? How troubling will we make it for the viewer to
gain access to its cage?
●● And more.

Here are five ways the film viewer finds accommodation and excitement not
in the pathways cinema openly affords but in its cheats. Not the supposed
realities as putative realities but the supposed realities as pure suppositions.

[1] Act for me.

There is an urgent, intense, perhaps very longstanding desire for seeming

rather than being. That is, a vital part of our being (Sein) is a craving for
being elsewhere, with others, in another world (Dasein). Gertrude wants to
know why Hamlet is so particularly obsessed with (his father’s) death, since
death is “common.” In that case, she presses, “Why seems it so particular
with thee?” and he ripostes (in all the productions I have seen, with some
overt irritation), “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’” (I.ii.76).
This Hamlet rejects performance??? Or this Hamlet is performing rejecting
performance?
But this Hamlet is not watching a character in a play, with enthusiasm,
in the way that we are watching him berate his mama. This Hamlet is a
character in a play, perhaps a being like you or I, yet surely in his presence a
creature we watch for pleasure (brighter pleasure, darker pleasure) through
his very fictionality. We would rather watch Hamlet (let him be Laurence
Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant, anyone) than look in the mirror.
That he seems so very real at the same time as he is palpably not real, that
we know he is not real but love to pretend that he is. (Playing with dolls.)
Hamlet unendingly fascinates (let him be Mel Gibson, let him be Benedict
Cumberbatch, let him be Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy). This particular
fascination, for the ersatz not the echt, for the pretense, we will find onscreen
with any and every Hamlet, each actor bringing forth a body and a breath
which signify life and instantiality yet behaving in a way that is crafted
for seeming. And then, after every Hamlet, every everyone who lives in the
screen world.
What we seek in film stories, then, from those who engender them, is
performance at least as much as action, perhaps a great deal more so. The
 EPILOGUE  325

sharp and articulate tongue (such as no one of us can muster on the street
corner); the graceful sweep of the arms and consummate, dancer’s balance;
the replete vocabulary of gestures, small and huge; the diva’s capacity
to modulate the voice for subtlety and extensivity; the uncanny sense of
spontaneous presence (that Nicholas Ray found to his great delight in James
Dean). The green glare of the eye. The pause between words, for emphasis,
for rhythm. The sweeping exit (none better than by Bette Davis). In The
Fantasticks (1960) the old actor regales his listeners about his long career
and how audiences particularly favored his various ways of dying. “Do it
again, Oliver!,” he says they cried, “Do it again!” To see what seems real
in the full and reassured knowledge that it is not. Encore!!! To intimate
consequence when we know the consequence is only false. To see gravity
when if there is gravity it is elsewhere.
So that no matter the assiduity with which an actor can race through his
paces, no matter the blunt accuracy with which he can deliver his lines, a
bad performance still, and always, stinks. It leaves us wanting, but surely
not wanting the factualities of the imposture, the gun pulled, the threat
chewed out, the awkward hesitation, the finger on the trigger . . . these may
be not enough as cooked, but it is something more that we want. We want
the glory of the fakery. As Gene Hackman puts it in Heist (2001), eyeing a
character who is pointing a gun into his face, “Don’t point that if you’re not
going to shoot it. It’s so insincere.” We need the sincerity of the character
seeming to be alive in his moment, not secretly alienated from it through
some puppeteer’s manipulative consciousness smartly denied us. We need
Hamlet to be suicidal while not being suicidal. We need Romeo and Juliet
to be lost in the madness of young love while not being lost. We need Lee
Marvin in Point Blank (1967) to be hell bent on revenge, at all costs. We
need Geraldine Fitzgerald in Interiors (1978) to behave as though nothing
on the face of the earth is more crucial than placing each piece of furniture
at exactly the right spot in a well-designed room. We need Sean Connery as
James Bond to be absolutely relaxed in his confidence in his well-trained
strengths. We need Elliott Gould in The Touch (1971), eyeing the termites
eating the wooden statue of the Virgin from the inside, to be shaken, while
not being shaken at all.
Luke Skywalker is not really fighting Darth Vader, you know, with his
light saber. This is not really a battle to the death.
“Yes, yes! But I want to see!” (And if, as did not happen in 1977 but by
this time is very likely to happen, one sees the arcing, flashing light sabers as
“effects” not light sabers, the whole performance starts to stink. One must
will to believe it all real, while knowing it is an effect.)
One must will to believe.
And being given we want still more. That the character, unlike folk of
the everyday, should at each instant be at a peak of emotion or form, never
less than spectacular, never in front of a mirror getting ready to seem that
326 THE FILM CHEAT

way. Even waking up and crawling out of bed, the character must act with
brilliance, even brilliant stupor. Even the before-the-mirror moments must
be spectacular in themselves (see David Warner checking himself out in his
gorilla suit in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment [1966]). No stumbling
that is not dramatically wonderful in itself (Van Johnson in 23 Paces to
Baker Street [1956]). No speech troubles that are not sweet and attractive,
or poignantly indicative (Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker [1962]). No
song but eloquent song (Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music [1964]; Jerry
Lewis in The Delicate Delinquent [1957]).
And we want the kind of grace it would be naïve or churlish to expect in
the world of the everyday, that every streetcar arrives with its doors open at
the precise instant the desperately fleeing heroine needs a ride from Berlin
Alexanderplatz; that the multiple bodies spinning, leaping, and vocalizing in
bravura color never collide, never even brush or accidentally touch things
that have been arranged so much like a Swiss clockwork (the opening number
of La La Land [2016]). A symphony of movements expressing the height of
style (Brando in Streetcar [1951]) and, too, the high aeries of emotionality
(Wendy Hiller in I Know Where I’m Going! [1945]). There is a delicious
moment in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Thief of Bagdad
(1940) when in his ornate pink palace the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson)
is being visited by the (evil) wizard Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) and he decides to
regale his guest with a little tour through his collection of toys. One of these
is a tiny theater, with a stage and a curtain. A group of acrobats are set to
perform, tiny figurines, but the Sultan makes the toy operate and the figures
“come to life,” going through a whole beautiful routine: no accidents, no
flaws, no bumping, no falling. This has been achieved with a matte-in of
an acrobatic routine filmed life-size on a stage against a black curtain, and
before optical printing the matte image has been several times reduced in
size—because we do see at least one shot of the Sultan standing beside
the theater looking at it with awe. This little fakery-within-a-fakery has a
lesson: very like these tiny acrobats are the figures (figurines) of cinema,
mechanically placed and constructed, moving according to plan, everything
seen and foreseen, everything polished, everything sized to fit the screen.
Everything a joy.
Give me someone who is saying something, anything, so very believably,
with such generosity of feeling laid upon each breath . . . something he or
she doesn’t believe at all, since he or she has no mind, no belief, and a writer
wrote all this. Give me that absent writer through the shining body of this
bewitching genius. Give me puppets.
Let me see a growing up that isn’t growing up, a dying that isn’t dying,
a love that isn’t love, devouring a chicken leg that isn’t real devouring,
inebriation that I can trust is sober, malevolent intent that is only a puff.
Give me brilliantly choreographed fear and desperation (the car chase),
give me startling intelligence from a being who, were I to encounter her or
 EPILOGUE  327

him in the everyday world, would seem only pleasant, polite, and pale. Or
would seem, indeed, supremely gracious and sweet (I have found many very
celebrated performers to be this way) but not as scathingly expressive, as
chilling as they were onscreen. (They don’t go through real life with a writer
at the side.) Give me a realm that is another realm, filled with creatures of
superhuman proportion and form, unearthly expressivity, color to bleach
the rainbow.

[2] Take me along.

It was in the 1960s that film productions began remorselessly to use location
exteriors and often location interiors, rather than studio set-ups. Call it social
realism, call it economy, since studio space rental was not cheap. A very
frequent tactic was to shoot set-ups and exteriors on location (sometimes
with a second unit) and do the interiors on soundstage sets. The idea of giving
the viewer a location to view bloomed in the 1950s, of course, with exotic,
often Technicolor epics set in such desirable spots as postwar Rome, Hong
Kong, Paris, Istanbul, and London. The idea of a lush travel experience,
fostered on land through such agencies as Gourmet magazine and onscreen
in films such as Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Topkapi (1964), An
Affair to Remember (1957), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), Love in the Afternoon (1957), The
Barefoot Contessa (1954), Light in the Piazza (1962), The Roman Spring
of Mrs. Stone (1961), Midnight Lace (1960), or To Catch a Thief (1955)
accustomed audiences to the expectation of being taken somewhere by film,
taken in luxury and shown only the richest sights of the territory. The act of
viewing thus entailed the viewer taking as given a description of narrative
space, its geographic identity flashed onscreen through a title card. One
cherished authenticity as regards architecture, quality of light, human and
vehicular traffic, language, and cultural emphases. One did not recognize
what was in fact playing out through the images:
●● A story scripted in the United States, mostly Hollywood, by writers
familiar with foreign customs (because of their own wartime
experience, often; or their own travel) or else deftly based on a
detailed published fiction (deriving from the same kinds of source),
and very meticulously researched by studio departments with
enormous library and personal resources.
●● Scenarios imaginatively but tactically set in foreign locations,
usually very specific foreign locations, such as the hilltop hospital in
Hong Kong where Dr. Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones) works in Many-
Splendored Thing or Rome’s Trevi Fountain in Three Coins.
●● Visions of splendid—for many North American viewers, hitherto
inconceivable—panoramas effected by special photography or
328 THE FILM CHEAT

second-unit crews sent off from the studio in advance of principal

photography and working for supervisors in Hollywood very
typically under the guidance of local advisers. Photographed
landscapes or interiors were usually so artfully managed, so
spectacularly encompassing, and so richly colorful that deprecating
them to second-quality status was unthinkable to viewers caught up
in the sight.
●● Canny insertion into the script of specific linguistic identifiers,
tinting the situation with credible sound. Bon giorno! Aloha!
Mais, quoi?
●● Sensitive make-up effects meant to hint at foreign physiognomy
without disconcerting disrespect, as was considered at the time:
Jennifer Jones’s eye make-up in Many-Splendored Thing or Paul
Muni’s in The Good Earth (1937), in both cases to Orientalize. Film
has grown from conditions we would not blithely accept today, but
we were not there with our astute and discerning critique.
●● Specific casting of local actors to bring genuine vocal and
ornamental tone to “foreign” locales, such as Rossano Brazzi in
Contessa or South Pacific (1958), Khigh Dhiegh in The Manchurian
Candidate (1962), Pedro Armendáriz in The Hidden One (1956),
and Katy Jurado in High Noon (1952).
●● Knowing and artful set design and interior decoration to establish
European or other non-American interiors on Hollywood stages.
A good example is Cathleen Nesbitt’s hilltop home in Affair to
Remember.

