The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies by David Bordwell

Author:David Bordwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, General
ISBN: 9780520246225
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2006-04-09T21:00:00+00:00

2. some likely sources

I’ve drawn most of my evidence about intensified continuity from regularities in the films and comments by practitioners, but critics have also noticed these norms. In 1980 Richard Jameson observed that an overwrought style had become evident in the previous decade.51 Two years later, Noël Carroll pointed to a tendency toward “strident stylization” since the mid-1960s.52 I’ve already mentioned the critics’ sense that movies are cut faster nowadays, with Todd McCarthy of Variety harping on the drawbacks of the style: “Gladiator, with its fast flurries of action and jump cuts, emphasizes the ferocious speed and urgency of every move in the arena, to the slight detriment of spatial unity and action continuity.”53 Of The Bourne Supremacy (2004), McCarthy writes: “One has to imagine that the lack of clarity, continuity and coherence in this furiously fought sequence is intentional,” but he worries about the director’s tendency to give action scenes “breathless bluster, insistent showiness and defiant disorientation.”54 Although McCarthy speaks from a powerful pulpit, nobody seems to have been converted. Intensified continuity is taken for granted in handbooks and film-school curricula. Daniel Arijon’s Grammar of the Film Language (1976), a manual that professional directors sometimes consult in planning a scene, compiles many of the emerging staging and cutting schemas.55 Later manuals incorporate instructions on sidewinding camera movements.56 During a 1985 class at NYU, a professor advised a student to “capture the energy” of a pinball game with tracking shots: “Give the camera a life and energy as well.”57

Films themselves sometimes comment on the style. We get parodic versions of it in the bombastic crane shot down to the chairman of the board in Soapdish (1991) or in the entirety of the short George Lucas in Love (1999). When characters discuss recent movies, prototypes of intensified continuity may appear on the agenda. The most celebrated example is the flamboyant long take that opens Altman’s The Player (1992), during which characters argue about... flamboyant long takes. (“The pictures they make these days are all MTV. Cut-cut-cut-cut.”) In Swingers (1994), the protagonists comment on the Copacabana shot in GoodFellas; later in the film a pastiche of that shot trails them through a kitchen and into a club. During the same scene, they praise the slow-motion shot of walking heist men in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and that shot is copied immediately, showing them strutting off to a party. To top things off, the men’s conversation is filmed in arcing tracking shots around them sitting at a table, as in the diner opening of Reservoir Dogs. One character remarks, “Everybody steals from everybody. That’s movies.”

These passages from Swingers remind us that U.S. “independent” films

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