Film Dialogue by Jeff Jaeckle

Author:Jeff Jaeckle
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Because the actors themselves cannot divine Cassavetes’ intention from his script, and because the director refuses to tell them what he wants from a scene, they deliver their lines with an improvisational uncertainty similar to what one hears in real speech.

Cassavetes was not the only filmmaker of his era to imbue his dialogue with an air of improvisation or to incorporate dialogue that emphasises the everyday qualities of real speech. In fact, the 1970s, when Cassavetes made most of his independent films, saw a vogue of this type of dialogue in such movies as Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), American Graffiti (1973), Badlands (1973), The Last Detail (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Mikey and Nicky (1976). Robert Altman regularly allowed his actors to improvise lines, and his characters’ sometimes mumbled, overlapping dialogue underscores the technique. All the President’s Men (1976) makes use of overlapping dialogue in almost every scene, as well as misspoken lines (‘Do any of you guys speak English? Er. Do any of you guys speak Spanish?’) and narratively irrelevant dialogue insertions (‘Coffee’s cold’; ‘I don’t want a cookie’). Similar to Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese taped his actors’ improvisations when shooting Mean Streets (1973) and then wrote scripted dialogue based on the tapes (see Thompson and Christie 1989: 43). Woody Allen’s linguistic stumbling has become a trademark, and, like Cassavetes, he uses verbal tics and rambling speeches to generate dramatic tension.

None of these filmmakers, however, allow dialogue digressions to dominate narration in the way that Cassavetes does. With these other filmmakers, eventually narrative causality regains control of their scenes and an overt authorial intention emerges. Allen, for instance, eventually brings his rambling speeches to a definitive resolution, and one ultimately feels the presence of the scriptwriter. Alvy Singer’s opening monologue from Annie Hall provides a good example of Allen’s dialogue style:

You know, lately the strangest things have been going through my mind, ’cause I turned forty, tsch, and I guess I’m going through a life crisis or something, I don’t know. I, uh – and I’m not worried about aging. I’m not one o’ those characters, you know. Although I’m balding slightly on top, that’s about the worst you can say about me. I, uh, I think I’m gonna get better as I get older, you know? I think I’m gonna be the – the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to the say, the, uh, distinguished gray, for instance, you know? ’Less I’m neither o’ those two. Unless I’m one o’ those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.

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