Observations On Film Art Everything New Is Old Again - Stories From 2017 Print

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Everything new is old again: Stories from 2017

Posted By bordwellblog On January 5, 2018 @ 8:55 pm In 1940s Hollywood,Film comments,Film
technique: Editing,Film technique: Music,Hollywood: Artistic traditions,Narrative
strategies,National cinemas: France,National cinemas: Israel | Comments Disabled
[1]
Silence.
DB here:
This is a sequel to an entry posted a year ago [2]. Like many sequels, it replays the ending of the
original.
I don’t want to leave the impression that as I’m watching new release a little
homunculus historian in my skull is busily plotting schema and revision, norm
and variation. I get as soaked up in a movie as anybody, I think. But at
moments during the screening, I do try to notice the film’s narrative strategies.
Later, when I’m thinking about the movie and going over my notes (yes, I take
notes), affinities strike me. By studying film history, most recently Hollywood
in the 40s, I try to see continuities and changes in storytelling strategies.
These make me appreciate how our filmmakers creatively rework conventions
that have rich, surprising histories.
Parts of those histories are traced in the book that came out in the fall, Reinventing Hollywood.
Some of my blog entries have already served to back up one point I tried to make there: that
contemporary filmmakers are still relying on the storytelling techniques that crystallized in
American studio films of the 1940s.
Relying on here means not only utilizing but also, sometimes, recasting. In keeping with earlier
entries (including one from the year before last [3]), I want to explore some films from 2017.
These show that the process of schema and revision creates a tradition. Hollywood is constantly
recycling, and sometimes revitalizing, Hollywood.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/01/05/everything-new-is-old-again-stories-from-2017/print/ 1/21
Of course here be spoilers.
Back to basics
[4]
The Big Sick.
The US films I’ll be considering all adhere to canons of classical Hollywood construction. Some of
these are laid out in the third chapter of Reinventing.
Classically constructed films have goal-oriented protagonists who encounter obstacles, usually in
the form of other characters. The goals are often double, involving both romantic fulfillment and
achievement in some other sphere. (Somewhere Godard says that love and work are the only
things that matter. Hollywood often thinks so too.) Alternatively, the goal might be prodding
someone else to action (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri). Often there’s a clash
between the goals, as when work tugs the protagonist away from love (La La Land).
The plot is typically laid out in large-scale parts. A setup is followed by a complicating action that
redefines character goals. In Downsizing, once Paul has gotten small, he has to reconceive his
goals in the face of his wife’s last-minute defection from their plan. There follows a development
section that delays goal achievement through characterization episodes, backstory, subplots,
parallels, setbacks, digressions, twists, and new obstacles. That marvelous slab of show-biz
schmaltz, The Greatest Showman, relies for its development on a potential love triangle and a
secondary couple’s romantic intrigue.
There follows a deadline-driven climax that resolves the action and an epilogue (sometimes
called the tag) that celebrates the stable state achieved and perhaps wraps up a motif or two.
The Greatest Showman presents Barnum’s success in creating a genuine circus and reconciling
with his family. The tag shows a big production number, with the subplot resolved (Carlyle
embracing Anne) and the motif of swirling points of light—initiated in Barnum’s spinning Dreams
gadget—washing over the final spectacle and his daughter’s ballet performance.
[5]
[6] [5]
[7]
Classical narration—what’s usually called point of view—typically attaches us to the main