All of the above have signal effect in “exoticized” travelogue dramas of

the 1950s and 1960s, but the audience’s purchase on setting, the belief in
the transportational quality of cinema, the willingness to be taken along
all function strongly in other films, too, since a fundamental proposition
of the cinema is that we should be elevated by it and removed to a special
place where notable things happen. The War Room with its fluorescent giant
screen in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Astaire and Horton’s hotel suite in Top
Hat (1935), the Miami Beach hotel in Written on the Wind (1956), the
Jamaican quay in Dr. No (1962), the viewing platform at the top of the
Empire State Building while three goofy sailors dance out their happiness at
being on leave in On the Town (1949), not to mention very contemporary
concoctions like the “Shanghai” skyscraper from which Tom Cruise does a
(matted-in) nocturnal jump in Mission: Impossible III (2006). We want to
believe we are going, and so we “go,” all the while knowing deeply that we
are in a theater the lights of which have been strategically dimmed, a theater
for entrance to which we have paid, a theater also occupied by myriad
strangers. The scenic, script, performance, and editing cheats that carry
 EPILOGUE  329

us “abroad” we accept and digest with eager joy—even, ironically, when

the screen depicts a darkened room filled with strangers staring at a bright
screen (The Dreamers [2003], Play It Again, Sam [1972], Sabotage [1936]).
To be “not here” but “there,” and further, to be “there” in a space we are
substantially imagining, building up through kenning acceptance of clues
embedded for us to find, is a strange, even surreal experience if we give it
serious consideration, but in order not to be troubled by such disruptive
thought we accept the whole package without proof; move without a map.
There are so many advantages, indeed, to traveling by motion picture that
actual travel can seem laborious and tedious by comparison. We move from
signal spot to signal spot, with no cumbersome intermediary treks, in fact
flying effortlessly through an ether not even hinted at. We are given the
most glorious points of vantage, selected ideally so that anything interesting
that happens will be in full visual range, unobstructed. If cinema cheats by
offering such delights, take pleasure in the cheats. The cheats offer a magical
fulfillment of dream desire. We need not change money at the bank, pay for
the tram, negotiate our way from the airport, put up with seasickness, find
a decent restaurant, avoid being pickpocketed, learn enough of the language
to converse with the most appealing conversationalists. We need not learn to
read a map for fear of getting lost, because in cinema we never get lost. If we
“get lost,” even that is part of the pleasure, a design but not a fact.

[3] Make more happen.

In the everyday, we move in and out of sharp consciousness, entertaining

reflections, daydreams, empty pauses, anxious preparations, self-reminders,
and so on. Our consciousness of events happening around is thus interrupted
and spasmodic, and anything at all might call up a vague blur of memory, a
line of dialogue rising from the past that one cannot place, a smell. In filmic
narratives, notwithstanding that in a very eventful, intensively pictured way
a character might be posed as having a memory, an anxiety, a daydream,
coherence and continuity are simpler, fuller, and purer. The characterological
daydream onscreen is far more evenly eventful than actual daydreams,
which are themselves interrupted, fragmented, repeated, jumpy, and variably
focused. In film we are shown a cue that signals “daydream,” or “anxious
fear,” or whatever arcane internal state, and then the material onscreen
is very capably presented for clear focus and swift understanding. It is as
though the viewer is being told a tale from a great distance, arrangements
having been put in place to ensure constantly that every nuance, every
syllable, every frame comes across plain and simple as an a-b-c. But being
told a tale this way is especially enchanting.
As we watch film, there is a much clearer sense than we have as we live our
lives outside, that one thing inexorably and directly leads to another, the facts
flow on; this is because in cinema there is only continual process, a leading
330 THE FILM CHEAT

and a leading and a leading (even toward a precisely calculated confusion).

Eventfulness is primary. Yet very often as we go about our banal everyday
routines, it is difficult if not altogether impossible to be sure what leads to
what because events in themselves are so diffuse. In cinema, the story and
the visual presentations are cheated so that nobody has opportunity to get
actually lost, so that clarification is heightened, so that some specially noted
feature centralizes and focuses each moment, and so that the transitions are
made so probable, instantly now or instantly in retrospect.
Onscreen there is also a preponderant and weighty tendency toward
significance, whereas we live in a world where if anything might be significant
relatively few things are. In film, there can be no insignificance, not as we
perceive—even if apparent significances turn out later to have been false
ones—essentially because, five seconds of screen time costing an arm and a
leg and necessitating the sophisticated organization of many people’s labor
simultaneously, time is not to be wasted on what does not contribute to the
construction. Because many shots are taken but only some are used; because
film is edited and re-edited and re-edited again; because it is watched dozens
and dozens of times by the makers before it hits the screen, there are no
mistakes to be seen. Mismatches are routinely covered, continuity errors
routinely patched. What we see is happening, boldly and frankly; our seeing
is a happening upon a happening; and as we see relentlessly, film events
relentlessly happen, blossom without letup. It is inconceivable to think
film might pause upon itself, daydream for a moment, fly away. Imagine in
Disney’s Peter Pan (1955) the flying boy stretched out on a fat tree branch of
a lazy afternoon, muttering to himself, “Oh wow, what an exciting time I’m
having here in Neverland!” Imagine Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca
(1942) sitting morose at his shady office table doodling on a pad in thick
black ink, “Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa.” Imagine Professor Charles
Xavier in X-Men (Patrick Stewart), sitting by himself one evening in his
wheelchair and muttering, “Oh my God, I’m so alone. All those fabulously
inventive young people I teach have gone off to the movies. What will happen
if I try to go downstairs and my chair crashes and I’m caught underneath
it?!” Imagine May Welland (Winona Ryder) in An Age of Innocence (1993)
watching her husband Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) chatting with
Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) at a dinner party and thinking to herself,
“Oh! He is in love with her! Or wait—-is he? I think he is. But maybe he
isn’t. I’m wrong so much of the time. Am I wrong now? How would I ever
figure that out? Should I do anything about this, or just let it go? I’d better
make sure to see my attorney tomorrow morning!”
Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon, a private moment: “Gee, I have a big
dance soon, I’d better get some practice in.”
Cinematic narrative flows onward, a river that is not a river, with no times-
out, no intermissions (even when a long film actually has an “intermission”),
no coffee breaks. And we would have it no other way, would find lacunae—
 EPILOGUE  331

if there were any—intolerable, as though, flying through the air with the
greatest of ease we had suddenly come upon a patch where all the oxygen was
missing. To get the intensified eventfulness, scripts are drafted and redrafted
countless times, scenes polished or curtailed or eliminated, establishing
shots dropped away, lines of dialogue clipped, editing rhythms established,
clues planted about what lies ahead down the road and then some object
is sent barreling down the road soon afterward, lest the audience forget
about having been given clues. All of this cheats authenticity, but creates the
believable surface, and the believable surface is everything.
As we watch, authenticity—actual authenticity, if we could ever determine
what that was—is of no value.

[4] Dance

We are not given access, by cinema, to performers and artists as they train
or prepare. Fred Astaire’s long, long, long hours of off-camera practice,
refining those splendid dance moves to perfection . . . impossible even to
know which direction to point the compass to find him doing this. Hein
Heckroth mixing his paints to do the sets of the Ballet of the Red Shoes
(1948) for Powell and Pressburger—unthinkably hidden. Vittorio Storaro
getting ready to shoot scenes of One From the Heart (1982) for Coppola
and testing out various theatrical gels to see what effect they will have on
various film stocks with certain patterns of lighting: all backstage. Leonardo
DiCaprio or Meryl Streep or Pierce Brosnan or Ian McKellen (born Los
Angeles; New Jersey; Ireland; Lancashire) learning how to put on believable
South African accents (for Blood Diamond [2006], Out of Africa [1985],
Survivor [2015], Six Degrees of Separation [1993]). McKellen doing makeup
tests for Lord of the Rings (2001), Apt Pupil (1998), X-Men (2000), or Mr.
Holmes (2015). Johnny Green re-populating and re-seating and rehearsing
the MGM Orchestra to record for An American in Paris (1951).
Without access we are led to take the realized performance as a
spontaneous outpouring, and this spontaneity, this unprepared spirit is
what we come not only to believe we are always seeing in cinema but also
to desire to see, again and again. (Desire does not spring from a vacuum;
“Nothing will come of nothing.”) We much prefer the cheated gloss to the
untouched, and would not choose the latter over the former if given free
opportunity (even in documentaries, which have their own backstage). We
wish not to see labor but to revel instead in the fruits of labor, success. This
even in the many strange, utterly ironic cases where labor, not performance,
is openly given onscreen as the content of the performed dramatic moment:
the prisoners’ work laying bricks in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1970), the actor’s dressing-room labor in The Dresser (1983; 2015), the
engineer’s control of the train in The Train (1964), the botched rehearsals
of a wannabee diva in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). We happily see the
332 THE FILM CHEAT

elegantly performed botched dance rehearsal (The Band Wagon [1953]) or

the elegantly performed clumsy work-up to a complicated heist (The Italian
Job [2003]), without wishing to see the inelegant rehearsal for, or work-up
to, filming such scenes.

[5] Project without bound

We want to believe that all of the lines composing all of the spaces we see
can be projected further than the limit of our sight, on and on, so that a
corner becomes a neighborhood, a neighborhood a city, a city a portion
of a state, the portion the state, the state the country, the country the
hemisphere, the hemisphere the planet, and on and on until the end of time.1
That space is both fluid and continuous, that the border does not really
exist, that fragmentation is a theoretical construct but not a fact of life. The
truth is that outside what is depicted onscreen, very little exists of the scene
involved, not the ceiling, not the other side of the bedroom. The qualities of
screen space end not very far from the camera’s framing. On the other side
of the door to the office is a storage space full of boxes and rolled canvas
and spare light bulbs. The skyscrapers we see through the office window are
painted on a backing that is thirty-seven feet high, and from the top of that
upward one finds only ropes, hanging work lights, a fixed grid. Everything
of cinema is built to appear perfect in the frame but is not built the way
the world is built, except, of course, that what is built for the camera is in
the world. And when something is made to fit a frame, the designers think
about how long the shot might be on the screen, whether the camera will be
in motion, which colorations will stand out and which recede, how much
that is already familiar to the viewer will be filled in by the imagination and
need not be constructed. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy, Toto, the
Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion go dancing off on the yellow brick
road, away, away, away from the camera, diminishing, diminishing, and
then quickly the scene dissolves to another. Just at the last point of the shot,
before the dissolve begins, the dancers were only inches from the painted
backing that showed the road continuing onward as far as one could see;
but that backing was only twenty or so feet from the camera. What is built
as a set is what will be seen by the camera, not what would exist in a world
such as the world depicted (suggested) in the frame. Thus, cinema has its
own geometry, but the cheat of the medium is to convince viewers they
are looking at some natural geometry instead, the mountains receding, the
distant clouds.

1
André Bazin wrote, “What the screen shows us seems to be a part of something prolonged
indefinitely into the universe” (166). One might add, indefinitely and perhaps not without form.
 EPILOGUE  333

And in the contest between fake and real geometry, watchers want the
fake to win.

* * *

Moreover, we know all this.

We know of the arbitrary constructions of cinema. But we choose instead
to revel in our suppositions, that the star after walking past the camera keeps
going down the street, turns the corner, climbs onto a tram. The cheat is not
a negation of cinema, not a withdrawal from the viewer’s bank account of
sympathies, but a pillar of the temple. It is not the filmed story that we want,
truly, madly, deeply: it is the lie that gives the story over to us.
And yet, can it be said that we wish for a bold-faced lie?
Do we want the deceiver to wear his identity on his sleeve, and prance
with it before our eyes? “Here I am, TOM CRUISE pretending to be Ethan
Hunt!!! Watch me do this fake leap!!!!!!!” And the answer to that piquing
question is no, definitively. We want to know that we are being confronted
with fabrication, and at the same time be deceived, be unable to discern the
cheat as such. I know there is a trick, but . . . how? We do not—we cannot
and must not—adopt the belief of fools and come into the conviction that
onscreen we are witnessing actual reality. On the other side, we cannot and
must not see a rank charlatan hiding his cards up his floppy sleeve. That
would be demeaning to critical judgment. “Not even the best magician in
the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat . . . if there isn’t already a rabbit
in the hat,” the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) says in The Red
Shoes (1948). Yes, surely, because, first, the magician cannot embody a living
rabbit out of thin air (any more than can Nature). But: Where was that
rabbit in the first place? Where in that infernal hat? Because if we can see
the creature in its hiding place there is no marvel in its sudden appearance.
The cheat will be enchanting when it is accomplished by workers of great
accomplishment, smoothly, as it were effortlessly, swiftly enough to pass
criticism, blended artfully with its scene. We want the actor to put it on,
but not show us her putting it on. We want the scenic designer to fool the
eye, but not jab us with the information that he is fooling the eye: that set
design of Heckroth’s for the Ballet of the Red Shoes—it looks precisely like
a stage design for a ballet, ready to be incorporated into a film that shows
that ballet; that and only that; and since the “designer” is a character in the
film, Ratov (Albert Bassermann), it must look like the kind of set this man
would have prepared. The non-balletic sets in The Red Shoes are glorious,
but they do not seem to have been designed by this same man; they can have
been designed only by the designer-behind-this-designer, Heckroth, who
(also designed the ballet, and) neither makes himself visible nor identifies
himself except through his work.
334 THE FILM CHEAT

The cheats multiply, far beyond what I have pointed to in these pages.
Punch cheats, rooftop chase cheats, language cheats, makeup cheats, cheats
upon cheats upon cheats. Should we be embarrassed or ashamed to confess
our delight with all these? Should we be upholding the search for truth and
only truth, and decry all these cinematic fabrications or opiates? Or should
we accept ourselves, and accept the cinema we so deeply wish to accept? To
put it differently: reality isn’t truth, so the imitation or cooking of reality
through “reality”-making is no evasion of truth. “Human kind cannot bear
very much reality,” sang T. S. Eliot.
As concluding example, I take a cinematic moment of trite sentimentality,
yet one that seized and transformed a generation of filmgoers and still,
repeated as it has so often been, manages to lift the spirit. Note: the thought
of it does not lift the spirit. The knowledge about it does not lift the spirit.
But as we actually watch it onscreen we are lifted. There can be no question
of how blatantly inauthentic it is, nor any doubt that the inauthenticity
bears the least weight of importance. This is the iconic instant in E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial (1982) when basketed in the boy’s mini-bike, with little
Elliott frantically pedaling, E.T. causes the device to fly in front of the full
moon. Obviously an animation—-yet caused when, where, how, and by
whom we are not to see. The musical theme, already stirring, is here soaring
over its highest harmonic Alp. The moon is notably gigantic, silver yellow,
both radiant and mysterious and confounding. It is the moon over Los
Angeles, thus the movie moon, the moon that illuminates and substantiates
the transformative magic we are watching. The bike and its two riders are
fully, and only, a silhouette, thus a call-back to the nineteenth century as
much as a call forward to the future. The movement is the movement of
liberation, snapping one’s tether to conventional reality and to budgetary
constraint and to moral proscription and to the rule-guided business of the
everyday. It is also, of course, escape from noxious people who were quite
prepared to use rifles on the creature and on Elliott. And ultimately, it is
proof positive—within the narrative constraints, always present yet always
invisible—of the alien’s awesome power, his freedom from gravity, his ability
to protect against all evil, his beneficence without bound here shown in a
notably unbounded glyph.
Movie cheats are contingencies finally, always kept in treasure but always
lost. They hauntingly invoke the strange and plastic yesterday. They bravely
summon a strange and plastic tomorrow.
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 INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic signify images.

Abbott, Diahnne 301 Alcott, John 185

About a Boy (Chris Weitz and Paul Alexander, John 160
Weitz, 2002) 4 Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) 29, 207
Aboutboul, Alon 313 Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton,
À bout de souffle ([Breathless] Jean- 2010) 150
Luc Godard, 1960) 170 Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) 86, 87,
Abraham, F. Murray 84 150, 239–41, 243, 303, 314
Absorption and Theatricality (Michael Allen, Karen 144
Fried) 209 Allen, Woody 121, 125
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Almendros, Nestor 169, 185
Sciences 183 Claire’s Knee 169
Academy frame rate 203 Paris vu par 170
Oscar (Academy Award) 65, Pauline at the Beach 169, 182
183–4, 187 Alps, the, as setting 323
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Tom Altick, Richard 86
Shadyac, 1994) 106 Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984) 84
Adair, John 139 n.2 America 41, 67, 89, 94, 161, 165,
Adam, Ken 164 195, 196, 220, 225, 228, 229,
Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949) 92 273, 274, 276, 277, 303, 309,
Adjustment Bureau, The (George 310, 327, 328
Nolfi, 2011) 221 American Beauty (Sam Mendes,
Adorno, Theodor 69 1999) 185
ADR (additional dialogue American in Paris, An (Vincente
recording) 129, 140 Minnelli, 1951) 132,
Adventures of Robin Hood, The 175, 331
(Michael Curtiz and William American Society of Cinematographers
Keighley, 1938) 100 (A.S.C.) 184
Affair to Remember, An (Leo American Standards Association, ASA
McCarey, 1957) 327, 328 ratings 168, 187
Affleck, Ben 305 Anderson, Judith 3
Affleck, Casey 151 Andersson, Bibi 77
Africa, veldt, as setting 159 Andress, Ursula 165
Age of Innocence, An (Martin Scorsese, Andrews, Julie 95, 326
1993) 194, 330, see also Animal Kingdom (2016) 104–5
Hollywood, mattes Ann-Margret 95 n.1
Agfacolor 236 Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) 121
 INDEX  341

Antibes 226 Badejo, Bolaji 150, 152

Antonioni, Michelangelo 285 Baker, Kenny 85
Antony and Cleopatra (William Bale, Christian 4, 4 n.2, 100, 262,
Shakespeare) 144 294, 295ff, 299 n.2
Anwar, Gabrielle 105–6 Ball, Lucille 35–7
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Bana, Eric 264
Coppola, 1979) 100, 185 Bancroft, Anne 245
Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995) 163 Band Wagon, The (Vincente Minnelli,
Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998) 331 1953) 4, 55, 57–63, 330, 332,
Aranyó, Daniel 192 see also Hollywood,
Argentina 3 studios, MGM
Aristotle 73, 158 Banlieue 13 ([District B13] Pierre
Armendáriz, Pedro 328 Morel, 2004) 27, 29
Arnaz, Desi 35–6 Bannerjee, Victor 162
Arnold, Malcolm, “A Grand, Barefoot Contessa, The (Joseph L.
Grand Overture Op. 57” Mankiewicz, 1954) 4, 67,
(1956) 66 n.2 327, 328
Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, Barnes, George 171
1944) 81, 160 Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick,
Arthur, Jean 312 1975) 185
Arthur, W. J. G. Ord-Hume 86 Barrymore, Drew 3
Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, Barrymore, John 3, 193
1955) 138 Bartsch, Shadi 128
Asner, Ed 138 Bassermann, Albert 333
Asphalt Jungle, The (John Huston, Bassett, Angela 273
1950) 10 Bates, Alan 18 n.2, 52
lighting 169 Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) 265
Astaire, Fred 3, 4, 55, 57ff, 74, 175, Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan,
328, 330, 331 2005) 265
Asther, Nils 90 Bazin, André 332 n.1
Astin, Sean 100 Becker, Jacques 207
Astor, Mary 99 Beckinsale, Kate 106
Astronaut’s Wife, The (Rand Ravich, Beebe, Dion 186
1999) 143 Bel Geddes, Barbara 196
At the Circus (Edward Buzzell, Belle, David 29
1939) 83 Bellini, Adriano 128
Atherton, William 50 Belton, John 46
Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) 53, Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959),
111–12, 194 chariot race 175
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) 186, Benjamin, Walter 51
216, 265 Bergman, Ingrid 101, 196, 201
Avedon, Richard 90–1 Berlin Alexanderplatz 326
Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony Russo Bierstadt, Albert 189
and Joe Russo, 2018) 265 Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray,
Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004) 186 1956) 232, 233ff
Big Store, The (Charles Reisner,
Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017) 1941) 134
72, 76, 138, 175, 177, 290 Bill of Divorcement, A (George Cukor,
Bach, J[ohann] S[ebastian] 129 1932) 67
342 INDEX

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Bourne Ultimatum, The (Doug Liman,

of Ignorance) (Alejandro G. 2007) 161, 289
Iñárritu, 2014) 186 Bowie, David 84, 320
Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock, Boyd, Russell 186
1963) 134, 201 Boyle, Robert 237
Biroc, Joseph 185 Bracey, Luke 309
Bisset, Jacqueline 89, 167 Brakhage, Stan 282
Bitter Tea of General Yen, The (Frank Branagh, Kenneth 89, 324
Capra, 1932) 90 Brando, Marlon 99, 100, 175,
Biziou, Peter 185 196, 322
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)
1982) 301 185
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, Brazzi, Rossano 328
2017) 186 Break, The ([La trêve] 2016)
Blanc, Joann 106–7 106–7
Blanchett, Cate 150 Breathe (Andy Serkis, 2017)
Blob, The (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 150
1958) 244 Brewster, David 86
Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, Brice, Fanny [Fania Borach],
2006) 331 characterized 258
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, as person 259
1966) 23, 24–5, 46 n.1, Bridge on the River Kwai, The (David
117 Lean, 1957) 162
Blyth, Ann 280 Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954),
Bobrinskoy, Alexei 41 235 n.3, 302, see also
Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, Hollywood, studios, MGM
2008) 313 Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks,
Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1938) 232, 239
1993) 106 Broderick, Matthew 29
Bogart, Humphrey 4, 146, 237, 278, Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee,
280, 300, 302, 303, 330 2006) 144
Bonanova, Fortunio 76 Brosnan, Pierce 273, 274, 276,
Bonham Carter, Helena 150 309, 331
Bordwell, David, intensified childhood 276, 331
continuity 50 n.3 Broughton, Bob 201
Born Yesterday (George Cukor, Brown, Jeffrey 21 n.1
1950) 140f Brown, Norman O. 98, 260
Borsippa 220 Brown, Steve 85
Bösendorfer piano 136 Browning, Ricou 150
Boudin, Eugène 189 Bucquet, Harold 90
Boulding, Kenneth 28 n.3 Buenos Aires 276
Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) 26, 157,
1976) 185 175, 176 n.1
Bourne Identity, The (Doug Liman, Bullock, Sandra 291–3
2002) 276, 313 Bumstead, Henry 140, 227, 230 n.1,
Bourne Supremacy, The (Paul 230 n.2
Greengrass, 2004) 31, Burke, Kenneth, ratios 135 n.2,
177, 289 161, 230–1
 INDEX  343

