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Hail Caesar
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[Tim Wilson] “It highlights a reality that I’ve never seen addressed at any length: the reverse shot is entirely unnatural. Literally. It can’t exist in nature, because it requires two simultaneous points of view.”
I do think you might be over-egging this.
If you have two actors sitting facing each other across a table, all the viewer is “effectively” doing is sitting at a third chair at right angles to them and moving his/her head from side to side with each cut, as in a tennis match. Yes, we accept some stretching of reality in that we’re seeing further round than we would if we were physically there, but it’s not a huge stretch. If we leaned right over the table so that we were more between the two actors then we would reduce the unnaturalness still further.
What shows this to be true is the discomfort we feel when the eyeline is not respected – what’s happened is that we’ve been jolted without warning to the other side of the table.
Obviously we have become accustomed to the stretching of reality here, so that we accept over the shoulder reverses, but I still think that instinctively we sense that we are occupying a viewing position between the two actors. (Over the shoulders on a long lens feel the most unnatural of all, of course …) Perhaps we feel that we are shifting our body position between cuts to accommodate the change of view?
All the cut is doing is eliminating the head movement (or torso movement or repositioning of our feet) that we would make. But this ellipsis is itself very natural – it’s a cognitive error not to realise that our brains see in snatches rather than in a continuous “recording”. Film cuts work because they emulate the way our brains see – rather than the way we think we see.
Cinematic conventions tend to stretch reality rather than as you are suggesting break with it altogether.
I would accept however that as the language has evolved it has allowed us to accept a greater degree of implausibility of viewpoint. There is a very bizarre convention that seems to me to be utterly unnatural when you have three people at a table to shoot between the heads of the actors sitting on the same side. To me that feels completely wrong and can result in serious spatial confusion. What’s happening there is breaking with the natural sense that you are sitting at the same table as the actors.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I do think you might be over-egging this. “
I need to add “Over-egging” to my job title somehow. Definitely belongs on my business card.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Cinematic conventions tend to stretch reality rather than as you are suggesting break with it altogether. Perhaps we feel that we are shifting our body position between cuts to accommodate the change of view?”
Perhaps I was over-egging my use of the word “reality.” And I think there’s an extent to which we’re using it in a slightly different way.
I like the tennis match analogy, but I think it also supports my view at least as well as yours.
That is, as executed, reverse shots tend not to be filmed from a single seat at center court, but as if they were from two cameras behind each baseline.
There’s certainly a spectrum of artistic choices to be made, of course. In the context of the Coens, they (and Roger Deakins) do tend to shoot conversations from “inside” the conversation, so to speak, very frequently (most frequently, if I’m remembering correctly) in a position “between” the actors that one might describe as “on the net.”
No OTS, but rather, reversed 1-shots. They may be the only filmmakers for whom Bill’s two-headed camera could work.
Except that their use of short lenses is often combined with long distances, to include big parts of the background. They certainly used it to great effect in Fargo, but just as often use it interior spaces to communicate details about minor characters and settings.
This gets back to the reality of one’s ability to take in both sides of the reverse. We can’t, because the cameras are “really” placed well behind the actor who we’re “apparently” in front of.
That is, the camera appears to be in the couple of feet between the actors, but is actually several feet behind the pair of them.
Which is some of what I meant by saying that no one person could actually experience a reverse shot. Not as it’s shot, and most often, not as it’s viewed.
There’s also the matter of non-dialog reverse shots. Call them reverse establishing shots. You could do something close with a pan of course, but as used in practice, especially by the Coens, I think the point is to take away the idea of “there’s one perspective that encompasses two points of view” and intentionally replace it with “there are two isolated points of view. There is no unified perspective.”
Returning to our tennis analogy, we’re not MEANT to be seated in the stands, swiveling our heads from a single perspective. We’re MEANT to have TWO points of view, and their isolation from each other is critical.
That’s HUGE for the Coens. Sometimes it’s expressed as being trapped (think William H Macy in Fargo), sometimes as separation (think Javier Bardem), but I think they’re stylizing the dis-unity of emotional elements. The further apart, the less reconcilable their perspectives, the better.
I think Tony’s video (which I hope u ppl have watched, so I’ll link it again here) also wisely calls out Paul Greengrass’s approach to conversational reverses in The Bourne Supremacy, where the shot is almost BEHIND the shoulder, starting at around 1:32 in the clip. It’s like we’re hiding behind Joan Allen to eavesdrop on Brian Cox….but then we’re also hiding behind Albert to eavesdrop on Joan. It’s absolutely impossible for one person to be in both of those positions. It simply can’t be done.
These are just the grabs I could grab, and don’t fully express how far behind them I appear to be standing for the shots in motion. That I can go from having Joan Allen blocking half the screen to in an instant now be alllllll the way behind Brian Cox is impossible.
