Visual Storytelling

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Visual Storytelling

• FS101Week 7

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Lecture

• Last Week
• Kurosawas Rashomon
• Alternative mode of storytelling from CH
• Point of view and subjective narration
• This Week
• Readings
• Film Music (Ch 9) I will discuss
• Analysing film (Ch 12) will help you with
  writing the essay
• French New Wave and Nouvelle Roman film
• Last Year at Marienbad

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Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave)

• Important film movement in France
• group of filmmakers 1958 to 1964
• Rebellion against status quo
• Hollywood filmmaking in US and studio filmmaking
  in Fr
• Argued that cinema should express the subtlety
  and expressiveness of art rather than be
  commercial
• Rejected
• Heavy emphasis on literariness
  plot/narration/dialogue
• Emphasis on montage (lots of editing) in favour
  of
• mise-en-scène, long takes, and deep focus
  composition
• Encouraged
• Film as a visual art with greater
  emotional/psychological impact
• Expression of human thought a medium of personal
  expression

Three most important New Wave films all released
in 1959 Les quatre cents coups (Truffaut)
Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais) A bout de
souffle (Godard)
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Nouvelle Roman (New Novel)
See media-arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/MMAlec/Las
tYearMarienbad.html

• Overlapping w/ Nouvelle Vague Nouvelle Roman
• contemporary literary writers (in 50s, 60s, 70s)
  like
• Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras
• Many worked with filmmakers like Alain Resnais
• Ideas of movement centred on the relationship
• between writer (author)/ reader (subject)/ and
  story (text)
• complex linguistic and narrative concepts
  explored by writers
• generated experiences of time, space, memory
  perspective
• preoccupation with shifts between objective
  subjective realities led writers to a fascination
  with the cinema
• they could more sensuously and potently shift
  time and space
• engage the viewer with multi-dimensional
  experience of narrative

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Effect for reader/viewer

• New Novel lit film dislocates the reader/viewer
  
• prevents them from holding onto a fixed, defined,
  rational and tangible construct of meaning
• Typical textual aspects explored include
• 1. Plot lines go nowhere or in endless circle
• 2. time spans collide, cancel, and/or overlap
  each other
• 3. truth value is continually ascribed yet
  simultaneously denied
• 4. narr is riddled with gaps, ruptures, fissures
  and other holes
• continually affirm that the narrative itself is
  perversely aware of itself as a narrative with no
  reference to any imaginable reality
• These aspects are translated into cinematic
  language
• through a dialectic relationship between Sound
  and Image
• Ie. whatever is happening on the soundtrack sets
  up a series of tensions and ambiguities with
  whatever is happening in the image-track (ie. the
  voice-over)

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Voice-Over Narration

• New Novel cinema addresses what we normally take
  for granted
• you see an image and hear a voice-over
• But here, relationship between the two is not
  necessarily clearly defined
• Is the image in the past of the story or the
  present of a character's mind?
• Is the voice of that character telling the truth
  or not?
• Was that character privy to every detail of every
  event we witness?
• Who exactly is the character addressing?
• Are the events being related by charac - or is
  charac the creator of the events?
• What is the relationship between VO charac and
  the whole of the film's story?
• Many questions like these the New Novel
  writers/directors found
• unanswered in much American cinema of the 40s and
  50s
• Consequently, much New Novel Cinema is
  characterized by
• puzzles and riddles which both drive the
  narrative and prevent it from being resolved.

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M.C.Escher
Think of the art of someone like M.C.
Escherfamous for his so-called impossible
structures,
House of Stairs 1951 Drawing Hands 1948
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Alain Resnais

• Early career
• director of documentaries
• burst onto international film scene with his
  first feature
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
• 2nd film
• LAnnée Dernière à Marienbad (1961)
• Won Grand Prize at the 1961 Venice Film Festival
• Script by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Resnais
• Photographed by Sacha Vierny (cinematographer)

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Plot v Story

• The story is simple
• A man (M) insists that he and the woman (A)
  have been romantically involved he wants to
  renew the affair
• The woman maintains that there never was a past
  romance and that she is involved with another man
  (X)
• They perform a dance of seduction at Marienbad
• A palatial European resort hotel
• The plot however, is not so simple
• Chronology of events is uncertain
• Last Year vs the Present
• Events/actions are repeated belong to both past
  and present?
• Temporal status of filmic events becomes
  undeterminable
• When did this event happen?
• What does it mean if it is repeated?

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Past v Present

• Two years after Hiroshima, Resnais made LAnnée
  dernière à Marienbad which, in many ways, is
• one of the least realistic films ever made.
• Its time structure and location are labyrinthine.
  
• It breaks down times inevitable advance by
  completely disorienting the viewers sense of
  space and time.
• The film does not privilege one time over the
  other.
• There is no way for the viewer to know which time
  frame represents the present.
• This breaks down temporal cause and effect

From J. Beebes article Past Against The Present
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Narrative Logic

• Typically, a films plothowever simple or
  difficult
• allows the spectator to construct
• the causal and chronological story mentally
• But Marienbad is different
• story is impossible to determine
• The film has only a plot with no single
  consistent story for us to infer
• Marienbad creates its ambiguity
• through contradictions on many different levels
• the spatial, the temporal, and the causal.
• Within the same shot, impossible juxtapositions
  may occur in the mise-en-scene, for example

From Bordwell and Thompsons Film Art
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Impossible shadows
People have shadows but the trees dont!
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Spatial shifts

