Nuts and bolts

A few weeks ago I read a very stimulating discussion — on the website of a favourite writer, Jim Emerson — about the “technical” knowledge required for in-depth movie criticism. Emerson mentions the reluctance of the legendary reviewer Pauline Kael to analyse technique, or to engage with the nuts and bolts of movie making. Elsewhere, he writes, “You can’t distinguish form and content for the purposes of analysis... You can’t perceive the whole without taking notice of the specifics, any more than you can absorb a novel without reading the words.”

I was reminded of this recently during a chat with an acquaintance — a thoughtful movie buff — about a workshop I was doing on film appreciation. As I ran though a rough list of talking points for the workshop, she exclaimed: “Good heavens! I hope you won’t be boring everyone there with pseudo-technical analysis.”

It wasn’t my intention to do any such thing: I don’t think a reviewer should spend most of his time self-consciously commenting on camera angles at the expense of his own emotional responses to a film. In any case, even the most analytical critics are essentially interested in narrative. The first time they see a film, they want to know what happens next: in fact, they might be so engrossed by dialogue or performance that they fail to register the more technical aspects of a scene. This is one reason why Friday reviews (written after a single viewing and on a tight deadline) focus on a film’s plot and on easily assessable elements like acting and music — while long-form criticism (where the writer has the luxury of watching a film multiple times) tends to examine the more hidden aspects of craft.

But I’m surprised by the strange idea that technique is something esoteric, only of interest to academicians. Any halfway-good film is a “technical” accomplishment — even movies that contain nothing obviously stylish or flamboyant are the products of hundreds of artistic decisions taken in conjunction. A straightforward scene — say, a conversation between two people — may get resonance from the way the camera is positioned, or the use of close-ups at key moments to emphasise a character’s response. One director might choose to make a scene intimate by placing the viewer right amidst the action; another might set an immobile camera at a fixed distance, creating a more detached and “objective” effect. And these are only rudimentary elements. Any given scene can be defined in so many other ways by the use of colour, how characters are placed relative to each other, sound editing... the list goes on.

The process of re-watching and selecting movie sequences for the workshop has helped open my eyes to things that I hadn’t properly noticed before. The use of set decoration or costume, for example: in the 1950s American film Bigger than Life (about a middle-class family facing a personal crisis), the house is deliberately crammed with objects, which subtly creates a sense of claustrophobia — exactly the right mood required by the film. Or take the beautiful song sequence Kuch Dil Ne Kaha in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama. The subject is a shy, emotionally repressed girl, and the camerawork works with the song’s plaintive lyrics to define the viewer’s feelings towards the character: it maintains a distance, almost as if respecting her privacy; there are long takes, slow tracking shots, no unexpected movements (in contrast to other songs in the same film, which have faster cutting).

These aren’t the sorts of observations you would expect in a 400-word-long weekly review, but they are central to film studies and to an analysis of cinema as a form with its own language. Expecting a critic not to touch upon them is a bit like expecting a book reviewer not to mention whether a novel has been written in the first person or the third person.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer