The Moving Image Reclaimed

Robert Kolker

Department of English
University of Maryland
Robert_P_KOLKER@umail.umd.edu

 

Preface: “The Moving Image Reclaimed” is a twofold experiment. On the level of textuality, it is an attempt to write about films with moving-image examples present and available to be viewed, the way a paragraph from a novel or lines from a poem are available to the reader of literary criticism. But to make this experiment possible, much technical experimentation was necessary. Moving images are packed with detailed information. They are analogue events. Digitizing them is a prodigious task and transmitting them over the Internet is even more prodigious. They are big, ungainly, and consume a lot of computer resources, so you will need to have patience as they come across the network. If you are receiving the clips over a dialup (SLIP) connection, you will need more than patience–you will need something to occupy your time (maybe a good book?). The clips in this essay are in MPEG format, but a Quicktime version is also available (on average, the color QuickTime clips will be at least 50% larger than their MPEG equivalents; black-and-white QuickTime clips may be as much as ten times the size of the MPEG clips). Whatever format you choose, you will need appropriate viewing software installed on your system. If you find that you don’t have such software, you can find some unsupported programs, for various platforms, here. Please note that, in viewing these clips, you may occasionally experience problems with color or frame-rate (if you are using the default MPEG viewer for Windows, you might try choosing “ordered (256)” or “hybrid” under the “dither” menu; you will also find that some clips exceed the size allowed under the free version of the Windows MPEG viewer. We recommend that you support shareware by paying for the full version of that software). All the images will look best on a video-display capable of 16 thousand or more colors: on 256 SVGA and VGA displays there may be a phenomenon called palette flash, where colors look less than attractive. Please also note that, although the QuickTime clips do have a soundtrack, the MPEG clips are without sound (“MOS” they called it in Hollywood, mimicking German filmmakers just gaining a hold of the language: “Mit Out Sound”).

 

Textual access has been a major problem in the work of cinema studies. Unlike our colleagues in literary and art criticism, film scholars’ access to the text has been absolutely limited to still images, which are often enough not taken directly from the film under discussion. Computer imaging is changing that. With relatively inexpensive video-capture hardware and software, it’s now possible to digitize film images from a videocassette or laserdisc and put them to critical use, making the film as quotable as a novel or poem. Published on-line, with image text and written text wrapped around one another, the work of film and television criticism becomes linked to its source, gives up a certain innocence, and claims a heightened authority (even responsibility). In fact, sources become reversed. The critical act becomes the source for the imagery and its meaning: the imagery is reclaimed, meaning becomes a result of the reclamation process in ways that correct and advance older methodologies of the field.

 

I recently wrote an essay on Martin Scorsese’s debt to Alfred Hitchcock. Its purpose was to discover a viable structure in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, a film that is part of that other reclamation process I spoke about: a work that calls to itself images from many other films as it plays and teases its audience with them. Cape Fear is many things: a popular film Scorsese made to help pay back a debt to Universal Pictures, the company that supported his earlier work, The Last Temptation of Christ; and a remake of a 1962 film of the same name, which itself owes a debt to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Scorsese has always been interested in reclaiming Hitchcock, and in fact made his own version of Psycho in 1976, called Taxi Driver. But the calls Scorsese makes on Hitchcock in Cape Fear are nested very deeply. Unlike the film’s references to more recent mad killer movies, which audiences readily recognize, the Hitchcockian quotations are coveted. This is celebration as ceremony, allusion as test as well as play. More modernist than postmodern. Cape Fear cites three of Hitchcock’s lesser early fifties films, Stagefright, I Confess, and Strangers on A Train. It cites them and quotes from them, and takes an almost arcane pleasure in secreting them within its own structure.

 

To talk about them is one thing, and the essay that emerged from my research into the sources of Cape Fear needs, like almost any conventional essay in film studies, a great deal of faith from the reader. Even frame enlargements from the films in question will not adequately prove my assertions or my theorizing about allusion, citation, and quotation in modernist and postmodern practice. Such a discussion needs visual proof, which only the moving images can provide.