And then we get even CLOSER. You can definitely get more of a sense of how thoroughly “behind” each of the speakers we are, and the extent to which we as viewers are hiding, in two specific, very separate places.
Not to put too fine a point on the nature of reality, but in reality, human eyes don’t work the way this shot works. This shot can ONLY be achieved by a long lens, far away, zoomed in.
As a career documentarian, I think Greengrass is very aware of the extent to which is visual approach is not rooted in “real” reality, but it feels organic in the context of the story. After all, it’s a story about manufactured reality explicitly in contrast with “real” reality.
Over-egging our irreconcilable positions in space and time underscores the irreconcilability of Joan Allen and Brian Cox, and very much supports the idea that both have something to hide, and that Very Bad Things Are Coming Soon.
That’s one of the things that long lenses, far away, zoomed in TELL us. They compress distance. To start the scene with the cameras so far away, but to wind up so much “in their faces” and yet still hiding? Pressure is building! This isn’t sustainable. Something’s gotta give.
For that matter, the Coens RELY on the unreality of Deakins’ short lenses, frequently using it to distort faces, but also to exaggerate camera moves that, again, we as humans, don’t make. Even if we could, we see the world differently than these kinds of shots reflect. We don’t have fixed lens lengths. LOL
In all cases I’ve cited — long lens or short lens, OTS, “behind” the shoulder, isolated singles, conversational shots, establishing shots, so on — the physical unreality of our position and intentional deviations from the way we normally see the world are intentional uses of highly stylized cinematic technique to support storytelling. The glues they rely on to hold these shots together include our ability to abstract a unified worldview from conflicting perspectives, and our essentially human drive to empathy, even with characters we don’t actually empathize with.
But they DON’T include an especially deep commitment to representing a view of the room that any particular human could ever possibly have.
I think it’s worth noting that there’s some evolution at work here. Early cinema’s roots in theater are evident in the relative absence of reverses. Over time, the angles are further and further separated from each other, to the point that, as in Bourne, they are utterly irreconcilable.
Again noting that there’s a spectrum here. There are clearly some parts of the cinematic language that haven’t changed much at all, and some filmmakers use visual language that has been settled for generations. But I think that the language of reverses has changed a lot, and I think approaches that Greengrass and the Coens take would have looked daring to any stylistic innovators who might have been contemporary with, say Barton Fink. Buñuel went pretty far, but he never went this far.
[Simon Ubsdell] ” it’s a cognitive error not to realise that our brains see in snatches rather than in a continuous “recording”. Film cuts work because they emulate the way our brains see”
On that we agree completely.
I’m only aware of one music video that uses a single, unbroken take of a slow zoom, Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise.” Neither a brilliant song, brilliant video, nor much of a disguise at all, it illustrates how completely unnatural it is to see the world without cuts. He’s sitting in a chair in the kitchen, playing an acoustic guitar, but we WANT to see multiple closeups — fingers on frets, strings plucked, his face — mixed with shots at a variety of distances.
Plus it’s in black and white, and hey, where’s the rest of the band? LOL It’s really a terrible idea. I see you playing AND hear it, so I’m clearly in a world where instruments are playing — where’s everyone else??
I understand why they tried this but I don’t get how they found the result usable. You’re fighting — or at least *I’m* fighting the zoom the whole time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idnJnjV_8rg
Maybe it felt daring to go so far out on a limb.
Of course, Sinead O’Connor went even further out on the limb 3 years later with “Nothing Compares 2 U.” After a brief preamble, the camera rests on a chin-to-no-hairline closeup, no zoom whatsoever. She changes what’s in the frame by the size of her singing, but it feels less artificial because there really is nowhere else to look. We’re not worried about the music, because we’re not in the frame with a musician. We’re in the frame with her soul.
If you haven’t seen this in a while, you only think you remember how bold it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB1TKw8_b1s
Anyway, if I’m being honest, ever since the part of the conversation where the Englishman mentions tennis, I admit that my internal soundtrack comes from another bit of video, wherein WTF = Why the frogs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2f6-U72Zk
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Tim,
Man – I so enjoyed spending a piece of a lazy morning reading this. Thanks.
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Thank you for your fascinating reply. Lots of really interesting points in there, but I think you are perhaps missing an essential nuance or two.
Film language is much less about physical geometry than it is about “engagement”, and engagement is a direct function of “distance” both physical and psychological. Because distance is a sliding scale, so is the effect of any shot or sequence of shots. (I’ll explain this in a moment.)
You seem to talk as though there were a Platonically existing reverse shot that it is possible to pin down and measure, with the camera being placed exactly here and looking at exactly this, but my contention would be that there is a continuum in what we are psychologically prepared to accept as a reverse shot and it extends a long way in both directions. But what is important to understand is that the concept is grounded in a simple perceptual model.
