Moving Landscapes: Travelling Shots of Location in Narrative Film

John Duncan Edmond

BA (First Class Honours) in Communication and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland, 2008

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2015 School of Communication and Arts

1 Abstract The history of mechanised travel parallels the history of film, dating back to the popularity of “phantom rides”—panoramas filmed from rapidly moving trains—in early cinema. The discourse of Modernity is shaped by how the twinned technologies of cinema and vehicular transportation present a collapse of space. This thesis examines the history of this technological and spatial intersection through the investigation of the “travelling shot,” created by affixing a camera to a vehicle and filming what passes. Examination of the travelling shot has thus far been piecemeal. The aforementioned phantom rides have been studied as part of the “Cinema of Attractions” (Gunning; Gaudreault), which posited that early cinema prioritised demonstration over storytelling: the phantom ride is film demonstrating its ability to document a train demonstrating movement. Later study is found in the scattered textual analysis of films and genres with salient travelling shots.

This thesis contributes to the field by providing an overview of the travelling shot. Film and mechanised transport’s distinct presentation of space has not been studied in a sustained manner since the emergence of the travelling shot in early, pre-narrative cinema, hence the connections among vehicle movement and camera movement within narrative cinema remain poorly understood. This thesis corrects this by detailing how the initial meaning of the travelling shot has been altered by the everyday experience of travel and manipulated through film form. The first part of the thesis provides a survey of the travelling shot: from Panorama du Grand Canal pris d’un bateau (Promio 1896), the first example of a moving camera, to the CGI-enhanced impossible travelling shots of contemporary blockbusters such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009). The cognitive theories of narratologist David Bordwell are used with Martin Lefebvre’s consideration of landscape in film to develop a theory how audiences have developed a culturally acquired schema for associating the travelling shot with landscape appreciation, contemplation and point of view.

This thesis identifies two broad strands to the practice of the travelling shot, one derived from the concept of a Cinema of Attractions, the other derived from Charles Musser’s complementary concept of a Cinema of Contemplation. Using textual analysis, the second part of this thesis examines how travelling shots are a prerequisite of “intensified continuity” (Bordwell), demonstrate technological world-building in blockbusters, and encourage a contemplative regarding of the world in art films that acknowledge the travelling shot’s 2 distinct relationship with the real world. These two strands are drawn together through an analysis of the Road Movie genre, which sees world-building narrative context and culturally accrued expectations of the travelling shot re-configure the collapse of space originally enacted by both cinema and vehicle transport. Because the thesis develops an inclusive theory it examines films from a variety of filmmakers including: John Ford, Walter Hill, Abbas Kiarostami, Maurice Pialat, Hiroshi Shimizu and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

This thesis argues that while some approaches to filmmaking such as blockbusters have continued the modern trend towards the collapse of space and globalisation, others such as art films and road movies have used moving landscapes and the context of narrative to emphasise duration and contemplation and to reverse modernity’s collapse of space through evoking the localised particularities of regions.

By building on the foundational work of Gunning and Musser to critically examine how filmmakers have adapted their use of travelling shots to accommodate initial meaning, prior meaning, the rise of narrative and the various trajectories of technology, this thesis examines how meaning shapes form. I question how the travelling shot’s connections to landscapes and to vehicles through the history of film invites contemplation and offers the pleasures of spectacle to the film audience in addition to giving rise to particular genres and modes of filmmaking. The overview offered by this thesis demonstrates the importance of artistic discourse in understanding the poetics of technology and space.

3 Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.

4 Publications during candidature

Edmond, John. “Moving Landscapes: Films, Vehicles and the Travelling Shot”. Studies in Australasian Cinema. 5.2 (2011): 131-143.

Edmond, John. “Vehicle Anachronism and the Consolation of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West”. Peephole 2 (2013)

Publications included in this thesis

Edmond, John. “Moving Landscapes: Films, Vehicles and the Travelling Shot”. Studies in Australasian Cinema. 5.2 (2011): 131-143. --- Partially incorporated in chapters 1 and 2.

5 Contributions by others to the thesis No contributions by others.

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree None.

6 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge my long-suffering (and superb) supervisors, Jane Stadler and Frances Bonner.

I would like to acknowledge my family for being my family. X, Chris, David, Maura and Wendy Edmond.

And I would like to acknowledge those who, without obligation, have indulged me in thesis conversation and in response offered critical insight, research assistance or proof-reading: Lisa Bode, Andrea Fox, Greg Hainge, Samantha Lindop, Elliot Logan, Caroline McKinnon, Whitney Monaghan, Kate O’Connor, David Richard, Matthew Sini, Alison Taylor, Kate Warner, Kim Wilkins, and Danni Zuvela.

Thank you all.

7

Keywords travelling shot, landscape, space, narrative, spectacle, contemplation, cinema of attractions, phantom rides, point of view, travel

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC) ANZSRC code: 190201, Cinema Studies, 80% ANZSRC code: 200212, Screen and Media Culture, 20%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification FoR code: 1902, Film, Television and Digital Media, 80% FoR code: 2002, Cultural Studies, 20%

8 Table of Contents Title ...... 1 Abstract ...... 2 Preliminary Pages ...... 4 Table of Contents ...... 9 List of Illustrations ...... 11 Introduction ...... 13 Disinterring Attention: The Perceptual Regimes of Modernity and Narrative ...... 15 Cognitivism and Perceptual Engagement ...... 19 Chapter Outline ...... 21 Chapter One. Moving Landscapes: Films, Vehicles, and the Travelling Shot .... 26 Disentangling Lines of Movement: The Difference Between Tracking and Travelling Shots ...... 28 Approaching Narrative Films ...... 30 Introducing Early Silent Cinema ...... 31 Unexpected Space: Travelling Shots as Cinematic Attractions ...... 33 Unseen Energy: Phantom Rides for Phantoms ...... 38 The Machine on the Road: Films, Vehicles, and Subjectivity ...... 45 Conclusion ...... 51 Chapter Two. The Integration of Travelling Shots into Contemporary Hollywood Filmmaking Practice ...... 53 A Bevelled Cinema ...... 55 Micro-Travelling Shots as a Counterbalance to Reduced Visual Legibility and Average Shot Length ...... 57 Acknowledging Spectacle: Travelling Shots and Narrative ...... 60 Travelling Shots and the Relationship Between Auteurs, Industry, and World Building in Modern Hollywood Filmmaking ...... 67 The Fantasy of Blockbusters ...... 73 Conclusion ...... 76 Chapter Three. Windscreen as Cinéscreen: The Travelling Shot and Contemplative Cinema ...... 78 Regarding Contemplation and Slow Cinema ...... 79 An Overview of the Obvious Advantages that Travelling Shots Hold for Contemplative Cinema ...... 81 The Pedagogic Modernity of Abbas Kiarostami ...... 84 Hiroshi Shimizu ...... 98 Shimizu and Compound Point of View ...... 101 Conclusion ...... 105

9 Chapter Four. Driving Memoirs: The Road Movie Genre Considered as a Series of Tactics for Depicting Landscape and Contemplation ...... 107 An Incoherent Genre ...... 109 Digression as Experience ...... 113 Cars and Cars ...... 117 Motivating Contemplation and Landscape ...... 119 Digression as Thought ...... 120 Motorways and the Lure of Landscape ...... 124 Conclusion ...... 131 Conclusion ...... 133 Taxi Driver and the Contaminated Mind ...... 133 Structuring Information: Holy Motors, Cosmopolis, and the Saliency of Thought ...... 136 Organising Information ...... 141 Notes for Future Research ...... 144

Bibliography ...... 148 Filmography ...... 165 Appendix ...... 173

10

List of Illustrations

Chapter One

1. Gondola Down the Grand Canal (Promio 1896) 2. Namo Village, Panorama Taken From a Rickshaw (Veyre 1900) 3. Through the Haverstraw Tunnel (Bitzer 1897) 4-12. Psycho (Van Sant 2002) 13-18. Shooter (Fuqua 2007) 19-24. Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) 25-30. The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) 31-40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 41-45. Faust (Murnau 1926) 46-58. Liliom (Lang 1934) 59-68. This Property is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 69. The Fast and the Furious (Cohen 2001) 70-72. You, the Living (Andersson 2007) 73-80. A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) 81. Pola X (Carax 1999)

Chapter Two

1-7. The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013) 8-14. The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) 15-16. As Seen Through a Telescope (Smith 1901) 17-24. Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) 25-33. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001)

Chapter Three

1 Life and Nothing More… (Kiarostami 1991) 2. Blissfully Yours (Weerasethakul 2002) 3. Late Spring (Ozu 1949) 4. What Did the Lady Forget (Ozu 1937) 5-10. Life and Nothing More… (Kiarostami 1991) 11-28. Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 29-31. The Overlanders (Watts 1946) 32. Dog Days (Seidl 2001)

11 Chapter Four

1-4. Thelma & Louise (Scott 1991) 5-8. Cars (Lasseter 2006) 9-10. Vanishing Point (Sarafian 1971) 11. Voyage to Italy (Rossellini 1954) 12. Locke (Knight 2013) 12-16. Radio On (Petit 1979) 17-18. The Brown Bunny (Gallo 2003) 19-21. Trafic (Tati 1971) 22. Road Games (Franklin 1981)

Conclusion

1-4. Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976) 5-11. Holy Motors (Carax 2012) 12-15. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg 2012) 16. Suspense (Smalley and Weber 1913) 17. Déjà Vu (Scott 2006) 18-19. The Car (Silverstein 1977)

12

Introduction

“If people need to object to something (and film buffs always do), I’d point to what appears to be a systematic use of digital technology to stabilize the image, which may look better to modern eyes but eliminates the eccentricities of filming with a hand-cranked camera mounted on a shaky wooden tripod.”

– Dave Kehr (n.p.)

“Moving Landscapes” critically evaluates the cinematic history and function of the ‘travelling shot.’ The label ‘travelling shot’ here refers to a particular form of movie shot that has been filmed from the perspective of a moving vehicle. This thesis both categorises and explains the pervasiveness and function of the shot within cinematic history. This research focuses on the shot’s seemingly contradictory evocation of excitement and contemplation. The types of travelling shots that this thesis will focus on include, but are not limited to, those filmed from trains, automobiles and helicopters, irrespective of whether the vehicle itself is visible on screen. While travelling shots have been present since Panorama du grand Canal pris d’un bateau/Gondola Down the Grand Canal (Promio 1896), it is only within recent decades, whether as virtuoso helicopter establishing shots or extended contemplative car vistas, that the salient use of travelling shots has become common in narrative film. The focus of this thesis is primarily on the integration of the travelling shot into narrative filmmaking, from its early micro-genre incarnation as the “phantom ride,” which was comprised solely of travelling shots (typically the view afforded by a train’s cow-catcher as it passed through an eye-catching location) in silent cinema, to a prominent formal device within both Hollywood and art cinemas. I analyse the significance of the travelling shot by tracking the shot’s transition to narrative and its contemporary use. In addition, drawing on a cognitivist approach to film, the thesis explores how the history of these shots shapes meaning, and how they inform the spectator’s experience of cinema. The pre-existing scholarly literature on travelling shots incorporates a variety of approaches and is unevenly distributed. Typically analysis arises when the use of the shot is so salient that discussion is unavoidable. This is most apparent in the analysis of early cinema, as a phantom ride solely comprised of a travelling shot will naturally draw attention to the appeal of the travelling shot. This has led to a deficit of analysis where the use of the travelling shot is less obtrusive. Accordingly, Moving Landscape’s introductory literature review works to establish the conceptual framework I bring to this thesis. New literature is reviewed as analysis demands. The technological and socioeconomic context for the birth of the travelling shot is ‘modernity.’ Developed by German social critics Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg Simmel’s evaluation of the public discourse of their time (Benjamin “Work of Art” 224, Kracauer 93, Simmel 419-23, Singer “Modernity, Hyperstimulus” 73-4), the concept of modernity describes a mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century spatial, temporal and perceptual break effected by mechanical advance and social re-organisation. These critics’

13 near-contemporary appraisal of modernity became, in the late twentieth-century, a critical, pan-theoretical node to be expanded upon by numerous scholars in many areas. In regards to theorising modernity and movement these include such exemplary works as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1987), Lynne Kirby’s Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Cinema (1997), and Tom Gunning’s “The Whole World Within Reach: Travel Images Without Borders” (2006). The travelling shot is both the offspring of modernity’s collapse of space and, as I will argue, a modern form of landscape that can be understood within the parameters of Charles Musser’s concept of a “cinema of contemplation.” The travelling shot, in this context, as simultaneous landscape and demonstration of technologically induced collapse of space, exists as a conceptual node. It comprises one of the most iconic signifiers of modernity and rupture, but also of contemplative continuity. While the work of Kirby, Gunning and Musser has provided a solid basis for understanding the function and attraction of rail shots, this is not the case for the succession of travelling shots that followed, whether car, helicopter, or drone mounted. The private car is now the dominant provider of day-to-day travel, and the windscreen-framed gaze from a car has now replaced the panoramic gaze from a train. Indeed many academics treat early cinema as a metaphor rather than part of a continuum (Verhoeff, Mobile Screens; King, “Ride- Films;” Lowenstein). The manner in which writers leap from early cinema to contemporary issues, bypassing the intervening time, discrete technological changes and the drift of practice, is in its own way a statement about spatial and temporal collapse. As Miriam Hansen observes, in discussing Kracauer’s focus on later modernity and the twentieth century, there is “something symptomatic in the ease with which so many studies seem to speak from one fin-de-siècle to another” (“America, Paris, the Alps” 363). Scattered works address various aspects of travelling shots after early cinema: Edward Dimenberg’s work on ‘50s car culture, cinema, and the rise of the motorway; Tim Corrigan regarding ‘70s car culture and the road movie genre; and Mike Jones’ discussion of virtual camera movement. Nonetheless, there is no work that addresses the travelling shot as a whole; there is no published research that tracks the shot from its origins, considers its adherence to and divergence from previous social and technological practice, and acknowledges its aggregate nature. As much as it is possible, this is the purpose of this thesis. In the following chapters I seek to provide an extended overview of the unique, paradoxical qualities of the travelling shot. My documentation of the development of the travelling shot is also designed to contribute to a broader understanding of how the handling of particular types of shots reflects on both the development of new technology, and alignment to old practices to generate meaning. My contribution to the study of space and temporality in film will comprise four interrelated aspects. Firstly, “Moving Landscapes” provides an outline of the historical lineage of the travelling shot in relation to filmmaking and technological trends. Secondly, my work explores the shot’s relationship to point of view (in terms of how vehicle traces left from the shot’s creation can cue perspective and clarify conceptual framing of a diegesis). 14 Thirdly, this thesis studies the travelling shot’s relationship to space (whether collapsing space as per the concept of modernity, or expanding it through the construction of new worlds or re-expansion of space bypassed by modernity). As such, “Moving Landscapes” examines the travelling shot’s capacity to contrast various forms of space and their associated temporality and worldviews. Lastly, I analyse films that singularly exploit the travelling shot’s form and associated meaning. The phrase “travelling shot” is the primary label for the shot under investigation throughout this thesis. Within the confines of this thesis, “travelling shot” refers to shots filmed from a vehicle mount (a definition that will be complicated later on). This definition goes against typical critical use: “travelling shot,” like “tracking shot” is often used to label any variety of mobile shot – whether they were created through the use of vehicles, computer-generated imagery, Steadicam or a dolly following the contours of a track. This thesis could have kept things clean by referring to the shots analysed by this thesis as “vehicle shots.” However, this thesis uses the term “travelling shot” for three reasons. It draws attention to the geographically ranging movement of the shot and the intersection this form of movement has with the collapse of space and power. It also draws attention to the fact that travelling shots eventually extend past being purely vehicle shots, once they are modified or emulated and exaggerated. Furthermore, the term “travelling shot” still maintains the shot’s porous relationship with the category of “tracking shot.” The sharp distinction between tracking and travelling shot is an important conceptual starting point, but examining how these two aspects intersect, and the implications of this, are also part of this thesis’s concern. In comparison, I use the term “tracking shot” to refer specifically to shots created by mounting the camera on a dolly or rig that moves along tracks. Throughout this thesis I will also use other labels to describe travelling shots; for instance, I will occasionally refer to a train-mounted travelling shot as a “train shot” or a helicopter-mounted travelling shot as a “helicopter shot.” I also follow established practice and use the label “phantom ride” to refer to travelling shots that comprise an entire film. In the remainder of this introduction, I summarise prior theorisation regarding modernity and filmmaking that I draw from throughout this thesis and I indicate how I will explore, evaluate and expand this field of knowledge. The following sections outline prior conceptions of modernity and the collapse of space, various proposed models of the early cinema of modernity, previous literature on and the role of travelling shot in unifying these cinemas, and an outline of the chapters and how they, through differing means and subject, reveal how travelling shots, through their integration into narrative and the context of history, make meaning.