characters. But not absolutely: we’re usually given access to things they don’t know, mostly for
the sake of arousing curiosity and suspense. And throughout, the film is bound together through
recurring motifs that reveal character (and character change) or significant plot information.
Think of the roles Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 assigns to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” Pac-
Man, David Hasselhoff, and that “unspoken thing.”
Or take The Big Sick, a semi-serious romantic comedy. Kumail’s initial goal is success in standup
comedy, but he also falls in love with Emily. His Pakistani-American family constitutes the main
antagonist, as his mother and father want him to go to law school and submit to an arranged
marriage. He hasn’t told his family about Emily, which precipitates the couple’s big quarrel: “I
can’t lose my family.” Kumail’s goal shifts when Emily is stricken by a mysterious disease. In the
development section , as she lies in a coma, he gets to know her parents, and a tense sympathy
develops between them. The crisis comes when Kumail confesses his true goals to his parents,
they disown him, and Emily’s disease hits a life-threatening phase.
In the climax portion, Emily revives and breaks off with him, his parents grudgingly accept his
move to New York, and he mounts a somewhat successful one-man show there. The film is
tightly tied to Kumail’s range of knowledge, so we’re surprised when he is—as when Emily’s
parents decide to move her to another hospital, and when Emily pops up in his New York
audience, ready to reconcile with him.
The Big Sick exploits many comic motifs: the parade of would-be fiancées Kumail’s mother
invites to dinner, the photos he keeps of them (which ignite Emily’s jealousy), the repeated sit-
downs he has with his family, the dumb catchphrases deployed by other comics, and especially
Emily’s “Woo-hoo!” heckling, which eventually attests to the rekindling of their love.
The power of classical plotting is shown in its ability to spotlight a Pakistani-American