• Settings shift in inconsistent ways
• between different segments of the film as well
• The balcony and promenade are
• sometimes at front of the hotel and sometimes at
  the back
• The statue sometimes appears
• directly outside the French windows of the hotel
• At other times the statue is at a great distance
• In some scenes the statue faces a lake
• In others, the lake is behind it

Hopping statues from the front to the back of
the promenade does the statue mirror the
relationship?
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Space shift
We see three images of her in one frame
reflections in a mirror? Her feelings are
divided? Or is she caught in the past, present,
and future all at once?
A woman can be in one place, but then she turns
and is somewhere else
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Temporal shifts
From night to day in one shot

• Temporal relations are equally problematic
• In one shot the woman stands by the window in her
  room
• The darkness of a night-time exterior is visible
  through window, and the lights by the bed are
  lit.
• But when she moves left, with the camera panning,
  she reaches another window through which sunlight
  is visible.
• The type of lighting inside the room is also
  different yet no cut or ellipsis has occurred
• But this is nothing compared to how the past and
  present are
• Intermingled
• Indistinguishable
• Alterable
• Actions are often repeated
• The ritual of vacuous lifestyle of the French
  elite (ie being criticised)?

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Challenging Storytelling

• Film broke with conventional expectations by
  suggesting
• that a film could base itself entirely on a
  game-like structure
• of causal, spatial, temporal ambiguity
• teasing the viewer with hints about elusive
  implied meanings
• refusing to specify explicit meanings
• Marienbad an anti-narrative Understanding the
  Act of Reading J. Y. Douglas
• It tells us more about our expectations based on
  cinematic literary conventions than about the
  characters who wander aimlessly through the plot
• No familiar grammar of the shot-reaction-shot,
  cause/effect narrative (CHS)
• Critics have too often tried to find a thematic
  key to the film
• much of films fascination rests in the process
  of discovering its ambiguity
• not trying to pin down specific meanings
• Despite the film's confusion, there is no sense
  of chaos or disorder
• Film imbued w/evident purpose to undermine
  conventional certainty
• instead, offers a contemplation of ever-changing
  memory and truth

Note unlike a Classical Hollywood film,
Marienbad is careful not to give clues to help
establish narrative clarityambiguity is integral
to the films meaning
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Questions to think about

• What is the film about?
• Memory? Time? Desire?
• Who is lying? Who is telling the truth?
• Is it a story of obsession (Mans) or about
  forgetting (Womans)?
• Is he right - they met before - or is she right
  that they havent?
• Is she lying about their past or is he obsessed
  with her?
• Why would either of them lie? Is one of them
  insane?
• Supposedly, Robbe-Grillet says that he wrote the
  story believing that the man is lying AND
• Resnais filmed it assuming that he was telling
  the truth and that the woman had forgotten him
• Time is a theme its contemplation and escape
• Is it a fantasy? If so - whose?
• Facts or merely vague recollections or desires?

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Music and Film
See web.archive.org/web/19970516041845/http//cit
d.scar.utoronto.ca/VPAB93/course/readings/prenderg
.html

• Roy Prendergast (industry film music editor)
  asks
• What is it, exactly, that music contributes to a
  film?
• headings from Aaron Coplands article in The New
  York Times of November 6, 1949
• 1. Music can create a more convincing atmosphere
  of time and place."
• Musical color
• Exotic/sensuous aspects of music, as distinct
  from musical structure or line
• Obvious example the Oriental music in Broken
  Blossoms
• Stylistic integration matching the music to the
  scenes tone/color to the images
• Stylistic parody purposely offering a contrast
  in tone/color to the images
• 2. Music can be used to underline or create
  psychological refinements
• the unspoken thoughts of a character or the
  unseen implications of a situation."
• same as 1. But tied specifically to character
  rather than atmosphere
• Composer Leonard Rosenman has pointed out that
  film music must enter directly into the 'plot'
  of the film, adding a third dimension to the
  images and words."

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Music and Film (contd)

• 3. "Music can serve as a kind of neutral
  background filler."
• Copland has said of "background" music "This is
  really the kind of music one isn't supposed to
  hear, the sort that helps to fill the empty spots
  between pauses in a conversation. It's the movie
  composer's most ungrateful task.
• blank spots in the dialogue are filled with
  fragments of music
• they come to the foreground momentarily to
  comment on the dialogue
• then drop back into the background when the next
  line is said
• 4. "Music can help build a sense of continuity in
  a film."
• Music can tie together film that is, by its very
  nature, continually in danger of falling apart
  ask a film editor!
• Ie. in a montage music can serves indispensable
  function--holding it together
• 5. "Music can provide the underpinning for the
  theatrical buildup of a scene and then round it
  off with a sense of finality."
• Music has a way of bypassing the human's normal,
  rational defense mechanisms.
• When used properly, music can help build drama in
  a scene to great intensity
• Whether for violence or romance

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Music and Film (from Boggs and Petrie)

• 2 key functions of musical score
• To create structural rhythms
• To stimulate emotional responses
• Both which greatly enhance and reinforce the
  effect of the image
• Specific functions of musical score
• To cover weaknesses in the film
• To heighten the dramatic effect of dialogue
• To tell an inner story
• To provide a sense of time and place
• To evoke feelings of nostalgia
• To foreshadow events or build dramatic tension
• To add levels of meaning to the visual images
• To develop characterisation
• Soundtrack of Last Year at Marienbad
• Music is jarring/loud organ music that one critic
  calls,
• excruciating but injects the film with an
  overblown sense of dramatics