Reverse Shot. Take Two.

With "Take One," Issue 17 of Reverse Shot, contributors were asked to "pick a single, memorable shot and use it as a springboard for reconsidering a film, filmmaker, or even cinema itself." Now, a year later, with Issue 20, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert present their writers with a topic that "couldn't be more open to interpretation": "Even though the shot may be the most instantly relatable element of film form, the captured image isn't the exclusive domain of cinema; it's the cut, the edit between two images, that has most clearly defined the unique character of the seventh art." Hence the issue title, "Take Two."

Chris Wisniewski reinforces the argument with a quote from, naturally, Sergei Eisenstein: "Cinema is, first and foremost, montage." And he adds, "For Eisenstein, it's not just that the juxtaposition of two images or shots can be meaningful in the hands of the right filmmaker; it's that cinema is images, sounds, and moments of time colliding with each other to produce new meanings. The cut is not simply one cinematic tool among many; it is the essential characteristic of the cinema." Now, to the film at hand: "If this is the way we conceive of the art and theory of film, then what do we do with a movie like Rope?"

Lauren Kaminsky revisits a cut you'll surely remember in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "[I]t's so narratively jarring because it undermines plot, setting, and characters entirely. Without warning we are yanked from a love story and dropped into what might have been war, ripped from the safety of eternally recurring, fictional time and thrust into the gravity of causational, irreparable and unrepeatable History. As Kundera might say, the buoyant narrative never recovers from the weight of these Russian tanks, all the weightier for being real."

Michael Koresky looks back to the year 2000: "It would be too simple and clichéd to say that Spike Lee was on the cutting edge; by all accounts Bamboozled seems to have been shot in its fashion out of necessity. Yet rarely has Lee's aesthetic been so accurately, spiritually wedded to his ideology - the erratic sound mix, the inconsistent lighting, the sense of multiple cameras jostling for screen supremacy... all fruitfully aid this tale of woe and compromise."

Elbert Ventura can still hear Juliette Binoche scream: "Code Unknown up to that point had largely unfolded in discrete scenes all filmed in long single takes. Cutting within the scene, [Michael] Haneke reverts to conventional film grammar—and, in the process, calls attention to the scene's artifice."

Nicolas Rapold considers the effect of Steven Soderbergh and editor Sarah Flack's use in The Limey (1999) of footage of Terrence Stamp in Ken Loach's Poor Cow (1967): "The cut to the past helps Wilson transcend the typical fictional character's limitation: namely, that he's created for the occasion, for this film.... The cut also posits film as something to be quoted and reused."

"There's a cut late in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ that does more than connect, surprise, or demonstrate: it quakes and shifts the ground below," writes Eric Hynes. "The entire film anticipates this cut, as does one's expectations of the climax to the greatest - or at least most repeated - story ever told, but still there's no preparing for it."

White letters against a black background: "MEANWHILE." Daniel Cockburn: "Coming ten minutes into Hal Hartley's first feature The Unbelievable Truth, it predicts much of what is to be admired in the coming 80 minutes and dozen or so features: spelling-out of cinematic and dramatic fundamentals that we take for granted, that we don't need to elucidate because they're... well, fundamental."

"[W]hat's so striking about the Bressonian universe, and probably most responsible for his lasting reputation, are his editing decisions," writes Jeff Reichert. "[I]t's rare that a shot ends exactly when you might expect it to, and even rarer that what follows provides easy linear causality." Then: "Throughout Au hasard Balthazar, Bresson employs that most traditional of cinematic devices - the reaction shot - to incorporate Balthazar's silent observation into the emotional fabric of the film. We don't, and can't know what the donkey is thinking at any given time, but don't need to because the editing does the work for us."

"Kenneth Anger was the first American filmmaker to understand the pop song's dark potential for the realm of moving images," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "And Scorpio Rising, the 1964 avant-garde short that marks the summit of Anger's vision, was the first American film to not just acknowledge in sound and image a youth culture whose hold on the American imagination had achieved a theretofore unprecedented power and influence, it was the first to seriously study the consequences of such a break.... To understand a film by Anger is to understand the use of sound in accordance to the cut. It is to learn from a master."

"To a certain extent, the disruptive Surrealist practice of the 1920s where one would walk in and out of films randomly in order to craft one's own dream narratives - the first of many 'appropriative' challenges to the supposedly ironclad discourses of Hollywood cinema - was already inherent within any given film," writes Andrew Tracy. "Surrealists sought to void the various texts of meaning in order to build a new text made up of evocative fragments, the assembly line fantasies of Hollywood often had only the most tentative of holds on meaning in the first place.... The particular case in point: Going Hollywood (1933)."

Travis Mackenzie Hoover decides "to write about the greatest cut in the [Claire] Denis canon, if not cinema itself. For years, I have isolated one surreptitious shot match in her largely overlooked Nenette and Boni as defining her particular brand of brilliance, which merges hyperstylized formalism with gentle realism to create something at once tactile and relaxed. Now it can be told: a single cut related to classical film grammar while also expanding and redefining its emotional range, it places the director astride the line of cinematic convention."

"The first few minutes of Days of Being Wild (credits for executive producers, cold opening, title card) are my favorite few minutes in a movie made in my lifetime," declares Nathan Kosub. "The opening scene is edited quickly, to the assured click of Yuddy's heels on concrete. It isn't that the ensuing transition from Maggie Cheung's backward glance to the title is unexpected, or particularly unique. It is, however, the essential cut for understanding the themes of Wong [Kar-wai]'s career: namely, memory and dreams."

Ryland Walker Knight: Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror "says we are each immortal, forever unbounded by the 'robes of a skeleton' that 'sheath' our bodies; therefore I find the defining edit of the film near its close when, abruptly, the narrator finally flies, unlocked and awakened, into the immortal, eternal life the film attempts to define and inhabit."

"Perhaps the quintessential example of the philosophical martial arts film is A Touch of Zen (Hsia Nu), by the legendary King Hu," writes Kevin B Lee, who then focuses on the impact of a single cut towards the end of the film.

"Where to start with a cut like this, a cut that explodes questions of documentary mode, genre, and the construction of personal narrative?" Brendon Bouzard studies "a classic variation on the shot/reverse shot," that moment between Charlton Heston and Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine.

"The Parallax View seems to tell us that representational democracy is nothing but a duping fantasy framework to make us feel as acting players in the country's governance," writes Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega. "Others do the actual work. The Parallax Corporation rules almighty. And to reinforce this, a highly elliptical editing style is utilized, every twenty minutes or so, reminding the spectator of who's pulling the strings."

The big build-up, and then the fight scene that wasn't in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indiana Jones pulls out a gun, fires, fight's over. "What gives the sequence its memorable charge is Indy's bemused reaction shot - an interruption to the sword-twirling antics that announce spectacular danger, but don't black out his practicality," writes Eric Kohn.

This issue's "Shot / Reverse Shot: Kristi Mitsuda argues that Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night is "profoundly frightening" yet "eschews sensationalism." But for Michael Joshua Rowin, it's "not about the morality or immorality of terrorism, it’s about generating a rush."

Interviews:

• Jeff Reichert with Volker Schlöndorff.

• Jeannette Catsoulis with John Carney, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

• Michael Koresky with Sarah Polley.

Plus, reviews of 10 new releases and two DVDs.

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2007 3:18 PM