Burks, Robert 182, 227 Chaplin, Charles 36, 302

Burr, Raymond 282 Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)
Burton, Richard 18 n.2, 144 160
“By Myself” (Arthur Schwartz and Chicago 276
Howard Dietz) 57, 59ff Chickering piano 136
China, historical cities of 220
Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) 184 Chinatown (Roman Polanski,
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The 1974) 93, 94, 96, 97,
([Das Cabinet des Dr. 187, 263
Caligari] Robert Wiene, Chion, Michel, acousmêtre 47,
1920) 220, 221 131, 208
Caesar salad (Caesar Cardini) 36 Cholame, California 304
Cagney, James (Jimmy) 317 Chopin, Frederic, “Grand Polonaise
Caine, Michael 29, 160 Brillante in E-Flat, Op. 22”
Call Me By Your Name (Luca (1830–1834) 183
Guadagnino, 2017) 322 Christie, Julie 52
Cannes Film Festival 224 Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Witch and the Wardrobe,
Caravaggio) 168 The (Andrew Adamson,
Carey, Harry 91 2005) 150
Carey, Harry Jr. 91 Church, Frederic Edwin 201 n.3
Carey, John 73 CIA (Central Intelligence
Carlton Hotel, Cannes, as Agency) 309
setting 222ff Cimiez, see Nice
Carpenter, Russell 185 Circle, The (James Ponsoldt,
Carrey, Jim 106 2017) 86, 164
Carrie (Brian De Palma, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
1976) 106, 320 1941) 30, 32–4, 51, 65, 66,
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 73, 76, 197
1942) 131, 278, 280, Claire’s Knee ([Le genou de Claire]
300, 330 Éric Rohmer, 1970) 169
Cassel, Jean-Pierre 89 Clark, Candy 320
Cassel, Vincent 276 Clark, Kenneth 108 n.2
Cavell, Stanley 76, 251–3 Clayton, Alex 34 n.6
Cedergren, Jakob 162 Clift, Montgomery 93, 94–7
Cerusico, Enzo 128 Clooney, George 249, 287
Cézanne, Paul 169 Close Encounters of the Third
painting as prop 232–3 Kind (Steven Spielberg,
Provence canvases 169 1977) 185, 303
still lifes 187 Cody, Andrew “Pope” 105
CGI 100, 196, see also Hollywood, Colbert, Claudette 172
cinematography tricks Cole, Finn 104–5
Chalamet, Timothée 314 n.2 Collateral (Michael Mann,
Chalfen, Richard 155 2004) 174, 178
Chaney, Lon, “Man of a Thousand Comingore, Dorothy 32
Faces” 82–3, 85, 152 Conlin, Jimmy 160
Changeling (Clint Eastwood, Connery, Sean 165, 325
2008) 215, 303 Conti, Tom 199
344 INDEX

Conversation, The (Francis Ford Day for Night ([La nuit américaine]
Coppola, 1974) 163 François Truffaut,
Conway, Jack 90 1973) 167, 173
Cooper, Gary 90, 165 Day-Lewis, Daniel 330
Cosgrove, Jack 201 Day of the Locust, The (John
Costner, Kevin 260 Schlesinger, 1975) 45
Côte d’Azur 222ff studio catastrophe scene 50–1,
Cotten, Joseph 64, 65, 66 173
Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Robert
(Vincente Minnelli, Wise, 1951) 32, 65, 66, 303
1962) 237 Gort 240
Coward, Noël 58, 58 n.2 Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) 279
Crafton, Donald 28 Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016) 265
Craig, Daniel 105 Deakins, Roger A. 186
Crawford, Joan 32 n.3, 280, 322 Dean, James 304, 305, 325
Creature from the Black Lagoon, The death 304
(Jack Arnold, 1954) 150 De Balzac, Honoré, artist 201
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, De Banzie, Brenda 227
1972) 185, 221–2 Debussy, Claude
Cronenberg, Brandon 151 n.1 “Arabesque No. 1 in E”
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1888) 134
([Wo hu cang long] Ang Lee, Deer Hunter, The (Michael Cimino,
2000) 185 1978) 100
Cruise, Tom 3, 174, 303, 328, 333 De la Tour, Frances 273
Cuarón, Alfonso 186 Delicate Delinquent, The (Don
Cumberbatch, Benedict 324 McGuire, 1957) 326
Cunningham, Lodge 295 Dench, Judi 46, 84
Curtis, Tony 91, 131 n.1, 189, 280 De Niro, Robert 15–16, 100, 301
Cusack, John 180 Depp, Johnny 65, 143, 144, 150–2,
279
Damon, Matt 105, 161, 249, 313 Deren, Maya 282
Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, Dern, Bruce 179
1990) 185 Descartes, René [1596–1650],
Daniels, Jeff 21 n.1 deception 48, 253
Daniels, Leroy 55, 58 Destination Moon (Irving Pichel,
Daniels, William 171 1950) 302
Dark Knight Rises, The (Christopher Detective, The (Gordon Douglas,
Nolan, 2012) 262, 265 1968) 83
Darkman (Sam Raimi, 1990) 265 Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer,
Dastur, Françoise 279 1945) 254, 255
David and Lisa (Frank Perry, Deulen, Eric 105
1962) 135 De Vaucanson, Jacques 86
Davis, Bette 181, 295, 325 DeVito, Danny 100
Davis, Judy 162 Dhiegh, Khigh 328
Davitt, Theodora 139 Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock,
Davy, Humphrey 170 1954) 301
Dawn, Norman O. 214, 215 Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton,
Day, Doris 40ff, 156, 227, 228ff, 303 1971) 308
 INDEX  345

DiCaprio, Leonardo 4, 4 n.12, 184, “Dutch” angles (“Deutsch” angles), see

313, 323, 331 Hollywood, cinematography
Die Hard (John McTiernan, tricks
1988) 312 Dutch still life 195
Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, Dynamic Frame, The (Patrick
1933) 193, 323 Keating) 168 n.1
Disney, Walt 239
Disorderly Orderly, The (Frank Easter Parade (Charles Walters,
Tashlin, 1964) 180, 288 1948) 3, 74
Dixon, Wheeler Winston 206 Eastmancolor 236, see also
Dmytryk, Edward 94 Hollywood, optical printing
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak) 72 East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955)
Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 304
1965) 72, 73, 75 Eastwood, Clint 131, 230, 230 n.1
Dombasle, Arielle 182 “Eating Machine”, see Museum of
Don Juan DeMarco (Jeremy Leven, Contemporary Art
1994) 99 Editing and Special/Visual Effects
Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, (ed. Charlie Keil and Kristen
1997) 65, 66 Whissel) 217
D’Onofrio, Vincent 100 Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton,
Doyle, Arthur Conan 69 1990) 150, 151
Dragon Seed (Harold S. Bucquet and Einstein, Albert 77 n.2, 278
Jack Conway, 1944) 83, 90 Special Theory of Relativity 278
Dreamers, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, Elder, R. Bruce 282
2003) 48, 67, 106, 329 El Dorado (Howard Hawks,
Dresser, The (Peter Yates, 1983) 1967) 138
331 Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2006) 105
Dresser, The (Richard Eyre, Elephant Man, The (David Lynch,
2015) 331 1980) 82 n.2, 84, 99
Dreyfuss, Richard 101 Elf (Jon Favreau, 2003) 106
Driver, Minnie 322 Elgort, Ansel 72, 76, 138, 139, 290
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler ([Dr. Eliot, T.S. 334
Mabuse, der Spieler], Fritz Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar
Lang, 1922) 68, 71 Kapur, 2007) 150
Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) 69, Elswit, Robert 186
164–5, 328 Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg,
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned 1987) 4, 52, 294, 295–301
to Stop Worrying and Love Empire Strikes Back, The (Irvin
the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, Kershner, 1980) 162, 289,
1964), War Room 328 see also Hollywood, mattes
Duke, Patty 4, 4 n.2, 326 England 274ff, see also London
Dullea, Keir 243 English Patient, The (Anthony
Dunaway, Faye 93, 99 Minghella, 1996) 185
Dunn, Linwood 203 Entertainer, The (Tony Richardson,
Durkheim, Émile, organic 1960) 74–5
solidarity 31 n.1 Epsom salts 136
Durrell, Lawrence 113–14 Epstein, Julius 302–3
Dur Sharrukin 220 Epstein, Philip 302–3
346 INDEX

Errand Boy, The (Jerry Lewis, 1961) Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison,
“dubbing studio” sequence 1971) 184
139 15:17 to Paris, The (Clint Eastwood,
Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 2018) 163
1979) 321 Film as Film (V. F. Perkins) 73
Escape from L.A. (John Carpenter, Finney, Albert 89, 207
1996) 321 Fiore, Mauro 186
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Firewall (Richard Loncraine,
Spielberg, 1982) 237, 306, 2006) 226
321, 334 Fitzgerald, Geraldine 325
Evelyn, Judith 282 Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson,
Expression of Emotions in Man 1970) 252
and Animals, The (Charles 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., The (Roy
Darwin) 85 Rowland, 1953) 159
Extras (2005) 1 Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen
Eye for Hitchcock, An (Murray Frears, 2016) 331
Pomerance) 2 Florida, swamps as setting 323
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, Flowers and Trees (Burt Gillett,
1999) 303 1932) 239
Fly, The (Kurt Neumann, 1958) 283
FAA (Federal Aviation Flynn, Errol 100
Administration) 49 Foch, Nina 175
Fabray, Nanette 57ff Foley tracking 140
Face Off (2011) 84 n.4 Fonda, Peter 246
facial recognition aphasia 13–15 Fontaine, Joan 3
Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod
1976), downhill car Wilcox, 1956)
sequence 140, 179 Altair–4 302
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Altaira projection 270
Bergman, 1982) 185 Krell power room 240
Fantasia International Film Robbie the Robot 240–3
Festival 151 Ford, Harrison 144, 164
Fantasticks, The (Harvey Schmidt and Foreign Correspondent (Alfred
Tom Jones, Sullivan Street Hitchcock, 1940), umbrella
Playhouse, New York, May 3, sequence 163
1960) 325 Forster, Robert 273
Fapp, Daniel 275 Forsyte Saga, The (John
Farrell, Nicholas 46 Galsworthy) 109
Fehr, Rudi 295 Forsyte Saga The (2002) 117ff
Fellini Satyricon (Federico Fellini, Foster, Jodie 155, 162
1969) 73 Foxx, Jamie 174
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, Frampton, Hollis 282
1986) 29 Francis, Freddie 185
Ferzetti, Gabriele 284, 284 Frankenstein (James Whale,
Festinger, Leon, cognitive 1931) 26, 82, 303
dissonance 290 Freed, Arthur 56
F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) Freed Unit at MGM (see
259 Hollywood, Studios)
 INDEX  347