protagonist, an Islamic family demanding that a son adhere to tradition, and the pathos of
parents facing the death of a daughter. But that ability to flexibly absorb new subjects and
themes and emotional registers has kept the classical template going for about a century.
Time travel
[8]
Wonder Woman.
One of the hallmarks of Forties cinema, I argue in Reinventing’s second chapter, is a eagerness
to explore what flashbacks can do. Flashbacks were already well-established, but a more
pervasive acceptance of nonlinear storytelling, so familiar to us now, became firmly part of
Hollywood sound cinema in this period.
One-off flashbacks are so common now we don’t particularly notice them. In The Big Sick, when
Kumail visits Emily’s apartment with her parents, he peeks into her closet, and we get glimpses
of her wearing the outfits earlier in the film. In this case, flashbacks function as memories. At
the climax of Guardians 2, Quill flashes back to moments of listening to music with his mother.
Similarly, in Get Out, Chris recalls his childhood TV viewing and, at the climax, he remembers
earlier moments at the Armitage garden party when he asks, “Why black people?”
Flashbacks usually aren’t pure representations of memory, though. They often include
information that the character doesn’t or couldn’t know. In fact many flashbacks are addressed
simply to us, coming “from the film” rather than from a character’s mind. These may remind us
of things already seen, or fill in gaps, or plant hints about things that will develop.
So, for instance, in Logan Lucky, when Logan says, “I know how to move the money,” we get a
flashback to him studying the pneumatic pipes that feature in the heist plan.
[9] [10]
He’s not necessarily recalling the moment; the filmic narration seems merely to be tipping us the
wink. At the climax, other “external” flashbacks plug gaps we didn’t notice earlier. These reveal
some aspects of the heist we weren’t aware of, such as the extra bags of money carried off.
1940s filmmakers also explored how flashbacks could be “architectonic,” how they could inform
the overall shape of the movie. Here the flashback rearranges story order to build up curiosity
and suspense, and it may come from purely from the narration or be motivated as character
memory.
One large-scale pattern is the extensive embedded flashback, as in How Green Was My Valley, I
Remember Mama, and innumerable biopics. Wonder Woman gives us a framed inset of this sort,
when a modern-day Diana opens the chest harboring the World War I photo. That scene segues
to the past. The origin story and war episodes are ultimately closed off by a return to the
present, and a reminder of a motif—Steve’s watch (which, in one of the film’s jokes, stands in for
something more private). The purpose of this is to provide what I call in the book “hindsight
bias.” While building curiosity about the past, the opening primes us to expect certain things to
have been inevitable (such as chance meetings).
Another common framing strategy begins at the climax and then a long flashback lays out the
conditions that led up to it. A reliable source tells me that Pitch Perfect 3 does this, starting with
an explosion followed by a title announcing that the action began three weeks earlier. In films
like this, there may be no closing frame; the internal action of the flashback catches up, perhaps
via a replay, with what we saw at the outset, and the film proceeds to the resolution and
epilogue. The somewhat phantasmic opening number of The Greatest Showman comes to
fruition during the finale.
To and fro
[11]
Loving Vincent.
Sustained blocks like this are fairly rare nowadays, I think. More common, as in the Forties, is an
alternation of past and present. The main examples in Reinventing Hollywood include Passage to
Marseille, The Locket, Lydia, Kitty Foyle, and Sorry, Wrong Number. Again, though, these are
motivated as memories, while current examples tend to be more “objective.”
A simple instance is Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Here clusters of events in 1981 alternate
with incidents in 1979: Gloria Grahame returns to her young lover, and we flash back to their
earlier affair. Neither protagonist is firmly established as recalling the 1919 events. Another
feature of 1940s flashbacks, the replay from different viewpoints, comes in here as well. The
couple’s crucial quarrel in New York is shown first from Peter’s perspective, and later from
Gloria’s. He suspects her of infidelity, but we learn that her secret involves her cancer. As often
happens, our restriction to the protagonist is modified by knowledge he doesn’t gain at the
moment.
The alternation of past and present is given a more geometrical neatness in Wonderstruck. In
maniacally precise parallels, Rose in 1927 runs away to Manhattan to find her mother, while in
1977 Ben runs there to find his father.
[12]
[13]
The parallels are reinforced by a host of motifs: wolves, movie references, the asteroid in the
Museum of Natural History, a bookmark, and so on. The linear chronology gets straightened out,
and the gaps filled, by an integrative flashback played out among miniatures and cutouts
adapted to the scale model of Manhattan. The dovetailing flashbacks create a sense of cosmic
design; in many films, convergences like these can suggest destiny [14].
For modern audiences, Citizen Kane is the prototypical flashback film of the 1940s, and its
investigation structure, while not completely original, was hugely influential. I was surprised to
see Kane’s schema revived this year in Loving Vincent. Once the postman has given Armand his
mission, to take Vincent’s last letter to brother Theo, we embark on an inquiry into Vincent’s life
and death. It’s refracted through the testimony of many who knew him during his sojourn in
Arles. Armand’s goal gets recast when he learns of Theo’s death, but in the course of his travels
he comes to understand how Vincent’s kindness and art touched many lives.
As in several Forties films, Loving Vincent’s past scenes jumbled out of chronological order, so we
must piece together the story Armand gradually discloses. And there’s the driving force of
mystery, a distinctive thrust in many Forties genres, for reasons I talk about in one chapter
of Reinventing. Very modern, and not so much like the 1940s, is the brief, fragmentary quality of
the flashbacks; I counted thirty-six of them.
The boldest experiment in nonlinear time I saw this year was Dunkirk. The film juxtaposes
timelines consuming a week or so, a day, and an hour, and then aligns them in unexpected ways.
In this staggered array, the distinction between flashbacks and flashforwards loses its force. Any
cut may constitute a jump ahead of the moment just shown, or a jump back to an earlier
incident. Christopher Nolan has acknowledged the influence of 1940s cinema on his thinking
about time schemes, and here he explores yet again how crosscutting different lines of action
can stretch or condense story duration [15].
Their eyes and ears