Disinterring Attention: The Perceptual Regimes of Modernity and Narrative

Perception is the crux of modernity. As Ben Singer observes, Benjamin, Kracauer and Simmel held a “neurological conception of modernity” (“Modernity, Hyperstimulus” 72), a conception that, though “an offshoot of the socioeconomic conception of modernity … stressed the ways in which these changes transformed the texture of experience” 15 (“Modernity, Hyperstimulus” 72). Accordingly, for Benjamin, “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence” (“Work of Art” 224). Whether in terms of absorption, proximity, reproduction or information, their writing seeks to describe how we engage with the world. For instance, Benjamin encountered metonymic anecdotal evidence of modernity’s perceptual shift, perception made manifest, in a variety of places — from the arcades of Paris and the poetry of Baudelaire to Henri Bergson’s interlinking of time and thought in ‘duree’ — but, most pertinently, in film. Here, the discombobulating fragmentation of modern city life, the shock of modernity and the stimuli of industrialisation, was stylistically reflected in the manipulation of time and space as manifested in film editing. “In a film,” Benjamin writes, “perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle” (Benjamin “Motifs in Baudelaire” 177). This diagnosis of the neurology of modernity was part of a conversation: Benjamin, Kracauer and Simmel’s interest in stimuli came from their wish “to reveal the dialectical flip side of the processes of modernity” as “exemplified by such practices as the new factory system, the establishment of worldwide standard time and Taylorism” (Gunning “Modernity and Cinema” 309). The trio addressed the relationship between the alienating regimentation of life required for the modern industrial city and the chaos and noise of life being fitted to such demands. Furthermore, modernity’s “collapse of space” and its formation of a new mode of perception exemplifies this dialectic. As Gunning observes, “Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s account of the experience of the railway as an emblem of modernity stresses precisely the interaction of these two aspects” (“Modernity and Cinema” 310). For Schivelbusch, the idea that the speed of trains reduced the sense of distance between points is mundane (53-55). Instead the collapse of space was equally the quantisation of space. Here space and time formed lines on a grid; the appearance of rail was not a break but a clarifying moment along a continuum. Prior to the coming of rail, society had come to prepare for its existence. Originally travel reflected our environments, with transport tracing out the contours of hills and the flow of rivers and time was only approximately consistent with other areas. Gradually travel become abstracted from its environment, with routes increasingly straightened and kept clear from their immediate natural surrounds to avoid disruption, and time synchronised across regions to ensure that the correct scheduling of timetables could proceed (Schivelbusch 7-12, 20-23). Rail, an aggregate of iron and society, merely concluded this process with its indefatigable nature further removing us from our environment, with the consistent click of tracks replacing the erratic energy of a horse pushed to its limits (Schivelbusch 8-12). And yet, this abstracted insulation from stimuli was “haunted by a degree of trauma unimagined up to that time” (Gunning “Modernity and Cinema” 310) by the shift of minor accidents and discomfort to the concentrated agony and disruption of a train accident. This binary encapsulates the question of attentiveness, alienation and how one becomes aware of the world which Benjamin, Kracauer and Simmel questioned. Schivelbusch, drawing on Benjamin, sees this totalising abstraction, as a “stimuli shield”, a means of insulating passengers from the trauma of industrialised transport (159-70)

16 and heralding the “panoramic vision”, an alienated vision (164) akin to a returning soldier’s thousand-yard stare, which discouraged the presence of reality for an objectifying, blasé gaze. It is here, as phantom ride, that the travelling shot first appears as a theoretical node. While many devices and practices of modernity altered perception, as Hansen argues, “the cinema was not just one amongst a number of perceptual technologies, nor even the culmination of a particular logic of the gaze; it was … the single most expansive discursive horizon in which the effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or denied, transmuted or negotiated” (“America, Paris, the Alps” 365). The travelling shot speaks to modernity and the collapse of space, and the travelling shot speaks to filmmaking and the landscape. As a document of technological practice, the travelling shot as phantom ride represented the collapse of space. Whereas the sublime landscape, painting or geography revealed the insignificance of humanity, humanity overwhelmed by the elements, the phantom ride represented the coming of modern space. As Benjamin observed, “The desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly . . . is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction” (“Work of Art” 225). Rail and cinema, twinned by the track, represent modernity’s crushing of space: the train transported people to exotic locales and film brought the depictions of these lands back to waiting audiences (Griffiths “’World We Show’” 284-5, Schivelbusch 33). Accordingly, the phantom ride acted as a document of modern technology’s control over space. The absence of narrative in phantom ride films draws attention to this demonstrative documentation. Gunning’s concept of a “cinema of attractions” helps us understand the popularity of phantom rides. As Gunning argues, the difference between early filmmakers and later narrative filmmakers is not a question of technique but of expectation (Gunning “Cinema of Attraction” 66-7). Rather than providing narratives, early films demonstrated the qualities of film and its capacity to allow the filmmaker and subject of the film to address an audience. For André Gaudreault, this emphasis on presentation can be understood as “monstration” (to show) rather than narration (“Narration and Monstration” 29, 30). The differing filmmaking priorities at play in the “cinema of attractions” are apparent in both the form and content of these short films. In addition to showing off film’s capabilities, early cinema’s subject matter revelled in displays of exotic locales, stunts, and various new technologies of the modern era (Gunning “Cinema of Attraction” 66-7, Griffiths “World We Show” 282). As both Gunning and Kirby note, early travelling shots provided a two-fold demonstration of technological prowess: phantom rides documented both a vehicle’s ability to move quickly through space, and film’s ability to document this movement (Gunning “Whole World” 37, Gunning “Cinema of Attraction” 66-7, Kirby Parallel Tracks 1-8). For instance, the exemplary phantom ride Through the Haverstraw Tunnel (Bitzer 1897) was likened to “unseen energy swallowing space” (Gunning “Aesthetic of Astonishment” 126). As a cinematic landscape the phantom ride can be said to present the sublime; as a technological artefact it represents the antithesis of the sublime. Discussions about the picturesque and the sublime are discussions of assimilation and containment. Picturesque 17 landscape paintings both showcase content matter that demonstrates humanity’s control and safety on the land, farmland, churches, and parks (whether natural or created); and through formal choices, unassuming colours, balanced compositions, and a sense of scale proportionate to the human figure. The Burkean-Kantian understanding of ‘sublime’ used in this thesis describes its opposite, the stuff that is beyond human comprehension and scale, whether religious, environmental or technological, and that by provoking awe, raises the question of representation itself1. Accordingly, sublime art attempts to evoke this through the depiction of form or content that mocked human comprehension — either using scale or subject matter that mocked human pretensions to prowess, mountains, storms, and defeated ruins, or form that mocked humans’ ability to perceive, diffused shattered visuals, off-centre compositions, or mingling of both sublime form and content2. These tendencies also apply to film and travelling shots. In addition to being part of the cinema of attractions tradition, the phantom ride was also part of a 19th century conversation about panoramas, a desire to show everything (pan) that can be seen, which is visible (horama). This was exemplified by the then vogue for monumental in-the-round landscapes in which the spectator gazed out from the centre—able to choose what they wanted to see, but also totally surrounded. Accordingly, the history of landscape images leading up to the travelling shots was a history of moving away from the tightly composed pictorial scapes to images that avoided the idea of the frame through borderless, panoramas (these borderless panoramas were either immersive static panoramas that surrounded the viewer or moving panoramas in which the painted canvas passed through a frame) (Gunning “Whole World” 34). As a landscape, a travelling shot is a photographic panorama removed from its three-dimensional origins and then unravelled by reel. However, while Gunning sees moving panoramas as doing away with the frame, one could equally argue the reverse with the continual unveiling and covering of the screen’s content can foreground how disclosure is framed. Whereas Gunning’s concept of a “cinema of attractions” understands film and Modernity as an exciting break with tradition, Charles Musser sees early cinema, at least in part, as a continuation of artistic traditions, a “cinema of contemplation”. Musser explores how more

1 The sublime is a complicated concept; Philip Shaw’s The Sublime provides a lucid overview of the topic. However, the salient omission from this thesis’s overview of the sublime is Fredric’s Jameson’s update of the sublime in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. For Jameson, the subjective response of the sublime remains the same. We still feel overwhelming awe regarding a given content; the overwhelming aspect still provokes the question of representation (33-4). However, instead of nature evoking this awe, Jameson identifies contemporary, multinational (or late) capitalism as also evoking a sublime awe (34). For Jameson, this postmodern sublime can be suggested by computers and satellites: “our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism” (34). Though this thesis does not dispute Jameson’s premise, this thesis examines how modernity removed much of nature’s overwhelming aspect by making it more traversable and quantifiable. When icons of postmodernity are examined (the drone, the satellite), they are examined from a different perspective than Jameson’s. For example: from the perspective of a human being, a satellite may seem to suggest the sublimeness of late capitalism; however, from the perspective of the satellite, it is still diminishing time and space.

2 An expansion on the role of sublime form can be found in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard demarcates between modernist and post-modernist representations of the sublime using an extended version of the “show, don’t tell” aphorism (80). For Lyotard, modernist artworks “tell” the sublime by drawing on well-established forms (or language, signs or rules) to indicate the unrepresentable (80-1). Conversely, postmodernist artworks “show” the sublime by not using establish forms, the rules themselves are (at the time) unrepresentable and thus sublime (81). This is of course, as Lyotard notes himself, a self-immolating approach: once the rules are discovered a work shifts from postmodern to modern – hence Lyotard’s guideline, “ A work can become modern only if it first postmodern” (79). Whether or not one agrees with Lyotard’s defining of modern and postmodern, this distinction is a useful way of thinking through ways in which the sublime can be represented.

18 rarefied film presenters, clubs, and societies did not run a stream of astonishing shorts, rather they gave the audience a chance to catch their breath, to become absorbed, by letting the brief films loop continuously (“A Cinema of Contemplation” 168-9). This repetitive style of presentation helped audiences get used to the film experience and explore how the medium of film differed from previous media (Musser “Cinema of Contemplation” 162). Here audience members were able to watch films like Rough Sea at Dover (Acres 1895), Waterfall in the Catskills (Heise 1897), or Surf at Long Branch (Heise 1896) as loops. Through this repeated exposure, they came to discern and then appreciate the difference between the landscape paintings of Turner or the Hudson River School and film’s own equivalent landscapes, marvelling at how film could capture the motion of waves or shifting leaves (Musser “Cinema of Contemplation” 167, 171). Observed within the tradition of contemplation, in which the travelling shot is perceived as a great landscape, it becomes possible to think of the travelling shot not as an icon of collapsed space but of the overwhelming sublimity of space.

Cognitivism and Perceptual Engagement

The schism of vision exemplified by Gunning and Musser’s delineation regarding the stimulating cinema of attraction and the calm cinema of contemplation is the reason why David Bordwell, a narratologist whose work is informed by cognitive-psychology, refutes the “modernity thesis” (History of Film Style 143). As I discuss in more detail in Chapter One and throughout the thesis, Bordwell argues that human perception is shaped by culturally accrued schema.3 For Bordwell, it is highly unlikely that human perception abruptly deviated from the mental and physical mechanisms developed over millions of years of evolution (History of Film Style 142). At most, Bordwell argues, we can ascribe this to learnt habit and skills derived from the new environment of the industrialised city, but, even this is contradicted by the widespread comprehension of cinematic style as evidenced by the equal success of movies within pre-industrial towns (History of Film Style (142-44). Instead, cinematic comprehension is a learnt skill, specific to comprehending film and its practice, which is why film can be readily understood throughout a spatially, socially, and technologically dispersed audience (History of Film Style 142-43). Accordingly, the form of film, the phantom ride, or travelling shot cannot simply be construed as a metonym of a perceptual break or continuum; our comprehension of such shots is the practice of a learnt skill engaging an element contextualised by its surrounding film. For Bordwell, units, of whatever form, lack an inherent meaning. Instead he describes the process as pragmatic, with units deriving meaning from the totality of their context at a particular moment (History of Film Style 159-74). In general I find myself in accord with that belief: a forward-moving travelling shot can signify freedom of movement, while a receding

3 In line with the cognitive-psychology informed approach of this thesis, I hold that our everyday experiences help us develop schema for both content and activities (this includes travelling, driving, viewing behaviours and the travelling shot’s synthesis of these elements). As an approach that sees our everyday behaviour informing our understanding of film, this has strong parallels with phenomenological approaches to cinema. However, whereas this is where schema-informed approach ends, this is where a phenomenological approach begins. Vivian Sobchack’s “Phenomenology” provides a succinct overview and history of film phenomenology (435-45). Sobchack’s own The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience provides an in-depth exploration of the relationship between phenomenology and cinema. 19 travelling shot can signify regret.4 However, for Gunning, Bordwell is overreaching himself. Bordwell’s disagreement about perception is “a primarily technological issue” (Gunning “Modernity and Cinema” 304) that fails to argue against the well-documented reality of urban change that: transformed the habits of large segments of the population in terms of the way they experienced and negotiated time and space, not as abstract Kantian categories or hard-wired cognitive structures but as material of a historically daily life and labor. (Gunning “Modernity and Cinema” 304) Furthermore, as Singer notes in “Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis”, which is probably the most extended defence of the modernity concept, further advances in cognitive psychology have highlighted “plasticity in the perceptual apparatus” which does allow for perception to be “reorganized in response to a new sensory environment” (Melodrama and Modernity 106-7). Accordingly, this thesis examines how the non-arbitrary, inviolable or material characteristics of the travelling shot lend themselves to particular baseline functions that can be subverted or overpowered by other cues. It examines how once the travelling shot’s defining characteristic of vehicle movement is immersed within narrative it changes. Within a narrative context, the travelling shot also lends itself to dialectic between the descriptive, sublime and the contemplative associations of landscape attached to such thinking, and the action of technological collapse of space and the associations of power and abstracted space associated with its origins in modernity. In the time of early cinema (1895-1907), a given shot’s context was its immediate situation; in the time of narrative cinema (1908-onwards), context is both situational and narratively shaped. For instance, narrative filmmakers quickly developed shorthand for depicting journeys. A brief journey may be comprised only of a few shots to indicate departure point, arrival at the destination and movement in between, while a lengthier journey may be stretched out by languorous transitions such as fades or dissolves, and a few more representations of movement in between. In such a depiction, space is presented as minimal and geography abstracted as a presence, instead existing as a sign. Conversely, travelling shots of extended duration have become a way of presenting travel where technology fails to crush a journey into a brief shot. The compression or excessive depiction of travel identifies contrasting relationships with the world. Bordwell would see in the elliptical shorthand depiction of a journey, a focus on the cause and effect typical of classical narrative cinema; this focus is what leads us to

4 For instance, the receding ute-mounted shot in Interstellar (Nolan 2014) as NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaghey) abandons his family to search for a new home for humanity signifies regret as it visualises the growing space between Cooper’s destiny and desire not to abandon his loved ones. This ute-shot is followed by two shots of Cooper looking back at his family in the ute’s side mirror, before a sound bridge of control-tower dialogue connects this sequence to rocket-mounted travelling shot that depicts a NASA-crewed voyage from Earth. As such, the receding travelling shot’s connotation of regret helps conceptually rhyme and connect these two departures together, conflating personal and public abandonment. As Interstellar proceeds it becomes clear that this form of connection between home/space, interior/exterior, and private/public is the film’s central theme. For myself, this sequence has a clear connection to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and its use of an extended driving sequence as analogous to space travel (following the sequence, the next shot is of the protagonist arriving at his space-station destination. However, while Tarkovsky uses this connection to reify or humanise space travel, Nolan uses this connection to instil awe or inflate an everyday event.