French Connection II (John Go-Between, The (Joseph Losey,

Frankenheimer, 1975) 246 1971) 52–3
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola,
(Karel Reisz, 1981) 233 1972) 144, 163, 248,
Frost, Alex 105 317, 322
Fugitive, The (Andrew Davis, Godunov, Alexander 312
1993) 69, 164 Godzilla (Ishirô Honda, 1954) 150,
Fujicolor 236 243, 303
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, Goffman, Erving 34–5, 95
1987) 100 Golem 244
Funny Games (Michael Haneke, Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) 305,
2007) 161 316, 319 n.1
Funny Girl (William Wyler, Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming,
1968) 257 1939), see Hollywood,
Mattes
Gainsborough, Thomas 193 Good Earth, The (Sidney Franklin,
Gale, Peter 295 1937) 328
Galvani, Luigi (1737–98) 33 Goodman, John 162
Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant,
1982) 185 1997) 48, 322
Garai, Romola 53 Gould, Elliott 98, 325
Garbo, Greta 171 Gourmet magazine 327
Gardner, Ava 4, 57, 59 Graduate, The (Mike Nichols,
Gardner, Virginia 105 1967) 174–5, 245
Garfield, Andrew 150 Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer,
Garfinkel, Harold 2 1966) 27, 155
Garland, Judy 3, 20, 65, 74, 96, 322 Granger, Farley 134
Garrel, Louis 67, 106 Grant, Cary 90, 107, 173, 188 n.2,
Gay, Peter 120 219, 223ff, 232
Gazzara, Ben 7 Graves, Peter 103
Gemora, Charles 83 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) 186,
General Died at Dawn, The (Lewis 287, 291–3
Milestone, 1936) 83, 90 Gray, Charles 308
Georgia, as setting 162 Grazer, Jack Dylan 105
German Expressivism 195 Greatest Show on Earth, The (Cecil B.
Gervais, Ricky 1, 2 DeMille, 1952) 222
Gettysburg Address 110 n.4 Greek sculpture, see Hollywood,
Ghost Story, A (David Lowery, lighting techniques,
2017) 47, 151 bounce light
Giant (George Stevens, 1956) 304 Green, Eva 48, 67, 106
Gibson, Mel 324 Green, Johnny 331
Gibson, Walker, “mock reader” 208 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 209
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Gross, Kenneth 128
(David Fincher, 2011) 69 Guard, Dominic 52
Glamorama (Bret Easton Guare, John 263 n.1
Ellis) 108 n.3 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989) (Stanley Kramer,
185 1967) 10, 144
348 INDEX

Guilty, The ([Den skyldige] Gustav Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro,

Möller, 2018) 162 2004) 84
Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Hemingway, Tom 34 n.6
Swift) 156 n.1, 197, 270 Hemmings, David 23, 46 n.1, 111
Gunning, Tom 33 Hepburn, Audrey 160
Gyllenhaal, Jake 144 Hepburn, Katharine 92
Gypsy Moths, The (John Hercules, Samson & Ulysses (Pietro
Frankenheimer, 1969) 142 Francisci, 1963) 128, 129
Herrmann, Bernard 41 n.1, 65,
Hackman, Gene 246, 325 306 n.1
Hagen, Jean 137, 140 Hidden One, The ([La escondida]
Haigh, Kenneth 18 n.2 Roberto Gavaldón,
Hale, Alan 100 1956) 328
Haley, Jack 20 High Noon (Fred Zinnemann,
Hall, Anthony Michael 106 1952) 328
Hall, Conrad L. 185 High School (Frederick Wiseman,
Hall, Kevin Peter 149 1968) 213
Hall, Thurston 57 Hiller, Arthur 141
Halloween (David Gordon Green, Hiller, Wendy 89
2018) 105 Hindenberg, landing of 110 n.4
Hamill, Mark 94, 95 n.1 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks,
Hamilton, Margaret 20, 21 1940) 295
Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 47–8, Hitchcock, Alfred 40ff, 41 n.1, 42,
65 n.1, 320, 324 43, 44, 57 n.1, 124 n. 1f,
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996) 46 136 n.3, 188 n.1, 229, 281,
Hammer, Armie 322 281 n.1, 282
Hanks, Tom 49 framing style 237
Hardy, Tom 181 and Kuleshov 280–1
Harris, Barbara 179 Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi, 2012) 105
Harris, Neil Patrick 316 Hochheim, Frieder 168 n.2
Harry Potter films 240 Hoffman, Dustin 84, 98, 124, 139,
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of 163, 245, 302
Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, Holden, William 140, 237
2004) 213, 323 Holliday, Judy 140
Harvard University 48 Holliman, Earl 242
Havers, Nigel 295 Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven,
Havlick, Gene 295 2000) 265
Hawke, Ethan 111, 191, 194 Hollywood
Hayakawa, Sessue 162 body negotiations in film
Hayden, Sterling 317 work 122
Hayes, Rita 139 car scenes 176–81
Hearst, William Randolph 32 n.4 in classical era 179
Hecht, Ben 263 rear projection (process plates)
Heckroth, Hein 331, 333 in 177, 179
Hedren, “Tippi” 134 cinematography tricks
Heisenberg, Werner, uncertainty CGI 190, 221, 264
principle 134 “Dutch” angles 195ff
Heist (David Mamet, 2001) 325 mo-cap 196, 241
 INDEX  349

nylon stocking 171 designs 204

rear projection 177, 179, digital and non-digital
220–1, 303 transpositions 204
second unit crews 327–8 dissolves general 203
sfx and audience dissolves and
reception 217, 272, 301, Hitchcock 201, 203
303, 304 and Eastmancolor 203
slo-mo 294ff fades 203
split-screen 156, 181, 280 high-contrast film 214
tilts 195 lap dissolves 202, 202ff
Vaseline 171, 189–90 and mattes 214ff
classical 262 optical printer design 203ff
star images in 171 special considerations with
code (Production) era 119 Technicolor 203 (see also
design tricks, “wild” wall 229ff Technicolor)
editing 294ff split screen 203–4
golden age 57, 89, 102 transformations 204ff
laboratories Oscar (Academy Award) 65
DeLuxe 203 painted backings 170, 236,
Metrocolor 203 301–2, 332
Warnercolor 203 research in 327
latex effects in cinema of 83–4 stage writers and 263
lighting techniques studios
arcs 170, 189 Marvel Productions 263
barn doors 170–1 MGM 90
bounce light 171, 193 The Band Wagon (Vincente
cookies 171 Minnelli, 1953) 4, 55,
Moles 187 57–63, 330, 332
skypans 170, 301–2 Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli,
Styrofoam 171 1954) 235 n.13, 302
mattes 214ff, 271, 274, 296 n.1, Freed Unit and musicals 56
298, 300, 326, 328 Munchkinland 235 n.3
glass mattes 215 musicals 60, 63, 238
green screen 303 orchestra 331
in Gone With the Wind 302 prop house 323
in Lord of the Rings films 302 Stage 27: The Band Wagon
“minus” 217 (Vincente Minnelli,
painted, in An Age of 1953) 4, 55, 57–63,
Innocence 302 330, 332
in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes The Wizard of Oz (Victor
Back 302 Fleming, 1939) 20, 83,
in The Thief of Bagdad 302 85, 162, 239, 248, 332
in Titanic 302 Paramount Pictures 234, 304
musical canon 58 Stage 1 231, 231 n.3
noir cinema 169, 169 n.3, Stage 18 234 n.1
170, 171 Selznick International 188 n.1
optical printing Twentieth Century Fox 90
and color grading 204 Warner Bros. 90
350 INDEX

cartoons 36 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk,

ranch 165 1954) 226
Road Runner cartoons 26 impressionists, French, plein-air
stunt work in 138, 141, 142, lighting 169
176, 176 n.1, 177, 179, 258, in cinematography 189
287ff, 317 Inception (Christopher Nolan,
with animal wrangling 287 2010) 186
system, social class in 197 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (Jack
Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Arnold, 1957) 162
Era to Film Noir (Patrick Indovina, Franco 285 n.1
Keating) 168 n.1 Ingram, Rex 196
Holm, Ian 240–1 Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan,
Holt, Tim 73 1965) 144, 195, 196
Hong Kong 276, 327 Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006) 69
Hopkins, Anthony 99 Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) 325
on Instagram 103 Invaders from Mars (William Cameron
Hopkins, George James 300 Menzies, 1953) 303
Horton, Edward Everett 328 Invisible Art, The (Mark Cotta Vaz
Hospital, The (Arthur Hiller, and Craig Barron) 217
1971) 141 Ireland 276, 331
Hoult, Nicholas 4, 4 n.12 I Remember Mama (George Stevens,
House of Cards (1990) 207 1948) 15
House of Games (David Mamet, Irishman, The (Martin Scorsese,
1987) 7 2019) 319
Howe, James Wong 189 Istanbul 327
Howitt, Barbara 41 n.1 It (Andy Muschietti, 2017) 105
How To Steal a Million (William Italian Job, The (F. Gary Gray,
Wyler, 1966) 249 2003) 332
Hudson, Rock 156
Huffman, Felicity 7 Jackson, Peter 1, 272 n.4
Hughes, John 165 Jacobs, Jason 108 n.3
Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) 186 Jaffe, Sam 10
Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003) 264 Jamaica, as setting 328
Hume, David 14 James, Henry 51 n.4
Hurt, John 84, 99 James, William 251–3
Husserl, Edmund 278–9 James Bond films 26, 27, 69, 164,
311, 314
I Am Love ([Io sono l’amore] Luca Japanese lighting techniques 172
Guadagnino, 2009) 322 Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass,
Ibu, Masatô 295 2016) 276
I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) 87,
1953) 317 101, 244
I Know Where I’m Going (Michael Jesus, legends of 240
Powell and Emeric JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 185,
Pressburger, 1945) 326 213
Il provino/Prefazione ([The Screen Johannson, Scarlett 105
Test/Preface] Michelangelo Johnson, J[oseph] M[a]cMillan
Antonioni, 1965) 89 n.1 “Mac” 226
 INDEX  351

