Observations On Film Art - Narrative - Suspense

6/17/14 8:20 PM Observations on film art : Narrative: Suspense
Page 1 of 54 http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/narrative-suspense/

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Archive for the 'Narrative: Suspense' Category
earlier posts
Hitchcock again: 3.9 steps to s-u-s-p-e-n-s-e

Henry Edwards; Alfred Hitchcock.
DB here:
My previous entry reminded you that Hitchcock was notorious for
distinguishing between suspense and surprise. To achieve suspense, he
maintained, the audience has to be aware of more than the characters know.
Surprise arises when we know as much as the characters, or less. Hitchcock
also declared his general preference for suspense, since it provides prolonged
tension while surprise produces merely a momentary buzz. The mystery was:
Where do this distinction and this preference come from? Are they original with
Sir Alfred, or can we find precedents?
The story so far:
Step 1: The distinction itself goes back at least to the eighteenth century and the
playwright/theorist Gotthold Ephriam Lessing. Lessing likewise expressed his
preference for suspense because it demanded superior craftsmanship and yielded
stronger effects on the audience.
Step 2: The distinction and the preference for suspense was still circulating in
late nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentaries on theatre. My entry
also mentioned a 1922 screen playwriting manual by Howard Dimick that took
the same stance.
So weve located general conditions for influence. By the early 1920s, the
suspense/surprise doublet was still circulating in the worlds of film and theatre,
when Hitchcock was starting his career. But influence, like its source-word
influenza, requires close contact. It would be good to find the secret agent who
might have passed along the idea to the young director.
Step 3: My P.S. to the entry ropes in one candidate: Eliot Stannard. Richard
Allen proposed him as a possibility, and Ian Macdonald supplied information
that strengthened the suspicion. Stannard was a busy screenwriter of the period,
who worked closely with Hitchcock on nearly all his silent pictures, and he even
wrote a manual on screenwriting. Although he apparently didnt talk about
suspense and surprise in print, he would have known William Archer and other
drama theorists who did. Stannard could well have initiated Hitchcock into the
idea.
Step 3.9: But do we have the wrong man? After I posted my P. S., another
foreign correspondent weighed in. Charles Barr writes:
A key figure here is Henry Edwards. Director in British cinema 1916-
1937, and actor for much longer. His (lost) feature film Lily of the Alley
in 1923 made a big point of avoiding intertitles. Whether or not he saw
it, Hitchcock must have at least been aware of it, even though later he
always said that The Last Laugh was the first such film. And already in
1920 Edwards had spelled out the surprise/suspense distinction: see
attachment from the trade paper The Bioscope.
Edwards was indeed a major figure, as producer, actor, and director during the
1910s and 1920s. At the British Film Institute site, Geoff Brown and Briony
Dixon provide a lively account of his career. He was clearly in a position to
influence younger filmmakers.
The 1920 Bioscope article, cited in the Brown/Dixon overview and supplied to
Charles by Ph.D. student Michaela Mikalauski, is a revelation. Edwards writes:
We must so construct our story that suspense is createdsuspense is the
dread that something may happen, and it is on this that we must build
our story.
We must so construct it, that by careful preparation impeding
difficulties or dangers are looming up before our characters. We must
show the audience these dangers, and keep our characters ignorant of
them until the proper moment; and it is the nearing of the danger to the
blissfully ignorant character, making us long to cry out and warn him,
that give suspense.
Tellingly, Edwards uses an example of an explosion. Imagine that our hero,
wandering in the wilderness, has taken shelter in a shack. He sits on a box and
lights a cigarette. While he has a leisurely smoke, his match has ignited some
dry rubbish by the box. He rises and leaves the shed, just as the box is blown to
pieces. Now we realize that it contained dynamite.
Here is a case in which there is expectancy, and never for a moment
suspense, because the audience does not know of the impending danger
to the character.
Now let us defy the critics who clamour for surprise in film
construction, and tell the incident in the language of the screen.
Edwards goes on to imagine that weve seen quarrymen leave the box of
dynamite behind. When the hero ambles in and settles down on the box for a
smoke, were already apprehensive. Now every gesture he makes prolongs the
tension, and we watch anxiously as the discarded match ignites scraps beside the
box.
It becomes a question as to which will take the longer, the hero to
recover his strength and go, or the box of dynamite to explode. Here is
sheer suspense, and when there hero has gone it is no jar to the
audience but rather a pleasurable expectancy to see the box explode
harmlessly in the air.
After supplying another, more psychological example, Edwards concludes his
piece: The letters of the film alphabet are s-u-s-p-e-n-s-e.

This articlepublished the very year that a young and innocent Hitchcock began
work for Famous Players-Lasky in Islingtonshows that the terms in which
Hitchcock understood the suspense/ surprise distinction were already clearly
articulated in English film culture. Even the bomb situation that Hitchcock
would summon up for Truffaut is there in Edwards piece. But of course this
information doesnt sabotage the standing of Stannard, who may have read the
Bioscope article and transmitted its lesson to Hitchcock in later years.
I confess I had thought I was done with the thing, but the last few days have
brought a small frenzy of emails, and Im feeling a bit of vertigo. Still, there
seems not a shadow of a doubt that Hitchcock was maintaining his faith in a
storytelling device that goes back quite far and still had a grip on the formative
years of British and American cinema.
Thanks very much to Charles Barr for the information and for sending me the
Edwards article. It was published as The Language of Action, Bioscope (1
July 1920), supplement p. iv. Thanks also to Michaela Mikalauski for locating
the piece, and to Antti Alanen for forwarding some crucial email addresses.
Charles revised edition of his Vertigo monograph includes some further
comments on the suspense/surprise distinction as it relates to that film. Charles
is also completing a new book, with Alain Kerzoncuf, called Hitchcock: Lost
and Found. It surveys the little-known films from all periods of Hitchcocks
career. It devotes some 15,000 words to Before the Pleasure Garden,
discussing the 21 films Hitchcock was involved with (surviving in whole or part
or not at all) and also a bit on the wider context, which is where Edwards comes
in. This is all about to go to the publisher (Kentucky) and if all goes well will be
out by the end of 2014.
Im grateful to all. The little adventure, which I suspect is not quite over, has
been rich and strange.
Broken Threads (1918), produced and directed by Henry Edwards, who also
starred.
Thursday | December 5, 2013 | Directors: Hitchcock, Film history, Film
scholarship, Narrative: Suspense, National cinemas: UK | No Comments
Hitchcock, Lessing, and the bomb under the table

