Tobe Hooper Appreciation Society

THAS: Hooper Trope #1: The Mathematical Scene, I

2012-01-21T23:01:00.000-08:00

For Hooper, a scene is not just means for narrative service, but a composition in and of itself. Many filmmakers of caliber are prized for masterminding scenes full of class-A cinematic manipulations and stylistic infusions that then fit like sleek puzzle pieces into the grander work, but no matter how stylish they get, you can sense a slavish functionality behind them, devoted to mechanizing story and sentimentalism. Hooper, on the other hand, is not devoted to story or manipulation, but to aesthetics and allegorical idea, embedded in his creation of unitary scenes of pure form, or singling moments of aesthetic creation.

Each scene its own composition, Hooper then has the uncanny ability to see a scene - and craft it - like an individual object of art, one that can hold its own allegorical essence within itself (this allegorical essence not only being its meaningfulness within the context of Hooper's often very metaphoric narratives, but the essential reason works of art have to exist: for being genuinely a product of art put forth, of aesthetic thought and creation, of artistic purity and substance -- a quality of genuineness that exudes from Hooper's craft, so rich with allegory-making* and so ambivalent to providing the crass satisfactions of the movies).

* Art, being notions of beauty and life expressed within a contained object, is thus in essence allegory-making (an object as a stand-in for beauty and life).

Hooper is a baroque visual jewel-maker (the constant, precise, slow-tracking elegance he asks of in his cinematography gives his scenes the luster of a jewel -- a stone shaped and cut in elaborate ornamental patterns) and a poet of cinematic narrativity (in conjunction with his films' odd metaphorical thematic frameworks), rather than a literalistic storyteller or novelty-maker. His camera eye paints scenes with a traditional brush of cinematic space and time, one not motivated by story, mechanical virtuosity, and audience effects, but by aesthetic, allegory of themes and tone, and visual symphony and expressionism.

One good place to pinpoint this is in a recurring Hooper trope I call the "mathematical scene." These are scenes where, one can sense, the whole purpose of the scene is to be contained in whatever number of shots it consists of, which is by virtue very minimal (i.e. unconcerned with ambivalent coverage), all the way to being single shots (single shots being something Hooper does very often, a topic I will cover in the future).

They are mathematical in the sense that the scene functions as a clear summing of these concise series of shots, and more so, the produced total is not merely a scene animatedly directed, but a scene that ends up containing that essence of allegory within it - that is, in its craft, it will embody the underlying tonal subtext(s) of the scene, contained wholly in this "unit of a scene," this unit consisting of the very deliberately woven sequence of shots. Usually resulting is a striking interior structure to sequences, bolstering their painterly intents and allegorical core of thematic or emotional expression (expression suggesting the ideas and substance which the piece of art itself wishes to communicate, not the emotional manipulations or empty visual stimuli it carries out clearly as designs on the audience).

Examples. One can usually see Hooper's sense of interior sequence structure throughout his films, even in the least conceptualized stretches, but here are particular scenes that really make a point of their isolated communicative purpose, and consist of only 1 to 5 shots (or shot set-ups), emphasizing the mathematical scene's antithesis to messy or crassly delineating straight-forward coverage, and instead its accordance to a lyrical minimalism and unitary compactness.

#1 - Hooper Trope - The Mathematical Scene, I (6 Examples)

* Pluses inserted where new camera set-ups are introduced.

~1~

(from 'Poltergeist')

Scene: Steven Freeling states his case to the paranormal investigators.

+ (2/2)

This whole scene consists of simply two slow dolly shots, in clear rhyme with each other: the first embodying the idea of a man laid out bare and despairingly anonymous to a group of strange interrogators. The second, the full realization of the man, the view coming in from a wholly different direction (from above), signifying of extreme personal stakes, as he makes utterly clear his desperation and need to get his daughter back.

Less important is the emotional sentiment than the fact that sentiment is embodied in a pairing (a summing, an equation) of camera movement, rigorous in the two shot's rhythmic arithmetic, fully divulging of formal design in its plain and wholly simple mathematical rigidity.

~2~
(from 'Poltergeist')

Scene: Steven Freeling and boss Teague venture out to the hilltop cemetery to discuss the planned housing expansion.

+ (2/5)

+ (3/5)

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This is another entire scene, constructed of only five shots. Hooper's directing and staging is always a mannered flow, or complex web, of directionality (another topic for a future post), and here, directionality comes to characterize a scene of moral quandary and malaise: Steven and Teague discussion of the expansion of their real estate is treated as a left to right movement, then a capping back to front movement, on a hill looming over their capitalist kingdom.