Johnson, Van 326 Kitano, Takeshi 199

Jolie, Angelina 99, 111 Kitchen sink drama, British 18 n.2
Jones, Chuck 26 Klein-Rogge, Rudolf 68
Jones, Jennifer 327, 328 Knightley, Keira 53, 111
Jones, Tommy Lee 164 Kodak (Eastman Kodak), see
Jovovich, Milla 273, 274, 276 Technicolor
Juan-les-pins 226 Koenekamp, Fred 185
Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kolker, Robert 37
Kramer, 1961) 93, 94–7 Korsakov’s Syndrome 14, see also
Jurado, Katy 328 “The Lost Mariner”
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, Krabbe, Jeroen 69
1993) 197, 241 Kracauer, Siegfried, mass
Justine (Lawrence Durrell) 113–14 ornament 241–2
Kramer, Stanley 94
Kahn, Michael 299 Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton,
Kama Sutra 110 1979) 124
Kaminski, Janusz 185 Kray brothers, characterized 181ff
Kaplan, Ann 200 n.1 Krugman, Jack 95
Karloff, Boris 150, 152 Kubrick, Stanley 37, 303
Kazan, Elia 175 Kuleshov, Lev 280–1
Keach, Stacy 94 Kurylenko, Olga 105, 309, 313
Keaton, Diane 121, 125, 144
Kelly, Gene 65, 322, 323 Ladd, Alan 312
Kelly, Grace 171, 219, 222ff Ladies Man, The (Jerry Lewis,
Kennedy, Patrick 309 1962) 161, 234 n.1
Keraudy, Jean 207 Lady Eve, The (Preston Sturges,
Keystone Kops 26, 302 1941) 7
Khoshabe, Iloosh 128 Lady for a Day (Frank Capra,
Killing Fields, The (Roland Joffé, 1933) 177
1984) 185 Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery,
King, The (David Michôd, 1947) 205, 206–7
2019) 314 n.2 Lahr, Bert 20
King and I, The (Walter Lang, L’aîné des Fercheaux (Jean-Pierre
1956) 162 Melville, 1963) 32 n.3
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and La La Land (Damien Chazelle,
Ernest B. Schoedsack, 2016) 186, 326
1933) 270 Lancashire 331
King Kong (John Guillermin, Lancaster, Burt 91, 96, 142, 189, 190,
1976) 269, 269ff 290, 314
King of Comedy, The (Martin Scorsese, Lange, Jessica 269, 269ff, 271 n.3
1982) 13, 15–16, 102, 301 Langlet, Amanda 182
Kingsley, Ben 3 Langmuir, Erika 195
Kino Flo 168 n.2 La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni,
Kiss, The (Edwin S. Porter, 1900) 143 1961) 65, 66, 322
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, LAPD (Los Angeles Police
1955) 239 Department), see Los Angeles
Kiss of the Spider Woman (Hector Lap dissolve, see Hollywood, optical
Babenco, 1985) 310 printing
352 INDEX

Last Emperor, The (Bernardo Livesey, Roger 74

Bertolucci, 1987) 185 Lloyd, Harold 160, 302
La toile trouée (Michel Chion) Logan Airport (Boston) 1
25 n.2 Lombard, Carole 3
La trêve, see The Break London 111, 200 n.1, 215, 258,
Laugh, Clown, Laugh (Herbert 274ff, 303, 327
Brenon, 1928) 82 n.3 Bloomsbury 273
Laundromat, The (Steven Soderbergh, Buckingham Palace (Buck’s
2019) 207 House) 52
Lavallee, Eric 151 CCTV in 274
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, City, the 275, 320
1960) 284, 284 Home Office 274
Law, Jude 105 Hyde Park 274
Lawrence, Gertrude 58, 58 n.2 Jubilee Bridge 275
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, Kensington Gore (see The Man
1962) 20–1 Who Knew Too Much)
Lean, David 20 London Eye 275, 276
Léaud, Jean-Pierre 167, 173, 200 n.2 Mermaid Theatre (Regent
Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, Street) 46 n.1
1945) 226, 317 Mermaid Theatre (St. John’s Wood
LeBrock, Kelly 106 and Blackfriars) 44 n.4
Ledger, Heath 144 Royal Albert Hall 39, 44 n.4 (see
Legend (Brian Helgeland, 2015) 181 also The Man Who Knew
Legends of the Fall (Edward Zwick, Too Much)
1994) 185 South Bank 275
Lego 56 Thames 273, 275, 276
Leigh, Janet, characterized 105 Thames Embankment 275
Lemmon, Jack 280 Waterloo Bridge 273, 275
Leslie, Joan 165 Waterloo Station 160–1
Lesnie, Andrew 185 West End, the 273
Le Trou (Jacques Becker, Westminster 275
1960) 207, 222 Lonedale Operator, The (D. W.
Levant, Oscar 57ff, 131, 132 Griffith, 1911), parallel
Lewis, Damian 117, 120 editing in 75
Lewis, Jerry 84, 161, 180 Long, Long Trailer, The (Vincente
Lewis, Juliette 144 Minnelli, 1954) 34–7
Life (Daniel Espinosa, Long Goodbye, The (Robert Altman,
2017) 239, 243 1973) 98
Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012) 186 Long Island 125
Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, Look Back in Anger (John Osborne;
1962) 327 Royal Court Theatre,
Lisca Bianca 284 London, May 8, 1956) 17,
List of Adrian Messenger, The (John 18, 18 n.2
Huston, 1963) 5 Look Back in Anger (John Osborne;
Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, Lyceum Theater, New York,
1970) 84 October 1, 1957) 17, 18
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson,
Memory (Stanley Cavell) 76 1959) 18 n.2
 INDEX  353

Lopez, Jennifer 176, 180 Magic Christian, The (Joe McGrath,

Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1969) 320
1963) 163 Magnificent Ambersons, The (Orson
Lord of the Rings saga (Peter Jackson, Welles, 1942) 73, 226
2001–2003) 100, 204, 331, Maguire, Tobey 303
see also Hollywood, mattes Magus, The (Guy Green, 1968) 161
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Malkovich, John 295
of the Ring (Peter Jackson, Malleson, Miles 326
2001) 185, 194 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston,
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 1941) 239
(Peter Jackson, 2002) 84 Manchurian Candidate, The
“L’origine du monde” (Gustave (John Frankenheimer,
Courbet, 1866) 48 1962) 237, 328
Lorre, Peter 146 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
Los Angeles 60, 235, 331 The (Nunnally Johnson,
Getty Mansion 259 1956) 327
Griffith Park 259 Mankiewicz, Ben 305
Griffith Park Observatory Man of Property, The (John
259 Galsworthy) 118–19
LAPD 164, 221 Mantle, Anthony Dod 186
as set 94, 215, 306, 334 Man Who Fell to Earth, The (Nicolas
Whitley Heights 188 Roeg, 1976) 84, 320
Wilshire Blvd. 178 Man Who Knew Too Much,
Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, The (Alfred Hitchcock,
1938) 162 1956) 227, 228ff, 303
“Lost Mariner, The” (Oliver Albert Hall sequence 39, 40–4,
Sacks) 14–15 44 n.4
Louis XV, furniture style 222ff kitchen scene 136 n.3
“Louisiana Hayride” (Arthur Schwartz Marrakech, as setting 41, 228,
and Howard Dietz) 62 229, 230, 230 n.2, 303
Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, Place Djemaa el Fna 303
2018) 106 restaurant scene 227, 228ff,
Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder, 231 n.3
1957) 327 Man With a Camera, A (Nestor
Love Is a Many-Splendored Almendros) 168 n.1
Thing (Henry King, Marathon Man (John Schlesinger,
1955) 327, 328 1976) 163
Lovejoy, Ray 37 Marchetti, Gina 90
Low, Chuck 301 Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach,
Lowery, David 151 2019) 149, 213
Lubezki, Emmanuel 186 Martin, Dean 89
Lucasfilm (Marin County) 48 Martin, Steve 7
Lugosi, Béla 83, 152 Marvel Productions, see Hollywood,
studios
MacArthur, Charles 263 Marvin, Lee 325
Machinist, The (Brad Anderson, Marx Brothers, The 83
2004) 100 Chico 134
Madame Sousatzka (John Schlesinger, Mason, James 65, 232, 233–4
1988) 132
354 INDEX

Massari, Lea 284, 285 n.1, Minority Report (Steven Spielberg,

286 2002) 70
Massey, Raymond 81 Miracle Worker, The (Arthur Penn,
Master and Commander: The Far Side 1962) 4, 326
of the World (Peter Weir, Miranda, Claudio 186
2003) 186 Mission, The (Roland Joffé,
Mastroianni, Marcello 65 1986) 185
Matthau, Walter 235 Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma,
McAvoy, James 53, 111 1996) 3
McBride, Joseph 299 n.2 Mission: Impossible III (J. J. Abrams,
McCarey, Leo 304 2006) 328
McDermott, Dylan 273 Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker,
McIntosh, Mary 246 1988) 185
McKee, Gina 117, 120 Mitchell-Smith, Ilan 106
McKellen, Ian 1–2, 4, 232, mo-cap (motion capture) 196,
331 241, see also Hollywood,
McKern, Leo 233 cinematography tricks
McQueen, Steve 176 n.1 Molina, Alfred 264
Mediterranean Sea 222, 284 Mon oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra,
Melville, Jean-Pierre 32 n.3 1971) 206
Memoirs of a Geisha (Rob Marshall, Monroe, Marilyn 90–1, 270, 280
2005) 186 Monte Carlo 27
Menges, Chris 185 Montgomery, Robert 207
Menjou, Adolphe 92 Moore, Dickie 165
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 279 Moore, Julianne 295
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence Moreau, Jeanne 65
(Nagisa Ôshima, 1983) 199 Morgan!: A Suitable Case for
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) 239 Treatment (Karel Reisz,
Mexico City (Ciudad de México) 1966) 150, 326
276 Morris, Oswald 184
Meyer, Emile 189 Morrow, Vic 287–8
Miami Beach, as setting 328 Moscow 31
Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, Moses 56
1969) 98, 139, 163 Mosjoukine, Ivan 281
Midnight Lace (David Miller, Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015) 331
1960) 327 MSNBC 103
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Max Müller, Robby 168 n.2
Reinhardt, 1935) 251, Mummy, The (Karl Freund,
252, 254 1932) 150, 239
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, Muni, Paul 328
1945) 280 Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney
Miles, Bernard 40ff, 44 n.4, 227 Lumet, 1974) 73, 89
Miles, Vera 160 Murder on the Orient Express
Mill on the Floss, The (George (Kenneth Branagh,
Eliot) 120 2017) 46, 89
Miller, Jonathan 317 Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert
Miller, Ron 83 Florey, 1932) 83
Minnelli, Vincente 36 Museo del Historia Natural y Cultura
(Mexico City) 14
 INDEX  355

