Cinematic Overtures by Annette Insdorf

Author:Annette Insdorf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 5.5  From the opening of Good Kill

The openings of all these films invite an immediate complicity between the viewer and the flawed or morally compromised hero. Bringing us into his singular—and often limited—point of view, the filmmakers acknowledge the overlap between external warfare and internal battlegrounds.

6

The Collective Protagonist

La Ciudad, 3 Backyards, Little Miss Sunshine, Le Bal, Day for Night, A Separation, Where Do We Go Now?

While motion pictures tend to focus on a single character’s trajectory, collective protagonist films utilize an intricate narrative structuring to convey interdependence. They present individuals who exist primarily in terms of a larger community: within such ensemble pieces, resolution emerges from group dynamics in a way that acknowledges the insufficiency of a single hero. Superb examples of this narrative strategy include Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Robert Altman’s Nashville, Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me and Remember My Name, Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, John Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus 7 and Matewan, Paul Haggis’s Crash, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros and Babel. As with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterful Decalogue, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Densely populated, these films express pluralism and inclusiveness. In the words of Philip Kaufman—whose own ensemble films include The Wanderers (1979) and The Right Stuff (1983)—“Living in this more collective time, we are trying to redefine the hero. We’re so used to believing there’s one way to confront things; but in a complex world, there are a lot of ways. It’s not so clear that one person can have all forms of heroism.”1 A. O. Scott perceptively described a tenet of this kind of filmmaking in his New York Times review of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s Ajami: “The film has an ingenious and carefully worked-out structure. Dividing their story into chapters that are presented out of chronological order, the filmmakers embrace the multi-stranded, decentered narrative strategy that has become one of the prevalent conventions of contemporary world cinema. There are no coincidences, only hidden connections among apparently random events, some of which happen more than once so that the deeper patterns can be revealed.”2

Among the lesser known but highly recommended collective protagonist films is Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), written and directed by Rodrigo García. The five intersecting vignettes of this Los Angeles canvas focus on compelling women—played by Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and Cameron Diaz, among others—and explore female identity shaped by loss as well as caring for another person. This first feature by García—who previously worked as a cinematographer—uses close-ups not only for intimacy but also to give actors a chance to build emotions, fulfilling the awkward title. The East Coast counterpart is 13 Conversations About One Thing (2002), directed by Jill Sprecher from a script she cowrote with Karen Sprecher. They intertwine the lives of New Yorkers who are dealing with guilt while searching for meaning.

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