[16]
Get Out.
Like flashbacks, subjectively tinted storytelling has a long cinematic lineage. Silent films
displayed dreams, visions, anticipations, and deformations of mind and eye. Those devices
mostly dropped out of 1930s American cinema, which was to some extent more “objective” and
“theatrical” in its mode of presentation. Subjectivity came roaring back in the Forties, which is
why Reinventing Hollywood devotes two chapters and several other passages to various
techniques that go beneath the surface.
Memory-based flashbacks are common options today, but the inward plunge can take other
forms. For most of its length, Get Out restricts us to Chris’s range of knowledge, and it relies on
optical POV in many stretches. Through his eyes we see Mrs. Armitage staring at him while
stirring the tea.
[17]
[18]
More complex is his view of Georgina at the upper window. That’s followed by a shot going
beyond his range of knowledge: she’s looking not at him but herself.
[19]
[20]
[21]
We take a deeper dive into Chris’s mind under hypnosis. The boy Chris sinks into a stellar cavity
and becomes Chris staring at Mrs. Armitage as if she were appearing on the TV screen. The shift
dramatizes his guilt at his mother’s death and his susceptibility to this Bad Mom figure.
[22]
[23]
Once Chris becomes a prisoner, the narrational range widens again to show Rod’s efforts to
rescue him, along with the family’s plans for him. But the film tightly realigns us with Chris at
the climax, so that the attacks from Rose, Jeremy, and others come as surprises.
Chris, a photographer, channels his experience through vision, though the hypnotism scene
blends sounds from the present with the rain drizzling in the past. Subjectivity goes more fully
sonic in Baby Driver, about a whey-faced lad who lives in the auditory ether.
Edgar Wright, now exercising straight the percussive dashboard details he parodied in Hot Fuzz,
punches up the visual exhilaration of Baby’s rubber-shredding takeoffs and getaway 180s. He
locks us into Baby’s auditory world as well. We’re almost completely attached to Baby, learning
what he learns when he learns it. Notably, the robberies are rendered from his perspective,
including optical POV shots as he waits in the getaway car.
[24] [25]
Again, fragmentary flashbacks replay his mother’s death and the childhood damage to his
hearing. We even get a fantasy, with Baby imagining his escape with Debora in black and white.
[26]
[27]
What’s just as subjective, though, is the music Baby incessantly cues up on his iPod. Blocking
out the shriek of his tinnitus, it provides a soundtrack to his life—danceable tunes as he bops
down the street, ballads when he flirts and falls in love with Debora, and pulsing rock during
robberies (what the psycho Bats calls, “a score for a score”). Through volume and texture,
Wright suggests that we hear the music as Baby does; only the loudest environmental sounds
poke through. Sometimes, when he pulls out one earbud, the volume drops. His growing
attachment to Debora is signaled by his dialing up a song using her name and sharing his
precious buds.
[28]
Some scenes are handled objectively, as we witness the gang’s conversations in front of Baby.
He can read lips, though, and he can keep the iPod cranked up. So a little bit of Baby’s custom
soundtrack leaks in for us underneath others’ dialogue. At other times, the score takes over to
become nondiegetic accompaniment, as when gunshots in a firefight land on the off-beats of
“Tequila.”
As you’d expect, the music comments on the action throughout (“Never ever gonna give you up”
when Baby defends Debora from Buddy) and supplies motifs. Queen’s “Brighton Rock,” Baby’s
favorite heist accompaniment, briefly enables him to bond with Buddy.
[29]
A song about a couple’s devotion reminds us that both thieves are loyal to their women.
Momentary sound changes are rendered through our protagonist’s viewpoint. Wright lets us hear
the whine of Baby’s tinnitus as Bats taps his ear. When Buddy blasts his pistols alongside Baby’s
head, we suffer his hearing loss and the distorted voices that wobble through it.
Such streams of auditory perception occasionally emerged in early talkies (e.g., Gance’s
Beethoven). Those experiments got normalized in 1940s manipulations of sound perspective in
different environments. More fancily, in A Double Life (1947), party chatter subsides when the
hero covers his ears, and in Pickup (1951), the gradually deafening protagonist hears high-
pitched noises. Wright extends these one-off devices to the texture of an entire film.
Confidants
[30]
The Keys of the Kingdom (1945).
Large-scale and small-scale, the heritage of the 1940s seems to be everywhere. Many of the
flashbacks and fantasies I mentioned already are primed by a track-in to a character’s face, just
as in classic studio pictures. There’s also block construction, either unsignaled as in the Wonder
Woman and Greatest Showman cases, or signaled, as in the date-stamping in the early
alternations of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. We also get explicit chaptering, as in The
Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New
York Fixer.
