About sex in Monster's Ball
November 22nd 2006 21:13
* To quote something I wrote earlier this year: "Movies switch effortlessly between first and third point of view; and perhaps, really, there is only first person, except that the character who's understood to be doing the viewing is more or is less concrete."
* Third person is really a less substantial first? Maybe true, maybe not. But, even using the terms the traditional way, there's sometimes a blurring of the two.
***
* Sitting in a short film course one day, the lecture is on editing, and a ten-minute section from Goodfellas is the example. Ray Liotta has just taken drugs. The camera zooms in on his face, then -- jump cut -- it's suddenly closer, then -- jump cut -- it's extreme close up.
* Psychological editing: the effect is to convey something of the character's experience -- perhaps something like, when you're drugged up, the paranoia you feel, or the way you can fixate, or the sensation of the world narrowing.
* The close-ups are cues as to how to interpret. Quite apart from the general habit of empathy -- of thinking about how the protagonist is thinking about the world.
* When you film something moving left to right, you establish a perspective; the audience has a sense of where they are. But if you break the convention, "cross the line" -- walk around the object, film it from the opposite side (going right to left) -- you disorientate.
* Crossing the line is forgiveable in the context of fight scenes or sex scenes, usually from first person point of view. The audience simply takes you to be conveying the experience of confusion, disconnection, sensory overload.
* And the sex scene in Monster's Ball appears to go a step further. Okay, so there's a variety of non-standard non-linear effects -- fragments of time, fragmentariness of image, jump cuts, repetitions and out-of-order stuff, multiple angles, and overlappings (including an overlapping of an echoing moan in the background -- is that a real moan from future or past? is it a mental moan?). So you're conveying psychological messiness: you're suggesting, and actually creating in the audience, what it's like to be there.
* But at some point the non-standard becomes the non-naturalistic; I'm not sure why. Among other strangenesses, pretty much the whole thing is filmed from third person, not first, just as with the Ray Liotta scene, but without the close-ups. Part of the uncomfortable effect is the suggestion of there being a stalker or watcher.
* At some point, the effect is dreamlike (is it the lighting? the nighttime setting? the emotional build-up?). Similar to the way, in a dream, you see the character from a third person perspective, but you also are that character.
***
* So is third person really first person? Do you always dream when you watch? Does Monster's Ball simply make explicit what was always there?
***
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Monster's Ball.
A couple more thoughts on crossing the line. Says Wikipedia: "The 180° rule is an essential element of a style of film editing called continuity editing. The rule is not always obeyed. Sometimes a filmmaker will purposely break the line of action in order to create disorientation. Stanley Kubrick was known to do this. Directors Yasujiro Ozu and Jacques Tati sometimes ignored this rule also... Some filmmakers state that the fictional axis created by this rule can be used to plan the emotional strength of a scene. The closer you place the camera to the axis, the more emotionally involved the audience will be."
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Comment by Cibbuano
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Comment by Adrian
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Comment by Kams
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Orble sex expert, what you say Adrian we open a blog on that
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Among other things, I'd forgotten that it goes on uncomfortably long.
And it's much more naturalistic than it became in my memory (so maybe the entire post above is bullshit!).
Cibby and Kams -- forget Monster's Ball. Rent Debbie Does Dallas instead.
Comment by Cibbuano
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May I suggest Pizza Girls instead?