DB here:
Every good cinephile knows Alfred Hitchcocks famous distinction between
suspense and surprise. In articles and interviews from the 1930s on, he
explained that situations are more gripping if the audience has more knowledge
than the characters do. His classic example, in conversation with Truffaut, was a
bomb under a table.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there
is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then
all of a sudden, Boom! There is an explosion. The public is surprised,
but priot to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no
special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is
underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they
have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the
bomb is going to explode at one oclock, and there is a clock in the
decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions
this innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is
participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the
characters on the screen: You shouldnt be talking about such trivial
matters. Theres a bomb beneath you and its about to explode!
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at
the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them
with fifteen minutes of suspense.
In Film Art, we invoke Hitchcocks example to illuminate how narration can be
more or less restricted. You can confine the narration to what only a character
knows, or you can expand it to give the viewer story information that a character
doesnt have. By widening the audiences knowledge somewhat, you can build
suspense; by confining it, you can make the audience share the characters
surprise.
After Hitchcock came to the United States, he often invoked this distinction in
interviews, and it became part of craft lore among writers of screenplays and
genre fiction. I trace the ideas fortunes a little in the online essay, Murder
Culture. In practice, though, Hitchcock didnt always follow through. Rebecca
(1940) and Suspicion (1941) confine our knowledge very closely to the
protagonists, without providing that wider perspective he advocates in his
remarks to Truffaut. And surprise is central to some Hitchcock works, notably
Psycho.
In other films, of course, he did follow his own advice. When Johnny Jones
detours to the Tower of London in Foreign Correspondent, we know that the
little man steering him there intends to kill him. Shadow of a Doubt lets us see
Uncle Charlie in a sinister light before he visits Santa Rosa, and glimpses of his
behavior strongly hint that he will menace Young Charlie when she starts to
investigate him. And of course The Greatest Film Ever Made (or is it?) tips us
off to whats really going on with Madeleine/ Judy before poor Scottie grasps it.
Ive wondered: Is this suspense/surprise distinction original with Hitchcock? In
the tapes of the original interview with Truffaut, he notes: You know, there has
always been this dispute between suspense and surprise. . . . What Im saying is
not new, Ive said this many times before. He then launches into a more
expansive account of the bomb-table scenario.
His formulation is ambiguous. Is the distinction not new because its been
around a long while (always), or because hes reiterated it many times? And is
his preference for suspense an uncommon opinion? Exact answers may lie in the
vast Hitchcock literature, but so far I havent found them. Heres what I came up
with.

What enduring disquietude
Gotthold Ephriam Lessing was a playwright and drama theorist. His Miss Sarah
Sampson (1755) is sometimes considered the first bourgeois tragedy in
German, and his best-known play is perhaps Nathan the Wise (1779), a classic
that was made into a notable silent film. Lessing is also famous for his
influential book-length essay Laocon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry (1766), which has been a center of debate in aesthetics ever since.
In that piece he argued for a fundamental distinction between time-based arts
(drama, literature) and arts of space (painting, sculpture). From that distinction
Lessing inferred a principle of decorum, or expressive fitness, for different
media. He claimed that the famous sculpture showing Laocon and his sons
caught in the serpents coils could express only a split-second of pain, not the
extended agony of their struggle. As a three-dimensional image, the fathers
scream is vivid, but it lacks all the intermediate stages of emotion that a poem
could have rendered as it unfolded in time. The great film theorist Rudolf
Arnheim argued that the sound film obliges us to ask whether moving images
and recorded dialogue cover different expressive territories, so he called his
essay The New Laocon.
Lessing also ruminated on the drama, and his thoughts about playwriting, set
down in notes written between 1767 and 1769, contain many intriguing
observations. In one passage, he replies to writers who have criticized ancient
Greek playwrights for giving away too much in their prologues. These critics
have implied that audiences would be more satisfied if big events took them by
surprise. So, says Lessing mockingly, lets simply reedit the plays and chop out
all the information that sets up the final reversals.
His serious point is that a surprise yields only a transitory thrill. In the passage
below, he uses poet and poem in a general sense, including storytellers and
dramatists, plays and prose fiction.
For one instance where it is useful to conceal from the spectator an
important event until it has taken place there are ten and more where
interest demands the very contrary. By means of secrecy a poet effects a
short surprise, but in what enduring disquietude could he have
maintained us if he had made no secret about it! Whoever is struck
down in a moment, I can only pity for a moment. But how if I expect
the blow, how if I see the storm brewing and threatening for some time
about my head or his?. . .
[By not preparing the spectator] the whole poem becomes a collection
of little artistic tricks by means of which we effect nothing more than a
short surprise. If on the contrary everything that concerns the
personages is known, I see in this knowledge the source of the most
violent emotions.
Lessing is evidently thinking of classic cases of recognition, plot twists that
reveal connections among characters that they were long unaware of. (Oedipus
is actually the son of the man he killed!) At another point, Lessings English
translators find the word Hitchcock uses: Our participation will be all the more
lively and strong the longer and more confidently we have foreseen the issue.
Foreseeing here might be too strong, because in Hitchcocks parable of the
bomb we dont really know the outcome. Will the men at the table escape in
time, or halt the bomb, or be blown up? The inevitability of catastrophe that we
expect in Greek tragedy produces a different sort of suspense than we
experience in modern narratives. Yet it remains suspense nonetheless.
Lessing goes on to suggest that Aristotle valued Euripides most among
dramatists not because of the plays gruesome endings but at least partly
because the author let the spectators foresee all the misfortunes that were to
befall his personages, in order to gain their sympathy. In other words, we have
that sort of unrestricted narration we usually call omniscience. Thats what is at
stake in Hitchcocks bomb example.