Voice-overs come along with flashbacks, as a way of guiding the audience to understand the
time shifts. In the Forties, as I discuss in the book’s sixth chapter, voice-overs became more
flexible and fluid. Sometimes they were external, issued from an all-knowing commentator
(Naked City and other police procedurals). Sometimes they were sonic equivalents for letters
and diaries, letting us in on what characters were writing. Deeper intimacy could come from
voice-overs serving as inner monologues, the voice of a character’s mind. These, like flashbacks,
are associated with film noir, but also like flashbacks they actually emerge in many genres–as
they do today.
The voice-over can be perfunctory, as in All the Money in the World. Young Paul Getty, kidnapped
in the opening reel, has a couple passages confiding in us, but he’s not heard from again.
Moreover, his explanation of his grandfather’s rise to power (during the inevitable flashbacks)
could have been supplied in other ways. Paul baldly tells us that we need to know all this to
understand what follows (who’s he talking to?). He admits that he’s an expository shortcut. This
is why voice-over is sometimes considered lazy storytelling.
It doesn’t have to be. Take Martin Scorsese’s Silence. In subject and strategy it reminded me of
The Keys of the Kingdom (1945), which dramatizes the diary of a young missionary to China. Via
this novelistic device, we get flashbacks to his youth and his years of service. We get as well the
reaction of the skeptical priest whose voice reads the journal. This fairly straightforward schema
is in effect revised by Scorsese and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks, who create a floating dialogue
among voice-overs.
After initial exposition via an old letter from Father Ferreira, which is recited in his voice, two
young priests set out for Japan. They hope to maintain the clandestine Christian community
there, and they want as well to discover if Ferreira has truly renounced his faith . The bulk of
their grim adventures is commented on through the voice-over of one of them, Father Sebastião
Rodrigues. At first he’s vocalizing a letter, which he calls a report, summing up the struggles of
the Jesuit mission and their encounters with Christian villagers. In the course of his report, we
also get an embedded flashback narrated by Kichijiro, their guide and a sporadically lapsed
believer himself.
But at a crucial moment, Father Sebastião’s report ceases to be such and turns into an inner
monologue. Seeing a Christian village devastated by the shogun’s forces, he asks, “What have I
done for Christ?”
[31]
Soon his voice presents a kind of stream of consciousness–praying for the villagers as they walk
off in captivity, thanking God when he has a vision of Jesus on his prison wall. His inner voice
urges his colleague Father Garupe, severely tortured, to apostatize.
In last stretch of the film, new voices are heard. There’s Jesus, perhaps filtered through
Sebastião’s mind (subjectivity again), and then, more objectively, there’s an account from the
Dutch trader Albrecht. He drily reports that Sebastião apostatized and followed Ferreira in
leading a Japanese life. Albrecht’s narration is interrupted by a dialogue between Sebastião and
Jesus, capped by the priest’s blurting out: “It was in the silence that I heard your voice.”
Albrecht’s voice-over concludes the film, with his final claim that the priest was “lost to God”
belied by the closing image.
From the 1940s onward, voice-over has been a rich resource–describing settings and external
behavior, judging other characters’ motives, giving us access to the deepest thoughts of the
speaker. I try to show these capacities at work in a fairly ordinary film, The Miniver Story, but for
our time, the soundtrack of Silence is another vivid demo. In the juxtaposition of different
voices, it achieves some of the density of a novel, and by the end we better understand the
initial words and emotions of Father Ferreira, the priest whose apostasy launches the plot.
Passed-along voice-over gets a bigger workout in Dee Rees’s Mudbound. The original novel is
somewhat like As I Lay Dying; its sections set various characters’ voices side by side, shifting
viewpoint as each takes up a portion of the tale. Constant commentary and perfect alignment
with a character’s range of knowledge are hard to sustain in cinema, so what we have onscreen
are objectively presented scenes accompanied by an occasional voice-over. Still, it’s a rare
option. If Silence gradually opens its voice-over horizons near the film’s end, Mudbound
introduces polyphony from the start. Six characters share their thoughts and feelings in
alternation, providing backstory and deepening our access to their reactions.
As in Silence, there’s a pattern to the voice-overs. The bulk of the film is an embedded
flashback, triggered by the McAllen brothers setting out to bury their father and encountering
the Jackson family riding by.
[32]
[33]
The intersection of two families sets up not only the flashback episodes but the floating voice-
overs. As the visuals anchor us initially to the white family, the first voice-overs issue from