Three tracking/dolly shots charting their movements (the first two dolly shots being mirrors/continuations of the other, a structural repetition of rightward tracking and moral fleeing; the last is a directional coup of a scene capper, not going left to right but now going forward towards them) are evenly separated by two intermediate shots: one is a pan from the swinging arms of the venal property owner to the slumped shape of the disillusioned protégé, a shot cinematographically precise and editorially jarring enough to strike a note of sharp, prickly visual rhetoric -- Steven's arrival into the frame deeply ironic, the foreground/background placement perfectly composed.

The second is an eerie, picturesque, extremely wide landscape shot...

The final shot contains not one, but two Hooper tropes (to be looked at specifically in the future): one, the delayed, cued dolly movement, and two, the taste Hooper has for having his characters reorient themselves in very angular ways within a continuous shot, often in ways either balletic in the choreography or jarring in their defiance of conventional shot progression. In this shot, we have the camera execute its slow dolly-in movement past the cross tombstone and up into a follow shot of Steven and Teague as they start to walk back downhill. They stop, though, and Steven is made to walk back up to the camera, creating stage blocking that may well have been treated to new, progressive camera shots, but instead is left, somewhat awkwardly, to this single take. It is the undermining of directionality that is yet another Hooper trope, rhetorically advanced due to the subtle but incredibly strident way it brings attention to the existence of camera perspective: the deliberate movement forward of the camera is defied by a character walking back up to it, now even closing in the proximity with the camera than initially before.

~3~

(from 'Salem's Lot')

Scene: Susan and Mark converge in the Marsten house and haplessly meet their doom.

(noise)
(noise)(noise)
(noise)

+ (2/3)

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This scene - essentially consisting of our witnessing two flies being entrapped, witlessly, in the spider's web - consists of three camera set-ups, and congeals into a stunning embodiment of fear and petrification, the stiffness of nerves at near limit manifested in two bookending dynamic shots that inhabit surprise within the camera's very movements along the dolly track, and the middle shot that places Susan's fear bound in the stiffness of her body and the stiffness of a single frozen close-up, vised ruthlessly between the moving shots around it.

Directionality is present again, this scene beginning simply as dolly movement up and down a hallway (forward vs. backward, escape vs. danger, retreat vs. entrapment). This first shot is an extended single take that first follows Susan traveling down the narrow hallway, then her arriving at the end of it, where she is confronted by Mark. The shot continues, the camera re-framing the duo into a two-shot -- a veritable Bobbsey twins image of fright as noises throw their glances off-screen a frightful to and fro (directionality created through mere suggestion! Extreme, pointed directional usage made a perfect allegory for diffuse fears of the unknown!). Then the camera trails forward, back down the hallway (back where it came from; backwards vs. forwards; paralysis vs. confrontation) as Mark takes on a new dynamic of resolve, committing himself to charging into a room he knows is where the monsters await him. He strikes a heroic, stupid pose. Susan is left immobile in the foreground of the shot, cutting a striking silhouetted figure of feminine beauty, feminine piteousness, and, being perfectly frank, gender-ambivalent cowardice (I would love for this to be revealed an intentional homage to the hallway scene in Mark Robson/Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim, where Kim Hunter similarly allows a male companion go to his fate down a dark hallway while the film sticks on the woman, waiting and wondering what is occurring just past their sight).

Next is the still shot already described above, of Susan and a close-up paralyzed with/in fear...

Then a return to the wider shot as Susan finally breaks free of her paralysis, the camera also breaking free of its station in order to follow her forward, into the forbidden room...

... Then the bookending camera set-up/dynamic take that has Susan entering the room and Mark's unconscious body falling past the backing camera, the camera's eye falling as swiftly to the ground as Mark and Susan, in the omniscient camera's equivalent of human surprise. Subtly into the background appears Straker (James Mason), Susan rising in terror, the camera also rising (and dollying forward, reconfiguring the whole mise en scene) with this new found opportunity to mechanically manifest surprise (surprise being essentially equivalent to fear in this funhouse that is a horror film -- especially one such as mannered as Salem's Lot, a horror film about the confronting of horrors by horror fanatics, like ourselves).

~4~
(from 'Night Terrors')

Scene: Genie calls her father, away at the dig site.

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Five shot set-ups, a whole scene neatly bifurcated into two sections: the first depicting a daughter subtly beseeching a distant father through the telephone line (consisting of numerically neat cross-cutting between the two, the shots of the father being one binary, the shots of the daughter being the other), the second pulling wide and revealing her agency and independence from the influence of her father of religion (consisting of two linked shots that depict, first, the daughter's leftward movement, and then her arrival, into the grasp of a woman of pleasure).