Clairvoyant aloofness
Its a long stretch from the late eighteenth century to Hitchcocks time. Thanks
to Google, and especially its wondrous Ngram software, we can get a rough
sense of what happened to the duality of suspense and surprise in those
intervening years.
A quick sampling shows that they were conjoined by the late nineteenth century.
An anonymous 1884 critic finds that in Tennysons plays the elements of
suspense, of surprise, are altogether wanting. In 1882, J. Brander Matthews,
towering authority on theatre history, praises Hugos vibrant play Cromwell:
There is the familiar use of moments of surprise and suspense, and of
stage-effects appealing to the eye and the ear. In the first act Richard
Cromwell drops into the midst of the conspirators against his father,
surprise; he accuses them of treachery in drinking without him,
suspense; suddenly a trumpet sounds, and a crier orders open the doors
of the tavern where all are sitting,suspense again; when the doors are
flung wide, we see the populace and a company of soldiers, and the
criers on horseback, who reads a proclamation of a general fast, and
commands the closing of all taverns,surprise again. A somewhat
similar scene of succeeding suspense and surprise is to be found in the
fourth act.
Throughout this period writers fairly often counterpoised suspense and surprise
as two essential strategies of plotting. But do the writers recognize the
narrational implications they harbor, and do writers display Hitchcocks
preference for suspense? Yes to both.
George Pierce Baker, early twentieth-century drama macher, weighed in with
his book Dramatic Technique (1919). He notes that in Shakespeares Henry VI,
Part I, a revelation of the Countesss plan yields a momentary sensation,
surprise. Baker reimagines two versions of the situation: When we know more
than one of the antagonists does, and when we know more than both of them do.
Suppose we had been allowed to know the plans of the Countess, and
they had seemed very dangerous for Talbot. Then, as she played with
him, there would have been more suspense than in Shakespeares text,
because an audience would have been wondering, not merely What is
the blow Talbot will strike? but Can any blow he will strike overcome
the seemingly effective plans of the Countess? Suppose we had been
allowed to know the plans of both. Then, as we watched the Countess
playing her scheme off against the plan of Talbot, of which she would
be unaware, might there not easily be even more suspense? At every
turn of their dialogue we should be wondering: Why does not Talbot
strike now? Can he save the situation, if he delays? With all this against
him, can he save it in any case?
Baker concludes that surprise enlivens the situation, but suspense allows for
deeper characterization: awaiting an outcome, we must speculate on the
characters temperaments, motives, and strategies.
Baker has already cited the Lessing passage Ive mentioned, and he goes on to
quote another authority of his period, William Archer. Archers Play-Making
(1912) became something of a Bible for aspiring playwrights. (Preston Sturges
swore by it.) Without explicitly mentioning suspense or surprise, Archer
celebrates the pleasures of lording it over the characters.
The essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge.
In relation to the characters of the drama, the audience are as gods
looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment,
the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings
of purblind mortals after happiness and smile at their stumblings, their
blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their
groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to reduce us to their
level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
All of these drama theorists are promoting the well-made play as the best model
for plot construction. Theyre reacting against popular melodrama, with its
episodic construction, wild coincidences, and startling twistsa model of what
our colleague Lea Jacobs calls situational dramaturgy. The preference for
suspense is a recognition of the playwrights adroit shaping of the plot,
preparing the later revelations carefully but also creating a steady arc of tension
rather than a firecracker string of surprises. Suspense, its implied, is just more
difficult to achieve than surprise, and a successful passage of suspense testifies
to the writers skill.
In sum, by the time Hitchcock started his film career, the suspense/surprise
couplet was fairly common in discussions of playwriting, and the superiority of
suspense was more or less assumed. A 1922 essay concedes, Whether or not
surprise has a legitimate place in the drama is debated by commentators. But
the author, one Delmar Edmundson, suggests that an entirely unexpected turn
of events in a one-act play can yield a valid thrill, just as in an O. Henry story.
Still, the author suggests that even such a twist needs to be subtly prepared for.
In 1922 as well, Howard T. Dimicks Modern Photoplay Writing: Its
Craftsmanship devotes a whole chapter, Suspense, Excitement, and Crisis, to
the need to make the viewer participate in the action. The melodrama Lady X,
then recently adapted to film, affords an example. The attorney defending an
older woman is in fact her son, though neither of them knows it. (Shades of
ancient Greek theatre.) The result is double suspense: we, like the characters,
worry about the outcome of the trial, but we also wonder whether they will
discover their kinship. Had the womans identity been kept from the spectators
till the end and then sprung with explosive suddenness, fully half the
emotional effect would have been stripped from the play. Lessing had already
anticipated the power of situations of unknown identity: None of the
personages need know each other if only the spectator knows them all.