Let’s step away from reverse shots for a moment, because I think they are a special case of a much more basic principle which we can understand better if we focus on what’s happening in a single first of all.
The viewer is “engaged” with the character he is looking at any one time to the exact extent that the actor’s eyeline relates to the lens.
It goes without saying that if a character has his/her back to us, we are completely disengaged.
If we move around so that we are at right angles to the eyeline, things have obviously improved but we are still disengaged to a considerable degree. We feel this viewpoint as an objective one – we are “looking on” much more than we are empathising. This viewpoint is typically dispassionate.
If we continue moving round, we engage more and more. An obvious reason for this is that we can now see into the actor’s eyes and this is a really huge factor in creating engagement – we have evolved to be incredibly sensitive to the messages we get from another person’s eyes. Unless you’re a sociopath, it’s physically impossible not to be absorbed when you can see into someone’s eyes.
If we move all the way around, until we are looking directly into the actor’s eyes, we have full engagement, and it is surprisingly disturbing especially in a narrative context, in that instead of “viewing” the scene, we become implicated in it.
Obviously a clever film-maker is going to manipulate the angle of the eyeline to the camera differently at different moments to enhance or reduce the engagement we are feeling. Clearly there is no ideal, right answer to the choice of this angle or the degree of engagement that results from it – that’s obviously absurd. It’s all about making a choice that is right for that particular moment. Obviously there will be times when disengagement can be used just as effectively as engagement. A film is not a steady state experience – it’s an ebb and flow of states and great film-makers are masters of the ebb and flow. (What’s really depressing incidentally is to see mere aesthetics trump this fundamental principle – pretty shots are meaningless, and very frequently utterly counter-productive, if they are not subservient to the engagement principle.) Note that I am absolutely not saying that engagement is good and disengagement is bad – both are essential, and to some degree you can’t have one without the other. But that’s a discussion for another time. (Also I should point out that of course actors turn their heads, which means the the eyeline is not fixed by the camera alone, but let’s not over-complicate for now, but merely note that the actor can shift the level of engagement within the shot and this can be a very powerful factor. If you really want complication, remember that the camera too can change its position …)
What I think this discussion of the eyeline angle and engagement shows us is that the camera puts us the viewer in the scene, not just physically but psychologically. Sticking with our single for a moment, it’s obvious that both the choice of lens and the distance of the camera from the subject are going to be factors that we will want to manipulate to enhance or reduce engagement. A lens and camera position that excludes the environment and isolates the actor will create greater engagement than a wider lens that allows us to be aware of what’s happening around the character. It’s a well-worn trope to use a long lens and shallow focus in order to put us inside the character’s thoughts (which usually also involves an eyeline that is close to the lens). Incidentally I don’t think we experience the actual distance of the camera in this instance (which will often be quite considerable) – what we feel is the sensation of being inside the character’s personal space and it’s this psychological “distance” that we feel most strongly, not the geometric distance. (There is the “voyeur factor” that a long lens can introduce sometimes, but again let’s not over-complicate.)
So what does all that mean for our reverse shot discussion? I think the important point is that we have established that our engagement is predicated on a sensation of being physically present in the space of the scene. We have also seen that the canny film-maker knowingly varies the “distance” we have from the actors/action, this distance being both a physical and psychological thing and not necessarily dependent on physical geometry.
So I come back to my original contention that in essence we perceive the shot/reverse shot method to conform to the “tennis match” model. In other words, it stems from the natural sensation of standing/sitting between two people and looking from one to the other as they interact, with a neurologically-attested ellipsis for the head movement that relocates our gaze. There is nothing odd or unnatural about this – we know exactly what it feels like to stand/sit between two people who are interacting with each other but not with us, and we know exactly how we redirect our attention, depending on what we want to hear and/or see (not always the same thing).
Now let’s think about this in terms of the eyeline/engagement factor. We can go from both actors looking right down the lens (very rare but not unheard of – check out Tokyo Story and be amazed!), all the way round to behind either of the actor’s heads. Clearly this is a continuum. There is no cut-off point at which the single of actor A looking straight down the lens ceases to be a single and becomes a reverse shot. Which leads us to the slightly counter-intuitive realisation that a reverse shot is just a (developed) single of actor A … But what it also shows is that there isn’t a definitive set-up for a reverse shot. I would suggest that as film language has evolved, we have become used to how the continuum stretches what it would be physically possible for us to see as an observer within the actual space. As long as we stay on the right side of the eyeline, we accept that it’s possible to have a viewpoint anywhere on the arc between the two actors – because if we were quick enough on our feet or our necks were long and supple enough, we could probably just about get there physically in time to redirect our gaze.
