THE SUBJECTIVITY IN CINEMA
For my research project I decided to look into the ways a drama film can intentionally break its continuity for dramatic effect/narrative emphasis, although that’s only a loose description of it. A phrase that we’ve used quite a lot over the semester is “stepping out of the established world of the film”. I’ve found my research topic quite difficult to put a name to, but you always know it when you see it. To assist with this defining what I’m talking about, I’ve tried to come up with a series of rules defining what it isn’t.
RULE 1: It is not the use of camera angles/movements to provide insight into a character’s inner state.
RULE 2: It is not the representation of a reality which ‘objectively’ exists for all characters in the films universe.
RULE 3: It is not the use of dream/hallucination sequences, when these experiences are acknowledged as non-existent/explained. (e.g: “it was just a dream”, or “they were just tripping”)
The scene which inspired all of this research is one from the French film Perdrix (which I wrote about here for my second scene analysis). Funnily enough, after all my research, I still consider this example to be the gold standard.
(Skip to 3:45 to see the moment in discussion, alternative link here)
The first time I saw this scene I was totally blown away. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen in film before. Sure, heaps of other scenes have similar moments that come close to that, but that was somewhat of a revelatory moment for me. That was the ‘it’ I am trying to define.
The point I am trying to argue, is film as a medium has a unique potential for moments like these. There is no rule book that says the world of the cinema has to conform to the same laws as reality. In fact, film is the only artistic medium that has this freedom. Yet, this exciting potential is very rarely realised. Why is that?
Nowhere in the film Perdrix states that this moment was purely in the mind of one of the characters, but it also doesn’t state that they were literally transported to a new location, or an alternate reality. It doesn’t try to make sense of something which is, by human standards, impossible. It just lets this moment exist without comment or implication, and it speaks wonders to the relationship between the characters.
I would love to explore some more examples of these ‘motivated breaks in continuity’, and what better place is there to start than the musical film?
A dramatic lighting cue is not rare in the musical genre, very often you will see ‘the house lights go down’ to enter into a song. Like in this example from High School Musical 3:
(Skip to 1:45 to see the moment in discussion, alternative link here)
On paper, this is a similar situation to our first example. The lights go down, and the focus is solely on two people. However, there are some key/noteworthy differences between the two.
Pay attention to how we transition into and out of this ‘moment’. It is quite a smooth transition. We never lose sight of the other people in the crowd, and there are no harsh changes in lighting or location. I will call this a seamless transition (as opposed to the abrupt transition of Perdrix).
This is where we get into a grey area about using the term ‘continuity’ when discussing moments like this. With the musical genre, this seemingly happens all the time, so it is almost to be expected. Continuity in film is all about upholding expectations as to not jar the audience. Would this moment then be considered a break in continuity? Sure, this is somewhat of an impossible situation in the real world, but in the world of this film it’s a) completely possible, and b) almost to be expected.
I would also like to draw up some terminology around different kinds of continuity. In this ‘write-up’ I will be mostly talking about spatial and temporal continuity; Spatial continuity regarding the location of a scene, i.e: is there an impossible break in location, and temporal continuity regarding the behaviour of time, i.e: broken by a match cut between scenes.
Hollywood cinema has often bound itself more tightly to the ‘rules of the real world’ than its European/global counterparts, and I believe that will be evident in the selection of films I am sharing today. It is not simply a preference against Hollywood films causing their lack of representation in this study, but in fact the lack of their relevance. Hollywood cinema is very much reliant on continuity editing practices, and I believe that may at times be to their detriment. Of course there are some exceptions to this found in directors like Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, Spike Jonze, and perhaps Wes Anderson, but I would argue they are all slightly outside of the ‘mainstream’.
Another musical film which provides a stellar example is Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. It might be important to note that while La La Land is undoubtedly a Hollywood film, Chazelle is a French-American filmmaker.
(Skip to 2:00 to see the moment in discussion, alternative link here)
I would argue that this film does a far better job of breaking the spatial continuity of its scenes (which doesn’t really happen in the HSM example). In this planetarium scene Sebastian and Mia literally go into another world. One question I would like to raise is when do they actually enter into the alternate space? At first thought, I would’ve stated it to be when the handkerchief flies into the air. However, it could very easily be earlier than this. In the lead to that handkerchief moment we are shown shots of flying through the stars of a galaxy. This shot clearly isn’t the perspective of Sebastian and Mia looking into the planetarium’s dome, as these shots show a parallax which can only be created by moving through a three dimensional space. The camera is literally ‘in’ the stars. So perhaps that could be our moment of transition? But why not go further back? How did these characters get access to the prestigious planetarium in the first place? Could we be in a subjective moment prior to their entry into the planetarium? Or, even further than that, what if the transition into this scene is the transition into subjectivity? The previous scene ends with Mia and Sebastian sitting in a cinema, gazing into each others eyes. A slow fade (possibly establishing the passing of time) takes us into the shot of them arriving at the planetarium.
I would say that this establishing shot of the car driving up the road creates some sense of spatial continuity in terms of how they arrive at this location, but how would this scene operate if we transitioned straight into the scenes of them flying through the galaxy?
(Alternative link here)
I feel that this edit makes the scene operate on a whole new level (although please excuse the fact the score no longer aligns with the action). I would consider this to be far more ‘magical’ than the original cut, and all it took was removing some pillars of the scene’s continuity. It is a shame that this kind of thing can’t really happen outside of a musical in the Hollywood world, why is there such a dependence on continuity, does the audience’s hand need to be held for the entire duration of the film? I think not. Freedom from this need for constant continuity allows for truly great, expressive filmmaking.
From my findings, the only other time this really happens in American cinema, is when it is done for comedic effect. Even then, a lot of these instances can be counted as parodies or homages of the musical genre. Take this scene from the rarely politically-correct It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia for example:
(Skip to 2:20 to see the moment in discussion, alternative link here)
This scene uses an abrupt transition back to reality as the punchline to a joke, simultaneously parodying the musical trope of incredibly dramatic lighting cues, with the ‘light-drop’ as a standard seamless transition into the moment of subjectivity. The editor has decided to use a match cut to create an abrupt transition out of this moment, creating the sudden reveal which gives the scene its comedic effect. This is something also done regularly by director Edgar Wright in his 2010 film Scott Pilgrim Vs The World.
(Alternative link here)
This excerpt from the film has two examples that are very interesting to examine in response to my three rules. The first (0:00) being Scott’s dream sequence, and the second (1:20) being the match cut from the library to the band practice. According to my third rule, the first example can not count, due to the fact it is explicitly a ‘dream sequence’. However, the way we move into this sequence is particularly interesting. We never get closure on the scene leading into this moment, and this sequence serves as some kind of ‘extended transition’ bridging two scenes together (as well as foreshadowing future characters). If you were to cut out the shot of him waking up, it would be a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It transports the character into an alternate subjective-reality without any ‘explanation’. The idea of using this technique for transitioning between scenes seems extremely powerful to me, and that’s where the second example from this clip comes in.
While it’s not in any shape creating the same alternate reality I’ve been envisioning, this kind of transition seems to have the same effect. It breaks the continuity of the film in order to tell us something about the character’s subjectivity. In this example we are shown just how captured Scott is by Ramona’s presence, so much so that he ‘blacks out’ for the whole space between that moment and the next scene. All of this is done through one simple and very effective match cut. There’s countless other examples moments like this throughout the rest of the film, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Bringing this back to how this operates as a narrative drama device, I think another interesting thing to look at is the number of characters occupying these spaces. Out of my examples so far, none of these scenes contain only one character in their discontinuous moment.
It seems that most often these realities are shared between two characters, although theres no way to tell whether both characters are experiencing a shared reality, or if we are instead ‘inside the mind’ of only one character. One film which plays with the distinction between these two things is Michel Gondry’s The Science Of Sleep, which never really lets the viewer know the difference between its protagonists imagination and reality, and frequently presents contradictory scenes.
(Alternative link here)
This example might seem a little out of place without the context of the film, but the reciprocation from Stephane’s love interest (his neighbour, Stephanie) is shown to both existent and non existent throughout the duration of the film. I don’t mean that in the ‘she keeps changing her mind’ kind of way, I mean that Gondry intentionally contradicts previous statements throughout the film, blurring the lines between objective and subjective realities. He doesn’t fully know what is real and what isn’t, and as the film is presented through his perspective, the viewer often doesn’t know what is objectively true either. It’s hard to classify what is abrupt and seamless within this film’s transitions, as there isn’t a well enough established ‘base reality’ to know when we are departing from it. It is nearly impossible to say what is a shared experience between the film’s two main characters and what is a figment of Stephane’s imagination with any sense of certainty.
Another film which (arguably) contradicts its established reality is Luis Buñel’s Simon of the Desert, which takes an anachronistic turn in its closing minutes. The film breaks free of its 5th-century setting and places the film’s protagonist in a bustling New York City bar, here’s the result:
(Alternative link here)
The unexpected departure Buñel is a big win for narrative spatial and temporal discontinuity, he even abruptly changes the way Simon looks! This ending was what made the film for me, there was no foreshadowing or implication of logic, it just simply lets the ‘impossible’ happen. Although, you could argue that one factor of this clip does create some sense of continuity. At the beginning of this excerpt we see Simon standing atop a pillar, we then cut away to the shot of the airliner flying through the sky, and then back to the empty pillar. These two cuts imply that through the presence of the plane Simon has disappeared, although it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that Simon is transported on that plane.
I think closing the film in this manner leaves such a lasting impression, almost similar to Inception‘s ‘was-he-or-wasn’t-he-dreaming’ ending. There are countless other examples of films concluding with a departure from reality, such as the vision of Jep’s youth in The Great Beauty (which I felt strongly echoed Fellini’s 8½), the increasingly detached Caden from Synecdoche, New York, or even the visions of the bereaved Genjūrō in Ugetsu.
But, in the case of Simon of the Desert I was quite impressed to see such a wonderful example in a 1960s film. Upon reflection, it’s definitely reasonable to assume that there would be many examples in earlier cinema (not that I’m including Simon of the Desert in that category), especially before the influence/translation of theatre practices into film. I imagine this technique is something that if possible in theatre, would be commonplace.
I’d like to showcase another example of this kind of intentional discontinuity editing from 60s cinema can be found in Lindsay Anderson’s The White Bus. I think this excerpt is very relevant to the question of ‘how many people are these realities experienced by?’.
(Alternative link here)
I would argue that the departure from reality in this clip is the experience of just the one character (who is imaging an alternate reality). This tells us a lot about the character’s internal reality, and does so in without any dependence on dialogue (“show, don’t tell” comes to mind). I think is also a really interesting example, because it doesn’t really break the spatial continuity in any major ways, instead it depends on breaking the temporal continuity, with the positions of the cleaners abruptly transitioning to the subjective moment.
It seems as if some form of continuity break needs to be done to signify the existence of these subjective moments to the audience, even if this is done on the way out but not the way in. I would argue that this doesn’t happen in my High School Musical 3 example, so maybe that doesn’t fit into the umbrella of my research topic? Perhaps there is two kinds of subjective moment in film, one which breaks a films continuity and one which does not. I would argue the former is much more exciting.
In conclusion, film is a medium with so many incredibly unique possibilities. This potential often goes unrecognised and ignored, which is quite a shame. One of these possibilities is the use of discontinuity editing and subjective to speak depth into a character. Traditional Hollywood filmmaking practices often shy away from utilising this technique, at least outside of the musical (and sometimes comedy) genres. I think it is important to ‘know the rules’, but it is more important to know how you can break them.
Regards,
Ziggy
P.S: If anyone has any recommendations for great scenes that relate to what I’m talking about here, I’d love to hear about them! Feel free to email me at any time 🙂