THAS: The Distribution of Discrete Movements

Alternatively can be called "THAS: The Dispensation of Discreet Movement."

Cut-up still from "The Bag Lady/Restroom Scene" in The Funhouse (1981)

Nothing particularly brilliant or deep about this scene, outside of it being probably the film's most overt gesture toward the antiquated (in broad performance style and capricious flight of tone) and most explicit tonal gambit (one wonders what theatrical vocabulary of prelinguistic folk gesture or German Expressionist performance tradition the Bag Lady's conclusive "wink" is borrowed from), but rather, it is instead only ("only"*) highly emblematic of Hooper's entire notions of craft in film and cinematic idea.

* emphasis on the appended quotation of the word.  Just as Eliot posed of Henry James's genius as that of a writer with "a Mind so Fine," without any "Ideas" ("He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"), here I betray my own position (pushing a notion of genius) through a backhanded compliment, which claims the artist's virtue is seen even clearer through a complementary lack.  "Only" is the scene totally emblematic of Hooper's genius, without it being explicitly genius.

So while I have little to wax on about this scene, particularly thematically*...

* I find it a rather cut-and-dried bit of undiscerning levity, pushing merely the obvious vocalized irony.  It falls 1 degree short of actually doing anything to attenuate the figure of the withered prude (as the film does excellently with the magician and the fortune teller)... if the stock character of "the Bag Lady" wasn't so clearly made comic, so inherently a grotesquerie the result of desiccant Victorian moral values (and Amy such an imperturbable, mindlessly and wonderfully anti-dogmatic unplucked flower) [side note: Amy and Genie from Night Terrors are the same character; Genie is an evolution, as she willfully schemes to escape bourgeoisie strictures], I'd almost be tempted to criticize the picture for pushing a God-fearing angle.

... While, as said, nothing of outstanding brilliance or profundity occurs in it, this one scene nevertheless serves as a condensed, simplified crystallization of one fundamental property of Hooper's sense of craft: his sense of a cinematic arithmetic, of spatially precise mise en scene and character blocking.  This scene by itself can be the basis for a one-off seminar on the "arithmetic" of Hooperian scene-building.

Hooper's idea of cinema is one of form and idea, and what more pure form and idea is anything but the mathematical.  Contemporary female songwriter/guitarist Marnie Stern writes in the genre of "Math Rock" where guitarists shred in flurries of alternating time signatures, while contemporary songwriter/harpist Joanna Newsom often does something close to a "Math folk," her more traditional songwriting - devoted to composing traditionally beautiful melodies - infused still with structural formulations and conceptual severity; experimental filmmaker Michael Snow partakes in a "Mathematical Cinema" where filmmaking is precise experiments in calculations and patterns of image-sound, while Tobe Hooper often does something of a "mathematical scene-craft," in his more traditional narrative cinema - devoted to telling traditional, but also lyrical, narratives - but instilling in the traditionalism a visual design markedly structural and of uncommon conceptual severity.  We can also go back again to the "classicist" categorization of Hooper, tying him to the scholasticism of the Greeks, who wrote their poetry and structured their plays along the rigor of a set of rules that brought maximums of communicative reason in stories of humanity.

The Meter of Cinema

Hooper designs with such specificity, not only in his mise en scene but in his meter, which manifests in shots that are clearly meant to intersect (be edited between them) at very specific moments, moments that seem to stress an idea of accentual syllables (articulated through a precise use of space and, on occasion, camera motion) that indeed intersect along an assured idea of order, structure, and logic that can be said to be "arithmetic."

Use of Space / The Distribution of Discrete Movements

 
A wide shot serves as cartilaginous connecting tissue for the scene.  For Hooper, a wide shot often suggests a stage set for the observation of human drama.  As it does generally, for any bumbling or master filmmaker, you might say... But put alongside Hooper's designs of structure, attribute of observational tact (as opposed to hyperactive film school tack), and the control he seems to assert over that contained within the precise, rigid, austere photography he requires in his works, Hooper's wide shots are always taking on the quality of a modernist painting -- in which human drama (or, more precisely, for Hooper, the presentational quality contained in it, the drama before the camera) is amplified by truly austere and controlled (thus always emphatic) camerawork.