20 understand a film in terms of narrative patterning. This narrative focus leads to a cinematic perceptual regime, one in which presence is subordinate to causality. Analogous to the alienation from the experience or presence of reality, we are now alienated from spectacle, whether it is of a contemplative nature or the cinema of attractions, by the regime of narrative. For Gunning, the dialectic connecting the “systematically controlled narrative force” and the “explosive staccato energy of the attraction” mirrors the dialectic between modernity’s regimentation and chaos (“Modernity and Cinema” 310-13). Similarly, Bordwell and Gilles Deleuze have explored how the spectacle of contemplation can also form a dialectic with narrative. For Bordwell, films can become dedramatised: the minimisation of action and “unexpected longeurs” muddies cause and effect and obscures narrative patterning (Figures Traced 152-53). As a result, we may find justification for these temps morts as description or encouragement to contemplation. Deleuze, contrarily, sees a change in our social-perceptual regime mirrored by a change in narrative-perception regime (Cinema 2 xi). Where Benjamin saw in Bergson evidence of the perceptual shift wrought by modernity, Bergson’s disciple Deleuze saw in the films of Rossellini evidence of the perceptual shift wrought by the trauma of World War II (Cinema 2 xi). Deleuze distinguished between the movement-image, a form of filmmaking that roughly maps onto cause-and-effect oriented cinema, and the time-image, a form of filmmaking exemplified by neo-realist cinema, whose shots exceed narrative requirement and expectations to the point that not only do audiences start to contemplate the image, but also duree or time. As Deleuze writes, “time…rises up to the surface” (Cinema 2 xi). Pertinent here is the relationship between durational cinema and Musser’s cinema of contemplation. Whether one agrees with Bordwell’s or Deleuze’s explanation, what exists is a form of filmmaking that is narratively analogous to the looping, aware and aestheticised reception described by Musser. This thesis sees the travelling shot as both attractive and contemplative spectacle. It is a perceptual node that links temporal perceptual regimes (past and present), cinematic perceptual regimes, narrative and spectacle, spatial perceptual regimes, and city and country. The shot’s ever-changing juncture between its non-arbitary, specific, form and socially accrued connotations and cues helps films to make meaning through reflecting on perception.

Chapter Outline

A fully comprehensive history of the travelling shot and its use is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, my aim is to contextualise the travelling shot within the history of film, and through this to track the travelling shot’s own history from the birth of cinema, through its integration within narrative filmmaking to its varied manifestations within contemporary cinema (blockbuster and art film) in order to identify recurring tendencies within the shot, its application and its meaning. This thesis looks from the singular present at what seems to be eclectic examples from a very large body of film that is simultaneously available. The cinematic examples are selected because they instantiate recurrences or regularities in the use 21 of traveling shots that aren’t necessarily anchored to linear or solely historical or geographic progressions or logics because film circulates temporally and geographically. Throughout the writing of this thesis I surveyed hundreds of films, ranging from the earliest films from 1895 to contemporary blockbuster and gallery films, whether from Iran, Thailand or America, from which the examples referred to or analysed in the following chapters were chosen. Some were merely watched once, to develop a broader sense of how the travelling shot is used, others were closely analysed, either for their distinct or exemplary use. I refer to films and isolated travelling shots as both specific evidence of use within a given film, and as examples of broader patterns, with the aim of providing a sense of the conversations regarding space, action and contemplation that underpin the use of the travelling shot. Bordwell himself, when writing as a critic, brings together historical, formalist, and cognitivist analysis and this thesis adopts that model. The sample of films discussed in this thesis were drawn from an extensive survey of the field and were chosen because they reflected typical practice, atypical practice, the first use of a significant technology, or as part of a response to pre-existing literature in the field. Likewise, I tried to balance familiar films; films that act as critical nodes, with academically neglected films. Ideally this mingling of saliency and conventionality made apparent the presence of the travelling shot. Through this diverse selection I illustrate the two general uses of the travelling shot: to excite through mobility and to contemplatively frame the world; I also examine how these two functions interact. In the following four chapters, I outline and analyse these two functions and their relationship in significantly more depth. The following chapters contribute to the mapping of the evolution of the travelling shot and its specific function within broader fields, whether arthouse or blockbuster filmmaking. My approach endeavours to analyse both attraction and contemplative-oriented films, and will attempt to delineate their relationship. My first chapter outlines the historical lineage of the travelling shot. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the broad tendencies of the travelling shot and its application, and to provide a reference point for the more detailed exploration of the travelling shots used within various cinemas that will be addressed in later chapters. The first part of Chapter One, under the aegis of Gunning’s concept of a “cinema of attractions,” details the relationship between cinematic and vehicle travel through an exploration of travelling shots and their role in the development of camera movement. Then, by examining the travelling shot from its integration into narrative cinema, through films ranging from the 1930s to the 2010s, it is revealed that connoting the control and collapse of space is still an important function of the travelling shot as ‘cinematic’ movement. The second part of Chapter One returns to the origins of the travelling shot, this time under the aegis of Charles Musser’s proposition of a “Cinema of Contemplation” which addresses the continuity of early film viewing practices with discernment of art, landscape and manner of construction. Rather than being seen as a type of cinematic movement, the travelling shot is examined for its vehicle movement, thanks to the shot’s distinct perspective, movement and trace shudder. Martin Lefebvre’s argument for a cultural understanding of landscapes, one that helps make their presence known despite being subordinate to narrative, is used to make the parallel case for a cultural understanding of moving landscapes, one that draws on both our artistic knowledge of landscapes and our everyday understanding of vehicle travel. 22 My second chapter examines the relevance of the travelling shot to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. The first part of Chapter Two examines the use of travelling shots within blockbusters under the purview of the Cinema of Attractions. Here travelling shots enhanced or derived from Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) are considered for their ability to demonstrate Hollywood’s financial and technological prowess5. Older travelling shots, and the transportation and cinematic technologies behind their construction, have lost their attraction through the loss of novelty. This has required a constant renewal of vehicle and film technology to maintain their appeal, a process that eventually led to the use of CGI to further maintain the tradition of novelty of practice. Though CGI-enhanced travelling shots are post-vehicle, they are still inscribed with elements of their practice and connotation. Through the examination of such films as Alice in Wonderland (Burton 2010), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) and Independence Day (Emmerich 1996), I will show that though these enhanced travelling shots demonstrate an element of world-building they are more typically used as ornate establishing shots that reveal Hollywood’s ability to exhibit its logistical and artistic competence. These shots continue to confirm the travelling shot’s suggestion of control over space through its freedom of movement. Part two of Chapter Two uses The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) to illustrate the importance of residue vehicle traces, a legacy of the production process, to the travelling shot’s function within exciting cinema, through an extended exploration of how these traces act as a vignette that indicates or clarifies point of view within action sequences. As will be elaborated, contemporary blockbusters have amped up screen energy to maintain or heighten audience interest. The travelling shot, with its rapid movement and ability to clarify whirlwind cutting, is at home in this environment. Conversely, my third chapter examines the relevance of the travelling shot to art cinema, in particular focusing on the travelling shot’s paradoxical relationship with contemplation6.

5 Though this section deals with CGI, fundamentally this thesis does not engage with the broader question of digital versus celluloid (or Mylar) as it pertains to realism. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I believe that the difference between celluloid and digital, in terms of ontological realism, is overrated. Privileging film over digital is a matter of privileging chemistry over mathematics. As Stephen Price argues, “the transition from analog methods of imaging to digital ones does not represent “a break either stylistically or epistemologically” (4). Ever since the time of George Méliès, film has been marked as much by the manipulation of the image as it has been marked by ontological burden. Price’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality provides a strong recent overview on this topic. Secondly, this thesis is not interested in whether there is an actual “truth” that can be captured for an audience. Instead this thesis critically analyses how travelling shots are used in movies. Sometimes these travelling shots present footage as if reality is being captured, but the question is how such content is presented and not whether truth has actually been captured. 6 This thesis sets up an opposition between a cinema of “attraction” and a cinema of “contemplation.” While useful, this opposition is untenable and this thesis is structured around this fact. This thesis uses the broad fields of attraction and contemplation as a starting point for mapping out recurring patterns in the use of travelling shots. At first the analysis operates in broad gestures, but then as the chapters proceed they complicate the fields by identifying elements of contemplation in filmmaking modes associated with excitement (for instance, contemporary blockbusters) and the function of excitement with filmmaking modes associated with contemplation (for instance, art cinema). This approach is exemplified by road movie which concludes the thesis, and which examines how attraction and contemplative, genre and art filmmaking can intersect. The norm of Hollywood filmmaking, with its privileging of excitement and technological novelty may seem to be synonymous with the cinema of attractions, and the norm of art cinema may seem to be synonymous with the cinema of contemplation, but this is not the case. This is particularly important considering the fraught nature and impermanent nature of what art and popular cinema may be. As noted, this thesis looks back at the history of the travelling shot from a contemporary vantage point, a position from which one can observe the recurring transition of travelling shots from exciting novelty to the contemplative obsolescence. This trajectory is equally true of the films themselves: over time an initially exciting form of populist cinema becomes a work that is circulated through the art cinema infrastructure of arthouse, gallery and repertory theatres. Not only are the aesthetic fields of attraction and contemplation, populism and art, always inevitably muddled, the passage of time further complicates them.

23 Part one maps out the general application of the travelling shot within art cinema, from a means of providing visual energy to circumventing poetic restrictions. Part two focuses on the travelling shot’s ability to frame a film’s relationship with the real, with the world. Here Zendegi va digar hich/Life and Nothing More… (Kiarostami 1991) is examined for its distinctive mediation of the world and the past through its extensive application of the travelling shot. Laura Mulvey and Jean-Luc Nancy’s extended treatises on the film are also engaged with here, in part for their critical response to the film, but also to discuss their own interpretations of the film’s salient travelling shots. Mulvey sees them as a presentation of a wandering mind while Nancy sees travelling shots as clarifying how the film can better present evidence of the world for a more contemplative regard. Part three proposes the concept of the gestalt point-of-view shot. Here Arigato-San/Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) is used to contextualise Mulvey and Nancy’s propositions regarding Life and Nothing More…. While I am in accord with Mulvey and Nancy’s broader arguments, this part relates their specific arguments regarding Life and Nothing More… to the use of travelling shots within other contemplative films. As part of this analysis, Chapter Two’s examination of vehicle traces and vignetting is recalled to explain how travelling shots help bridge point-of-view, not just between character and audience, but also between character and character to produce a gestalt or group point of view that contemplates the passing world. Chapter Four draws together the strands of attraction, contemplation, popular and art cinema, previously explored in chapters one, two and three, through an analysis of the Road Movie genre. In this chapter I reveal how the world-building capacity of narrative context and culturally accrued expectations of the travelling shot re-work modernity’s collapse of space. This synthesis is framed by Mulvey’s reading of Voyage to Italy (Rossellini 1954), both in its contrast between protagonists representing action and contemplation, and the visiting of the past through spatial movement. The first part of the chapter extends this thesis’s understanding of what is meant by the collapse of space. In the process, part one explores the relationship between spatial collapse, perceptual and social alienation, and narrative framing. I argue road movies comment on this relationship through departing from the motorway to more picturesque, bypassed surrounds – as revealed by travelling shots. Through this, I demonstrate how the pragmatic, non-arbitary form and subject matter of the road movie helps synthesise popular and art tactics, and in the process comment on the place of contemplation, landscape and presence in modern life. Part two expands on this by perusing examples — The Brown Bunny (Gallo 2003), Locke (Knight 2013), Radio On (Petit 1979) and Trafic (Tati 1971) — of road movies that do not leave the motorway to see how they make meaning through deviating from the typical, expected relationship between road movie and motorway. Finally I conclude the chapter with an examination of Road Games (Franklin 1981), a remake of Rear Window (Hitchcock 1954) in which the bored voyeur is no longer confined to a wheelchair but confined to his job of driving his truck. Deleuze, whose philosophical understanding of time and cinema underpins Mulvey’s work on the topic, sees Rear Window as the exemplar of narrative-oriented cinema reaching its limit point when engaging with time and contemplation. This third part details how the smooth transposing of 24 Rear Window’s plot to a road movie reveals how road movies operate as a bridge between modes of perception and filmmaking. Together these four chapters outline the history of the travelling shot, identify and examine key tendencies of travelling shot practice, and map out how these tendencies interlock and comment on both the subject at hand and concepts of perception in general. This process demonstrates that the travelling shot has distinct qualities derived from its potential to suggest a behind-the-screen presence; it also demonstrates how these connotative qualities are derived from the shot’s encounter with history. Rosalind Krauss observes: “Benjamin believed that at the birth of a given social form or technological process the utopian dimension was present and, furthermore, that it is precisely at the moment of the obsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimension, like the last gleam of a dying star” (41). This thesis’s cumulative examination of travelling shot explores filmmakers’ varied responses to the shot’s drift into obsolescence: some attempt to renew the excitement of the shot’s technological display, others take advantage of the new possibilities offered by the ‘obsolescent’ shot. In examining the practice and intersection of these differing approaches arising from the travelling shot’s shifting circumstances, this thesis demonstrates how travelling shots evoke concepts of perception to make meaning.

