White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

The usual route for Walsh is to slow the development by increasing specificity. It is very cunning: by the time his gangster comes apart, is shot down, or shoots his way through an ambush, Waslh has slyly doubled and tripled every move that the gangster makes in terms of height, texture, path, angle, and sound. Cagney’s psychotic break in the penitentiary dining hall involves a messy noisy tantrum after he hears his beloved Ma has been gunned down. Every move Cagney makes has been counterpointed and varied. His incredible frenzy literally swimming through cutlery and china down the length of a table has been twice anticipated with a slow camera dolly down the table and back, picking out each diner who gets splashed and shocked by Cagney’s tantrum crawl across the table. Cagney’s running battle through a half-dozen guards spaced at crucial spots around the hall has been anticipated by a quiet over-the-hall long shot as the prisoners file in and angle off into the various aisles. The battle itself is a frenzy improvised with perfect Cagney instincts: characteristically it is a mesh of variations on pace and height ending with Cagney being carried by the guards down the aisles and out the hall, above their heads like a frantically struggling fish on a tray.

Manny Farber, “Raoul Walsh,” in Farber on Film (Library of America, 2009), 702-03.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

How did I miss what a dense and knotty picture this is? So I have the good people over at Reverse Shot (seriously why aren’t you reading their amazing Spielberg series) to thank for that. The film in its repeating motifs: eyes, mirrors, shifting perspectives, images doubling and overlaying each other call to mind DePalma making a futuristic Hitchcock wrong man picture. On repeated viewings the film’s metatextual concerns surface as Spielberg’s usual concerns (the reunification of the family) fade into the background.  So if A.I. is Spielberg’s most thematically audacious film, Minority Report is his most formally audacious. With A.I. Spielberg was interrogating his themes, whereas here he interrogates his method.

Filled with elaborate sequences, from a director who knows his way around elaborate, Report transcends the merely byzantine by crafting these sequences with a wit and playfulness that belies the film’s essential darkness, while simultaneously expressing a complex understanding of the nature of film, and moreover an understanding of how we construct reality through vision.  Moreover how images within cinema are constructed to create understanding. So while it the connection between the way John Anderton analyses, chooses, and discards images generated from the pre-cogs is represents how a film is edited, the entire films is constantly addressing seeing and crafting images. Most especially in the films greatest sequence, wherein Anderton and Agatha escape through the mall by directing their movements based on where the police are going to be. The scene perfectly encapsulates the way in which editing and camera placement determine the interplay of the objective and subjective views. Yet the camera is always subjective, even though it is essentially an objective recording device. It is through the editing of images that meaning is derived. What one is left with is the picture’s profound ambivalence about the nature of this process. So that while Spielberg in the opening of the film demonstrates how this process can illuminate truth, he spends the remainder of the film, undermining his initial hypothesis. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Agatha’s desperate inquiry “Is this now?”