Laura, the wife of Henry McAllen, and from Henry’s brother Jamie. In the flashback stretch, as
America enters World War II, the voice-overs shift to the Jacksons, the father Hap and the
mother Florence. The plot proceeds to add the voices of Henry and the Jacksons’ oldest son
Ronsel. All the characters narrate the action in the past tense, as if recalling it from a distance in
time, but no listener is ever specified–a common feature of voice-overs in the 1940s and
afterward.
During the film’s second half, the development and climax sections, the voice-overs nearly
vanish. For over an hour, we hear only Laura and Florence, and only once apiece. Jamie and
Ronsel, both disaffected returning vets, don’t confide in us during their growing friendship or
during the persecution of Ronsel by the local white men. The women are left to provide a
sporadic chorus.
At the end, however, a spurt of brief commentaries give the men their inner voices back. We
return to the present and see Hap Jackson help the McAllen men bury their father (the inciter of
KKK violence against Ronsel). The epilogue features brief comments from Ronsel, Jamie, and
Hap, and not the women. Ronsel gets the last word. Ironically, because of the KKK savagery, this
narrator has become mute.
[34]
Again, I felt a current film’s kinship to those I studied for the book. Mudbound traces the rural
home front, the military experiences of a white man and a black one, and the veterans’ problems
of adjustment upon returning home. These elements hark back to some of the powerful films of
the 1940s, including Home of the Brave and The Best Years of Our Lives. The sympathetic
portrait of African-American families isn’t unprecedented either, as seen in Intruder in the
Dust and Lost Boundaries. Mudbound‘s passed-along narration, like the ones we find in other
modern films, constitute contemporary revisions of the shifting voice-overs we get in Citizen
Kane and All About Eve.
Career women careening
[35]
Molly’s Game.
Molly’s Game and I, Tonya offer good wrapup examples of many of these strategies, with some
unreliability thrown in.
As you’d expect in a film by Aaron Sorkin, the flashback organization of Molly’s Game is fairly
complicated. Just as The Social Network intercut two arrays of flashbacks triggered by two legal
inquiries, the new film scrambles together crucial moments in Molly’s childhood , scenes of her
current legal troubles, and sequences showing her rise to become the Poker Princess, the
arranger of high-stakes games. The film gains a bit of the structural symmetry of Wonder
Woman by beginning and ending with a childhood defeat that Molly rises above.
The flashbacks are stitched together by Molly’s voice-over. A filmmaker who recruits a narrating
voice has to choose. Do you show the narrating situation? Or do you leave it unspecified? In this
last instance, the narration might be wholly internal, a mental summing up of events, or it might
feel like a confidence shared with an intimate, even though we’re shown no listeners. In Molly’s
Game, her bare-it-all confession might seem to be simply her unspoken thoughts, but at one
point it’s suggested that what we’re getting is her book’s version of her life.
Molly’s attorney Charlie is reading her memoir while he researches her case, and he asks her
about a passage we saw in a flashback: her boss chews her out for bringing him “poor people’s
bagels.” The attorney suggests that nobody uses that phrase, and that probably the boss used a
racial slur that she suppressed in the book. This throws a little bit into question the reliability of
Molly’s flashback, while also hinting at something we learn later: she sanitized the book to spare
the reputations of the high rollers she serviced.
I, Tonya takes another option. Again there are disordered flashbacks and bursts of subjectivity
tied together by the voice track. Whereas Molly is the sole speaker in her film, though, Tonya
shares the soundtrack with other characters, in the manner of Mudbound. But these
commentaries aren’t private musings. They’re the self-justifying testimony of people talking to a
documentary camera. (Even though these sequences are said to be occurring forty years after
the earliest events, the format is an anachronistic 4:3–presumably to help us keep the time
frames distinct.
[36]
Once you get characters in conflict recounting past events, you have the possibility of disparate
stories. Forties filmmakers exploited this in Thru Different Eyes and a certain Hitchcock film too
famous to mention. Tonya says explicitly that there are different versions of the truth. A brief
scene shows her battering Nancy Kerrigan, and a more complicated one occurs in a tale
recounted by her husband Jeff. She fires a shotgun at him and turns to the camera saying, “I
never did this”–before briskly ejecting a shell.
[37]
The comic possibilities of to-camera address on display here were exploited in My Life with
Caroline, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and other 1940s films. Then the momentary
breaking of the fourth wall was reserved for the frame story and kept separate from the