25 Chapter One Moving Landscapes: Film, Vehicles, and the Travelling Shot

Camera movement is an assemblage of gestures. Some movements are abstractions of human movement and perception, while other movements are informed by different visual histories and experiences: ranging from handheld documentary work, through shots influenced by paintings and video games or constructed using computer generated imagery (CGI), to the vehicle mounted travelling shots that are the focus of this research. This chapter explores how the visual experience of travelling by vehicle has been adapted for film by examining travelling shots, a type of film shot that marries the speed and perspective of a vehicle with the documentary capacity of film. No matter what vehicle, no matter if the vehicle remains seen or unseen, we have a shot that creates a distinctly modern gaze that combines the twin technologies of industrial vision and industrial transport — creating a shot that is emblematic of modernity. As travelogue expert Jeffrey Ruoff argues, “we should theorize the cinema as a mode of transportation and the automobile as a mode of representation” (8). To that I would add the train, plane, and helicopter are other modes of representation needing investigation. In examining these travelling shots, this chapter questions the significance of these shots, how they have changed over time, and what gratifications they offer historical and contemporary audiences and filmmakers. As observed in the introduction, the travelling shot’s synthesis of the twin technologies of cinematography and transportation is not something that has gone unnoticed. While there may not be a significant body of work directly addressing the travelling shot, there is a significant body of work that touches upon elements of the travelling shot. Tom Gunning has noted how travelling shots (along with panning and tilting-based shots) attracted the attention of 19th century audiences through their demonstration of film’s capacity to use the camera’s movement to document a shift in space (“Whole World” 35-37). Fellow historian Lynne Kirby’s Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema extended Gunning’s theories by examining the travelling shot’s use within early silent narrative films, and in the process outlined how film and rail reinforced one another and help change how we perceived space and time. In his work on film culture following the Vietnam War, film theorist Timothy Corrigan examined the function of car-mounted travelling shots and their relationship with genre and mobility (137-60). For all three scholars the travelling shot is important because it encompasses shifts in how we perceive space, whether through symbolising a greater cultural shift or being the means to the shift itself. Whereas this previous work has at best only focused on one combination of vehicle and film, in this chapter I evaluate the history of travelling shots: from the tram and train mounted shots of the late 19th century through the ships, helicopters and cars vantage points of the 20th century, to the impossible movement of otherworldly 21st century vehicles. Acknowledging this historical lineage allows the examination of particular aspects of travelling shots that are beyond the scope of earlier work. For instance, this diachronic 26 analysis helps outline how the travelling shot was integrated into narrative films. More than that, it allows me to explore whether the shot’s foregrounding of current film and vehicle technology has been maintained throughout its history, and the cumulative effect this has on an audience’s perception of space. The framework for this analysis comes from a number of sources. In particular, I draw on fellow film academics and proponents of cognitive psychology David Bordwell and Edward Branigan’s separate theories of narrative. Their work provides a basis for understanding how audiences perceive and understand travelling shots in relation to narrative’s organising principles. Then, to better examine the historical continuum of the travelling shot, I outline two separate traditions of travelling shots. Both start with Modernity and early actuality films. However, the first history uses Gunning’s concept of the Cinema of Attractions to understand modernity as an exciting rupture, while the second history uses fellow film historian Charles Musser’s concept of a Cinema of Contemplation to understand modernity as a modifier of continuing traditions. I then draw on Kirby and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s varied examinations of modernity and transport to buttress Gunning’s concept, while my understanding of Musser’s conceptual framework is expanded by Lefebvre’s examination of the relationship between landscape and film. Each history tackles permutations of travelling shots that are illustrative of the differing priorities of filmmakers and how they have adapted the shot for differing styles, whether highlighting the attraction’s accommodation of technological shits in its modern Hollywood incarnation, or foreground the shot’s replication of everyday travel in less costly art films. These two histories allow me to outline and explore how the varied connotations associated with travelling shots are informed by their late 19th century birth. In this chapter I explore the travelling shot’s histories of being used to produce excitement and contemplation. When researching this topic, what interested me was the interplay between these two histories and their joint relationship with the shot’s vehicle origins. The structure of this chapter reflects this. First I provide an expanded distinction between tracking and travelling shots. Then I elaborate on my theoretical framework for this thesis, particularly as it pertains to the first history I wish to discuss, Unexpected Space, which examines the travelling shot as an exciting display of technology and power. Unseen Energy follows and its discussion of fantastic, impossible travelling shots is used to explore how ‘cinematic’ technology has obscured or blurred the relationship between the shot and its vehicle origins. Lastly, Machine on the Road acts as a counterpoint to Unexpected Space and Unseen Energy by discussing the second history of the travelling shot. Here shots which emphasis their vehicle origins in order to evoke our everyday experience of travel are analysed. To provide balance, and match the historical scope, just as diverse a range of films will be discussed. These histories will be argued for through a series of examples ranging from the aforementioned actuality films through to fantasy films, in order to explore how these two traditions of travelling shots adapted in response to cinematic and technological developments over time. Many films will only be noted in passing, but the more historically 27 important or illustrative examples will be subjected to greater analysis. Representative films include 19th century actuality films such as Down the Hudson (Armitage & Weed 1903) and Through the Haverstraw Tunnel. Early examples of the travelling shot’s integration will be seen in such early 20th Century films as The Kiss in the Tunnel (G. A. Smith 1899) and The Great Train Robbery (Porter 1903), while example pre and post war classical cinema will be seen in such films as Liliom (Borzage 1930) and This Property is Condemned (Pollack 1966) respectively. Fantastical films will be represented by such divergent examples including Fritz Lang’s Liliom (1934), The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) while the more restrained contemplative art cinema will be studied in such films as La gueuele overt/A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) and Du Levande/You, the Living (Andersson 2007). Through such a range of examples this chapter will argue that the travelling shot’s cinematic history meshes with our own experience of vehicle travel. This experiential history helps travelling shots enact a technological mastery of space and reframes the audience’s perception of landscape.

Disentangling Lines of Movement: The Difference Between Tracking and Travelling Shots

In the introduction, I carefully distinguished between the conventional film ‘tracking shot’ and what I term ‘the travelling shot’. As I described, the travelling shot is distinct from the ‘tracking shot’ due to the traces left from their vehicle source and their geographically- ranging movement and yet the common blurring of these two shots is understandable. Even aside from the fact that both types of shot feature salient movement, the reality is that tracking and travelling shots are to a certain degree inextricably intertwined. In the earliest years of filmmaking all camera movement was the same — they were all travelling shots in that none of the earliest examples of mobile framing were created using a dolly moving along tracks. Take for instance the transposing of the panorama from painting to film. Initially we had two types of shots referred to by catalogues as “panoramas”: travelling and panning shots (Salt 35-6). What distinguishes these shots from other shots is that they move, and are thus capable of suggesting a surrounding space (as opposed to long shots which merely suggest a very large space). More than that, as pugnacious film historian Barry Salt effectively notes, the first moving shot is the travelling shot. As Salt writes, the first travelling shot appears as a film called Gondola Down the Grand Canal in 1896 (figure 1.1), which presented audiences with a moving view from the vantage point of a gondola (36). Gondola Down the Grand Canal predates R.W. Paul’s 1897 decision to arrange for a tripod head that was capable of moving while the tripod body remained fixed and stable so that Paul would be able to pan his camera “so that he could cover the passing processions of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot” (Salt 36). I am not suggesting that the travelling shot provided the basis for the panning shot, but I would suggest the possibility that travelling shots informed

28 filmmakers of the spatially suggestive possibilities of a moving shot as providing means for getting around the limited framing of film (as compared to the 360 degree framing available to panoramic paintings). Furthermore, while Paul put his panning tripod on the market in 1898 few filmmakers took advantage of the tripod until 1900 (Salt 36). Since the period between 1898 and 1900 was a burgeoning period for films consisting only of travelling shots, this means that for then contemporary filmmakers and audiences of that period the first camera movement (and all its suggestive possibilities) were informed by travelling shots. This process repeats itself when it comes to the tracking shot. What we now think of as tracking shots first appeared in 1903 with Hooligan in Jail (Bitzer) amongst an isolated cluster of Biograph films, but it was not until around 1912 that they started appearing with any frequency (Salt 50, 88-9). As Salt incidentally notes, “the use of tracking shots to show a view of a more or less static scene from the front of a moving vehicle was not generally taken over from ‘phantom rides’ to fictional films in this period” — suggesting a form of ancestry of effect (50).7 If the mere movement of the travelling shot helped evoke the pan of the panorama, than the specific type of movement of the travelling shot helped suggest the tracking shot. It is no coincidence that the rails of a train and a camera dolly mirror one another; the gesture of rail and car movement has been co-opted by cinema. All that has happened is that the movement of the pan or the tracking shot has become cinematic, abstracted from their vehicular inspirations. Likewise, the first reverse-tracking shot can be seen in Le village de Namo - Panorama pris d'une chaise à porteurs/Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rickshaw (Veyre 1900) (figure 1.2). Its title is self-explanatory, but I will also add that this is cinema’s first chase shot: a travelling shot that documents one form of transport’s superiority over another — as filmed from the perspective of the winning vehicle. Even the movement of a camera crane can be seen as a carryover from the possibilities offered by travelling shots. A strong example of this appears with the colonialist classic Turksib, (Turin 1929), a semi-staged documentary about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, which is structured around this display of technological superiority, and epitomised by a scene in which Turkestan steppe nomads foolishly try to beat a newly arrived train in a race. As Gunning notes, the ability to photograph technologically backward cultures alone seemed to proclaim cultural domination (“Whole World” 31). As Salt notes, prior to the crane’s development in 1929 “under the direction of Paul Fëjos for the Universal Studios production of Broadway”, fork-lift trucks were occasionally used to obtain not just the tracking movements associated with dollies, but the vertical to and fro we now link with cranes (203). Although travelling shots and tracking shots are very closely linked, what this thesis is interested in are those shots in which the vehicular source of movement is emphasised. The interplay between how audiences perceive a shot’s source is key. As such tracking and travelling shots are inseparable, the best one can do is distinguish between the two according to how much their vehicle origins are emphasised.

7 It should be noted here that when Salt mentions tracking shots he generally is referring equally to the two shots that I distinguish as travelling or tracking shots. For as Salt later notes, most of these tracking shots were staged with “the camera moving alongside or in front of a moving vehicle”, in other words they were presented as travelling shots and used to film staged sequences also set on moving vehicles — Salt cites D.W. Griffith’s The Drive for a Life (1909) as a superb example of such vehicle to vehicle staging (88-89). 29

Approaching Narrative Films

In order to look at the role of travelling shots within narrative film in detail, in this chapter I draw on the work of three key film theorists – Bordwell, Edward Branigan, and Murray Smith – who explain how audiences understand the diegetic world suggested by a film. Underpinning my own understanding of film is Bordwell’s approach to narrative and film. This approach treats films as works that organise icons into a system ready for audience comprehension. Key to Bordwell’s work is cognitive psychology’s argument that our perceptions require cognitive functioning for us to make sense of them: that the information we ultimately perceive is not purely visual (or aural, haptic, etc.) stimuli, but a combination of stimuli and schemata — or carefully harnessed accrued knowledge about a given subject. Particularly pertinent is Bordwell’s discussion of procedural schemata; that is, the schemata that provide the appropriate sequence of steps to deal with a familiar type of situation in which the specific circumstances are unfamiliar (Bordwell, Narration 32, 33). Bordwell uses procedural schemata to explain why audiences focus on narrative: our procedural schema for narrative films guides us to the most narratively relevant on-screen information (Bordwell, Narration 37). For Chapter One this is the most important aspect of this work: the strictest reading of Bordwell’s position would take the stance that once the travelling shot was integrated within a narrative the shot would only be perceived in relation to understanding the story of the film. As will later be explored, this thesis does not hold to a strict interpretation of Bordwell’s understanding of narrative framing, but rather draws on it to better explain how it can be manipulated. In the following chapter I also draw on Branigan’s supplement to Bordwell’s concept. Branigan – another narratologist informed by cognitive psychology – synthesises Bordwell’s cognitive approach with Gérard Genette’s literary theories of focalisation, arguing that since a film’s protagonists are typically what ties the cause-and-effect structure of a narrative together they are a particularly salient feature of the text (Narrative Comprehension 20, 101). Therefore we focus on the protagonists because they are likely to explain what will happen next and therefore help us produce better hypotheses as to what type of narrative schema the film belongs to (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 116). Key to this process are the film’s characters whose experiences and reactions to the events of the story act as diegetic narration, helping us understand what is most relevant and how to react (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 100-01). This is an important element of how narrative can foreground and frame otherwise less salient visuals — as characters’ reactions inform us that they are seeing something intriguing or horrifying, we are given strong cues to treat it as such. A more detailed case for how protagonists can guide, reinforce or be reinforced by narrative can be seen in Smith’s examination of the importance point-of-view (POV) shots. For Smith, POV shots are an important element of how audiences can form an alignment of information with film characters at a given moment (161-63). POV shots clarify what characters know at a given time, allowing audiences to use their own cognitive faculties to 30 empathise with the characters. For Smith this happens so that audience members can better hypothesise what a character is thinking, and from there predict what they may do next, and how this will affect the narrative outcome of the story. The result is that to better understand a film’s narrative, an audience has to better understand the film’s protagonists. In such a focalised narrative an audience understands the narrative through the protagonists, and therefore, if a protagonist is narratively framed as seeing something in a particular way the audience is cued to empathise with their vision, seeing it as the protagonists do. As will be expanded upon later, the travelling shot, with its capacity to suggest a point of view, can assist in clarifying the alignment of audience and character information.

Introducing Early Silent Cinema

Travelling shots appear early within film’s history. The first film in the history of cinema, La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon/Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Lumière Brothers), was first screened in 1895, and only a year passed before Gondola Down the Grand Canal and its gondola shot. Then in 1897 we have Through the Haverstraw Tunnel, which is a single shot movie filmed from the perspective of an unseen train’s engine (figure 1.3). Haverstraw Tunnel reveals traces of the vehicle used in its creation, but unlike Gondola Down the Grand Canal it also foregrounds the passing land in a uniquely mechanised fashion. There is a sense of geographic scale produced by such travelling shots: not only does vehicular speed allow more ground to be traversed, it also helps blur the foreground or mid- ground, drawing attention to the background land or cityscape. This speed also entertains us, allowing otherwise unpopular extended shot lengths to be used and therefore producing more sustained depictions of a film’s geographic setting. Haverstraw Tunnel is representative of the form that most travelling shots took before the rise of narrative cinema: short, self-contained films with little or no narrative, except that given by a presenter or by surrounding films (Gunning “Whole World” 25). As discussed in the intro and expanded upon elsewhere in more detail by film historians such as Gunning, Allison Griffiths, and Kirby, these shorts were so popular and prolific that they had their own genre name, Phantom Rides, and themed theatres to play them (Kirby, Parallel Tracks 46; Gunning “Cinema of Attractions” 66-7, Griffiths “World We Show” 283). The most famous example of this was the Hale’s Tours franchise, whose theatres simulated a rail carriage. Early films are particularly revealing of the travelling shot’s function. As Gunning observes of early cinema in general, “If early cinema plays a crucial role in the ideological analysis of the cinematic apparatus, it is less because it represents an age of innocence than a sort of naiveté in which elements that later become camouflaged are frankly displayed” (Gunning, “Whole World” 30). As will be discussed at length shortly, early travelling shots foregrounded technological prowess and a newborn ability to move rapidly through space. Furthermore, while one can only pay attention to the narrative when discussing a narrative film which contains a travelling shot, when the entire film is a travelling shot one has to discuss this formal quality, how it was made, and what appeal it had to both filmmakers and 31 audiences. Together, this in part explains why the travelling shots of early cinema are the shots that have received the most attention from film historians. The absence of distracting narrative defines early cinema. Overall, early films are indicative of their time, functioning more as spectacular displays of technological prowess than as adept presenters of story. One of the key shifts in academic thinking about early, pre- 1907 cinema is marked by the FIAF8 Brighton Project on Early Fiction Film conference held in 1978 (Gunning, “Attractions: How They Came Into The World” 31). Archival discoveries, and improved access to these archives had led to re-appraisal of these early films. Instead of understanding early cinema only in relation to the eventual development of Hollywood narrative norms, these films were examined in relation to the audience and filmmakers’ interest in spectacular, non-narrative films. For historians like Gunning, Gaudreault and Burch the difference between early filmmakers and later narrative films was not so much a question of technique, but a question of intention. Early filmmakers flaunted their knowledge of the camera and its role: actors and by-passers waved and smiled, while filmmakers foregrounded this through compositions that highlighted this behaviour, and camera movement that only made sense if it was showing to the audience what tricks it was capable of (Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions” 65-7; Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment” 121-23). This philosophical difference of approach is what Gaudreault would describe as “monstration” (from the French ‘to demonstrate’), labelling the creator of such films as demonstrator rather than narrator for their emphasis on de- monstrating the qualities of film and its capacity to allow the filmmaker to address an audience (“Narration and Monstration” 29-31) This difference of address was key for Gunning, as it summed up the basic impulses behind the two cinemas, and how they are distinguished from classical narrative cinema. Since narrative cinema is today’s cinematic norm, it is best to establish what this thesis refers to by ‘narrative’. Narrative refers to how a story is presented. By default this means reference to films interested in telling a story. When I refer to narrative film I am referring to films with a structure organised around presenting a story. For the purposes of this thesis I follow Edward Branigan’s prescription of narrative as a chain of cause and effect that is tied together through a recurring focus point (i.e., typically the story’s main protagonist/s) (Narrative Comprehension 20). Film moments, in which the links of the causal chain are highlighted or conspicuously withheld, can emphasise a film’s narrative nature. Associated with this principle of organisation are the basic formal film techniques that highlight a film’s narrative qualities such as analytical editing which draws attention to a story’s salient points or suspenseful parallel editing that provokes interest in the micro and macro questions posed by the story.