Museum of Contemporary Art Manhattan streets, as

(Hobart, Tasmania), “Eating location 160, 189–90,
Machine” 87 n.5 275, 303
Musliovic, Mediha 309 NYPD 221
Musso and Frank’s Grill Spanish Harlem 47
(Hollywood) 103 Times Square 60, 62, 274,
My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 277
1981) 160, 322 Times Square on New Year’s
My Son John (Leo McCarey, Eve 274ff
1952) 304 New York, New York (Martin
Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, Scorsese, 1977) 179
2003) 140, 187 New Zealand 1
Nice
Nakajima, Haruo 150, 152 Bataille des fleurs 222, 224
Naked Kiss, The (Samuel Fuller, Cimiez 226
1964) 207 flower market as setting
Naked Prey, The (Cornel Wilde, 222
1965) 29 Nicholson, Jack 93, 94, 96–7,
Nalder, Reggie [Reginald] 40ff, 44 n.4 252
Nantucket, as filming location 101 9/11 277
National Archives (Washington Noir cinema, see Hollywood
D.C.) 140 Noises Off . . . (Peter Bogdanovich,
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty 1992) 161
Organization) 314 “Non, je ne regrette rien” (Charles
Navajos, studied by Worth and Dumont and Michel
Adair 139 n.2 Vaucaire) 67
Navarro, Guillermo 186 Normandy, beaches of 53
Neill, Ve 84 n.4 North by Northwest (Alfred
Neolithic era 219 Hitchcock, 1959) 107,
Nesbitt, Cathleen 328 197
New Jersey 331 cornfield sequence 162
New York 49, 162, 235, 262, sets constructed, listing 237
271 n.3, 274, 303 Triboro Bridge (Robert F. Kennedy
broadway as setting 272 Bridge) 302
broadway theater 62, 95, United Nations Delegates’
262 Lounge 302
Bronx, the 275 Vandamm house 234 n.2
Central Park 8 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock,
Dakota, the 226 1946) 101, 196
Empire State Building 272, Novak, Kim 189, 233
272 n.4, 328 November Man, The (Roger
42nd Street 58, 59, 61, 62 Donaldson, 2014) 309,
Grand Central Station 57, 59, 62 313, 314
Hudson River 49, 237 Nutty Professor, The (Jerry Lewis,
La Guardia Airport 48, 49 1963) 84, 100
Lincoln Center (for the Performing Nykvist, Sven 185
Arts) 163 NYPD (New York Police Department),
Little Italy 163 see New York
356 INDEX

Ocean’s 11 (Lewis Milestone, Panic Room (David Fincher,

1960) 83, 249 2002) 155, 162
Oldman, Gary 84, 86 Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro,
Olivier, Laurence 3, 74, 160, 163, 2006) 186
322, 324 Pantoliano, Joe 295
Olsen, Christopher 232 Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich,
On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke, 1973) 7
2017) 320 Paramount Pictures, see Hollywood,
“On Cooling the Mark Out” (Erving studios
Goffman) 6 n.3 Paris 276, 327
On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1968 student revolution 67
1951) 44 n.2, 67 Palais Royal 160
One Day in the Life of Ivan Paris vu par (Claude Chabrol, Jean
Denisovich (Caspar Wrede, Douchet, Jean-Luc Godard,
1970) 331 Jean-Daniel Pollet, Éric
One From the Heart (Francis Ford Rohmer, Jean Rouch,
Coppola, 1981) 73, 183, 1965) 170
258, 302, 331 Parker (Taylor Hackford,
O’Neill, Ed 8 2013) 176, 180
O’Neill, Eugene 264 Passage to India, A (David Lean,
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter 1984) 162
R. Hunt, 1969) 28 Patton, Will 309
On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, Pau, Peter 185
1959) 4 Pauline at the Beach ([Pauline à
On the Town (Stanley Donen and la plage] Éric Rohmer,
Gene Kelly, 1949) 328 1983) 169, 182, 189
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) Paull, Lawrence 301
car conversation scene 175 Peck, Gregory 201
finale 196 Pereira, Hal 226, 237
Operation Finale (Chris Weitz, 2018) Perkins, Anthony 89
3 Perkins, Victor 73
Orfei, Liana 128 Perret, Nellie 51 n.4
O’Rourke, Heather 157 Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas,
Ortega y Gasset, José 200–1 2016) 98, 163
Oscar, see Academy of Motion Picture Persons, Mark 85
Arts and Sciences; Hollywood Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred
O’Toole, Peter 21 Jackson, and Hamilton
Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, Luske, 1953) 87 n.6, 330
1985) 185, 331 Pfeiffer, Michelle 330
Owen, Clive 276 Pfister, Wally 186
Phantom of the Opera, The (Rupert
Pacific Ocean 65, 324 Julian, 1925) 85
Pacino, Al 144 Phoenix, Joaquin 90, 94
Painting with Light (John Piaf, Edith 67
Alton) 168 n.1 Piano Teacher, The (Michael Haneke,
Palance, Jack 312 2001) 132
Palm Beach Story, The (Preston Pigeon, Rebecca 1, 7
Sturges, 1942) 99 Pike, Rosamund 305, 316
 INDEX  357

Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster,

1959) 24, 156, 280 2008) 105
Pirate, The (Vincente Minnelli, Queen, The (Stephen Frears,
1948) 322 2006) 52
Pissarro, Camille 169 Quinn, Anthony 131 n.1
Pontoise canvases 169
Pitt, Brad 184, 249 Rachmaninoff, Sergei 129
Pitt, Michael 48, 67, 106 RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic
Plagal cadence 65 Art) 183
Planck, Robert 32 n.3 Radcliffe, Daniel 213, 214–15
Player, The (Robert Altman, Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese,
1991) 188 1980) 100
Play It Again, Sam (Woody Allen, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven
1972) 329 Spielberg, 1981) 144
Pleasence, Donald 311 Railway Journey: The Industrialization
Plowright, Joan 74 of Time and Space in
Plummer, Christopher 69, 127, 132f, the Nineteenth Century,
195, 196, 197f The (Wolfgang
Poe, Edgar Allan 68 Schivelbusch) 199ff
Point Blank (John Boorman, Rainbow Productions 304
1967) 325 Rainier of Monaco 225 n.3
Poitier, Sidney 144 Rains, Claude 101, 196, 278, 280
Polanski, Roman 94 Rains, Douglas 242
Polglase, Van Nest 34 Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk,
Polito, Sol 181 1957) 94
Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy,
157 1942) 279
Potente, Franka 313 Ransom! (Alex Segal, 1956) 162,
Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) 86, 163
149, 241 Ray, Nicholas 325
Preiss, Wolfgang 68 Raymond, Gary 18 n.2
Price, Vincent 131 n.1 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock,
Princess Bride, The (Rob Reiner, 1954) 171, 234 n.11,
1987) 240 281 n.1, 282–3
Private Lives (Noël Coward; Times Reason, Rex 162
Square Theater, New York, Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) 3
January 7, 1931) 58, 58 n.2 West Wing sequence 171
Prometheus 194 Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray,
Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) 244 1955) 198, 259, 304, 305
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) 105, Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni,
160, 206, 306 n.1, 317 1964) 160, 170
Pudovkin, Vsevolod 280–1 Redford, Robert 68, 144
Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life Redgrave, Vanessa 53, 89
(Kenneth Gross) 128 Red River (Howard Hawks,
“Put Me Among the Girls” (Johnny 1948) 94
Wakefield and C. W. Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981)
Murphy) 74 185
Pythagoras 47 Red Sea 56
358 INDEX

Red Shoes, The (Michael Powell Ronan, Saoirse 53, 111–12, 320
and Emeric Pressburger, Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998) 319
1948) 331, 333 Rooney, Mickey 251, 252
Ballet of the Red Shoes 331, 333 Roosevelt, Teddy, characterized 160
Rees, Roger 273 Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) 229
Reeves, Keanu 105 Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski,
Regression (Alejandro Amenábar, 1968) 226
2015) 99, 191, 191–4 Ross, Katharine 144
Reimann, Walter 220 Roth, Tim 161
Remember (Atom Egoyan, Rousselot, Philippe 185
2015) 127, 132 Rush, Barbara 232
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 168 Ruskin, John 27
Return of the Vanishing American, The Russell, Bertrand 247 n.1
(Leslie Fiedler), and American Russia 310, 314
literature 220 Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean,
Revenant, The (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 1970) 184
2015) 186 Ryder, Winona 330
Reynolds, Debbie 65, 137, 140
Richard II (William Shakespeare) 2 Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936) 329
Richard III (Laurence Olivier, Sabotage (David Ayer, 2014) 71,
1955) 322 318, 319
Richardson, Ian 207 Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954) 237–8
Richardson, Robert 185, 186 Sacco, Dan 100 n.1
Richter, Dan 37 Sacks, Oliver 14–15, 17
Ringwald, Molly 106 Saint, Eva Marie 107, 197
Ristovski, Lazar 309 Sandgren, Linus 186
River Runs Through It, A (Robert San Francisco 48, 276
Redford, 1992) 185 Santa Barbara, as location 180
Riviera, French, see Côte d’Azur Satie, Erik 313
Road Runner cartoons 26, see “Gnossiènnes” (c. 1895) 313
also Hollywood, studios, Saturday Review, The 120
Warner Bros. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg,
Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, 1998) 185
2002) 185 Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) 319
Robbins, Jerome 275 Scheff, Thomas 23 n.1
Robinson, Nick 106 “ladder of awareness” 42, 48
Rohmer, Éric (Maurice Scheider, Roy 101, 163
Schérer) 21 n.1 Schell, Maximilian 94
Röhrig, Walter 220 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg,
Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) 186, 226 1993) 185
Romance and the “Yellow Peril” (Gina Schivelbusch, Wolfgang
Marchetti) 90 light 167–8
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The (José panoramic perception 199ff
Quintero, 1961) 327 Schlesinger, John 51
Rome 327 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 100, 319
Trevi Fountain 327 Scofield, Paul 314
Romeo and Juliet (William Scorsese, Martin 15–16
Shakespeare) 325 Scott, Campbell 1, 7
 INDEX  359

Scott, George C. 141 Sirens of Titan, The (Kurt Vonnegut

Scott, Ridley 150 Jr.) 320
Seale, John 185 Sisley, Alfred 169
Sedaris, Amy 106 Bougival canvases 169
Selznick, David O. 188 n.1 Six Degrees of Separation (John Guare;
Selznick International, see Hollywood, Vivian Beaumont Theater,
studios New York, November 8,
Semler, Dean 185 1990) 263 n.1
Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, Six Degrees of Separation (Fred
1941) 165 Schepisi, 1993) 232, 331
Serkis, Andy 84, 241 Sixteen Candles (John Hughes,
Seven Year Itch, The (Billy Wilder, 1984) 106
1955) 270 6 Underground (Michael Bay,
Sèvres pottery 222, 223f 2019) 26, 175, 178
Shakespeare, William 264, 311 Skarsgård, Stellan 69
Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
1998) 84 1972) 160
Shane (George Stevens, 1953) 312 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle,
and Europe 312 2008) 186
and Old World 312 Smith, Dick 83, 84
Shanghai, as setting 328 Smitrovich, Bill 309
Shape of Water, The (Guillermo del Smoktunovskiy, Innokentiy 324
Toro, 2017) 84 Snow, Michael 282
Sharif, Omar 21 Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, 2013) 84
Sharif, Tarek 72 Solomon, Matthew 82 n.3
Sharits, Paul 282 Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder,
Sharpe, Karen 288 1959) 10, 280, 318
Shawn, Wallace 322 Sophocles 264
“Shine On Your Shoes” (Arthur Sound of Music, The (Robert Wise,
Schwartz and Howard 1964) 326
Dietz) 55, 58ff South Africa, speaking accent 331
Siberia (Matthew Ross, 2018) 105 Southampton (Hampshire) 48
Siddig, Alexander (Siddig el South Pacific (Joshua Logan,
Fadil) 103 1958) 328
Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, Spandex 265
1972) 85 Spanish Prisoner, The (David Mamet,
Simmel, Georg 1997) 1, 7–10
city life 129 Spark, Cheryl 85
tertius gaudens 114, 145 Special Effects: The History and
Sinatra, Frank 83, 89 Technique (Richard
Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rickett) 217
Rodriguez, 2005) 265 Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock,
Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and 1945) 201
Stanley Donen, 1952) 65–6, Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) 303
137, 140, 323 Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004) 264
ballet 221 Spielberg, Steven 101, 298, 301
Sin of Harold Diddlebock, The child characters and 298,
(Preston Sturges, 1947) 160 299 n.2, 306–7
360 INDEX