At this point, I cant say precisely how Hitchcock learned of the distinction
between suspense and surprise. Clearly, though, the idea was circulating in the
theatrical and cinematic milieu of his early career. Its entirely possible that he
read Archer, Dimick, or some comparable source.
In any event, the distinction isnt original with him. He is, however, the person
who made it central to conversations about filmic construction. Recall that he
always denied making detective stories. As the Master of Suspense, he wanted
to play down the startling solution to a mystery and instead emphasize slowly
building tension. And his continuing reliance on the distinction reminds us that
the man always in search of what he thought was purely cinematic owed a
great deal to the theatre. Some critics complained about divulging Judy/
Madeleines secret partway through Vertigo, but here, as in most of his films,
Hitchcock was adhering to lessons learned from the well-made play. The result
was a disquietude that endures.
Hitchcocks remarks appear in Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 52 of my 1967 edition.
There he somewhat qualifies his position about superior knowledge, adding at
the end of the passage Ive quoted: The conclusion is that whenever possible
the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when
the unexpected ending is itself the highlight of the story. I take it that this plot
construction is different from that of a mystery plot, which poses questions
explicitly (whodunit?). A twist ending, by contrast, catches us by surprise
because we didnt suspect that certain aspects of the situation were in question.
Central examples would be Stage Fright, Psycho, and, more recently, The Sixth
Sense.
Truffauts Hitchcock book (the first hardcover film book I ever owned, I think)
is a considerable condensation of the extensive interview. The sessions,
punctuated by sounds of cigars being lit and snacks being eaten, are preserved
on tape. Thanks to the Internets, they are available here. Hitchcocks slightly
more elaborate version of the bomb scenario occurs in session 4, starting at
17:44.
You can read the books Ive cited in free digital versions: Lessings Laocoon
and his essays on theatre; J. Brander Matthews French Dramatists of the 19th
Century; William Archers Play-Making; George Pierce Bakers Dramatic
Technique; and Howard T. Dimicks Modern Photoplay Writing: Its
Craftsmanship. Print editions are also available, of course. Other passages Ive
quoted come from Anon., New Editions of Tennyson, The Critic and Good
Literature (15 March 1884), 123; and Delmar J. Edmundson, Writing the One-
Act Play VIII: Suspense and Preparation, The Drama 12, 7 (April 1922), 258.
Arnheims essay The New Laocon is in Film as Art. For more on situational
dramaturgy, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (Oxford,
1998).
Thanks to Hitchcock adept Sidney Gottlieb for helpful advice on this entry.
Anyone interested in Hitchcock needs to consult Sids excellent collections
Hitchcock on Hitchcock and Alfred Hitchcock Interviews. The suspense/surprise
duality recurs throughout them in varied forms.
Googles Ngram software is here. Its a tremendously useful tool for historical
research.
Id be grateful to anyone who can help pin down sources for Hitchcocks
acquaintance with the suspense/surprise couplet. As ever, feel free to correspond
and Ill update the entry as necessary.
P.S. 30 November 2013: Correspondence incoming! Richard Allen, NYU
professor, lead guitarist, and Hitchcock expert, suggests in an email: One
suspects that the person who probably introduced Hitchcock to this was Eliot
Stannard. Stannard participated in writing all but one of Hitchcocks all-silent
films, and he published a short manual on screenplay technique, Writing Screen
Plays (1920), derived from columns he published in Kine Weekly.
I havent been able to determine whether Stannard opined on the
suspense/surprise duality, as the manual is extraordinarily rare, and the writing
on Stannard that Ive seen doesnt explore this aspect of his work. Nonetheless I
can recommend Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Cameron & Hollis, 1999), 22-
26; Barrs article, Writing Screen Plays: Stannard and Hitchcock, in Young
and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896-1930 (Exeter University Press,
2002), ed. Andrew Higson, 227-241; and especially Ian W. Macdonalds
chapter, Hitchcocks Forgotten Screenwriter: Eliot Stannard, in his brand-new
and enlightening Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 132-160. Further information on Stannard, or other sources
of Hitchcocks idea, remains welcome.
P.P.S. 2 December 2013: Ian Macdonald writes: Its very difficult, as you
know, to trace the development of ideas such as the bomb in the
briefcase/suspense-surprise thing. Stannard is surprising in that he clearly
thought about how best to tell stories on screen, and came close to insights like
Russian montage before those ideas became known in London (as Charles Barr
has already pointed out). Unfortunately he did not continue to publish ideas after
the early 20s, and his work is of course mixed up with ideas from everyone else
in his work group. My picture of Stannard is built up from scraps, and his
manual I have only seen in the British Library. This is tantalisingly aimed at the
wannabe, so does not take ideas very far either. However, Im sure he was
aware of the prevailing doxa of play construction through such as William
Archer, as others (like Brunel) were, and Im sure that Hitch hoovered up
Stannards ideas along with everyone elses. As an inveterate theatre-goer, Hitch
would also have been aware of ideas on suspense also. I will also have another
look at my material specifically on this suspense question, for further clues, and
let you know. Thanks to Ian, Richard, and Sid Gottlieb for writing! More as
things develop.
P.P.S. 5 December 2013: Oh, boy, have things developed. See the next entry.
P.P.P.S. 12 December 20113: Ashish Mehta has found evidence for the
suspense-surprise duality in another eighteenth-century figure. He writes:
Heres what Samuel Johnson had to say in essay #3 of The Idler, published
April 29, 1758, accessible here:
It has long been the complaint of those who frequent the theater, that
all the dramatic art has been long exhausted, and that the vicissitudes
of fortune, and accidents of life, have been shewn in every possible
combination, till the first scene informs us of the last, and the play no
sooner opens, than every auditor knows how it will conclude. When a
conspiracy is formed in a tragedy, we guess by whom it will be detected
; when a letter is dropt in a comedy, we can tell by whom it will be
found. Nothing is now left for the poet but character and sentiment,
which are to make their way as they can, without the soft anxiety of
suspense, or the enlivening agitation of surprise. (Emphasis added.)
Thanks to Ashish for this!
Vertigo (1958).
Friday | November 29, 2013 | Directors: Hitchcock, Narrative: Suspense, Poetics
of cinema | No Comments
David Koepp: Making the world movie-sized
Stir of Echoes (1999).
DB here:
For a long time, Hollywood movies have fed off other Hollywood movies.
Weve had sequels and remakes since the 1910s. Studios of the Golden Era
relied on swipes or switches, in which an earlier film was ripped off without
acknowledgment. Vincent Sherman talks about pulling the switch at Warners
with Crime School (1938), which fused Mayor of Hell (1933) and San Quentin
(1937). Films referred to other films too, sometimes quite obliquely (as seen in
this recent entry).
People who knock Hollywood will say that this constant borrowing shows a
bankruptcy of imagination. True, there can be mindless mimicry. But any
artistic tradition houses copycats. A viable tradition provides a varied number of
points of departure for ambitious future work. Nothing comes from nothing;
influences, borrowings, even refusalsall depend on awareness of what went
before. The tradition sparks to life when filmmakers push us to see new
possibilities in it.
From this angle, the references littering the 1960s-70s Movie Brats pictures
arent just showing off their film-school knowledge. Often the citations simply
acknowledge the power of a tradition. When Bonnie, Clyde, and C. W. Moss
hide out in a movie theatre during the Were in the Money sequence from
Gold Diggers of 1933, the scene offers an ironic sideswipe at their bungled bank
job, and a recollection of Warner Bros. gangster classics. When a shot in Paper
Moon shows a marquee announcing Steamboat Round the Bend, it evokes a
parallel with Fords story about an older man and a girl. Even those who
despised the tradition, like Altman, were obliged to invoke it, as in the parodic
reappearances of the main musical theme throughout The Long Goodbye.
But tradition is additive. As the New Hollywood wing of the BratsLucas,
Spielberg, De Palma, Carpenter, and othersrevived the genres of classic
studio filmmaking, they created modern classics. The Godfather, Jaws, Star
Wars, Carrie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and others werent only updated versions
of the gangster films, horror movies, thrillers, science-fiction sagas, and
adventure tales that Hollywood had turned out for years. They formed a new
canon for younger filmmakers. Accordingly, the next wave of the 1980s and
1990s referenced the studio tradition, but it also played off the New Hollywood.
For New New Hollywood directors like Robert Zemeckis and James
Cameron, their tradition included the breakthroughs of filmmakers only a few
years older than themselves.
So todays young filmmaker working in Hollywood faces a task. How to sustain
and refresh this multifaceted tradition? One filmmaker who writes screenplays
and occasionally directs them has found some lively solutions.

From the 40s to the 10s
The Trigger Effect (1996).
David Koepp was fourteen when he saw Star Wars and eighteen when he saw
Raiders. By the time he was twenty-nine he was writing the screenplay
for Jurassic Park. Later he would provide Spielberg with War of the Worlds
(2005) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Across
the same period he worked with De Palma (Carlitos Way, 1993; Mission:
Impossible, 1996; Snake Eyes, 1998), and Ron Howard (The Paper, 1994), as
well as younger directors like Zemeckis (Death Becomes Her, 1992), Raimi
(Spider-Man, 2002), and Fincher (Panic Room, 2002). The young man from
Pewaukee, Wisconsin who grew up with the New Hollywood became central to
the New New Hollywood, and what has come after.
Koepp began directing his own lower-budget features as well: The Trigger
Effect (1996), Stir of Echoes (1999), Secret Window (2004), Ghost Town (2008),
and last years Premium Rush. The last two were written with his frequent
collaborator and high-school friend John Kamps. Koepps directorial efforts
show how contemporary films can build intelligently on the tradition of
American studio cinema.
He spent two years at UWMadison, mostly working in the Theatre Department
but also hopping among the many campus film societies. He spent two years
after that at UCLA, enraptured by archival prints screened in legendary Melnitz
Hall. The result was a wide-ranging taste for powerful narrative cinema. He
came to admire 1970s and 1980s classics like Annie Hall, The Shining, and
Tootsie. As a director, Koepp resembles Polanski in his efficient classical
technique; his favorite movie is Rosemarys Baby, and one inspiration for
Apartment Zero (1988) and Secret Window was The Tenant. You can imagine
Koepp directing a project like Frantic or The Ghost Writer.
Old Hollywood is no less important to Koepp. Among his favorites are Double
Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Sorry, Wrong Number. In conversation he tosses
off dozens of film references, from specifically recalled shots and scenes to one-
liners pulled from classics, like the But with a little sex refrain from Sullivans
Travels.
Its not mere geek quotation-spotting, either. The classical influence shows up in
the very architecture of his work. He creates ghost movies both comic and
dramatic, gangster pictures, psychological thrillers, and spy sagas. The Paper
revives the machine-gun gabfests of His Girl Friday, while Premium Rush gives
us a sunny update of the noir plot centered on a man pursued through the city by
both cops and crooks.
One of the greatest compliments I ever got (well, it seemed like a
compliment to me, anyway) was when Mr. Spielberg told me Id missed my
era as a screenwriterthat I would have had a ball in the 40s.
Like his contemporary Soderbergh, Koepp sustains the American tradition of
tight, crisp storytelling. He also thinks a lot about his craft, and he explains his
ideas vividly. His interviews and commentary tracks offer us a vein of practical
wisdom that repays mining. It was with that in mind that I visited him in his
Manhattan office to dig a little deeper.