Take this scene's wide establishing shot, nothing stupendously clever but worth a gander as still a framing choice borne from Hooper's mind: the walls, hangings, contours, and whole what-have-you of verticals of objects seem to coalesce when you take into factor the stalls and beam that border the frame left and right, and constrict the frame into almost a fanning accordion of shapes that include the two girls.  The shot peaks out from the latrines in surely some attempt to acknowledge the secret scatological lives of human beings (or, as Matt at The Funhouse Blog puts it, our time in "the public chamber of bodily function").  A stretch, one might say, to read so far into it just because Hooper placed the camera in perhaps what was the most logical place to put the camera?  Sure... but the conception of a "latrine shot," imbued with irony, is no worse for wear under Hooper's extreme - yes, perhaps inadvertent - subtlety as it would be under another filmmaker's loud and circled-in-red point-making (imagine the scene where explicitly the shot peaks out from a toilet POV).

I'm content to appreciate the shot as nothing of declamatory brilliance (that is, declamatory and perhaps vulgar...), but something of subtle ironical beauty.

But let us finally get to the discrete movements.

Liz bends.

 

Which is accompanied by a switch to a single on Liz from Amy's POV.  And it seems a perfect collusion of Hooper/camera/script: to have Liz's teasing ("If you play your cards right..."), Liz's challenge ("... you might not have to spend the rest of your life a virgin!"), and a motion of both Liz and camera as she straightens up that suggests both those things (first teasing up at her, finally challenging at eye level) come together in the edit in such a graceful, seemingly so premeditated a way.  This moment seems even more worthy of the flourish in that it is afforded to a moment of a teen girl's act of personal hygiene, washing her hands off screen, as if the self-proprietorship of keeping clean one's body is such the reflex of beautiful girls.

A reverse shot of Liz's POV to Amy is less imbued with formalist guile, but it serves a purpose.  Let's just move on finally to the implementation of "discrete movement" (Liz bending, as enticing as it sounded, was not it yet, if you'll forgive my deception... it is a certain extension of the concept, though).

 

The Bag Lady enters with our return to the wide shot, and Liz goes running to her left.  That is Discrete Movement #1.  She runs behind Amy, who stands her ground - comparatively - intrepidly.

This funny shot of the Bag Lady's feet and a hand creeping slowly down into the frame (think the inverse of Joey's gaze creeping down to his hand activating the dummy's blinking mechanism in the opening scene; think of the entire film as a depiction of cogs and mechanisms that interact between actions and that which is happening, ticking away, just beyond the frame - what is a crumpled paper towel to someone?  A thing to toss on the ground, a thing to pick up in order to give trash its dignity back . . . an inanimate but mechanized pretense for both those things, and, allegorically, simply the arbitrary impetus for an arbitrary clash of personae) is Hooper's wit on display.

"God is watching you!"

Amy, wonderfully, witlessly anti-dogmatic: "Beg your pardon?" is her benign and absurd response to a very clear declaration.  Do Bag Ladies stutter?

I take it back.  The reverse single of Amy a few stills above (where she throws the crumpled paper towel, the one I deemed free of "formalist guile") does more than simply serve a coverage function: it now is a direct correlative to the new morphology of the shot seen above.  The two shots could very well be the same camera set-up.  So, since this current shot is of the same angle as that previous one, it is now a new intonation on that earlier shot's root word: what was once an angle and space only containing Amy now contains a new element - Liz as a fuzzy-focused negative reflection... a degraded, dark mirroring (considering them in their lump sum young womanhood...), crystallized in the visual which embosses Liz's inert contemptuousness alongside Amy's proactive tolerance.

The Bag Lady advances.  Discrete Movement #2.  A motion not very discreet - more torpedo-like - but still specific and distributed, or dispensed.

A return to the wide shot.  For a second cycle now, the scene reveals its structure of the wide shot interrupted by terse, emphatic contrapuntal interactions (the shot-reverse shots).

The discrete movement is dispensed such that the "discrete movement" reveals an effect on the scene through its modification of the structures established.   

(This is Hooper's sense of arithmetic in cinematic form.  Movements are distributed into the equation of a scene and Hooper accommodates them like variables into a linear equation, knowing what is entered on one side of the equation must effect the other.)

The structure established by the wide shot that segues into the fixed-corner shot-reverse shot singles is modified by the movement.  The Bag Lady's advance on the two girls is accommodated by the cycling back of a single on the Bag Lady, except now modified: closer to the camera than ever, right in the girls' faces, hawking her God-fearing [self-parodying] pitches.