Stairway to Heaven ([A Matter of Life Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock,

and Death] Michael Powell 1951) 304
and Emeric Pressburger, Jefferson Memorial (Washington
1946) 264, 280 D.C.) 304
“Stairway to Paradise” (Arthur shooting 304
Schwartz and Howard Washington D.C. locations 304
Dietz) 62 Strauss, Johann II. “The Blue Danube”
Stanislavsky, Konstantin 89, 222 (1866) 37
Star Is Born, A (George Cukor, Streep, Meryl 124, 331
1954) 65, 66 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Elia
Starobinski, Jean 209 Kazan, 1951) 326
Starship Troopers (Paul Veroeven, Streisand, Barbra 257, 258–9
1997) 104, 110 Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) 174
Star Trek Generations (1994) Stuart, Gloria 54
265 Sudnow, David 130
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Sully (Clint Eastwood, 2016) 48–9
Country (Nicholas Meyer, Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950) 170
1991) 48 Superman (Richard Donner,
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) 84, 1978) 265
85, 241, 270, 325f Superman Returns (Bryan Singer,
C–3PO 240 2006) 265
R2-D2 240, 270 Survivor (James McTeigue,
State of the Union (Frank Capra, 2015) 273, 273ff, 331
1948) 92 Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)
Statham, Jason 180 Aysgarth home atrium 169 n.3
Steiger, Rod 175 milk sequence 173
Steimatsky, Noa 89 n.1 train sequence 169 n.3
Steinway piano 134, 136 Sutherland, Donald 232
Stepford Wives, The (Bryan Forbes, Suyin, Han, Dr., characterized 327
1975) 242–3 Swanson, Gloria 170
Stern, Bert 91 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander
Sternberger, Dolf 200, see also The Mackendrick, 1957) 91,
Railway Journey 189–90
Stewart, James 131, 189, 196, 227, Swing Time (George Stevens,
228ff, 233, 281, 303 1936) 175
Stewart, Kristin 98, 155, 162 Swink, Gary 168 n.2
Stewart, Patrick 330 Swinton, Tilda 150, 322
Stewart, Paul 32 Synecdoche, New York (Charlie
Stigma: Notes on the Management Kaufman, 2008) 161
of Spoiled Identity (Erving
Goffman) 95 Taking Lives (D. J. Caruso,
Sting, The (George Roy Hill, 1973) 7 2004) 111
Stolen Life, A (Curtis Bernhardt, Taking of Pelham One Two Three,
1945) 181 The (Joseph Sargent,
Storaro, Vittorio 185, 331 1974) 31 n.2
“Storm Clouds” (Arthur Benjamin; Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Anthony
D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, 1934; Minghella, 1999) 105
1956), see The Man Who Tamiroff, Akim 83, 88, 89–90
Knew Too Much Tandy, Jessica 201
 INDEX  361

Taylor, Elizabeth 144, 158, 322 Tijuana 29

Taylor, Ronnie 185 Time Machine, The (H. G. Wells) 47
TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Time Machine, The (George Pal,
305 1960) 73–4
Technicolor 168, 236 Time Machine, The (Simon Wells,
epics 327 2002) 73–4
Kodak recording film for 168 Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) 48,
lighting for 168 54, 185, 323
three-strip process 168 Rolls Royce 323 (see also
Technique of Special Effects Hollywood, mattes)
Cinematography, The To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock,
(Raymond Fielding) 217 1955) 219, 327
Tel Aviv 276 To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert
10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Mulligan, 1962) 51
Trachtenberg, 2016) 162 To Kill a Mockingbird (Aaron Sorkin;
Tennant, David 324 Shubert Theater, New York,
Tennessee, homestead, as setting 165 December 13, 2018) 21 n.1
Teran, Manuel 29 Toland, Gregg 34
Terminal, The (Steven Spielberg, Tolkien, J[ohn] R[onald] R[euel] 2
2004) 163 Toll, John 185
Tess (Roman Polanski, 1979) 185 Tom Jones (Tony Richardson,
Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The ([Das 1963) 207
Testament des Dr. Mabuse] Tom Thumb (George Pal, 1958) 239
Fritz Lang, 1933) 68 Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) 302
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) 328
Anderson, 2007) 186 Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964) 83, 327
Theron, Charlize 143 Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock,
They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1966) 57 n.1
1948) 176 Toronto 276
Thief of Bagdad, The (Michael Powell Totter, Audrey 205
and Emeric Pressburger, Touch, The (Ingmar Bergman,
1940) 196, 326, see also 1971) 77, 325
Hollywood, mattes Touch of Evil (Orson Welles,
Third Man, The (Carol Reed, 1958) 83, 88
1949) 64, 65, 66, 194 Toumanova, Tamara 57 n.1
Third Reich 95 Towering Inferno, The (John
This Island Earth (Joseph M. Newman, Guillermin, 1974) 185
1955) 31 n.1, 162 Towers, Constance 207
velocitor 240 Tracy, Spencer 92, 96
Thomas Crown Affair, The (Norman Train, The (John Frankenheimer,
Jewison, 1968) 155 1964) 142, 290, 314, 331
1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, The ([Die Treasure Island (Bernard Miles and
1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse], Josephine Wilson; Mermaid
Fritz Lang, 1960) 68 Theatre, London, 1961–
Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean 1962) 44 n.4
Negulesco, 1954) 327 Trifonov, Daniil 132
Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Trip, The (Roger Corman, 1967) 246
Pollack, 1975) 68 “Triplets” (Arthur Schwartz and
Tierney, Gene 317 Howard Dietz) 62
362 INDEX

Triumph des Willens ([Triumph of Vermeer, Johannes 168, 193

the Will] Leni Riefenstahl, Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock,
1935) 32 n.4 1958) 10, 42
Truffaut, François 200 n.2, 37, 281, alternate (UK) ending 196
281 n.1 Big Basin State Park 182, 189
Truman, Ralph 40 redwoods sequence 189, 233
Tuan, Yi-Fu 219–20, 258 Victor/Victoria (Marquis Theater, New
Turkey 310 York, October 25, 1995) 95
Turner, J[oseph] M[allord] Victorian era 117ff
W[illiam], 168 Vienna 44 n.4
Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, Virgin Land (Henry Nash Smith) 186
1934) 3, 263 Virtuoso: Film Performance and the
Twentieth Century Fox, see Actor’s Magic (Murray
Hollywood, studios Pomerance) 116 n.6, 146
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Vitti, Monica 170, 284, 284,
(Richard Fleischer, 285, 322
1954) 244 Voight, Jon 98, 139
23 Paces to Baker Street (Henry Von Sydow, Max 68, 70
Hathaway, 1956) 326 Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. 320
Twilight Zone: The Movie (Joe
Dante, John Landis, George Wagner, Richard 132
Miller, and Steven Spielberg, Wagnerian sound 265
1983) 288 Wainberg, Lory 127
Twins (Ivan Reitman, 1988) 100 Walbrook, Anton 333
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Walken, Christopher 100
Kubrick, 1968) 37, 47, 51, Walker, Robert 304
239, 302 War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt
brain dismantling 242 Reeves, 2017) 241
HAL 240, 242, 243 Warner, David 150, 326
2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) 180 Warner Bros., see Hollywood, studios
Tyler, Walter 237 War of the Worlds, The (Byron Haskin,
1953) 83
Ularu, Ana 105 Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 265
1952) 73 Watkin, David 185
Unholy Three, The (Jack Conway, Watson, Emma 164
1930) 83 Watts, Naomi 161
Unsworth, Geoffrey 184, 185 Wayne, John 91, 138
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, Weaver, Sigourney 243
2009) 207 Webster, Ferris 34
Weimar culture 241–2
Valli, Alida 64, 65, 66 Weinstein, Harvey 122
Vanet, Charles 32 n.3 Weird Science (John Hughes,
Vanity Fair 90 1985) 106
Vaseline, see Hollywood, Welles, Orson 30, 32, 34, 73, 89,
cinematography tricks 99, 197
Veidt, Conrad 280, 326 “We’re a Couple of Swells” (Irving
Venezuela 8 Berlin) 3
 INDEX  363

Westmore dynasty (Hollywood make- Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming,

up) 84 n.4 1939) 20, 83, 85, 248,
Westmore, Michael 84 n.4 302, 332, see also Hollywood,
West Palm Beach, as setting 180 studios, MGM
West Side Story (Robert Wise Woman’s Face, A (George Cukor,
and Jerome Robbins, 1941) 32 n.3
1961) 47, 275 Women, The (George Cukor,
Wexler, Haskell 185 1939) 322
Weyl, Carl Jules 300 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (L.
What Maisie Knew (Henry Frank Baum) 239
James) 51, 51 n.4 Wood, Natalie 94, 144, 195,
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse 196, 197
Hallström, 1993) 4, 144 World Trade Center 272 n.4
Wheeler, Romney 247 n.1 Worth, Sol 139 n.2
White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) Worthington, Sam 219
317 Wright, Frank Lloyd 234 n.2
Whiteout (Dominic Sena, 2009) 106 Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1956) 328
(Mike Nichols, 1966) 144, Wycherly, Margaret 165
158, 322
Widmark, Richard 94, 96 X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000) 330, 331
Wieth, Mogens 41 X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin
Wild Bunch, The (Sam Peckinpah, Hood, 2009) 265
1969) 317
“wild” wall, see Hollywood, design Yeelen ([Brightness] Souleymane Cissé,
tricks 1987) 159
Wilde, Oscar 310, 311 York, Michael 89
Williams, Billy 185 You Are There (1953) 110 n.4
Williams, Linda Ruth 296 n.1 Young, Freddie 184
Williams, Olivia 319 You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert,
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory 1967) 311
(Mel Stuart, 1971) 163 YouTube 132
Wilson, Dooley 300
Winkler, Margot 13, 15–16, 179 Zabecka, Kat 269 n.1
Winslet, Kate 323 Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo
Wise, Robert 32–4, 275 Antonioni, 1970) 164
Wiseman, Joseph 164–5 going-to-work sequence 178
Wisenhunt, Larry 85 Zsigmond, Vilmos 185
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