The archeologist father strides down a track of desert and excitedly speaks of a breakthrough find, and is framed along the path he conqueringly cuts; against the eager briskness of his moving forward. Steadily intercut is shots of the daughter, Genie, coyly inquiring when he expects to return home (keeping from him accounts of her recent anxieties). She is framed frozen, against a background of ambiguous space, the extreme shallow focus relegating the house behind her to crystalline blurs, the low angle configuring a circlehead window and chandelier into synecdoche for the house-of-her-father at large - suggesting, for Genie, a house not a home, but a strange dream environment of both opulent and vague, indistinct comfort.

The house being the home of her venally Christian and dogmatic father, she pushes against it even as it represents for her safety and gilded innocence and her falsely upheld "daughterhood." Finishing her capitulating "daddy's little girl" call, the camera cuts stunningly to wide just as she hangs up the telephone on the hook, signalling the start of the second half of this sequence and signifying the life she lives outside of the attachment that binds with her father. She exits the house, crossing the threshold and going down the porch steps to the patio garden, where she veers left to the waiting Sabina, a person of ideological and moral opposition to her father.

The camera simply pans with her. This moment offers very Hooperian sense of movement and lens science: the pan left cuts a striking vectorial perspective (for another Hooper moment of striking vectorial subjectivity, see here) of subject proximity and lens parallax, and Hooper's expressiveness in use of metaphorical directionality pops up again in Genie's journey to the leftward reaches of the property: pure visual allegory made of a wayward daughter exiting her father's sheltering walls only to veer left to a near, yet far, garden of earthly delight.

A second shot that beautifully matches motion finishes off this half, as well as the whole scene: the camera revolves in order to configure the two women into a two-shot of female symmetry, and then holds on this symmetry as they pursue a serious, conflicting discussion on the hypocritical father who warns of sinful pleasure, yet also, in spite of him, of the truth of the repercussions of pleasure (involving a mother who commits suicide likely due to this same father's two-faced, feckless deceit).

~5~
(from 'Night Terrors')
(alert: major spoiler)

Scene: Dr. Matteson is murdered while recording his latest finds.

+ (1/1)

One shot. A slow crawl closer and closer to the archeologist as he makes recorded record of his a new, breakthrough acquisition. Such display of purpose, and fervor in one's work, is cut cruelly and shockingly short by the surprising - yet utterly banal - entrance of an assassin into his so-very-easily-penetrable tent.

This single, slow, elegant, opposite-of-excessive dolly-in shot is a brilliant encapsulation of a number of evocative items: the slow procedures of scientific endeavor (and the time-unconscious egocentricity of men with their work; this particular Christian man's utter parochialism in approaching items of an ancient religion), the suddenness, banality, and materiality of assassination, and a look at purposes at cross-purpose - a man hard at work, a killer come to thoughtlessly cut that short, and a camera slowly moving in towards a man deep in his own world and a killer without regard for manners of morality or cinema language -- whether seen as anticipated or unanticipated by the camera, the assassin outwardly evokes his audaciousness in walking brazenly towards a camera that, by convention, would be moving forward in order to push something back, not having something charge at it with such suddenness.

~6~
For Comparison: Ingmar Bergman
(from 'Through a Glass Darkly')

Scene: Martin takes his father-in-law with him to fish, where they have an intimate conversation about his wife's mental state.

+ (2/3)

+ (3/3)

A mathematical scene from outside a Hooper film. This scene from Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly consists of three very simple camera set-ups: a wide tracking shot that follows the boat moving rightward down the lake, and two medium close-ups of the two characters inside the boat creating a shot-reverse shot sequence.

Directionality as metaphor: the characters' movement down the lake allegorizes their journey together into the uncertainties of the future.

Interior structure: the shots of the boat being rowed down the lake begin and end the scene, while a neat shot-reverse shot conversation provides the middle movement. The character rowing brings the boat to a stop in order to discuss the sensitive issue of his sick wife (the other man's sick daughter), and it is a structural evocation of a journey (shot 1... rowing along...) being needfully stalled, before it inevitably must start back up again (final shot, return to wide, back to moving).

The Indelible Scenes, #2

2012-01-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

The Indelible Scenes, a series of film scenes that have held the greatest impact on me.

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I risk misrepresentation by giving another scene from the Val Lewton catalog as my 2nd "Indelible Scene" (that this blog has perhaps become the Tobe Hooper/The Birds/Val Lewton Appreciation Society), but I'll go ahead, as it would certainly not misrepresent the extent of sheer narrative poetry to which I feel these scenes are absolute zeniths of in all film works.

