#4: Talk Cinema To Me

I am a simple woman. Jesse McCartney speaks and I listen. In his 2009 masterpiece Body Language, McCartney taught me one of the many forms of communication.

The day I learned that I don’t need to speak Spanish, Japanese or French to maybe marry Jesse McCartney.

All pop culture icons aside, there is a hidden language in everything. In the case of cinema, the audience is her bewildered lover and she is the multi-lingual gem fluent in saying millions of different things at once.

Her most perplexing language is when she speaks in her native tongue, with the camera and production in place as her vocal cords. She doesn’t waste a minute in her words, each frame is intentional. It is composed in a way that betrays the meaning of the story she’s promised us for the night. As Cohen and Braudy (1974) write in Film Language, “The shot is motivated”. She mulls over everything from the angles, the blocking, the composition and the staging. She is a master craftsman.

There is a specific shot in films that often fills me with dread. The extreme long shots or wide shots that focus on the setting for far longer than it should as the score swells uncomfortably. My immediate reaction is to sit up slightly straighter. My fight or flight reflexes gear up and when the inevitable scene change arrives, I am either greeted with immense fear or a false sense of security. The wide shot gives viewers the feeling of isolation and unease. It tells the viewers what the protagonist wishes they had known: something bad is going to happen here.

The Witch (2015)

Despite my fear in the moment, I am always in awe of the power that camerawork and editing has to be able to throw me headfirst into a situation very far removed from my own. There is an intimacy in the language of film. None more so present than in the closeup. It is a facet of both photography and film. The camera has the ability to zoom in on the subject and capture every freckle, every pore, every speck of dust on eyelash. However, the beauty of the closeup does not come in the form of its detail nor of how close the camera can get to the subject. The beauty lies in how close the camera can bring us to the subject’s heart. Film as a medium adds the extra layer of immersing the audience in a space with the character in a moment. The face can speak with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural. There is something about human empathy that elicits us to feel the emotion of the person across from us. It is one thing to see the character in the film laugh or cry. It is another to be fully consumed by their tears and the wrinkles that form in the corner of their eyes and the skin peeling off of their lips.

It is indeed a silent soliloquy as Bela Balasz (1945) writes:

In the film the mute soliloquy of the face speaks even when the hero is not alone and herein lies a new great opportunity for depicting man. The poetic significance of the soliloquy is that it is a manifestation of mental, not physical, loneliness.

Bela Balasz (1945)

References

Balasz, B. (1945) The Close-Up. In Braudy, L. & Cohen. M (eds) (2004). Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford University Press. 6th edition.

Balasz, B. (1945) The Face of Man. In Braudy, L. & Cohen. M (eds) (2004). Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford University Press. 6th edition.