 

To set the scene for Scorsese’s Hitchcockian reclamations, I needed first to address larger notions of cinematic form. Many filmmakers have attempted to absorb elements of Hitchcockian structure in their films–basically because Hitchcock did various formal tropes so well and with commercial success. In Vertigo, to give one instance, Hitchcock solves the problem of how to communicate his main character’s response to heights by creating an elaborate visual effect, which is achieved by simultaneously zooming the camera’s lens in one direction while tracking the camera in the other. Difficult to imagine or even recall from the film. Here is what it looks like:

 

(VIDEO)
Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958 [.6 MB]

 

Still more difficult to imagine is the that fact that this bit of technique has fascinated a variety of filmmakers, who have tried to improve upon it over and over again. Spielberg does it often. This what it looks like in Jaws, where he attempts to communicate Police Chief Brody’s surprise and anxiety at spotting the shark.

 

(VIDEO)
Jaws, Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1975 [.19 MB]

 

In its most complex version yet, Scorsese recomposes it for a climactic moment in Goodfellas, where the main character is about to betray his friends.

 

(VIDEO)
Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1990 [2 MB]

 

This interaction of visual and explanatory texts not only proves a scholarly point, but explains intertextuality in an intertextual way. This becomes clearer in my main argument, which is, after all, about an intertextuality so essential to a filmmaker’s style that one film haunts another through the very structure of its images. Strangers on A Train and Cape Fear are films about doubles: evil twins, subjectivities split in two, each one attempting to destroy the other. There is a sequence in Strangers on A Train, in which the mad Bruno, who has committed a murder for his “other,” the tennis player, Guy. Bruno emerges from the shadows, calling to Guy. It is one of the most unnerving things Hitchcock has done, for it presents a character seeing his shadow take on form before his eyes.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [2.2 MB]

 

The structural base of this sequence is the shot/reaction shot–a look at the character and a cut to what the character is looking at–the basic way Hitchcock builds a viewer’s comprehension of his character’s situation (a construction basic to all cinema, that Hitchcock used with particular finesse). In Cape Fear, Scorsese keeps returning to the Hitchcockian version of that structure and to the central episode of Guy and Bruno in the dark. Here’s a version of it. Sam Boden, the lawyer suddenly haunted by his past, sees his nemesis, his evil other, Max Cady, as if in a dream.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [.26 MB]

 

Perhaps the most famous sequence in Strangers on a Train occurs when Guy spots Bruno staring menacingly from the audience at a tennis match. Secret terrors in public places is a favorite Hitchcockian gambit, a way to everyone’s anxiety.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [2.4 MB]

 

Scorsese quotes the passage quite directly, using a Fourth of July parade instead of a tennis match.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [1.6 MB]

 

Scorsese also inverts the Hitchcockian gambit. He takes another sequence from Strangers on a Train, in which Bruno appears to Guy, once again stiff and menacing as his is in the tennis match, but this time in front of the Jefferson Memorial.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [.95 MB]

 

Scorsese turns it into another nightmare vision. Sam Boden’s wife, Leigh, emerges from sleep to see Max Cady in a shower of fireworks (yet another Hitchcock quotation, this one from To Catch a Thief) in the dead of night.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [1.2 MB]

 

There’s a terrific sense of play in Scorsese’s work of reclamation that is now transferred into the critical process. Images created and recalled become images recreated and compared. The imagination of the critic and the filmmaker become commingled. Even enhanced. We now see what the critic is talking about and, hopefully, understand how deeply films grow out of other films.

 

And it’s quite possible to go beyond quoting images and actually intervene in their structure, inscribing the critical act within the images themselves. This is particularly useful in explaining how a filmmaker articulates narrative structure by framing and moving within a shot. A famous sequence from Welles’s Citizen Kane becomes an animated expression of the complex shiftings of narrative point of view as figures change position and dominate or become recessive in the frame.

 

(VIDEO) (VIDEO)
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, RKO, 1941 [1.3 MB each]

 

More than critical inquiry, this computer-assisted methodology becomes a kind of performance. The image is shared between filmmaker, critic, and reader, and its former inviolability is replaced by active intervention and presentation. The aura of the inviolable and inevitable text is diminished and the authority of the critic heightened by access.