And, of course, the wink.

The structure is broken at this point, and the scene more conventionally finishes itself off (thus my not claiming this scene is any sort of masterpiece of Hooper's).

But wait, let's not drop it completely quite yet.

A funny shot follows:

And then we're back to the wide shot.  And Discrete Movement #3: Liz walks away (Amy stays put), and then turns back.

Discrete Movement #4: Amy antes up to Liz's challenge and takes a few tentative steps forward.

And aha, the pinnacle of the scene and the pinnacle of the dispensation of movements: the next shot.

This shot of Amy and Liz - seen immediately below - could only have been possible through the dispensation of the movements just covered, of Liz walking away and Amy walking towards.  This determinacy and deliberateness is the definition of formalist design, and the rhythm of this design, concocted in this scene through these three small gestures - the walk away, the steps towards, and then the camera's sudden emphatic consolidation of these bodies and their newly-ascribed personality stakes within a newly-wrought frame - are striking at a cinematic wavelength for me beyond any amazing long take or spinning cinematographic jubilee.

And when I say these bodies and personalities are consolidated in the new frame below, I do not mean two, but three: the "body" of the Bag Lady is also contained in the shot, for not only does her floating voice literally interrupt the psychic communing occurring between the two girls, but also because they are in a bathroom, and the old woman is on a toilet.  If any object or image can be said to preside over every gross inch of a public restroom, along the grimy walls and deep inside the shadows of every corner (like the one behind Liz's head below), it is the toilets and whoever is on them.

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

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. This quality of genuineness exudes from Hooper's careful 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 motivated not just by aesthetic or dramatics, but also by an inherently cerebral allegorizing of themes and tone that is embedded in his visual design.

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, 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, #1 (6 Examples)

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

~1~

(from 'Poltergeist')

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

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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 (his back being fixedly to us) to a group of strange interrogators (the camera pushes in past Steven Freeling's back, and eventually lands and stops fully on Dr. Lesh). The second (the full realization of the man with his back turned), the view comes in from a wholly different direction (booming down from above, revealing his face, brilliantly left concealed initially by a lifeless room object), which signifies 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 shots' 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.

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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's discussion of the expansion of their real estate is treated as a left to right movement, then an end-capping back to front movement, on a hill looming over their capitalist kingdom.

Three tracking shots - (1/5), (3/5), & (5/5) - charting their movements (the first two tracking shots - 1 & 3 - being mirrors/continuations of each other, a structural repetition of rightward tracking and moral fleeing; the last, 5, 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 [(2/5) & (4/5)]: 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 landscape shot revealing the cemetery.

The final shot, (5/5), 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 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, rather awkwardly (and wholly intentionally), 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, boldly rhetorical 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)
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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 soon noises throw their glances off-screen a frightful to and fro (directionality created through mere suggestion! Extreme and 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 final shot/camera set-up, 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 closest approximation 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 somehow 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 [(1/5) to (3/5)] depicting a daughter subtly beseeching a distant father through the telephone line (consisting of numerically neat cross-cutting between the two, the follow shot of the father being one binary, the shots of the daughter being the other), the second half [(4/5) & (5/5)] pulling wide and revealing her agency and independence from the influence of her father (consisting of two linked shots that depict, first, the daughter's exit from the home, then her arrival, into the wayward 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, tracked along the eager briskness of his moving forward. Steadily intercut are the shots of the daughter, Genie, coyly inquiring when he expects to return home (whilst keeping from him 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 dogmatic Christian 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 attachments that bind 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 creates 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 (5/5) that beautifully matches motion (with Genie's back wiping the screen at its start) finishes off this half, as well as the whole scene: after Genie is seated, the camera begins a slow revolve in order to configure the two women into a two-shot of female symmetry, and then it holds on this symmetry as they pursue a serious, conflicting discussion on the hypocritical father who warns of sinful pleasure, and, in spite of him, the truth of the repercussions of pleasure (involving a mother who commits suicide likely due to this same father's two-faced, feckless hypocrisy).

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

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

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

This single, slow, elegant, time-conscious, 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 coming and thoughtlessly cutting that short, and a camera slowly moving in towards both this 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.


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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).