I just don’t think it’s psychologically plausible that we would accept two discrete and unrelated viewpoints as being possible, as you seem to be suggesting. I think you’d have to do a lot of explaining as to how that might have come about if it were true.
The point about this principle being a continuum is that again the knowing film-maker is going to adapt the degree of engagement to achieve specific results at specific moments. Tony Zhou’s fascinating video essay on the Coens’ use of reverse shots illustrates this nicely. There is a point that he doesn’t mention which I think is interesting, and that’s how the camera placement is such that it disengages us entirely from actor B (the off camera actor) and puts us in the personal space of actor A. I think part of the reason for this is that the Coens’ characters typically “talk past each other” rather than to each other, something that all the best dialogue achieves to some degree. The characters are shown as being “disengaged” from each other – Barton Fink is a magnificent example of this but all the films show it to a greater or lesser degree. They are isolated in their own worlds of desire, ambition, delusion, longing, etc., and we are the only ones who can really hear what they are saying. And we hear it because of where the Coens have physically located us within the space. (Actor B just “doesn’t get it” the way we get it.)
What of the opposite of the Coens’ method here, namely the over the shoulder reverse? Interestingly, in the light of what we have discussed, an over the shoulder in many ways maximises engagement because we are moving around to a point where actor A’s eyeline is closest to the lens. However, because of the principle of “distance”, the fact that actor B’s shoulder is part of the shot makes us much more aware of B’s presence in the scene, so our engagement with actor A is subtly different. We are now “siding” with actor B in our view of actor A. Again, it’s important to recognise how significant is our perception of our own physical presence within the space. Literally and metaphorically we are “standing shoulder to shoulder” with actor B, we are “on his/her side”. A clever film-makers will use this for the psychological value that is carries with it – sadly, you don’t see that happening too often and again the choice is often banally aesthetic rather than freighted with intention.
So it may be that we are not disagreeing as much as all that, but I do think it’s very important to stress the psychology of film language as against the mere geometry of it. Yes, the film-maker can use staging and editing effects that are actively disruptive of our engagement but it’s best if this is done knowingly – it’s even a legitimate tactic to provocatively draw attention to the filmic artifice, but again I would stress that disengagement itself is a sliding scale and we can be acutely conscious of it, or only just barely perceive it or anywhere in between. It’s all good if you now what you’re doing. If the reverse shot were as disruptive as you seem to be claiming, I’m pretty sure we would feel it – instead of which, most of the time we are barely aware at all that a cut has taken place because in our brain all we’ve done is turn our head. Yes, of course, it can be used disruptively for creative purposes (and often is by accident because the film-maker isn’t actually in control of what s/he is doing), but it’s not fundamentally unnatural – indeed the reverse. As it were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R65wTHVUCGk
Simon Ubsdell
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I just don’t think it’s psychologically plausible that we would accept two discrete and unrelated viewpoints as being possible, as you seem to be suggesting. I think you’d have to do a lot of explaining as to how that might have come about if it were true.
“Perhaps, Simon, it’s a simple as the human need to decode everything we experience and seek meaning in even things that aren’t perfectly in line with our experience.
If it’s not directly our experience, but close to something we’ve experienced, most people can make the leap.
In fact, one hallmark of dumbed down creativity to my thinking might be trying to OVER CLUE the viewer to subtleties. It’s what causes too many movies to believe, for example, that the bad guy must be TOO nuanced, they must be thoroughly bad or the audience might not “get it.”
On a totally different track, I see this in my voiceover work constantly. I come at a line in a script “flat” without trying to help the listener “at all” to derive meaning via emphasis or pacing. And then I’ll give it another reading looking to provide subtle emphasis and direct the listener to what I hope is increased comprehension.
Usually, the “neutral” read turns out to communicate MUCH more clearly and cleanly, precisely because it allows the listener to focus on what elements of the presentation are the most meaningful to them.
Basically, it’s the “less is more” concept.
It’s fun to look at all these options in our forum discussions. Like a cook learning the nature of spices and mixture ratios in order to build a singular, and particular flavor profile. But it’s often true that the most satisfying dish is the one where the cook gets out of the way of whatever food he or she is preparing – and lets it simply be what is is.
Basically acknowledging that not all peanut butter sandwiches NEED jelly to be delicious. And if jelly is desired, knowing that some jelly’s typically work better than others.
I’m still going to be TOTALLY engaged in the character with their back turned, if the director establishes a reason for me to be so engaged. And even if he or she doesn’t – the fact that the character is simply in the frame, may be enough to cause large swaths of the audience to wonder why – and thus be engaged.
To me, the biggest threat to good work might be to try to make the audience always see things the way I’ve decided they must. Because then I’m not engaging them on their terms, but requiring them to engage on mine.
My thinking anyway.
It’s a fun discussion.
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