Humanizing the Gizmo
Today, the challenge is the tentpole, the big movie full of special effects. A
tentpole picture needs what Koepp calls its Gizmo, its overriding premise, the
outlandish thing that makes the big movie possible. The Gizmo in in Jurassic
Park is preserved DNA; the Gizmo in Back to the Future is the flux capacitor.
The more outlandish the Gizmo, the harder it is to write everybody around it.
The problem is to counterbalance scale with intimacy. You need to offset
whats up there [Koepp raises his arm] with things that are down here [he
lowers it]. This involves, for one thing, humanizing the characters. A good
example, I think, is what he did with Jurassic Park.
Crichtons original novel has a lot going for it: two powerful premises (reviving
dinosaurs and building a theme park around them), intriguing scientific
speculation, and a solid adventure framework. But the characterizations are
pallid, the scientific monologues clunky, and the succession of chases and
narrow escapes too protracted.
The film is more tightly focused. In the novel, Dr. Grant is an older widower
and has no romantic relation to Ellie; here theyre a couple. In the original,
Grant enjoys children; in the film, he dislikes them. Accordingly, Koepp and
Spielberg supply the traditional second plotline of classic Hollywood cinema.
Alongside the dinosaur plot theres an arc of personal growth, as Grant becomes
a warmer father-figure and he and Ellie become short-term surrogate parents for
Tim and Alexa.
Similarly, Crichtons hard-nosed Hammond turns into a benevolent grandfather;
in the film, his defensive attitude toward the parks project collapses when his
children are in danger. Even Ian Malcolm, mordantly played by Jeff Goldblum
(stroking some of the most unpredictable line-readings in modern cinema), can
be seen as the wiseacre uncle rather than the smug egomaniac of the novel.
Crichtons tale of scientific overreach becomes a family adventure. Koepps
consistent interest in the crises facing a family meshes nicely with the same
aspect of Spielbergs work, and it gives the film an appeal for a broad audience.
In the original, Tim is a boy wonder, well-informed about dinosaurs and skilled
at the computer. Koepps screenplay shares out these areas of expertise, making
Lex the hacker and letting her save the day by rebooting the parks defense
system. Theres a model of courage and intelligence for everybody who sees the
movie.
While giving Crichtons novel a narrative drive centered on the surrogate
family, Koepp also creates a more compressed plot. For one thing, he slices out
the chunks of scientific explanation that riddle the novel. The main solution
came, Koepp says, when Spielberg pointed out that modern theme parks have
video presentations to orient the visitors. Koepp and Spielberg created a short
narrated by Mr. DNA, in an echo of the middle-school educational short
Hemo the Magnificent. The result provides an entertaining bit of exposition
that condenses many scenes in the book. Why Mr. DNA has a southern accent,
however, Koepp cant recall.
Compression like this allows Koepp to lay the film out in a well-tuned structure.
Most of his work fits the four-part model discussed by Kristin and me so often
(as here). In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, she shows how
Jurassic displays the familiar pattern of goals formulated (part one), recast (part
two), blocked (part three), and resolved (part four). When I visited Koepp, he
was laying out 4 x 6 cards for his screenplay for Brilliance, seen above. He
remarked that the array fell into four parts, with a midpoint and an accelerating
climax.
For a smaller-scale example of compression, consider a classic convention of
heist movies: the planning session. In Mission: Impossible, Ethan Hunt reviews
his plan for accessing the computer files at CIA headquarters. As he starts, the
reactions of the two men hes recruiting foreshadow what theyll do during the
break-in: the sinister calculation of Krieger (Jean Reno), in particular, is
emphasized by De Palmas direction. Ethans explanation of the security
devices shifts to voice-over and we leave the train compartment to follow an
ineffectual bureaucrat making his way into the secured room. (The room and the
gadgets were wholly made up for the film; the Langley originals were far more
drab and low-tech.)
Everything that will matter later, including the heat-sensitive floor and the drop
of moisture that can set off the alarms, is laid out visually with Ethans
explanation serving as exposition. Like the Mr. DNA short, this set-
piece, extravagant in the De Palma mode, serves to specify how things in this
story will work. Here, however, the task involves what Koepp calls baiting the
suspense hook. Each detail is a security obstacle that Hunts team will have to
overcome.

The world is too big
Panic Room.
The overriding problem, Koepp says, is that the world is too big for a movie.
There are too many story lines a plot might pursue; there are too many ways to
structure a scene; there are too many places you might put the camera. You need
to filter out nearly everything that might work in order to arrive at whats
necessary.
At the level of the whole film, Koepp prefers to lay down constraints. He likes
bottles, plots that depend on severely limited time or space or both. The Paper
s action takes 24 hours; Premium Rushs action covers three. Stir of Echoes
confines its action almost completely to a neighborhood, while Secret
Window mostly takes place in a cabin and the area around it. Even those plots
based on journeys, like The Trigger Effect and War of the Worlds, develop
under the pressure of time.
Panic Room is the most extreme instance of Koepps urge for concentration. He
wanted to have everything unfold in the house during a single night and show
nothing that happened outside. (He even thought about eliminating nearly all
dialogue, but gave that up as implausible: surely the home invaders would at
least whisper.) As it worked out, the action in the house is bracketed by an
opening scene and closing scene, both taking place outdoors, but now he thinks
that these throw the confinement of the main section into even sharper relief.
The result is a tour de force of interioritynot even flashbacks break us out of
the immense gloom of the placeand in the tradition of chamber cinema it
gives a vivid sense of the overall layout of the apartment.
Panic Room, like Premium Rush, relies on crosscutting to shift us among the
characters and compare points of view on the action. But another way to solve
the world-is-too-big problem is to restrict us to what only one characters sees,
hears, and knows. This is what Polanski does in Rosemarys Baby, which
derives so much of its rising tension from showing only what Rosemary
experiences, never the plotting against her. Koepp followed the same strategy in
War of the Worlds. Most Armageddon films offer a global panorama and a
panoply of characters whose lives are intercut. But Koepp and Spielberg decided
to show no destroyed monuments or worldwide panics, not even via TV
broadcasts. Instead, we adhere again to the fate of one family, and were as
much in the dark as Ray Ferrier and his kids are. Even when Rays teenage son
runs off to join the military assault, we learn his fate only when Ray does.
Less stringent but no less significant is the way the comedy Ghost Town follows
misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais). After a prologue showing
the death of the exploitative exec played by Greg Kinnear, we stay pretty much
with Pincus, who discovers that he can see all the ghosts haunting New York.
Limiting us to what he knows enhances the mystery of why these spirits are
hanging around and plaguing him.
Yet sticking to a characters range of knowledge can create new problems. In
Stir of Echoes, Koepps decision to stay with the experience of Tom Witzky
(Kevin Bacon) meant that the film would give up one of the big attractions of
any hypnosis sceneseeing, from the outside, how the patient behaves in the
trance. Koepp was happy to avoid this clich and followed Richard Mathesons
original novel by presenting what the trance felt like from Toms viewpoint.
The premise of Secret Window, laid down in Stephen Kings original story,
obliged Koepp to stay closely tied to Mort Raineys range of knowledge. In his
directors commentary, Koepp points out that this constraint sacrifices some
suspense, as during the scene when Mort (Johnny Depp) thinks someone else is
sneaking around his cabin. We can know only what he sees, as when he
glimpses a slightly moving shoulder in the bathroom mirror.

