Hulu.com has created an ingenious 15-episode series called, “The
Story of Film,” and I believe we can
learn a great deal about our craft by watching it. The first two episodes
reveal how filmmakers stumbled upon film techniques we now take for granted—the
close-up, the flashback, depth perspective, etc.—and it’s not difficult to see
how we can use the same techniques on paper.
Take the cut shot, for example. The earliest narrative films portrayed
each scene from a single point of view, as an audience would see a stage play,
but filmmakers soon realized this medium gave them the ability to switch or “cut”
instantly from one point of view to another and back again.
An early example
was the 1903 film, “A Day in the Life of a Fireman.” It showed a firetruck
roaring up to a house afire, the firemen connecting hoses and setting up ladders,
then one fireman smashing out a window on the second floor. Moments later, a
fire ax breaks through another window on the second floor, the ground crew
moves his ladder to that window, and the fireman emerges with an
unconscious woman draped over his shoulder. Had this movie followed the stage
convention of keeping the audience in the same position with the same point of
view, that’s all we would have seen. Instead, the director used a series of
cuts to tell the story in sequence:
* A fire truck roars up to a house afire.
* Cut to a woman’s bedroom filled with smoke. The woman
struggles to her feet, then falls back on her bed, overcome with smoke.
* Cut to the exterior, where one fireman smashes out
a window on the second floor.
* Cut to another smoke-filled bedroom, where the
fireman breaks through its window and looks around.
* Cut to the woman’s bedroom, where the fireman
enters from the right and finds the victim unconscious. He tears down the
window drapes and smashes out its window.
* Cut to the exterior, where the fireman’s ax breaks
through a second window and his ground crew repositions his ladder there.
* Cut to the woman’s bedroom, where the fireman
hoists the victim onto his shoulder and exits the window.
* Cut to the exterior, where the fireman clambers
down the ladder with the woman over his shoulder.
* Cut to the woman’s bedroom, where the smoke sudden
thickens and bursts into flame. They’ve escaped just in time!
* Cut to the exterior, where the fireman lays the
unconscious woman on the grass, shakes her, pours water on her face, and she
revives. (What do you expect? It’s 1905. They didn’t know CPR back then.)
Every cut shot is equivalent to the word then: “He
did this, then he did that, then he did that,” and so on. A movie
audience now accepts this storytelling technique, and virtually every movie made
since 1905 has used it.
Here’s another one. A film shows a grocery wagon driver pull
up in front of an apartment building, where the deliveryman goes in with a big
basket of food.
* Cut to an interior shot, where he begins climbing
the first flight of stairs.
* Cut to the exterior, where his horse eyes an open
sack of feed leaning against the building. The horse draws the cart onto the
sidewalk and begins to eat.
* Cut to the interior, where the delivery man climbs
another flight of stairs.
* Cut to the exterior, where the horse really chows
down on the open feed sack.
* Cut to the interior, where the delivery man climbs
another flight of stairs.
* Cut to the exterior, where the ravenous horse drags
his wagon over the curb, tipping it and spilling several bottles of milk onto
the sidewalk.
And so on. In this case, every cut shot is equivalent to the
word meanwhile. It’s a far more effective way of telling the story than
simply showing a lengthy take of the delivery man climbing many flights of
stairs, then showing another lengthy take of the hungry horse and the ruined
groceries.
One more. In D.W. Griffith’s 3-hour 1916 epic film, Intolerance,
he shows how human prejudice has led to the persecution and death of heroic
figures throughout history. He does it with a series of cut shots. He shows how
worshipers of two Babylonian gods slaughtered one another, then cuts to Jesus
performing miracles with jealous Jewish leaders conspiring against him, then
cuts to persecuted Protestants during the Reformation, etc.
In this case, each cut shot is equivalent to the word, likewise. By juxtaposing these scenes
from different periods of history that illustrate the same human tendency to be
intolerant of other people, Griffith makes his point. We can do the same,
especially in an epic story that spans several generations of the same family.
Such cinematic techniques are powerful ways to convey a
message. Thanks to documentaries like “The Story of Film,” we can see how they
work and apply them to our own storytelling.