embedded flashbacks. But I, Tonya‘s revision is easy to understand as a zany equivalent for her
verbalized denial. Given the defiant way she brandishes the gun, we’re permitted to doubt her
denial–which means that the film is refusing to settle the matter. The possibility that the overall
filmic narration could be unreliable was rehearsed occasionally in the Forties, perhaps most
vividly in Mildred Pierce (analyzed here [38], sampled here [39]).
Other paths
[40]
Foxtrot.
The 1940s were important for other national cinemas too. The book’s last chapter suggests that
filmmakers in Britain, France, Mexico, and other countries engaged in similar narrative
explorations–sometimes in imitation of America, sometimes on their own. I go on to suggest that
eventually non-Hollywood narrative models came to international attention, and still later those
affected American cinema.
Italian Neorealism was a prime source of alternatives. A good example of its long-term impact, I
think, is The Florida Project, which embraces a slice-of-life pattern. Once you’re committed to
episodic plotting, you need to organize the incidents coherently. Sean Baker follows European
and US indie precedent in tracing a rhythm of daily routines that change in sync with the
characters’ relationships. So Halley’s quarrel with her friend Ashley means that Moonee can no
longer claim leftover food from the diner, which helps push Halley toward prostitution, which
leads to the intervention of child welfare authorities.
The drama arises less from crisply defined goals than from circumstances that alter life routines.
In addition, like many Neorealist films and others in this vein afterward, the poignancy gets
sharpened by the presence of children caught up in adults’ bad choices.
[41]
The Florida Project presents many actions elliptically, leaving us to infer what has happened
offscreen. (I think, for instance, that it’s motel manager Bobby Hicks who contacts the
authorities, but I don’t think it’s made explicit.) Moving to films made outside the US, Michael
Haneke’s Happy End takes ellipsis even further.
[42]
Haneke uses the strategy of delayed and distributed exposition. [43] He presents some
apparently casual events at the outset, then gradually reveals what’s actually going on, all the
while tracing out ultimate consequences. Instead of presenting a clear-cut chain of causes and
effects, he asks us to fill in unspoken plans, offscreen actions, and hidden motives. Haneke has
specialized in suggesting how vague forces can disturb rich, smug families and their shady
schemes. His mystery-driven narrational tactics suit Happy End as well as Code inconnu and
Caché.
I speculate in Reinventing Hollywood that the European art cinema’s story-based mysteries and
narrational uncertainties owe something to 1940s American films. So too perhaps does the use
of block construction, which emerged in overseas portmanteau films of the postwar era (e.g.,
Dead of Night, Le Plaisir, The Gold of Naples [44]). Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot is a striking example of
block construction.
His Lebanon [45] (2009) took POV restriction to a limit by confining its action to a military tank in
the heat of battle. (This tactic has Forties precedents as well, as Lifeboat and Rope remind
us.) Foxtrot operates differently. Broken into three parts, it looks at a single situation–a young
soldier’s duties at a checkpoint–through shifts in time and viewpoint. The opening shot, at first
enigmatic, gets specified in an epilogue that recasts all that went before. Maoz also incorporates
monotonous routines into his plot, the better to throw a single shocking incident into relief.
So classical construction isn’t the only option available. But other choices have histories as well.
As viewers we learn these alternative stoytelling traditions, and we use that knowledge to make
sense of new examples. No less than the Hollywood model, these other formal strategies engage
us through familiar pattern and unexpected novelty, schema and revision.
I don’t mean to obsess over this 1940s thing. Our current films owe debts to silent cinema and
to other eras too. It’s just that I continue to be fascinated by finding repetitions and variants of
storytelling strategies that got consolidated in the period I was studying. Denounce them as
formulaic if you want, but I prefer to think that these and other recent films illustrate, in fine
grain, the continuity and sometimes the vitality of a major cinematic tradition.
Maybe this is my hook to an entry for the start of 2019?
Many thanks to Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics for help on this entry.
On the four-part structure of classical films see Kristin’s 2008 entry [46] and my essay “Anatomy
of the Action Picture.” [47] Today’s entry deploys the analytical categories trotted out at length in
this essay [48] and more briefly in this discussion of The Wolf of Wall Street. [49]
[50]
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Article printed from Observations on film art: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog
URL to article: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/01/05/everything-new-is-

old-again-stories-from-2017/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Silence-600.jpg

[2] an entry posted a year ago:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/01/02/fantasy-flashbacks-and-what-ifs-
2016-pays-off-the-past/
[3] one from the year before last:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2016/01/09/pick-your-protagonists/
[4] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Big-sick-500.jpg
[5] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Barnum-400.jpg
[6] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Barnum-3-

400.jpg
[7] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Barnum-4-
400.jpg
[8] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Wonder-W-500-
2.jpg
[9] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Logan-1-400.tif
[10] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Logan-2-
400.jpg
[11] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Vincent-500.jpg
[12] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Wonder-1-
400.jpg
[13] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Wonder-2-
400.jpg
[14] can suggest destiny: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/08/26/no-
coincidence-no-story/
[15] can stretch or condense story duration:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/08/09/dunkirk-part-2-the-art-film-as-
event-movie/
[16] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Get-Out-
500.jpg
[17] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/chris-a-400.jpg
[18] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Chris-b-400.jpg
[19] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Chris-1-400.jpg
[22] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Chris-x-400.jpg
[23] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Chris-y-400.jpg
[24] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Robbery-1.jpg
[25] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-
content/uploads/screenshot_2268.tif
[26] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Deb-1.jpg
[27] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Deb-2.jpg
[28] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Baby-Driver-
400.jpg
[29] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Baby-driver-
buds-2-400.jpg
[30] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Keys-500.jpg
[31] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Silence-400.jpg
[32] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Mudbound-1-
400-1.jpg
400-1.jpg
400.jpg
[35] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Molly-500-1.jpg
[36] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Tonya-1-
400.jpg
[37] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Tonya-2-
400.jpg
[38] here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/06/26/twice-told-tales-mildred-
pierce/
[39] here: https://vimeo.com/68895551
[40] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Foxtrot-500.jpg
[41] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Florida-400.jpg
[42] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Happy-End-
400-alt.jpg
[43] delayed and distributed exposition.:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/10/02/dispatch-from-sunny-vancouver/
[44] The Gold of Naples: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/04/04/wisconsin-
film-festival-retro-mania/
[45] Lebanon: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/10/07/the-row-strikes-
again/
[46] Kristin’s 2008 entry: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/06/21/times-go-
by-turns/
[47] “Anatomy of the Action Picture.”:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php
[48] in this essay: http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics_03narrative.pdf
[49] this discussion of The Wolf of Wall Street. :
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/01/12/understanding-film-narrative-the-
trailer/
[50] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Guardians-
600.jpg
Copyright © 2010 Observations on film art. All rights reserved.

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Everything new is old again: Stories from 2017

Of course here be spoilers.

The Big Sick.

Classical narration—what’s usually called point of view—typically attaches us to the main

The power of classical plotting is shown in its ability to spotlight a Pakistani-American

Their eyes and ears

The Keys of the Kingdom (1945).

Career women careening

Maybe this is my hook to an entry for the start of 2019?

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Article printed from Observations on film art: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog

URL to article: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/01/05/everything-new-is-

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Silence-600.jpg

[6] Image: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Barnum-3-

[43] delayed and distributed exposition.:

Copyright © 2010 Observations on film art. All rights reserved.

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