Having nothing to cut away to, Koepp says, didnt allow him to build maximum
tension. Still, the film does shift away from Mort occasionally, using a little
crosscutting during phone conversations and at the climax. During the big
revelation, Koepp switches viewpoint as Morts wife arrives at the cabin; but
this seems necessary to make sure the audience realizes that the denouement is
objective and not in Morts head.
Once youve organized your plot around a restrictive viewpoint, breaking it can
be risky. About halfway through Snake Eyes, Koepps screenplay shifts our
attachment from the slimeball cop Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) to his friend
Kevin (Gary Sinese). We see Kevin covering up the assassination. In the manner
of Vertigo, were let in on a scheme that the protagonist isnt aware of. This runs
the risk of dissipating the mystery that pulls the viewer through the plot. Sealing
the deal, Snake Eyes then gives us a flashback to the assassination attempt. Not
only does this sequence confirm Kevins complicity, it turns an earlier
flashback, recounted by Kevin to Rick, into a lie. Although lying flashbacks
have appeared in other films, Koepp recalls that the preview audience rejected
this twist. The lying flashback stayed in the film because the plots second half
depended on the early revelation of Kevins betrayal.
Because the world is too big, you need to ask how to narrow down options for
each scene as well as the whole plot. Fiction writers speak of asking, Whose
scene is it? and advise you to maintain attachment to that character throughout
the scene. The same question comes up with cinema.
Say the husband is already in the kitchen when the wife comes in. If you follow
the wife from the car, down the corridor, and into the kitchen, were with her;
well discover that hubby is there when she does. If instead we start by showing
hubby taking a Dr. Pepper out of the refrigerator and turning as the wife comes
in, its his scene. Note that this doesnt involve any great degree of subjectivity;
no POV shot or mental access is required. Its just that our entry point into the
scene comes via our attachment to one character rather than another.
Heres a moment of such a directorial choice in Stir of Echoes. Maggie comes
home to find her husband Tom, driven by demands from their domestic ghost,
digging up the back yard. Koepp could have gotten a really nice depth
composition by showing us a wide-angle shot of Tom and his son tearing up the
yard, with Maggie emerging through the doorway in the background. That way,
we would have known about the mess before she did.
Instead, Koepp reveals that Toms mind has gone off the rails by showing
Maggie coming out onto the back porch and staring. We hear digging sounds.
Ohkay she sighs.
She walks slowly across the yard, passing their son and eventually confronting
Tom, whos so absorbed he doesnt hear her speak to him.

Once youve made a choice, though, other decisions follow. So Maggie provides
our pathway into the scene, but how do we present that? Koepp asks on his
commentary track:
What do you think? Is it better to do what I did here, which is pull back
across the yard and slowly reveal the mess hes made, or should I have cut
to her point of view of the big messy yard right in the doorway? I went for
lingering tension rather than the sudden cut to what she sees. You might
have done it differently.
Sticking with a central character throughout a scene can have practical benefits
too. Koepp points out that his choice for the Stir of Echoes shot was affected by
the need to finish as the afternoon light was waning. Similarly, in the
forthcoming Jack Ryan, Koepp includes an action scene showing an assault on a
helicopter carrying the hero. Koepps script keeps us inside the chopper as a
door is blown off and Ryan is pinned under it. Rather than including long shots
of the attack, it was easier and less costly to composite in partial CGI effects as
bits of action glimpsed in the background, all seen from within the chopper.

Saving it, scaling it, buttoning it
Ghost Town.
Because the world is too big, you can put the camera anywhere. Why here rather
than there?
Standard practice is to handle the scene with coverage: You film one master
shot playing through the entire scene, then you take singles, two-shots, over-the-
shoulders, and so on. Actors may speak their lines a dozen times for different
camera setups, and the editor always has some shot to cut to. Alternatively, the
director may speed up coverage by shooting with many cameras at once. Some
of the dialogues in Gladiator were filmed by as many as seven cameras. I was
thinking, said the cinematographer, somebody has to be getting something
good.
Koepp opposes both mechanical and shotgun coverage. Whenever he can, he
seizes on a chance to handle several pages of dialogue in a single take (a one-
er). Theres a great feeling when you find the master and can let it run.
Sustained shots work especially well in comedy because they allow the actors to
get into a smooth verbal rhythm. The hilariously cramped three-shot in Ghost
Town (shown above) could play out in a one-er because Koepp and Kamps
meticulously prepared its rapid-fire dialogue exchange.
When cutting is necessary, Koepp favors building scenes through subtle
gradations of scale, saving certain framings for key moments. He walked me
through a striking example, a five-minute scene in Panic Room.
Meg Altman and her daughter Sarah have been besieged by home invaders. Meg
has managed to flee from their sealed safety room, but Sarah is trapped there
and is slipping into a diabetic coma while the two attackers hold her captive.
Now two policemen, summoned by Megs husband, come calling. The criminals
are watching whats happening on the CC monitor. Meg must drive the cops
away without arousing suspicion, or the invaders will let Sarah die.
Koepps scene weaves two strands of suspense, the peril of the girl and Megs
tactics of dealing with the cops. One cop is ready to leave her alone, but another
is solicitous. Meg offers various excuses for why her husband called themshe
was drunk, she wanted sexbut the concerned cop persists. The scene develops
through good old shot/ reverse-shot analytical editing, with variations in scale
serving to emphasize certain lines and facial reactions.

At the climax, the concerned officer says that if theres anything she wants to
tell them but cannot say explicitly, she could blink her eyes as a signal. When he
asks this, Fincher cuts in to the tightest shot yet on him. The next shot of Meg
reveals her decision. She refuses to blink.

Fincher saved his big shot of the cop for the scenes high point. The cops line
of dialogue motivates the next shot, one that keeps the audience in suspense
about how Meg will respond. What I love about this shot is that everybody in
the theatre is watching the same thing: her eyes. Will she blink?
Building up a scene, then, involves holding something back and saving it for
when it will be more powerful. An extreme case occurs in Rosemarys Baby. I
asked Koepp about a scene that had long puzzled me. Rosemary and Guy have
joined their slightly dotty older neighbors, the Castevets, for drinks and dinner.
Having poured them all some sherry, Roman settles into a chair far from the
sofa area, where the other three are seated.

Mr. Castevet continues to talk with them from this chair, still framed in a
strikingly distant shot.
Koepp agreed that virtually no director today would film the old man from so
far back. Cant you just see the tight close-up that would hint at something
sinister in his demeanor?
We found the justification in the next scene, the dinner. This is filmed with one
of those arcing tracks so common today when people gather at a table, but here
it has a purpose. The shots opening gives us another instance of the Castevets
social backwardness, as Rosemary saws away at her steak. (Youd think people
in league with Satan could afford a better cut of meat.)
Mr. Castevet proceeds to denounce organized religion and to flatter Guys stage
performance in Luther. As the camera moves on, the fulcrum of the image
becomes the old man, now seen head-on from a nearer position.

He was saving it, said Koepp. He was making us wait to see this guy more
closelyand even here, hes postponing a big close-up.
Yet having given with one hand, Polanski takes away with the other. Next
Rosemary is doing the dishes with Mrs. Castevet while the men share cigarettes
in the parlor. Because were restricted to Rosemarys range of knowledge, we
see what she sees: nothing but wisps of smoke in the doorway.

Well later realize that this offscreen conversation between Roman and Guy
seals the deal over Rosemarys first-born.
Empty doorways form a motif in the film (the major instance has been much
commented on), and they too point up Polanskis stinginessor rather, his
economy. He doles his effects out piece by piece, and the result is a mix of
mystery and tension that will pay off gradually. Koepp likewise exploits the
sustained empty frame, most notably at the end of Ghost Town.
Building up scenes in this way encourages the director to give each shot a
coherence and a point. Koepp recalls De Palmas advice: For every shot, ask:
What value does it yield? Spielberg comes to the set with clear ideas about the
shots he wants, and when scouting or rehearsing hes trying to assure that the set
design, the lighting, and the blocking will let him make them. As Koepp puts it,
Spielberg is saying: This is my shot. If I cant do X, I dont have a shot.
Compared to the swirling choppiness on display in much modern cinemasay, at
the moment, Leterriers Now You See MeKoepps style is sober and
concentrated. For him, the director should strive to turn a shot into a cinematic
statement that develops from beginning to end. The slow track rightward in Stir
of Echoes has its own little arc, following Maggie leaving the porch, moving
past their son, concluding on Tom as she speaks to him and he suddenly turns to
her (at the cut).
Accordingly a shot can end with a little bump, a button thats the logical
culmination of the action. Something as simple as Rosemary turning her head to
look sidewise is a soft bump, impelling the POV shot of the doorway.
Something more forceful comes in Stir of Echoes, when the people at the party
chatter about hypnosis and the camera slowly coasts in on Tom, gradually
eliminating everybody else until in close-up he says cockily, Do me.

Shooting all the conversational snippets among various characters would have
required lots of coverage, and it was cleaner to keep them offscreen as the
camera drew in on Tom. With the suspense raised by the track-in (a move
suggested by De Palma), Koepp could treat Toms line as a dramatic turning
point and the payoff for the shot.
In a comic register, the button can yield a character-based gag. Bertram Pincus
is warming to the Egyptologist Gwen; hes even bought a new shirt to impress
her. They discuss how his knowledge of abcessed teeth can help her research
into the death of a Pharaoh. A series of gags involves Pincus discomfiture
around the mummy, with Gwen making him touch and smell it. The two-shot,
Koepp says, is still the heart of dialogue cinema, especially in comedy.
Bertram offers Gwen a sugar-free treat and shyly turns away. The gesture
reveals that hes forgotten to take the price tag off his shirt.
This buttons up the shot with an image that reveals the characters attitudes.
Pincuss error undercuts his self-important explanation of the pharoahs oral
hygiene. Yet its a little endearing; he was in such a hurry to make a good
impression he forgot to pull the tag. At the same, having Gwen see the tag
shows her sudden awareness that Bertrams offensiveness masks his social
awkwardness. As Koepp puts it: He bought a new shirt for their meeting, she
realizes it, and she finds it sweet. Shes starting to like him, as is suggested
when she turns and matches his posture.

Koepp gives the whole scene its button by cutting back to a long shot as Pincus
murmurs, Surprisingly delightful. Is he referring to his candy, or his growing
enjoyment of Gwens company? Both, probably: Hes becoming more human.

