One of the charges most often levelled at detailed film criticism is that of “over-analysis”. You’re reading too much into this scene, the critic is often told. Or more gently: yes, I get your point, but did the director really intend that? The easy answer to the latter remark is to quote D H Lawrence’s famous line “Never trust the teller — trust the tale”, which basically means a critic is under no obligation to consider what an artist consciously intended (or claims he intended). But this line of defence can sometimes be misleading: it can be a way of ignoring how much deliberate thought often does go into the making of a film — even into the use of “technique” in scenes that on the face of it have nothing flashy about them.
To take an example from a hugely popular film: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is a cinematic classic, a commercial as well as a critical success. But a case can be made that even the film’s biggest devotees — the ones who gasp in admiration at its many big setpieces — don’t completely appreciate the extent of the collaborative rigour that went into its creation at a sequence-by-sequence level. In the book The Conversations, a fascinating series of exchanges between author Michael Ondaatje and film editor Walter Murch, there is a discussion of one of the quietest sequences in The Godfather.
The scene involves a hotel-room exchange over wine between Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and his girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton). Michael, initially a young innocent, is on the verge of moving into a life of crime and distancing himself from Kay, and the first, more laidback part of their conversation uses the classic film grammar of cutting back and forth between them, with each person occupying the centre of the screen. But a point arrives when things become more urgent and Michael has to openly dissuade Kay from asking too many questions, or from coming with him. After he briefly gets up and sits back down, the framing has changed: he now occupies a space near the left edge of the screen, with a large empty space to the right.
Most viewers — and most professional critics for that matter — are unlikely to register this framing change at a conscious level, at least on a first viewing; and if they do register it, they might see it as a random camera-placement decision (or even as a “mistake” made by the cinematographer or director, working in a hurry). But as Murch explains in his discussion with Ondaatje, it was a very deliberate choice by Coppola and his team —a subconscious signal to the viewer that something is off, that the terms of engagement between the young lovers have changed: “With that empty space, Michael’s family has made an invisible entrance into the room and is making its presence felt... he’s being pulled by something behind him, something that is going to take him away from her.”
The book contains many such insights into how the making of a good film can be a much more complex process than viewers realise. But as an editor, Murch was also well-placed to comment on the role that serendipity or chance — or interference — can play in fixing a film’s tone and legacy. In one of the book’s most poignant sections, he describes his work re-cutting Orson Welles’s 1958 film Touch of Evilmany decades after it was made, in accordance with the detailed memo Welles had written (in vain) to his producers. Murch relates how the removal of a single, one-second close-up of a character’s face late in the film has the effect of completely changing the viewer’s response to that person and the role he plays in the climax: “Huge issues of character and story are decided by the inclusion — or not — of a single shot that reverberates throughout the film.” For any movie buff trying to grasp just how intense — and equally, how fragile — the filmmaking process can be, The Conversations is an absolute must-read<
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer jaiarjun@gmail.com