Another Val Lewton scene, another of musical conceit. I Walked With a Zombie tells a story of white gentry angst in a post-colonial island of their servants, where the Jane Eyre-inspired soap opera of family scandal and anguished romances amidst the descendents of a wealthy sugar cane plantation family are slyly backgrounded by the sway, impositions, and beliefs of the population that surrounds them. The film resolves with the reveal that the interests of all are in fact the same, and beautifully united are all parties - the slave descendents and believers of Vodou, the nurse heroine, the feuding plantation brothers - under the powers of such common denominators as love and suffering and death. More than any measure of superior rationalism (the white family's doctor matriarch decries the harmfulness of local superstitions) or superior religion (a servant woman confidently promotes the Vodou religion by insisting it provides the "better doctors"), the only true - or greatest - measure is that which unites all of us.

In this scene, the subservient population undermines their masters by appropriating what has now been made their menial service - singing at a busy port - but has actually been for ages a tool of expression and, of course, rebellion (song or even just words).

A calypso singer (played by Lewton stock player and Calypso musician Sir Lancelot) sings a subversive ballad, disseminating a suppressed history, forcing its clues upon the plantation family's new nurse.

In the previous scene, the singer sings this song - a derisive tell-all of the boss family's shameful history - in the presence of one boss himself, and feigns puppy apologies to his employer. This following scene gains its power from what it proves: the deception, intentional disobedience, and mischievous scheming of the servant singer, as he returns with all facades of preening subservience cast off.

#2 - I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE - A Sung Oral History

As the just-arrived nurse tries to wake up the drunken Holland brother, a calypso quietly begins in the background. We soon see that the singer is afar but is facing her, slowly walking towards her. Soon, he is openly approaching, provoking her reaction and confrontation. As he finally achieves the lock down of stares between them he desires and finishes his song, Mrs. Holland, the mother, walks in, and the singer, without fuss, slips away.

Like the 'Curse of the Cat People' Christmas caroling scene, it is another brilliant musical scene that gains its brilliance from the fact of its poetical narrative conceit. Both are conceptual masterstrokes that allegorize freely (the 'Cat People' scene serendipitously evokes a madrigal stand-off between two worlds, this scene manifests the functions of oral history and the return of the repressed, and their aggression, through the means at their disposal), and through visual and staging means; through a crystal clear, indelible and deliberate utilization of cinematic space and narrative time. The 'Cat People' scene was about separate spaces and the imposition of one over the other in a moment of magic and arrival, while this scene derives its power from the closing in of space between nurse and assailant, class and class, future and past, however you wish to see it, in a moment of menace and melancholy.

"The wife and the brother they want to go, /
But the Holland man, he tell them no, /
The wife fall down, and the evil came, /
And it burn her mind in the fever flame."

"Wes, we must get back to Fort Holland."

"Her eyes are empty and she cannot talk /
And the nurse has come to make her walk /
The brothers are lonely and the nurse is young /
And now you must see that my song is sung."

THAS: Mortuary, Pt. 1

2011-12-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

The peculiar sense of craft that belongs to Hooper has a prevailing virtue: a combating of crassness, the non-alliance with style-for-style's sake, an indifference to "cool," and an aversion to rote slickness. If Hooper is vulnerable to tipping into clumsiness, his fumbles are balanced out - surpassed, even, in the sheer creation of artistic goodwill - by his interest in creating without crassness, to conceive with utter ambivalence to commercial or stylistic formula, to not leave a moment untouched by florid form, and to only answer to his personal aesthetic realization.

Hooper is a "folksier" kind of filmmaker in the sense that his most striking formal gestures only depend on components of cinema at their most basic and subdued: space to be plainly rendered, time to be also, and the plain presence of a grounded camera. He does not quite rock montage theory or art-house cliches as other filmmakers do, but the minimal excesses that his style employs - driven by very traditional harmonies and not amped-up power chords of evolving style - endows his tenderly wrought ideas of camera form, his floating mise en scene, and his awareness of sublime textures, with the beauty-centric purity of purpose of, sure, a solemn country hymn.