Like the Movie Brats and the New New Hollywood filmmakers, Koepp is
inspired by other films. And as with them, his usage isnt derivative in a narrow
sense. He treats a genre convention, a situation, an earlier Gizmo, or a fondly-
remembered shot as a prod to come up with something new. Borrowing from
other films isnt unoriginal; in mainstream filmmaking, originality usually
means revising tradition in fresh, personal ways.
Theres a lot more to be learned about screenwriting and directing from the
work of David Koepp. He told me much I cant squeeze in here, about the
Manhattan logistics of shooting Premium Rush and about the newsroom
ethnography behind The Paper, written with his brother Stephen. What I can say
is this: He really should write a book about his craft. I expect that it would be as
good-natured as his lopsided grin and quick wit. It would illuminate for us the
range of the creative choices available in the New Hollywood, the New New
Hollywood, and the Newest Hollywood.
Thanks to David for giving me so much of his time. We initially came into
contact when he wrote to me after my blog post on Premium Rush, which now
contains a P.S. extracted from his email. We had never met, and Im glad we
finally caught up with each other.
Ive supplemented my conversation with David with ideas drawn from his DVD
commentaries for Stir of Echoes, Secret Window, and Ghost Town. Soderbergh
provides intriguing observations on the commentary track for Apartment Zero.
Ive also found useful comments in these published interviews: David Koepp:
Sincerity, in Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 5: Interviews with
Screenwriters of the 1990s (University of California Press, 2010), 71-89; Joshua
Klein Writers Block, [1999], at The Onion A.V. Club; Steve Biodrowski,
Stir of Echoes: David Koepp Interviewed [2000] at Mania; Josh Horowitz,
The Inner ViewDavid Koepp [2004] at A Site Called Fred; Interview:
David Koepp (War of the Worlds)[2005] at Chud.com; Ian Freer, David
Koepp on War of the Worlds [2006], at Empire Online; Peter N. Chumo III,
Watch the Skies: David Koepp on War of the Worlds, Creative Screenwriting
12, 3 (May/June 2005), 50-55; E. A. Puck, So What Do You Do, David
Koepp? [2007] at Mediabistro; Nell Alk, David Koepp, John Kamps Talk
Premium Rush, Joseph Gordon-Levitts Fearlessness and Pedestrian Scum
[2012] at Movieline; and Fred Topel, Bike-O-Vision: David Koepp on
Premium Rush and Jack Ryan [2012] at Crave Online.
Vincent Sherman discusses screenplay switching in People Will Talk, ed. John
Kobal (Knopf, 1986), 549-550. My quotation from Gladiators DP comes from
The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 159. For more on David Finchers way with
characters eyes, see this entry on The Social Network.
Tuesday | June 18, 2013 | Directors: Koepp, Film technique, Narrative
strategies, Narrative: Suspense, People we like, Readers' Favorite Entries,
Screenwriting | No Comments
The 1940s, mon amour
The Dark Mirror (1944).
DB here:
With the indispensable assistance of our web tsarina Meg Hamel, Ive just put
up an essay on Hollywood film of the 1940s. Its called Murder Culture:
Adventures in 1940s Suspense. Its long, I warn you. But if youre interested in
American film history, thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock, or all of the above, you could
find it worth checking out.
Now for a flashback. Cue track-in, soft dissolve, ominous music.
I was born in 1947, so the Hollywood
cinema of that day really belonged to my parents generation. Yet why do I feel
that the 1940s-early 1950s cinema is my Hollywood in a way that the 1960s
and 1970s arent?
TV is a big part of the answer. Living on a farm, I saw far more movies on TV
than in theatres. Thats why I dont have as absolute a fetishism for 35mm as my
baby-boom peers who grew up in cities. They could amble down to the local
Bijou every day after school and soak up current movies and classics. I couldnt,
so I can sympathize with kids today who see most of their movies on monitors.
Thats what I did, andtruth be toldwhat many urban cinephiles did too.
What I could see, thanks to Rochester and Syracuse television stations, were
those films that had sold in packages of 16mm prints. Fattened out by with
commercials, sometimes trimmed to fit schedules, old movies were treated as
filler. And while some of the 1930s movies, chiefly the Bs featuring Mr. Moto
and Charlie Chan, became lifelong favorites, it was mostly the 1940s and early
1950s films that stuck with me.
There were Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons, of course, which movie
books steered me toward. But there was also Ball of Fire, For Whom the Bell
Tolls (in black and white), and Suspicion. Those I remember most vividly, but
today, watching some obscure 40s item, I find dim memories of that sometimes
flaring up too.
From college through graduate school, I made 1940s Hollywood a touchstone.
My first published essay, back in 1969, was on Notorious. As a film collector, I
favored 1940s things, from His Girl Friday and Fallen Angel to Ministry of
Fear (below) and The Shop around the Corner. When I started teaching at the
University of WisconsinMadison, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research enabled me catch up on Warners, RKO, and even the stray Monogram.
In my courses we showed prizes like Meet Me in St. Louis and The Locket. I was
happy when several of my students, such as Diane Waldman, Brian Rose, and
Fina Bathrick, took up 1940s topics for their research.
The era pulled in my research too. In Narration in the Fiction Film my
preferences were exposed; some friends noticed that most of my prime
American examples (The Big Sleep, In This Our Life, Murder My Sweet, The
Killers, Secret beyond the Door, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, etc.) came
from the 1940s and early 1950s. The conversation sort of went like this. Q: So I
guess for you, David, every narrative is a mystery? A: Yes.
In The Classical Hollywood Cinema I could justify my 40s emphasis because
that era saw significant changes in storytelling. I couldnt avoid all those
flashbacks, all that deep focus, all that noir and melodrama. Still, as my
examples of ordinary Hollywood sound picture I picked Play Girl (1940)
and The Black Hand (1949). Likewise, when I wrote an article about how were
led to forget key story information, I fastened on Mildred Pierce. And one
theme of The Way Hollywood Tells It, a book purportedly about contemporary
moviemaking, is the debt that the Movie Brats and their successors owe to the
1940s.
No surprise, then, that when I was asked in 2011 to prepare some lectures for
Belgiums summer film college, I decided to revisit 1940s Hollywood. I began
preparing in the spring, and had plenty of time to watch films while I was
hospitalized with pneumonia. The more I watched, the more I came to believe
that we still dont know this period in its full artistic richnessand peculiarities.
True, we have plenty of studies that see all sorts of 40s films as reflections of
the war or postwar malaise. Certainly, as well, the literature on film noir and the
female Gothic will continue to grow. (Indeed, these categories werent available
to people of the time; they just called those movies melodramas.) But I
wanted to explore broader trends in cinematic storytelling that were pioneered
or consolidated after 1940 or so. That meant looking at family sagas like How
Green Was My Valley (see Kristins post here), as well as dramas like Daisy
Kenyon and All About Eve and other things that caught my interest.
During a July week in Antwerp, I delivered the lectures. It was exhilarating to
re-see the films in 35 and discuss them with a lively bunch of participants. But
my ideas kept developing. I couldnt shake the films and the spell they cast on
me. Over two years Ive continued to watch and read and turn ideas over.
End of flashback. Cue soft dissolve, track out, music with warmer harmonies.
Im now writing a book, one thats relatively short (honest!) and that, I hope,
creates an original perspective on American film of the 1940s. Although the
new piece centers on the suspense thriller, the book will look at other genres too.
You can get the flavor of the project from these entries on the 1940s and early
1950s:
Intensified continuity revisited. The Shop around the Corner vs. Youve Got
Mail.
Creating a classic, with a little help from your pirate friends. How His Girl
Friday acquired its stature today.
Foreground, background, playground. This is a trailer for William Cameron
Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea.
Chinese Boxes, Russian dolls, and Hollywood movies. On embedded
flashbacks.
Julie, Julia, and the house that talked. On narrational strategies and wild time
schemes.
Puppetry and ventriloquism. Bits and pieces from the 2011 lectures, focusing
on anti-realism and competition among directors.
Despoiling the movies. On 1940s attendance habits.
Pikes peek. Imaginary product placement.
Play it again, Joan. Analyzes the technique of replaying scenes seen or heard
earlier.
Bette Davis eyelids. Joans rival and her performance tactics.
Hand jive. General piece on performance and gesture, with discussion of All
the Kings Men.
I Love a Mystery: Extra-credit reading. A sort of dry run for the web essay.
Alignment, Allegiance, and Murder. How Lang attaches us to characters in
House by the River.
DIAL M FOR MURDER: Hitchcock frets not at his narrow room. Touches on
Dial Ms debt to 1940s experiments.
A dose of DOS: Trade secrets from Selznick. On Selznicks films, including
those directed by Hitchcock.
SIDE EFFECTS and SAFE HAVEN: Out of the past. On current thrillers
debt to the 1940s; ties to todays web essay.
Most of these and much of the new Murder Culture essay probably wont
surface in the final book. I wrote the pieces in order to clarify some research
questions and to sketch out some answers. If you have any suggestions or
corrections, feel free to correspond.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
Thursday | March 28, 2013 | Hollywood: Artistic traditions, Narrative strategies,
Narrative: Suspense | No Comments
earlier posts
comments about the state of this website go to Meg Hamel.


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