"Film as Film: Understanding And Judging Movies", V. F. Perkins
Victor
Francis Perkins (1936 – 2016) was a British film critic, teacher and co-founder
of Movie magazine. He became known
for his approach to the critical analysis of film without jargon. Film as Film (1972) is perhaps his most
famous work, a seminal book on film studies that makes an accessible
introduction to film theory and some of its history, while discussing mise en scène aspects (e.g., color changes, lighting techniques, camera
movements), the fusion of form and content, the how and what, in Preminger,
Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, among other classic filmmakers. He also discusses the
role of the filmmaker as an author, even in a commercial system with its financial
and logistic restrictions.
Excerpts:
“Consider
this sequence from Carmen Jones (…).
The soldier hero, Joe, is driving a jeep down a country road. Beside him sites
his prisoner Carmen, whom he has been ordered to deliver to the civilian authorities
in a near-by town. As the jeep speeds along, Carmen makes a pass at Joe; she
sings her invitation to abandon duty and run away to the shared excitements of
her favorite night-spot.
The camera
records the beginning of her song from the jeep’s bonnet, seeing both the
prisoner and her guard within the windscreen’s stable frame. A metal strut at
the center of the windscreen divides the image so as to isolate and confine
each character within a separate visual cage. But Carmen’s movements shatter
the rigid symmetry of the image. First she wriggles to Joe’s side of the jeep,
thrusting herself across the barrier into his cage. Then, her advances
rejected, she transfers to the back seat to gain greater freedom of movement in
a less restricted space. Preminger stresses the significance of her movement by
changing the camera’s viewpoint and making the image share in Carmen’s
liberation. The picture achieves a new openness now that the action is seen from
alongside the jeep, with the frame of the windscreen no longer enclosing our
view. The fresh angle conveys also a much stronger feeling of movement since it
brings into play what the previous shot had suppressed, the rapid flow of the
background scenery. Its fluid, varied pattern reinforces the free-ranging
rhythms of Carmen’s song.
Remarkable
in this shot sequence is the way that character ideas and states of mind are
projected visually without compromising the credibility of the image. The first
shot begins as a graphic expression of Joe’s personality. It shows us his world
as he wishes to see it – a world of order and stability. But as the shot
develops we see that the order is rigid and inhibiting, the stability unnatural,
claustrophobic and rather lifeless.
Where Joe
submits, Carmen challenges; the latter part of the shot gives us her view of
Joe’s world. She will not be contained within a static discipline. She rejects
external restraints; demands license to act according to her own needs and
impulses. She makes a brief effort to assert her freedom within Joe’s
structured world, by exploding the neat symmetry of his composition.”
“[Nicholas
Ray] has used the particular concept of ‘upstairs’. In Johnny Guitar upstairs represents isolation. The heroine Vienna, a
saloon owner, attempts a rigid separation of public from private life; the
former is lived on the ground floor of her establishment amid the drinks and
the gaming tables, the latter in her upstairs retreat with its more delicate
and feminine décor. (…) In Bigger than Life
upstairs suggests both the possibility of a normal family life and the
temporary retreat from responsibilities into a dreamland. In Ray’s own words, ‘the
upstairs were the areas of possible refuge, serenity and joy’. (…) Rebel Without a Cause uses upstairs to
point the failure of a man through his weakness as both husband and father.”
Link to the complete book in PDF:
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