Odd as it may seem to say about the maker of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it is the positivity of his work, the humble good-nature of his career, and the clearness of his aesthetic purposes that set him apart from an industry of comparable filmmakers. Hooper's self-declared gentle nature shows in his very film choices. I feel it is reasonable to presume, for the purposes of now, that Hooper has never directed for the "sexiness" of the medium. We can safely say that, for instance, he has never made a "guy movie" - an action film of that kind that trades in bad-ass fight moves and testosterone-raising levels of violence, swagger, and weaponry. Despite being a maker of ostensible slasher films, never do his works bypass a generous emotional element, and never has he given us one cold or blasé, or totally juvenile and ruthlessly exploitative. It suggest Hooper never takes on a project he does not feel, in some way, will reflect his humane nature, or that he cannot treat feelingly in some way. By that virtue alone, not even his most frivolous film should be deemed frivolous, treated as they are with this utmost positive artistic investment. It is in the way his craft is devoted not to genre, nor story, nor entertainment or thrills, but only to serious-minded aesthetic - a formula-free, symphony-aimed camera form, and one that I feel is especially adept towards the soulful, the abstract, the emotional (i.e. compassionate), and the richly meaningful. This - not genre, or surreal lighting, or his depraved families - is the most accurate Hooperian auteurist stamp.

This viewpoint has particular application with regards to his 2000s works, Toolbox Murders and Mortuary, both seemingly representations of the dregs of a career: low-budget DTV bargain bin horror fodder, schlocky body count films written with all the banal trappings of slasher killers, zombie carnage, and other promises of horror exploitation. Yet, with my odds on Hooper the artist, both films always strike me as highly worthy entries in an artisan's catalog, and the amount of delicate craft and textural, humane sensitivities of Hooper's variety that is packed into what by all means should be crass and artless works speaks of what a bottom-line there is to Hooper when making films, the bottom-line being it is an art, it is aesthetic expression, and as such it ought always to inspire grace and many notions of grace as often as it can throughout its running time.

With Mortuary (as with Toolbox Murders), Hooper works against the weightlessness of the material with a carefree investment in creating characters and situations instilled with warmth, amiability, joie de vivre, and any assorted uncharacteristic [undesirable] traits in horror films, to set his films apart from the usual ones that trade in cold emptiness, lurid atmospherics, exploitative set-ups, etc. - the "sickly-sensational slasher misanthropy" termed in my previous 'Toolbox Murders' post. Mortuary paints an, if not deep, an uninhibitedly fond portrait of a completely likable, completely down-to-earth family unit, consisting of a scatter-brained but well-intentioned mother (Denise Crosby), a perfectly unpretentious little girl, and a slightly disaffected but otherwise perfectly caring teenage son (Dan Byrd).

Mortuary is not a good film. When it comes down to it, it is a bad DTV horror movie with a horrendous screenplay. But I do love it, meaning I thoroughly enjoy it, of course mainly due to Hooper's idiosyncratic visual eye, resonant acquisitions of cinematography (by DP Jaron Presant; the film really is a good-looking picture, even a step up from the crude gothic of Toolbox Murders with its Halloween party colors), and directorial delicacy, which lends the film its amiable energy and gentle textures. Yes, Mortuary may be dumb as nails, and progressively more embarrassing as it goes on, but as all Hooper's films, it is still deserving of a fine stylistic combing-through.

Images from the First 20 Minutes of MORTUARY, Pt. 1

Blocking

Hooper's blocking is as alive and deliberately captured as ever, and it results in a picture that manages to make straight-forward scene coverage vivid and vital. A few things to notice are the way he has bodies populate his frame, how they arrange themselves in his mise en scene in precise, composed ways, how Hooper and his editor make the blocking absolutely integral to their construction, and the way Hooper loves the all-inclusive shot, here consistently accounting for off-screen bodies by consistently including them at the edges of the frame (in constant "dirty" framing, to use cinematographer-speak):

And pocked all throughout, used to marked effect, a buoyant, perceptive mixture of

two-shots

three-shots

four-shots

wides

and singles.

Patience of Storytelling

This textured, attentive and continuity-driven handling of bodies in the frame is continued through to the following scenes in Mortuary.

In the Kitchen

(Even an insert of a sink being turned on is given extra-textural treatment, with the character's entire arm filling the frame before pulling back and revealing his act of turning the faucet on.)

In the Parlor

Patient Storytelling

This detail to movement and spatial interrelation not only generates elegance and a graceful naturalism, but it works to all together create a pace for the picture. This opening portion of Mortuary - of four characters mingling together, inhabiting various spaces together - surprises by all together characterizing this low-budget horror film with an uncharacteristic patience of storytelling, wholly elegant and non-bombastic stylistics, and a tender attentiveness to the minuteness of interaction and of interiority (all traits of which really characterize Hooper's entire works). It's no surprise, then, when Hooper slows things down even further by breaking away from the group of four to follow the solitary motions of the little girl, slipping away to embark on a bit of solo exploration.

What makes this moment astounding, though, is that Hooper follows it with an almost identical moment not long afterwards, that follows the teenage brother as he quietly slips away from the group (at the point the little sister's solitary venture is cut short) and goes on his own bit of wandering self-exploration: