IN THE CUT – Press Play Video Blog

IN THE CUT: From THE LINEUP to THE FRENCH CONNECTION

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, Press Play features Part III of Jim Emerson's In The Cut series. This video essay compares Hollywood's current approach to cinematic action as typified by Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight to what came before it: Don Siegel's The Lineup, Peter Yates' Bullitt and William Friedkin's The French Connection. In The Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco delves deep into the history of the car chase scene itself, tracing how the visual language of such scenes developed and thrived, eventually smashing its way into America's cultural consciousness. Next week, Press Play will further examine the evolution of the cinematic car chase through its golden age, from The French Connection to that other Friedkin classic To Live and Die In L.A. To view Jim's piece about the police caravan scene in The Dark Knight, click here. To watch his video essay about the freeway sequence in Salt, click here.

By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor

Part III of In the Cut briefly recaps the action techniques previously examined in Part I (The Dark Knight — rapid chaotic cutting for impact, quickfire changes of direction) and Parr II (Salt — emphasizing spatial relationships within the frame and between shots), with a succinct comparison to the famous chase in William Friedkin's 1971 The French Connection, in which (as in TDK) two vehicles are traveling in parallel directions. Only instead of them being side by side, one is above the other.

From there, we move to the twisty streets and roller-coaster hills of San Francisco and two of the best car chases in American movies: the justly celebrated Ford Mustang vs. Dodge Charger contest in Peter Yates' Bullitt (1968), and a lesser-known but similarly accomplished pursuit from The Lineup, a 1958 film noir by Clint Eastwood's directorial mentor, Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers — the one in which villain Ronald Reagan infamously slaps Angie Dickinson — Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz, and many others).

The method I've used in this three-part series — subtitled "Piecing together the action sequence," though "Taking apart…" might be more accurate — has been to start off looking at every single thing I have always found confusing about the first chase; contrast it with the radically different strategy from another recent (2010) mainstream cinema action sequence; and then to cast an eye back to notable action set-pieces from the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy and exhilarating ride.

In response to the first two parts, some have complained that "nobody looks at movies this way" — which is demonstrably untrue, since the evidence is right here in front of you. What they are really saying is that they don't want to look at how action sequences are put together this way, and that's fine. Nobody is forcing them to. (In addition to pressing PLAY, you can press PAUSE or go to another page.) Far worse are the movie-nannies who are saying: "I don't want to look at filmmaking this way and neither should you," an attitude that's as insufferably arrogant as it is absurd.

To reverse the old "forest-for-the-trees" metaphor, if you always looked at the forest from a distance, you'd never discover all the different kinds of trees it's composed of. You don't examine the individual trees exclusively, or every single time you behold the forest, but you can learn from examining the elements up close. As I've said before, studying film is like studying literature or music or painting: it's helpful to look at words, sentences, paragraphs; notes, bars, passages, movements; brush strokes, colors, compositions… and how the pieces relate to one another.

Can a bad movie have some good filmmaking in it — or vice-versa? If you have to ask that question, you haven't seen very many movies. In the Cut focuses on one thing and one thing only: the construction of action sequences. Those sequences were chosen not because these are the greatest (or worst) movies ever made, but because these specific sequences offer opportunities for illustration and discussion.

Sure, this approach is not for everybody, but I've been gratified by the enthusiasm of the responses — including the articulate rebuttals and alternate views. It's been fun, I've learned quite a bit (from the movies and from the commenters). And I think I might like to do it again sometime.

You can watch In The Cut: Part I: The Dark Knight here and In The Cut: Part II: Salt by Phillip Noyce here. Jim Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.

IN THE CUT: SALT, directed by Phillip Noyce

EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is proud to present Part II of Jim Emerson's In The Cut series. In this piece he deconstructs an action sequence from Phillip Noyce's 2010 hit Salt to highlight compositions, camera movements, editing and spatial awareness. We have included the full, uninterrupted scene so the viewer can compare Jim's analysis with the finished product.

By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor

Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what’s important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that’s realistic because it shows you what’s 'really' happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is 'realistically' reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as 'chaos' (another description that Nobles applies to the Expendables action scenes)—well, action feels chaotic when you’re in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer? — David Bordwell, Observations on film art (September 15, 2010)

In Part I of In the Cut we looked at part of an action sequence from The Dark Knight and examined many questions, ambiguities and incongruities raised by the ways shots were composed and cut together. In Part II, we delve into a chase sequence from Phillip Noyce's Salt (2010) that uses a lot of today's trendy "snatch-and-grab" techniques (quick cutting, shaky-cam, but very few abstract-action cutaways — I spotted one doozy, but I didn't mention it; see if you notice it). And yet, there's very little that isn't perfectly understandable in the moment.

There are certain directors I think of as "one-thing-at-a-time" filmmakers. That is, they seem to be incapable of composing shots that have more than one piece of information in them at a time. This makes for a very flat, rather plodding style. You see what the camera is pointed at in each shot, but you get very little sense of perspective when it comes to relating it to other elements in the scene. Noyce's technique is much more fluid, organic and sophisticated. He keeps things from one shot visible in the next, even when shifting perspective — whether it's only a few feet or clear across several lanes of traffic.

In Part I: A Shot in the Dark (Knight) I asked (rhetorically) whether the techniques used made the action more exciting or just more confusing. I left the question unanswered because it's something viewers are going to have to decide for themselves. And, as usual in criticism, the goal is not to find the "right" answers but to raise the relevant questions. Noyce himself raised a good one when he said he thinks viewers are not looking for coherence but for visceral experiences. And yet, his filmmaking is quite coherent (grammatically, if not "realistically"). "Visceral," like "realism," is in the eye of the beholder.

That is why I also wanted to mention the quotation from David Bordwell at the top of this intro (and near the beginning of the video essay). Arguments made in the name of "realism" are susceptible to subjective interpretations. Whether a film is classical or impressionistic, employing long shots or close ups, extended takes or quick cuts, each of these choices has effects on the viewer (including the critic) and that's what we try to notice, describe, understand and assess.

Finally, let me quote critic , who said: "One can summarize a plot in one sentence, whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame." That's not only a fascinating statement about the nature of film, it hints at a kind of "close reading" approach to criticism that was previously available only to scholars with access to film libraries and Movieolas. Now we can pause, rewind, slow down and otherwise examine films — shot by shot, even frame by frame — in video essays shared over the Internet. Amazing.

You can watch Jim Emerson's deconstruction of The Dark Knight here. Coming soon: In the Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco, which looks at Don Siegel's 1958 filmThe Lineup. Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.

IN THE CUT: The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, Press Play debuts a new genre of video essay we are calling In The Cut. These video essays will zero in on a crucial scene in a film and they will deconstruct, study and evaluate it for its technical merits and its cinematic effectiveness. Given the recent arguments emanating from this site and others about the state of action filmmaking, Press Play contributor Jim Emerson felt compelled to produce a series of three In The Cut video essays. When taken cumulatively, these commentaries explain once and for all what a successful action sequence looks like and how such a scene should influence the viewer. His forensic analysis of the truck chase from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is Part I of these essays. Part II is Phillip Noyce's Salt and Part III is Don Siegel's The Line Up. We have included the full uninterrupted sequence from The Dark Knight so the viewer can compare Jim's analysis with the finished product.

By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor

There are plenty of ways to make a movie. There are plenty of ways to make a mess, too. But sometimes when I and fellow critics and moviegoers complain of "incoherence" in modern "snatch-and-grab" movies (particularly action sequences), some people say they don't know what we're talking about. This is an attempt to be very, very specific about why some of us get confused. What it boils down to this: we're actually watching the movie.

When, for example, we're shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there's a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at. But that's not always the case. Why? I don't know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible — and indefensible.

This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River. It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would — but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time. At last, I now know exactly why.

Anyone who has participated in the making of a movie, whether a D.I.Y. project or a Hollywood studio picture (I've been involved in both kinds of productions), can tell you about the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of planning, shooting and editing a movie. Surely the use of large IMAX cameras for this segment of The Dark Knight made the filming more of a challenge. Problems that could have been easily fixed on a film with such a huge budget (removing that phantom extra police car with CGI, perhaps) were also no doubt complicated by the IMAX process. And to the filmmakers' credit, they decided against using CGI for the actual stunts, using real vehicles, miniatures and explosions instead.

In the end, however, all that matters, to paraphrase Martin Scorsese, is which pieces of film wind up in the picture and which are left out (intentionally or otherwise). And then, to quote the great actor Sir Edwin (John Cleese) on all those words in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," you've got to get them in the right order.

P.S. If you want to see how this part of the chase sequence appeared in the "Dark Knight" script, click to view these .pdf pages.

In the Cut is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Parts II and III will examine two terrific action sequences — one recent, one older.

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Jim Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.