8 International Federation of Film Archives 32 Unexpected Space: Travelling shots as Cinematic Attractions

Gunning’s concept of a cinema of attractions helps us understand the popularity of phantom rides. It is in this section of the chapter that I explore the history of the travelling shot in relation to the demonstration of technology, both cinematic and vehicular, and the shot’s following association with power and control over space. The differing interests at play in the cinema of attractions are apparent in both the form and content of these short films. In addition to showing off film’s capabilities, early cinema’s subject matter revelled in displays of exotic locales, stunts, and various new technologies of the modern era (Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions” 66-7; Griffiths, “World We Show” 282). As Gunning notes, “One cannot understand modernity without penetrating its passion for images. Images fascinate modern consciousness obsessively, and this modern sense of images comes from a belief that images can somehow deliver what they portray” (“Whole World” 30). The makers of phantom rides utilised a number of burgeoning propulsive technologies. The 1900 Paris Expo Cinéorama used balloons to simulate a hot-air balloon ride, Down the Hudson (Armitage & Weed 1903) provides a sped-up boat ride along the river Hudson, and even the Eiffel Tower elevator was used to create a travelling shot in the case of Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower (White 1900). However, the most iconic and telling combination was that of rail and film. As historians Griffiths and Schivelbusch separately note, rail and cinema are the two most iconic technologies of Modernity’s collapse of space: rail helped transport people to distant lands and film virtually brought distant lands to the cinema audiences (Griffiths, “World We Show” 284-5; Schivelbusch 33). The result is that travelling shots became a metaphor for Modernity’s control over space, and simultaneously acted as documentary proof of modern technology’s control over space. There is a reason that Dmitri Eletheriotis, Kirby, Gunning, Ruoff and many others, have seized upon E. Burton Holme’s memoir epigraph: “to travel is to possess the world” (Eleftheriotis 76; Kirby, “Parallel Tracks,” 112; Gunning, “Whole World” 30; Ruoff 7). Even when rail was not specifically used, it still overshadows this modern documentation and control of space. Film historian Peter J. Bloom’s article “Trans-Saharan Automotive Cinema” even explores how half-track caterpillar tread vehicles provided the mounting for travelling shots that documented a French expeditionary team’s attempts to re-contour the Saharan desert for future rail development. The films themselves were designed to document how the technology of the half-track vehicles allowed them to ably access and explore the desert in the 1920s (Bloom 144-45). It is this nub of visual rhetoric that has been the mainstay of travelling shots from their existence as phantom rides, and through into their integration into narrative films. This rhetoric has not only continued to exist as a historical undercurrent, but as this thesis will explore it has been reinforced and added to over the last century by a variety of filmmaking practices that take advantage of the travelling shot’s formal and historical qualities. For instance, as expanded on later, Bordwell supports analysing artistic work in terms of very specific niche forms of competition between filmmakers — exploring how filmmakers take a fashionable technique or concept and stretch, tweak and develop it to show what they are 33 capable of (“2-4-6-8” n.p.). This process or cycle of development is just as applicable to the development of travelling shots and the depiction of motorised travel. While the individual shots may not have revelled in the synthesis of the technological prowess of film and the technological prowess of vehicular movement, they are still heavily tied up in investing the technological prowess represented by newly designed vehicles into film. (Recall the comments on Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rickshaw or Turksib for a stark contrast in technology). Here a country’s vehicle prowess is used to demonstrate a country’s filmmaking prowess, and by dint the filmmaker’s prowess as well. However, the most pertinent filmmaking practice that takes advantage of the travelling shot’s visual rhetoric is the structure of narrative films. For instance, as I will discuss in greater detail later, the legacy of travelling shots as an exciting cinematic attraction, and our own travelling experiences mean that we are perceptually primed to pay greater and more sustained attention to a film’s setting than we normally would. Nowadays, opening shots of movies often take advantage of this by using the excitement and interest provoked by travelling shots to extend otherwise static establishing shots. In a film like Psycho (Van Sant 1998), a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic, this allows a lengthy trip through the film’s world (Phoenix, Arizona) before the shot swoops in to pick out Marion Crane (Anne Heche), and her lover Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen), and identifies them as the film’s protagonists (figures 1.4-12). That this action aligns the travelling shot with a film’s narrative system is in most cases almost certainly accidental, but no less key in associating the travelling shot with control. Once the protagonists have been picked out, we are introduced to the other key means by which the basic rhetoric of the travelling shot is reinforced, through the linking of the creation of travelling shots to diegetic sources. The opening shot of the conspiracy thriller Shooter (Fuqua 2007) is one of these examples. Starting with a relatively low slung shot of a river, a helicopter-mounted travelling shot slowly winds its way along the cliff-lined river, through a valley until it reaches a delta where it then lifts up to take us to the top of the cliff face where amongst vegetation two snipers in ghillie suits are revealed (figures 1.13-18). In addition to demonstrating the narrative’s ability to pick out these hidden protagonists, the travelling shot landscape is actually their picturesque gaze: what has been shown is retroactively revealed as demonstrating the technological and human prowess of the snipers and their rifles — everything seen could be turned into a target. Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception argues that with the increasing ease of murder, the arms race of war has shifted to a competition of visibility: who and how something is seen dictates who wins. It is safe to say that Virilio would see the opening of Shooter, with its evaluating contrast between the visible and near invisible, and the alignment of the masterful travelling shot with the sniper protagonist, Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) as exemplifying his thesis. (In addition, once again the protagonist is foregrounded by the film’s narrative system.)

34 Then there is the certain happy coincidence between the rise of the car, and cause-and effect based narrative filmmaking9. Travelling shots are now heavily equated with the movement not of people, but of protagonists. As Ian Christie notes, “After German engineers developed the internal combustion engine in the 1880s, the motor car soon became an attractive personal alternative to the enforced collectivity of the railway (20). (Though the automobile had been around since 1886 with the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, it was not until the development of the Model T Ford in 1908, just as early cinema petered out, that the car became affordable for the masses.) The simple process of shot-reverse-shot unifies their existence: here is the protagonist in their vehicle and here is their view. As Martin Scorsese notes of Taxi Driver’s iconic protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro): “There’s a man on the screen who’s a fucking vehicle” (Taubin 50). The perspective of a vehicle has been conflated with the subjectivity of the protagonist. Key, forceful characters are now shown using the vehicles that produce travelling shots. Almost any action-based driving sequence, whether Bullitt (Yates 1968), Ronin (Frankenheimer 1998), or The Fast and the Furious, shows the characters’ generally successful movement through a space substantially demonstrating (and in the process reaffirming) the travelling shot with a control over space. The result is that there is a strengthening of travelling shot’s baseline connotation of spatial mastery and control. It is not just the rise of narrative that has reinforced this fundamental meaning; films have continued to maintain the tradition of demonstrating newfound cinematic abilities through deploying new technologies of movement. Viewers quickly become numbed to ways of moving through space; hence, for travelling shots to remain exciting to audiences they have needed travelling shots to provide new and improved depictions of movement. Combinations of new modes of transportation and new cinematic technologies have kept things exciting. Claude LeLouch’s C’était un rendez-vous/It Was a Date (1976) is in some ways the fluke last actuality, travel film. All that is depicted is the illegal speeding of a car from Port Dauphine, through the centre of Paris up to the Sacre Coeur; many one-way streets are driven up the wrong way. Filmed in 1976 and thus coming some 70 odd years after the last travel shot actuality ride films, what is amazing is how much continuity there is between this film and its ancestors in terms of highlighting the skill, and technological prowess through a depiction of speed, manoeuvrability, and smoothness. The length of the film is dictated by the length of a 35mm film magazine while the basic premise of the film apparently occurred from the synchronicity of director Lelouch acquiring a new Mercedes 450SEL and reading about a new stabiliser that would allow smooth filming from such a fast and erratically paved route. If the train does not excite us, then new improvements to camera size and faster film stock help us to once again ‘come off the rails’ with the use of cars.

9 As Altman and Musser record in their examination of pre- and early-cinema travel lecturers, this connection was already made visible (Altman, “From Lecturer’s Prop” 70-76, Musser Emergence of Cinema 38). Often these lectures saw the speaker alternate between portraits of the lecturer looking out a given window and landscapes of the passing view, an early form of shot-reverse-shot (Altman, “From Lecturer’s Prop” 70-76, Musser Emergence of Cinema 38). Nonetheless, I would argue the rise of the automobile, with its associations with individual transport and the ability to carry a camera, plays an important role in this connection. 35 For instance, one of the many pleasures of Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern hoodlum film À bout de soufflé/Breathless (1960) is watching cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s car-bound shooting. In conventional Hollywood rear-projection of a car scene, the travelling shot footage used for the rear projection is usually out of sync with the vehicle being filmed. The second-unit footage shows the vehicle travelling safely below the speed limit — and far slower than the protagonist’s car is plausibly meant to be travelling. Thanks to the size of the filming apparatus and the resulting precaution of the second unit crew we get to see ostensibly reckless hoons and drunks overtaken by holidaying families and little old ladies. In Breathless, thanks to being able to fit a small camera (albeit un-synced) inside various cars, we get to watch the car thief Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) actually speed to overtake vehicles. But even then, it was not until the 1973 version of the Panaflex appeared that filmmakers had a camera small enough to shoot while being handheld by the camera operator that could shoot 35mm synced dialogue inside a moving car (Lightman 598, Salt 312-13). Until then, filmmakers were reliant on hollowed studio cars ready for rear-projection or a substantial amount of ingenuity and modification. As Francis M. Nevins describes the back- seat shooting of a famous one-take robbery heist in Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950), “Lewis rented a stretch limousine with everything behind the front seats removed to make room for the crew. The cinematographer sat on a jockey’s saddle thrown across a greased plank on legs and was pushed back and forth to simulate a dolly shot” (39) (figures 1.19-24). This allowed the filmmakers to avoid a potentially expensive modification of the car (Salt 312-13). In addition to avoiding expensive or time consuming modifications, the 1973 Panaflex also allowed new forms of movement. As Richard Zanuck, the producer of the road film The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974), the first film to use the new Panaflex, exclaimed: “I just think it’s nothing short of sensational. I’ve never seen shots like those we’ve been seeing in dailies— 360° pans from inside the car with two travelling vehicles involved” (Lightman 598) (figures 1.25-30). Log-jockeys were subsequently considered unrealistic or distracting, as Lewis was limited to where his camera could pan. New exciting forms of travelling shots accompanied the development of aerial transportation. Initially we have the balloon shots seen at the Paris Cinerama, but in 1903, after the Wright Brothers experiment, powered flight becomes an option with at first the aeroplane and then the helicopter shot. How filmmakers have tended to utilise these two shots differently is interesting for what it reveals about the intersection between technology and poetics. The aeroplane’s requirement of a minimum speed shapes and limits the use of the aeroplane shot. Aeroplanes fly too fast to do justice to any content they might be used to film: this speed reduces their manoeuvrability, this speed also un-syncs or uncouples the travelling shot from its content (for instance, an aeroplane cannot match the speed of a pedestrian or a car but must fly over in an instant). This led to the appearance of plane-mounted aerial shots being adapted to the aeroplane’s strengths. This also included providing brief establishing shots; keeping the shots brief reduced the visibility of the vehicle shudder, and cut the shot off before it departed the intended setting. There were more extended, motivated shots. 36 Motivation or diegetic justification means that the source of the shot is as important (if not more so) than the filmed content; as such de-coupling from content becomes less of an issue. This is commonly seen in exuberant flyovers and military strafing and bombing runs (in which case the contrast between source and content is the point, superiority is being demonstrated). The Great Waldo Pepper (Hill 1975), a movie about barnstorming or flying circuses, provides a catalogue of exuberant aeroplane shots while similarly Wings (Wellman 1927) showcases military attacks. However, my favourite example of a motivated aeroplane shot is in 1934’s Crime Without Passion (this sequence was actually produced by the montage specialist Slavoljub Vorkapić rather than the nominal directors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) in which a murder unleashes the Greek Furies who then fly over New York (motivating the plane shot) and scream in outrage. The distance between the content and the source gives the shot a sense of supernatural charge, delirium and exultation. Motivation also shapes the most dominant form of aeroplane shot, the overdetermined aeroplane shot. More than any other form of common travelling shot, the aeroplane shot is marked by shots in which foreground content (whether elements of the vehicle or its occupants) occupies most of the screen and renders the passing terrain supplementary. This happens in cockpit sequences, where the head-up display is a particularly popular screen filler, and in passenger sequences where the small windows of passenger jets naturally emphasise the interior and help isolate the film’s diegesis from the outside world. When watching Hell’s Angels (Hughes 1930), what is striking about the film is that despite its readily apparent budget, so much of the aerial footage is directed inwards at the pilot rather than outwards in order to better document the military display being funded. This tendency is informed by multiple practical reasons, including acknowledging the aerodynamics of an aeroplane and working around the cramped space of a cockpit. However, I would argue that the main reason for this is that it completely solves the decoupling problem, with the overdetermined shot the source and the content become one subject. The aeroplane shot is one that emphasises its vehicle origins; the reverse is true of the helicopter shot. After World War 2 helicopters became a common source of travelling shots. These helicopter-mounted travelling shots were initially used as relatively simple establishing shots, but as Hollywood confidence in the coordination of the staging between helicopter, camera, and subject improved, filmmakers began using helicopters to film action sequences. This strong degree of coordination, enabled by the helicopter’s greater manoeuvrability, saw the helicopter shot used in a more functional manner than the aeroplane shot. Rather than the overdetermined nature of the aeroplane shot, the helicopter shot typically functions as an extension of pre-existing camera movements, in particular the crane shot. This is not to say there are no movies in which the vehicle-origins of the helicopter shot is emphasised. The overdetermined helicopter shot is a trope of Vietnam War movies (and not just visually but sonically, think of the helicopter-blade thwack in Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979) or Platoon (Stone 1986). They Live by Night (Ray 1948), the story of doomed lovers that

37 premiered the first helicopter action shot,10 provides a telling example of the experiential quality of such post-war period shots as the helicopter’s aerial vantage point combined with a still imperfect coordination between camera and subject to give the film’s travelling shots a noticeable quality of surveillance and hunting – stylistically apt for an expressionistic film about a fugitive lifestyle. The shudder of the helicopter shots that establish the Naples setting of the political thriller Le mani sulla città/Hands Over the City (Rosi 1963) is less obvious but this is balanced out by Rosi’s equation of spatial mastery over the city with political mastery over the city — right down to rhyming a tracking shot’s study of a model of a corruptly proposed development with the travelling shot’s study of the city. After the introduction of the helicopter the speed of improvements to vehicle-based technology slows down, but this slack is picked up by improvements in cinematic technology. The relatively discreet improvements came from camera mount improvements that helped stabilise the image. Furthermore, they also allow filmmakers to use longer lenses to keep the disturbance of a vehicle away; the winds and thumping sounds produced by a helicopter can not only cause problems for sound recordists, they can also bend trees. However, the most obvious example to audiences would be filmmakers’ frequent use of CGI and 3D to extend the possibilities of tracking shots, as can be seen in such films as the comic fantasy Alice in Wonderland and the fantastic Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which the aerial height and speed of the helicopter is combined with the careful control and impossible loop-di-loop movement allowed by CGI. In the latter film the travelling shot becomes associated with magical missiles tracking them up into the sky, as they appear from an image of Voldemort’s face, before following them as they plunge down into London and flit through dense streets and terraces (figures 1.31-40). The missiles’ impossible speed and control maps onto the speed and control of the travelling shot itself as the shot follows the missiles’ movements, up to and including their ability to pass through walls.

Unseen Energy: Phantom Rides for Phantoms

Fantasy cinema such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Alice in Wonderland have a longstanding history of using quasi, assisted-travelling shots, and their contradictory, impossible movement to depict the supernatural, the impossible, and the uncanny; 1903’s Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Méliès) already features a shot tracking into a model masquerading as a ship travelling to the moon. In this section of the chapter I use these impossible travelling shots to clarify the relationship between cinematic and vehicular camera movement and how this affects how audiences and filmmakers perceive and use said shots. Fantasy specialist David Butler identifies the frequent use of travelling shots in films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy (81-2), but for him it is purely a solution to the problem of

10 The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (Sherman and Levin 1946) reputedly features the first helicopter action shot, one that follows the protagonists as they reconnoitre a castle (Spark n.p., Pinkerton n.p.). However, when watching the film, I could not identify any plausible helicopter shot. Furthermore, the film’s sole castle is a fragmented interior-bound set. When the castle appears in the location shooting, it appears as a matte painting – this would have made filming such a shot implausibly difficult. The film was also shot on three-strip Technicolor. The size of a 1940s Technicolor camera blimp would have made using a helicopter as a mount logistically difficult. 38 depicting an elaborate fictional world. Butler observes, “One of the greatest challenges facing fantasy filmmakers is the construction and portrayal of the worlds and spaces in which their narratives take place” (79). However, I would also argue that the virtuoso travelling shots imbue the lands they depict with a certain amount of mystical energy. As essayist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (36), and these impossible travelling shots are based on this premise. Two illustrative variations of early fantastic travelling shots can be seen in F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), and Fritz Lang’s Liliom. While both film sequences are undeniably simulated travelling shots, having nothing to do with vehicles, their logic is derived from the core idea of travelling shots, and the ways in which this pair of shots take advantage of their impossible movement reveals much about the core tendencies of the travelling shot. The travelling shots in Faust gain their visionary power from cinematic movement, with Murnau taking advantage of the careful control allowed by panning, tracking, cranes, and tilts. The sequence in which Mephisto (Emil Janning) flies Faust (Gösta Ekman) around the world is presented through a shot that simulates their impossible trajectory by running a track-mounted camera over a miniature model landscape – as critic Michael Atkinson puts it, “strafing curlicue model villages with the fervor of a cranked hobbyist” (“My Soul to Take” n.p.). The travelling shot is not quite from Faust and Mephisto’s perspective though: in the cut-ins that allegedly present the travelling shots as their point of view the pair are shown to be quite high up in the air (figures 1.41-45). By comparison, Faust’s travelling shots sweep low across the ground, following the flow of the land, slowing down to examine a tree or hillside, and taking in the world. But while the low level of such shots do not accurately reflect their apparent perceptual cause, camera placement and movement is still indicative of Mephisto’s power. This not only reflects the default mastery over space of the typical travelling shot, the impossible probing of the land reveals Mephisto’s magical, fine-tuned control over this movement through space — beyond that which is possible from any vehicle. While Murnau’s probing pseudo-travelling shot in Faust foreshadows the travelling shot in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which in a way represents Voldemort’s impossible control over London, Lang’s sequence in Liliom takes the reverse tack (figures 1.46-58). Three-quarters of the way through the film, and following a failed robbery, carousel barker Liliom (Charles Boyer) is shown committing suicide. Lang presents Liliom’s following journey to heaven through a fake travelling shot sequence that gives up the appearance of finely tuned control to better reveal how the travelling shot, at its very fundamental level, turns the idea of a sublime landscape into a joke. If, like art historian Malcolm Andrews, we understand the sublime landscape as suggesting the overwhelming and inconceivable reality of nature (130), then the travelling shot is in many ways the sublime’s antithesis, a demonstration of Modernity’s collapse of this previously overwhelming space. Liliom’s travelling sequence sums up this irrepressible ability to document space in its ability to transport Liliom and the audience from the city streets up into heaven in only a few minutes. After Liliom’s suicide the camera faces parallel to Liliom’s

39 ghost who is taken prisoner by angels of death who hold him in place, and control his and (by default) the camera’s movement. The camera then tilts down while craning up to show Liliom’s corpse being left behind reduced to the size of a pinprick. Lang was able to quickly take advantage of the suggestive possibilities of the crane movement. As Salt notes, it was four years prior in 1929 that a crane (and their specific godlike perspective form of movement) “was built under the direction of Paul Fëjos for the Universal Studios production of Broadway” (203). Accordingly, the crane shot in Liliom, at the time, still demonstrated a startling range of movement. A dissolve takes us to a matte painting from the same perspective as we now start to pick out the surrounding city. Then in a series of tilts and cut-ins of Liliom’s stunned face we are taken out past the stratosphere, through a baby filled heaven before a painted star is picked out and moved towards. As we get closer we see Liliom’s destination, and a culmination of the visual rhetoric of the travelling shot — a heavenly Commissariat or police station exerting its control over space through its policing angels of death. The pseudo-travelling shot’s ability to depict control over space matches Lang’s joke on the heavenly police state. These pseudo-travelling shots mark in many ways the peak of the travelling shot’s association with power and a visual control over the land, so it is fitting that the gradual modification of actual travelling shots to mimic the impossible shots of Liliom and Faust also marks a possible endpoint of the traditional travelling shot, if not the end of their actual use. CGI now strips the shot of most of the residues of vehicular experience. Contemporary travelling shots augmented by CGI still present a technologically mediated landscape, but this is achieved through using a different type of technology rather than through mounting a camera on a vehicle. There are still traces of the experiences of vehicle movement left within the shot, but this is a matter of routine, habit, and expectations, and not because the shot is forced by limitations to replicate the perspective, speed, and movement of a given vehicle. The shift away from foregrounding vehicle technology might be interpreted as a sharp break within the history of travelling shots, but in many ways the diminution of the vehicular experience is itself a Hollywood filmmaking tradition. It is telling that while a car-mounted travelling shot would be perceived as anachronistic if used in a fantasy film — even if the car remains unseen — the use of helicopter shots is not considered anachronistic, as ably demonstrated by the Lord of the Rings and other recent fantasy films. This may be because helicopters are sufficiently detached from everyday experience; we all catch trains/travel in cars on a regular basis, planes on an irregular basis, but few of us would have ever been in a helicopter. As such, audiences are potentially cued to understand the visual traces helicopter movement differently: the cinema audience does not associate helicopters with transportation from a specific time, but instead interprets them almost as machines designed for vision, like the cranes, jibs and dollies that are engineered specifically for use in film production. This in part is because helicopters are much more three dimensionally mobile than a car or train, part of a vehicle’s trace is its reliance on physical roads or tracks on the ground. As a result, the movement of a helicopter is perceived as no more anachronistic than a camera panning:

40 because it connotes purely cinematic movement, it is therefore not mentally perceived as anachronistic. Turning vehicle movement into cinematic movement is something that is hardly new and reliant on CGI. Even as early as 1903 The Great Train Robbery (Porter) used a glass-based travelling matte to simulate shooting in a moving train carriage because a real moving train would be too difficult to shoot in. Filmmakers have almost always sought to reduce the problems caused by the combination of location shooting and vehicles: weather and other unpredictable aspects of the shooting environment, unstable cameras and uneven vehicular movement. Any initial improvements to camera and film flexibility were offset by the coming of sound and the associated problems of noise from the cameras and vehicles used in travelling shots, which resulted in greater reliance on studio shooting and rear projection as introduced by Liliom (Borzage) in 1930. However, while rear projection composite shots were designed to reduce the impact of the vehicle upon the making of the shot, they were not designed to remove the vehicle. Instead they were solutions designed to address how to include vehicle travel while maintaining control over the production process without disrupting standard filmmaking practices. This tradition of simulated shooting, and its resultant effacing of the experience of vehicular travel was also enhanced by a concurrent history of stabilisation in which a camera’s suspension and gyro system were used to smooth the shuddering movement of the vehicle out of such shots. While composite travelling shots allowed filmmakers to still include vehicle travel (albeit simulated) while filming in a studio, the improved stabilisation of camera and or vehicle has allowed the opposite: an un-simulated travelling shot that denies the existence of the vehicle used in its creation. The history of the effort to remove vehicle vibrations is most apparent in the history of the helicopter shot. Vibration is a particularly pertinent issue for helicopter shots. As anybody who has ever used a pair of binoculars knows, telescopic lenses amplify the traces of movement of their source — a bump or slight swivel at the operator’s end leads to a significant shift in what is being observed through the lens. This causes problems as helicopter shots are reliant on telescopic lenses to prevent the helicopter from interrupting the staging of a scene. Combine that with a vehicle that, even when not buffeted by wind, is still a collection of various vibrations and you have a situation in which the traces of the vehicle’s movement are immediately apparent. As a result filmmakers (and their providers of technology) have worked hard to compensate and stabilise such motion. The first crucial development to counteract vibration was in 1964 when the Tyler camera mount whose gyro-system significantly reduced vibration was introduced. As Salt writes, the Tyler mount allowed filmmakers to shift to more complicated helicopter shots; for instance, This Property is Condemned (Pollack 1966) captures a relatively intimate close-up of Alva Starr (Natalie Wood) through a train window before being able to wind through a reverse zoom and helicopter movement to an extreme long shot of the entire train (293). This shot is an exemplary case of the helicopter shot functioning as cinematic movement with the movement of the shot, tilting down while 41 moving up and around, suggesting an exaggerated crane shot (figures 1.59-65). However, also worth noting is This Property is Condemned’s closing shot. The film addresses the decline of rail, telling of the impact of railroad redundancies have on a small town during the Great Depression. Consequently, the closing shot, which suggests a train shot by smoothly following railway tracks away from the film’s narrator, Willie Star (Mary Badham), before gently lifting up and away in an aerial horizontal movement of the helicopter shot, has an added thematic resonance because of its evocation of a cinematic changing of the guard (figures 1.66-68). Another illustrative example of burgeoning stabilising systems for travelling shots was the introduction in 1965 of the Dynlens system which worked by passing the light that was to hit the film through a prism that vibrated in a manner exactly opposite to the helicopter vibrations so as to cancel them out, first used in the 1969 production of the feature films Darling Lili (Edwards 1970) and Catch-22 (Nichols 1970) (Salt 293). In combination the Dynlens system and Tyler mount drastically reduced the vehicle trace left inscribed into the helicopter shot, and through their more finessed movement allowed a more readily achieved level of complicated staging that would presage the CGI travelling shots that came in the 1990s. The cumulative impact of the race to remove helicopter vibrations on other forms of shots (both travelling and non-travelling) can be seen in the Istec Corporation’s introduction of the Wesscam in 1972. The Wesscam mount allowed the camera to be positioned outside the helicopter in a sphere (which allowed a far greater degree of panning and tilting) while the crew remained inside, monitoring it and controlling it by remote control (Salt 316). Even with a 250mm lens the Wesscam mount removed all traces of vibration,11 and as such it was adapted for non-helicopter work such as being mounted on cars, and most famously for the final shot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s identity study Professione: reporter/The Passenger (1975) where it was mounted on a crane (Salt 316). The result of these various improvements is that while the twitching shudder of The Night of the Hunter’s (Laughton 1955) introduction of Preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) announces the existence of a helicopter, the ghostly serene machine suggested by the unnaturally smooth, gliding movement in the opening of The Shining (Kubrick 1980) does not. There is a moment of historical ellipsis to be found here as Kubrick takes the burgeoning tendency towards stabilisation and pushes it to an uncanny extreme – the audience’s knowledge of helicopter movement conflicts with the precise movement that Kubrick presents. This potential for anachronism has a cautionary effect on how even legitimate diegetic travelling shots are framed in period films. If travelling shots do appear in a western like Stagecoach (1939) or a medieval parable like Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil 1967), then the source of the shot is doubly clarified. Not only does Marketa Lazarová’s horse-drawn cart sequence methodically introduce the vehicle, and shows the characters getting on board, but

11 The Wesscam mount is still the default option; for instance The Lord of the Rings’ helicopter work was filmed using them. 42 also, when the actual travelling shot is shown, the cart’s movement is exaggerated to the point of parody. Our view lurches and hiccups and each supposed sway of the horse flicks the camera up 45 degrees beyond the horizon line — all the better to emphasise and remind the viewer of the source of the shot.12 An example of what happens when this caution is ignored can be found in Gilberto Perez’s examination of an anachronistic travelling shot in Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne/A Day in the Country (1946). Here Perez sees Renoir’s use of a motor boat to film a rowing boat sequence as Renoir deliberately creating a disjuncture between film and filmed, reminding us of the historical distance between the story’s nineteenth century pastoral setting, and the time in which the film was made (225). In modern films, this laborious process of visual clarification is only required for travelling shots sourced from outrageous vehicles providing outrageous visual experiences. For instance, The Fast and the Furious (Cohen 2001), and Men in Black (Sonnenfeld 1997) both feature cartoonish exaggerated travelling shots that use wide-angle lenses, travel ridiculously fast, and follow implausible trajectories (Men in Black takes us upside down along a tunnel’s ceiling). To prepare us for the unusual travelling shots both films explain the diegetic source of these shots – highly modified cars (figure 1.69) that offer a new view. The various stabilisation technologies that appeared in the mid-to-late Sixties and early Seventies create a break in the history of the helicopter shot, with their use becoming a default standard for helicopter travelling shots (at least for non-vignetted helicopter shots). While these helicopter shots are the norm they have been supplemented by post-vehicle shots — at least post-passenger travelling shots. Post-passenger travelling shots can be broken into two branches. There are CGI-enhanced (or purely CGI) travelling shots which may not use a vehicle in their creation but which are descended from the practice of using vehicles (typically helicopters) to film similar shots. Then there are drone shots, which were heralded not just by military innovation but also the 1994 introduction of the remote-controlled Pegasus helicopter whose dramatically reduced size (and lack of need to protect the pilot) further increased the manoeuvrability of the travelling shot. Virilio’s analysis of the relationship between surveillance technologies, vehicles of war and aerial photography (whether from World War Two bomber planes or satellites) in the chapter “A Travelling Shot Over 80 Years” finds its apotheosis in the “pilotless Drone” (103). Virilo, writing in 1984, is analysing the Vietnam-War-era RM 147, a three-metre wing-spanned drone “whose camera could take two thousand pictures and whose onboard television could broadcast live to a receptor station 240 kilometres away” (103). Compared to the tiny domestic drone or the firepower of the contemporary MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper, the capabilities of the RM147 may seem archaic but the current use of the drone still accords with both Virilio’s and my thesis. Drone shots act as exaggerated versions of helicopter shots: they are either understood as cinematic movement, or, from one narrow range of perspective, as surveillance, as the epitome of control over space. Laurent Grasso’s gallery film On Air (2009) historicises the

12 As will be expanded upon in Chapter Three, the exception to this rule occurs when the travelling shot tracks equally fast content. In Stagecoach, travelling shots are used to follow galloping horses. 43 use of small, agile independent units by using traditions of Bedouin falconeering to imitate drone practice – sending falcons (with attached GoPros) off to document otherwise inaccessible private space. George Barber’s The Freestone Drone (2013) sees a drone become sentient and capable of speech and controlling its own movement; in this film the drone’s musings underline the relationship between the vehicle perspective and our understanding that vehicle shots can signify point of view. However, I see Omer Fast’s gallery film 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) as exemplifying drone cinema practice. Here dazzling drone shots that can be understood as cinematic movement, and that have been produced by domestic-grade drones, are interspersed with various treatments of an interview with an anonymous military drone operator. This interview is visualised in a number of ways: as a re-enactment of the interview (shot as a lush Sirkian melodrama), as a re-enactment of the ground-level trauma produced by drone strikes, and as drone surveillance shots of suburban Las Vegas. The film’s title comes from the operator’s comment about the best vantage point to do justice to their monitored world with the drone surveillance footage overlaying suburbia with the perspective of violence, much in the same way a slasher film’s point-of-view tracking shots do. Equally, the operator’s personal detachment from the actions produced by his work evoke Schivelbusch’s concept of the stimulus shield and its resulting alienation from our environment (159-70). Virilio’s analysis of the “glass-like” distancing effect produced by the increasingly mediated “industrialized warfare” (90-3) complements Schivelbusch’s concept strongly, indicating one way in which the travelling shot as alienated practice has been sustained as a tradition. However, as a corrective, I would turn to the “cinematic” shots that intersperse the operator interview. Here Fast has détourned the drone to produce glistening aerial landscapes, providing moments in which we can contemplate the film’s thesis as a whole. Along with drones, satellites are the other iconic manifestation of unmanned image- making vehicles. Like the drone, they seem to embody our contemporary age of globalisation and surveillance. Furthermore, as both image gatherers and information transponders, they act as the latest iteration of modernity’s collapse of space. Nonetheless, the satellite shot is an outlier in this thesis’s scope. Not only are they unmanned vehicles, their spatial positioning places them outside our everyday experience. Though satellites move through space, their literal movement has little to do with the vision they present an audience. Like the plane shot, their stratospheric movement does not synchronise well with the human scale. Instead their visual potential is made apparent in other ways. Rather than move through space, the vision of a satellite picks out a particular detail by either zooming in or, after the footage has been taken, expanding the detail. Instances of this typical approach can be seen, visualised, in such films as Enemy of the State (Scott 1998) and Burn After Reading (Coen 2008). In these films, and similar films, these satellite shots foreground the films’ surveillance theme (both Enemy of the State and Burn After Reading are about the US Government’s security and surveillance bodies) and function as distinctive establishing shots. For a more everyday version of this, Crank: High Voltage

44 (Neveldine & Taylor 2009) simply (and crassly, keeping in line with the film’s aesthetic) zooms in and around a Google Maps satellite view of Los Angeles. When satellite movement is seen on screen it exists as an illustrative metaphoric version, an interpretation that stresses the satellite shot’s ability to be and see everywhere. A revealing version of this can be seen in Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Witt 2004) in which a scene held within an underground laboratory morphs into a three-dimensional blueprint schemata of the laboratory (providing a visual connection to the maps of the computer game series that Resident Evil is adapted from) before flowing backwards through the building up into the sky, higher and higher, until the viewpoint rests next to the orbiting satellite that allegedly motivates the shot. Though this shot is impossible, it shifts through not just walls but also hundreds of metres of bedrock, it visualises the satellite’s popular representation of omniscient power. 13

The Machine on the Road: Film, Vehicles, and Subjectivity

Contrary to Hollywood’s history of removing the vehicle from the travelling shot, there is also a tradition of travelling shots that foreground the particularly vehicular qualities of a travelling shot. This section of the chapter focuses on the origins of this contemplative history, its relationship to narrative, and how descriptions of the world can be foregrounded by this approach to the shot. I argue this parallel tradition relies upon our own experiences of vehicle travel to draw attention to how a travelling shot’s landscapes are mediated by the camera, the vehicle, and its passengers. Crucial to this tradition is the shift from films attempting to instil astonishment within an audience to attempting to induce contemplation. As Ruoff notes, filmmakers “have constantly returned to a ground-zero travelogue aesthetic as a means of reinventing the cinema” (12). An important aspect of this shift towards contemplation comes from the audience’s awareness that travelling shots often indicate subjectivity, and, as I will argue, an intuitive understanding of why this is so. Film historian Musser provides a useful framework for dealing with contemplation and travelling shots in his exploration of early cinema as a continuation of artistic traditions, “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment.” This separation from the more populist traditions can be seen in how travelling shots were advertised. As Musser and Gunning both note, catalogue descriptions of travelling shot films emphasised a particular aspect of vehicle travel over others, not a gondola’s “somnolent sway” but its “rapidly moving launch” — the unique tremble of a particular vehicle is passed over for further opportunities for discussing speed and technological prowess (Gunning, “Whole World” 36- 7; Musser, Motion Picture Catalogues 138). Musser explores the alternative, how more rarefied film presenters, clubs, and societies did not just run one exciting short film after another as the Cinema of Attractions did, rather they gave the audience a chance to catch their breath by letting the brief films loop continuously (“Cinema of Contemplation” 168-9).

13 The laboratory and the satellite are both owned by Umbrella Corporation, the antagonists of Resident Evil. The spatial connection of the two acts as a symbolic acknowledgement of Umbrella’s omniscient power and reach. 45 This difference in presentation helped audiences get used to the film experience and explore how the medium of film differed from previous media (Musser “Cinema of Contemplation” 162). Audience members were able to watch Rough Sea at Dover, Waterfall in the Catskills, or Surf at Long Branch, and, through repeated exposure, come to discern and then appreciate the difference between the landscape paintings of Turner or the Hudson River School and film’s own equivalent landscapes, marvelling at how film could capture the motion of waves or shifting leaves (Musser, “Cinema of Contemplation” 167, 171). While Musser’s understanding of early cinema was concerned with continuing the landscape tradition by accommodating the machinery of film, I also want to extend the forms of machinery involved to include vehicles. In other words I argue that filmmakers and audiences have developed traditions of contemplating geography as mediated by a combination of film and vehicle. Key to this tradition is the travelling shot’s use of time to both describe a location, and to induce the audience to pay attention or contemplate what is being diachronically described. A Trip Down Market Street (Miles brothers 1906) is a clear example of how travelling shots use time to describe location, and to induce a contemplative frame of mind within an audience. A Trip is a near fourteen-minute ride, filmed from the front of a San Francisco trolley as it travels from the start of its route to its finish. In addition to visually documenting pre-earthquake San Francisco, this shot also maps out the route in time, describing how long it takes to travel along Market Street in a trolley. This diachronic provision of geographic scale might be particularly noticeable in extended takes whether as phantom ride or integrated into a narrative film, but I would argue that thanks to our experiences of travelling, even brief travelling shots provide an important set of cues for audiences to develop a sense of the on-screen space. Time can also have a numbing effect on an audience. While the hustle and momentum of A Trip might initially be astonishing, I argue that its lengthy duration has a de-dramatising effect similar to that of the looping of films discussed by Musser. As Gunning himself notes, attractions had a certain “now you see it, now you don’t” quality as audience attention fluctuated depending on the novelty and intensity of a given attraction (“Now You See It” 49). As with the films of the cinema of contemplation, the audience’s reaction to duration would likely have been a fidgeting shift in attention towards otherwise ignored background details whether filmic, vehicular or part of the passing scenery. This becomes more likely as the vehicle used loses its visual novelty and becomes more prosaic.14 It is this intersection of

14 This is looping pattern of vehicle obsolescence evoking contemplation can be seen in the barge shot. The barge’s technical novelty long predates cinema, and as such it has a particular resonance in such pre-war films as La Fille de l’eau/The Whirlpool of Fate (Jean Renoir 1925), L’Atalante (1934) and Ludzie Wisły/The People of the Vistula (Aleksander Ford and Jerzy Zarzycki 1938). This is because the barge shot was always an obsolescent shot; right from the shot’s initial use, it lacked novelty and instead evoked the past. As such, the barge shot allowed filmmakers the opportunity to work through notions of contemplation and bypassed space without having to wait for more contemporary vehicle technology to become obsolescent. This obsolescence is reflected in the films’ stories and setting. Filmed on Cézanne’s estate, Jean Renoir’s The Whirlpool of Fate is both of the French Impressionist film genre and homage to the bucolic late nineteenth century seen in Auguste Renoir’s Impressionistic paintings (Durgnat 31). Though L’Atalante and The People of the Vistula take place in the then contemporaneous France of 1934 and Poland of 1938, the films’ barge-dwelling characters are the people bypassed or elided by Modernity’s collapse of space. Unlike the straight lines of a rail or motorway, the river or canal still (mostly) followed the contours of their natural surrounds. This obsolescence is also reflected in the formal use of the shot. Though The Whirlpool of Fate is of the French Impressionist film genre, and therefore uses showy camera effects (whether handheld work or overlapping imagery) to indicate subjectivity, barge shots still provide a space for contemplation. With even less 46 obsolescence and duration that avant-garde filmmaker Ernie Gehr invoked by re- photographing A Trip Down Market Street so as to slow it down and better let us see the footage as film, and as an accumulation of details; Eureka (as Gehr called this footage in 1974) bypasses the stage of astonishment (and its loss) to go directly to a forced contemplation of the machine on the road. Duration is the key determinant here. At the far end, seemingly completely integrated into a narrative we have a particularly revealing travelling shot in Roy Andersson’s comedy You, The Living (2007). Filmed in an erstwhile primitive tableau manner (static camera, a long shot and a long take), the lack of cutting helps highlight how our attention shifts from the initial content to its finish. The scene is a forlorn dream sequence. A girl imagines her wedding day and life with the Black Devils’ singer and guitarist Mikke Larsson. Within a cramped living room and kitchen the pair chat as Larsson plays guitar. The travelling shot is this: to the left, through the window, what originally appears to be a passing train is slowly revealed to be passing scenery — it is a house-mounted travelling shot. The house is moving, and the scenery becomes more varied, drawing greater attention to the window as anxious crowds appear and gather to greet the honeymooning couple as the house pulls into a station whereupon the people cheer the pair on (figures 1.70-72). While the chanting crowds will probably have eventually tipped off the audience to the house’s exterior — the dawning realisation of what Andersson had filmed and the resulting pleasantly surprising comic timing of the shot is reliant on the timing of duration and the de-dramatisation of the scene. The idea that duration might lead to contemplation is scarcely a new one. Rather, as Musser observed, we have been contemplating film for as long as we have been excited by it. It is just that this meditative approach is heavily contingent on our own experience of travel. Though I disagree with Schivelbusch’s conclusion, since I argue that the travelling shot can encourage contemplation of the world (film or reality) rather than a deadening of the world, I agree with Schivelbusch that industrialised long-distance travel and the environmentally aware but detached sense of contemplation this travel can produce is a defining characteristic of the modern condition (192). Consequently, in addition to our normal response to de- dramatised imagery, we also have a perceptual framework acquired from our day-to-day travel that organises how this extended shot duration affects us. Lefebvre provides a useful parallel example of what might be happening here, in “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema” and “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema,” which offers an analysis of the integration of landscape and setting into narrative film aesthetics. Lefebvre, like most narratologists, argues that narrative dominates how audiences understand films (Bordwell, Narration 37; Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 20, 100-1). As fellow narratologist Bordwell argues, if an audience understands a film as being organised according to narrative principles then the audience will accordingly perceptually prioritise the content that is most likely to help them understand the narrative by focusing on protagonists, equivocation, this is also true of the barge shots in L’Atalante and The People of the Vistula. These barge shots use their immediate obsolescence to both evoke time and create time for contemplation.

47 faces, actions, guns, etc. (Narration 37). For Lefebvre the result is that audiences do not treat a film’s geography as a landscape, a visual spectacle worthy of attention, but as a setting, a background to be mostly ignored as the audience focuses on the story (“Between Setting and Landscape” 34, “Landscape in Narrative Cinema” 63-66). While he does not utilise Bordwell’s theories of narrative, Lefebvre’s argument is in fundamental alignment with Bordwell’s concept that when we hypothesise that we are perceiving a narrative schema we understand the film accordingly, and prioritise our attention towards content of narrative concern, and as a result understand most cinematic geography as setting and not landscape. He argues that these contemplative landscapes distinguish themselves from the cues that inform the audience that this subject is to be regarded as a spectacle (Lefebvre “Between Setting and Landscape” 29, 52). One cue is through what Branigan would see as character- based focalisation, the “my, what a beautiful view” approach. Here, characters prod us, through speech, gesture, or point and glance, to look out upon the land and appreciate its view — the focalising character in effect acts as what Gaudreault could possibly describe as a diegetic monstrator — and as a result a reminder to see the land as scape (Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape” 31-33). Then there are moments when a film, through formal shifts in tone or approach, “a kind of deviation from the predictable” (Chatman, “Description in the Cinema” 7) apparently informs the audience to demarcate between its narrative and non-narrative moments — style as a non-diegetic monstrator as it were (Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape” 37). Seymour Chatman, who is similarly concerned with how we distinguish between description and narrative, provides the key example, noting how Michaelangelo “Antonioni manoeuvres us through the cracks of diegetic convention” through his use of temps mort, or lingering dead time created by maintaining shots after their supposed narrative content matter has left, leaving us with a new content matter brought to our attention as spectacle or description (Chatman, “Description in the Cinema” 10), or as Lefebvre would see it, as landscape. However, most importantly Lefebvre sees a loophole created through the cultural appreciation of landscape paintings. He argues that contemporary viewers are well acquainted with what a landscape painting looks like — the recurring framing or composition choices, and geographic subject matter. As a result, when we see similar content we are more likely to understand this location as potentially a landscape, and therefore worth greater consideration than we would normally give to a film’s setting (Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape” 34, 35, 51). This “landscape” gaze jars the viewer into seeing the location distinct from the narrative (Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape” 34, 35). As Bordwell himself notes, the paths of eye movements dramatically diverge depending on what people have been told to look for because vision is a cognitive process dependent on pre-existing knowledge as much as visual stimuli (“Mind’s Eye” n.p.). Procedural schema not only explain why audiences fixate on narrative, but also why, on occasion they do not; why they may treat a particular film moment, whether Men in Black’s rooftop trip or The Shining’s serene helicopter movement as a spectacle. I would argue that the audience’s cultural knowledge momentarily provides them with a more apt procedural 48 schema for this more location-orientated part of a film. Musser, Lefebvre and Chatman’s theories together help explain how travelling shots help disinter the land from its setting.15 I argue that the process of identifying landscapes that Lefebvre describes is similar to what Bordwell describes, the key difference being that rather than being told what to look for, we are being culturally informed regarding what to look for. In other words, we also have a “moving landscape” gaze or procedural schema that disinters the location from the narrative. A similar process also takes place when we watch travelling shots. We are used to taking in the passing landscape from a vehicle, and this affects how we perceive a similar experience when it is on a screen. We are also perceptually primed by history and culture to perceive travelling shots as indicators of authenticity, particularly shots that highlight the shuddering of the vehicle mount. Narrative has not just reinforced, but also added to the meaning of travelling shots. Whereas originally, as phantom rides, travelling shots were simply actuality films, now, whether as second unit shots or on-location action sequences, many are non-fictional shots within a fictional framework in the sense that the vehicle movement, passing landscape and passersby are dramatically less staged than the surrounding film. As Nanna Verhoeff notes in her examination of early Western set travel films, there is a “rhetoric of space” in the contrasting between authentic external locations, and constructed internal spaces (West in Early Cinema 202). This contrast simultaneously draws attention to the travelling shot’s relative authenticity, and associates this newfound authenticity with the film as a whole (Verhoeff, West in Early Cinema 195-7). It is the cumulative effect of these processes that provides and distinguishes for us the mediated landscape that is the penultimate shot of Maurice Pialat’s A Mouth Agape (1974) (figures 1.73-80). The movie is about the gradual death of a rural matriarch and her family’s non-acceptance of this withdrawal of humanity. The particular shot involves a moving landscape filmed from the perspective of the boot of a car leaving a French village. It is what delineates the shot from the rest of the film, draws our attention to the careful details, and authenticates the image. This vehicular landscape may lack any diegetic framing, but this merely highlights how much of the car’s nature is still inscribed within the shot. It is not just the perspective and speed, but also the bumps and rhythms of the movement. The shot’s four minute length gives us a chance to focus on these traces of human and vehicle movement: the shudders as the car’s occupants get inside, the tremble as the engine starts, and the pauses that occur thanks to passing traffic. That this type of landscape shot appears within a Pialat film is particularly revealing. Typically Pialat cuts to the quick: there are no conventional establishing shots within his films. Instead location is revealed through how it is lived (Sallitt 10). That this vehicle-landscape shot was used says something about how pertinent this type of shot is to the day-to-day experiences of the village’s people. The last shot sees the bereaved husband gradually turning out the lights of his shop, signalling the end of this production.

15 For an extended discussion regarding the relationship between landscapes and travelling shots, see Gunning’s “Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures: Early Cinema’s Phantom Rides.” 49 Narrative also introduces meditative subjectivity into the travelling shot. Early narrative shorts barely connected their travelling shots with action or character based sequences. For example, while cleverly staged with its balancing of a robber coach on a side trail and handcar further ahead on the main rail, The Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express (Porter 1906) perfunctorily jumps from inside a train carriage to the engine’s view without any character derived motivation – omniscient curiosity of events is enough of a justification. However, travelling shots were quickly built into basic point-of-view editing principles: even if a travelling shot does not follow the viewpoint of a character as they glance off-screen, the direction of a given travelling shot is at least related to the protagonists’ spatial and perceptual orientations. The integration of authentic travelling shot and inauthentic studio is not just important to how audiences judge films; it is an essential part of film history. Two rail films, G. A. Smith’s November 1899 The Kiss in the Tunnel and the Bamforth company’s December 1899 remake, provide a crucial stage in the development of action continuity and the ability of film to integrate multiple distinct filming locations into one diegetic location. The Smith version was merely a one shot sequence of a couple kissing inside a darkened train carriage, but it was meant to be placed between two phantom-ride travelling shots of a train entering and exiting a tunnel to suggest cause and effect. The Bamforth version fine-tuned this action continuity by providing the surrounding train shots that were meant to contextualise the film’s event and clarify the cause and effect of the film (Musser, “Travel Genre” 128; Salt 41-42). (It is worth noting that while Smith wanted phantom rides to sandwich the sequence, the Bamford version uses distant shots of the train entering and exiting the titular tunnel — actually two trains since the Bamford version’s exterior shots were sourced from pre-existing footage. In other words, the Bamforth version was a prepackaged film. This was the first time such action continuity had been used, and part of the justification of its use was to solve the problems of integrating studio and location filming — narrative cause and effect smooths over discrepancies of space, joining them together much like an audio-bridge joins shots. Narrative is essential for diegetic space, it is only this suggested hypothetical space that can hold these otherwise discontinuous and possibly impossible spaces together. As a result, our experiences of the contemplation induced by long-distance travelling combines with our knowledge of a character’s use of a vehicle such that we understand many travelling shots as denoting a character’s perspective, position, knowledge, or even contemplation. Returning to Murray Smith’s observations, it is this conflation of vehicle perspective and protagonist subjectivity that travelling shots that helps align audience and character perspective. Little wonder that travelling shots were quickly used by filmmakers to indicate not just a vague contemplation, but also psychological states. Even by 1919 Robert Reinert’s Opium takes advantage of audiences’ connection of travelling with vision. As Salt notes of the insert shots used to depict a protagonist’s drug addled state: “These are travelling landscape shots taken from a boat going down a river, and they are intentionally shot out of focus, or underexposed, or cut into the film upside down. The last of these devices in particular seems to me very striking, and also quite successful in conveying a feeling of disorientation” (Salt 50 144). A more naturalistic approach appears in such films as 1923’s La Roue (Gance), in which the diegetically found, abstracted blur of rapidly passing foreground seen from a train’s window is used to indicate mental confusion and collapse. Leos Carax synthesises the two in Pola X (1999) with an obviously fake rear projection in the window of a train carriage stall showing a stylised take on La Roue’s found abstraction (figure 1.81). The best example of these narrative tweaks to the travelling shot and their apotheosis lie in the road movie genre. As will be examined in Chapter Four, the genre is defined by travelling shots. Road movies use them to demonstrate the protagonist’s vehicle-mediated contemplation of the land, and — harking back to the basic rhetoric of the travelling shots — their freedom to move through geographic landscapes and through a synthesis of contemplation and freedom, bridge interiority and exteriority. Conclusion

This chapter opens with a comment about how film’s lexicon of stylistic devices is informed by various accidents, histories and gestures sourced from outside film’s obvious purview; later it is noted that many of these devices are made more cinematic, that these devices are smoothed-down, integrated and stripped of their source’s connotations. In a way this chapter can be read as an examination of the cost and the advantages of such a sanding down. Travelling shots have accrued two sets of overlapping connotations, that of their emblematic depiction of modernity’s collapse of space and that of an audience’s own experience of day- to-day travel. Each of this chapter’s histories are dedicated to one level of connotations: the attraction history relating the shot’s continuing visual rhetoric of a control over space; and the contemplation history being guided by an audience’s own experience of travel and what mind set is introduced. When these two histories compete with one another, most noticeably when a travelling shot needs to demonstrate a fantastic control over space then we can see both the pros and cons of these extra-cinematic connotations. Here the everyday connotations of normal transport get in the way of demonstrating a mystical ability to move through space, and as a result the visual traces of vehicular movement are elided. But this comes at a cost, without these visual traces an audience loses their reminders of the side-benefit of everyday travel, the understanding that a travelling shot’s trajectory marks out someone’s contemplative point of view. This is not to say that the visual traces of the shot’s vehicle propulsion ensures that a travelling shot will forever connote vehicle movement, contemplation or technological prowess. History continues, and while audience perceptions of travelling shots might seem stable now they may just as readily change later. A potential example of this shift can be seen in the parallel history of another form of camera movement, that of handheld camera shooting. Whereas the shaking hunting movement of a handheld camera once clearly connoted a documentary approach it no longer does. This is because in recent years the movement inherent to these shots has been so excessively used to energise sequences that their initial connotation has become diluted. Audiences are less inclined to associate handheld camera work with documentary work, and as a result handheld camera work has moved that 51 much closer to producing purely cinematic movement. As a result, a recent period film like Robin Hood (Ridley Scott 2010) can frequently deploy handheld camera work without suggesting an off-screen, anachronistic, documentary maker. A similar dilution of the travelling shot’s vehicular qualities can just as readily occur, and audiences will then no longer associate a travelling shot’s movement with a vehicle, but a cinematic desire to energise.

52 Chapter Two The Integration of Travelling Shots into Contemporary Hollywood Filmmaking Practice

Four shots as one: A CGI-helicopter shot takes us toward a palace; now towards a barren volcanic plug and a plunge into a crevice; a railtrack now leads us through a tunnel and under an oncoming steam engine; the last shot brings us out of the tunnel and into the open, lightning strikes (figures 2.1-7). This is not the opening to Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger (2013), but to its first trailer, a far more satisfying and ideologically coherent piece. The trailer can be read thematically; as railway baron (and trailer narrator), Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) explicates “Imagine, time and space under the mastery of man; power.” In the light of Chapter One, this may explain why these shots in the trailer are all travelling shots. However, we can also look at the structural impetus behind Hollywood’s frequent use of these shots. The opening palace shot and the closing lightning shot are logos: the former Disney’s, the latter Jerry Bruckheimer Films’s logo. The trailer interpolates the logos into the film’s discourse on power and spatial mobility; it also highlights the fact that, nowadays, even logos are travelling shots. This chapter follows these two threads. This chapter examines the travelling shot as adapted for contemporary Hollywood blockbusters.16 While the first chapter outlined the broad strokes of the travelling shot’s suitability for narrative filmmaking, Chapter Two evaluates the flexibility of the travelling shot and how it complements specific Hollywood practices. It is important to study the travelling shot as it is used in contemporary blockbusters because it illustrates how highly adaptable the travelling shot is to evolving industry norms, demands and contexts. Furthermore, the travelling shot’s use reveals the extent to which contemporary industrial filmmaking is concerned with spatiality. I argue that the travelling shot is the perfect device through which to showcase or perform “space.” By examining travelling shots under the exaggerated or intensified conditions associated with blockbusters, I hope to draw out certain aspects of the travelling shot that can still be found, if less overtly, within other forms of filmmaking, whether more ordinary examples of contemporary Hollywood or arthouse films, which I will discuss in later chapters. Recent Hollywood filmmaking practices have revealed an inclination towards the visual excitement of movement (Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It 121-38) and travelling shots always contain movement. However, on some levels, contemporary Hollywood’s shift towards constant movement has devalued the travelling shot’s inherent movement. If in a classical Hollywood film a camera moved independently of its subject, then ideally it would have either a thematic or clarifying justification. The travelling shot was one of the few stylistic

16 It should be noted that when this thesis refers to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, this is not meant to be completely exclusive. The visual techniques of contemporary Hollywood have been co-opted by film industries trying to emulate this big budget aesthetic. For example, contemporary Chinese films like Feng Xiaogang’s Yè Yàn/The Banquet (2006) and Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui 2010) emulate the big-budget pageantry staging of modern Hollywood with their own geography-scaling modified-travelling shots that demonstrate the film’s respective production design. 53 devices that came with its own diegetic justification — they represent vehicle movement — and as such provided a loophole around such restrained tendencies. However, when filmmakers have no qualms about thematic or narratively inappropriate camera movement, then the travelling shot loses its distinction as a loophole. This chapter addresses what the travelling shot brings to the blockbuster, beyond mere movement. I argue that contemporary blockbusters reveal that the travelling shot is no longer just about demonstrating film’s ability to move through and document space, but Hollywood’s ability to create space. Through my original research on these films I have observed a number of patterns regarding the shot’s use within blockbusters: that micro-travelling shots are used to quickly establish POV, position and trajectory; that lengthier travelling shots help re-frame narrative sequences as spectacle in order to better demonstrate Hollywood’s industrial capacity; and that CGI-enhanced travelling shots are used to both frame and provide spectacle through world creation. Whether providing narrative information or showcasing an “altered” space, these patterns reveal a strikingly different approach to our experience of the world. The structure of Chapter Two is shaped by the exploration of these patterns. The works of Michael Allen, David Bordwell, Sheldon Hall, Geoff King, Steve Neale, Michele Pierson, Barry Salt, and Kirsten Thompson will be used to define what contemporary Hollywood blockbusters are, their relationship with previous filmmaking practices, and contemporary Hollywood’s visual tendencies and overall interests. Particular attention will be paid to Hollywood’s need to put the money on the screen, in other words the need to distinguish the blockbuster from its less well financed cousins (Allen, “Talking About a Revolution” 101, 112); as King notes “(e)xpensive productions maintain or raise ‘barriers to entry’ that help to ensure continued oligopoly control by the major studios” (Spectacular Narratives 5). This commercial imperative, what Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale refer to as “representational prowess”17 is examined in relationship to the current fragmentary Hollywood norm that Bordwell identifies as “intensified continuity” (Hall and Neale, Epics 6; Hollywood Tells It 121-23). In part, this chapter is about how contemporary filmmakers use the travelling shot to help mediate these sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic, fiscal and formal tendencies. This chapter then proceeds to examine three recurring patterns of travelling shot use within contemporary Hollywood: micro-travelling, vignetting, and virtuoso shots. While these three patterns do not cover the complete range of travelling shot functions, they are representative of the varied attributes travelling shots bring to contemporary blockbusters. The first pattern of travelling shot use examined is that of micro-travelling shots, or brief travelling shots that take advantage of the travelling shot’s historically accrued connotations. Rapidly cut films such as Avatar (Cameron 2009), Zoolander (Stiller 2001), and most prominently The Bourne Trilogy (Liman 2002; Greengrass 2004, 2007) are discussed in relation to how the filmmakers take advantage of the micro-shot's connotative qualities in making such intensely fragmented films more legible. The length of the travelling shot under

17 Hall and Neale draw this phrase from Ted Hovet’s unpublished thesis. 54 examination is slightly extended for the second pattern I consider in this chapter. Here the vignetted, connotative qualities of the travelling shot are examined in order to better highlight the role travelling shots play in establishing and orientating audiences under unusual circumstances — to whit, the astonishing and often chaotic visuals created by CGI and special effects for blockbuster films. The iconic examples of such special-effects laden blockbusters like Twister (de Bont 1996), Jurassic Park (Spielberg 1993) and, in particular, Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) will be examined and broken down in detail to demonstrate how travelling shots are used to better present a blockbuster’s spectacular and narrative sequences. Lastly, this chapter returns to the lengthy travelling shot that opens Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009), only this time the sequence is not examined as a fantastique depiction by filmmakers attempting to maintain the travelling shot’s tradition of excitement, but as an introductory sequence and shot of a modern Hollywood blockbuster. This shot, and other similar virtuoso CGI travelling shots, are analysed to show how they not only establish a film’s setting, but also the film’s credentials as a well-financed blockbuster. Cumulatively these sections reveal both the travelling shot’s importance to contemporary blockbusters, but also how Hollywood uses these shots to create space.

A Bevelled Cinema

Where contemporary Hollywood starts is inevitably a moving target. Classic scholarly works such as Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Neale & Smith eds. 1998), Spectacular Narratives (King 2001), New Hollywood Cinema (King 2002), The Way Hollywood Tells It (Bordwell 2006) and Movie Blockbusters (Stringer ed. 2003) all predate the triumph of digital filmmaking and online content, while a work like A Cinema Without Walls (Corrigan 1991) is now closer to the time of New Hollywood than contemporary Hollywood. Nonetheless, this thesis settles on the Nineties as the cut-off point of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. Barry Salt’s breakdown of the average shot length (ASL) of Hollywood films for each decade reveals a precipitous decline of ASL for films as Hollywood entered the 1990s (Salt 358) and, as will be expanded upon, this is a key component of intensified continuity. In terms of audience appreciation and technology, special effects theorist Michele Pierson observes that the normalisation of CGI has heralded a wonder-less age in which audiences are no longer curious as to how something was achieved — because the answer is always CGI (“No Longer” 36-42). The rise of the franchise helped to finance the shift toward CGI. In the Eighties, treating a blockbuster as a franchise was merely an option, but as King and Thompson have observed, by the Nineties the franchise had become the default standard (Thompson, “Frodo Franchise” 3-7; King, New Hollywood Cinema 68-9). While the film is still the marketing centrepiece, it is now a centrepiece of a campaign supporting and boosted by ancillary products — not just DVDs and novelisations, but also games, and toys that use not just the film’s story but also its world.

55 This justification for my demarcation of where contemporary Hollywood filmmaking begins also establishes what I see as the relevant aspects of travelling shots to contemporary blockbusters. Blockbusters utilise the contemporary filmmaking norm of intensified continuity to both showcase their expense and their ancillary world. Intensified continuity filmmaking practices were boosted alongside film budgets. Greater budgets require a greater guarantee of audiences. To ensure this, blockbusters are ever more tightly controlled, tested and tweaked by their producers. This control is equally abetted by the blockbuster’s growing budget and infrequency as the increased length of shooting periods and the relatively decreased cost of film and cameras have combined to significantly increase the degree of coverage available to filmmakers for editing. However, while excess coverage aided editors, the main reason for shifting further towards intensified continuity practices is the desire to attract and sustain the attention of large audiences. As the name suggests, intensified continuity is a continuation of previous classical Hollywood continuity (Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It 121-23). There is the same emphasis on understandable storytelling: basic premises of psychological plausibility, cause and effect, and the creation of a coherent space are still adhered to. The difference now is that in attempt to sustain audience and filmmaker interest in what could be seen as staid decoupage, filmmakers have taken to using various formal techniques to energise films and as a result have shifted away from classical, unobtrusive camerawork and editing towards a style filled with movement and obtrusive editing. Along with the 1990s ushering in a heretofore new ASL low, the decade also saw camera movement increase in every way imaginable. Whether it has been to tilt, pan, crane, track, zoom or even just to shake the camera on the spot, any device that increases on-screen movement has been used more, and the highly mobile travelling shots comfortably fit within this broader stylistic trend. As filmmaker Mike Figgis observes, “If somebody goes for a piss these days, it’s usually a crane shot” (Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It 135). Even the movement of the movement has increased: while filmmakers have attempted to strip travelling shots of their vehicular traces, Steadicam and hand-held cameras have added their own tremulous movement. However, while rapid cutting and camera movement inflate the visual interest of sequences, they also destabilise the image and the audience’s perspective as to what is happening, which leads to a loss of legibility. It is this balancing act between visual interest and legibility that both contemporary Hollywood filmmakers and this chapter seek to deal with. At least for the purposes of this thesis, what contemporary blockbuster filmmakers aim for are films that visually entertain and sustain audience interest from moment to moment while imparting a legible story in a manner that highlights Hollywood’s distinguishing characteristic, its financial strength. Sometimes these tendencies supplement one another: for instance, big budget CGI provides useful eye candy. Other times they distract from one another: as just discussed, frantic movement can distract from pictorial legibility. As such, contemporary Hollywood blockbusters can in part be defined by their attempts to find an optimal balance of these tendencies. I argue that the travelling shot’s ability to simultaneously provide visual energy and guide our vision perfectly supports Hollywood’s filmmaking priorities. 56 Micro-Travelling Shots as a Counterbalance to Reduced Visual Legibility and Average Shot Length

One of the most common ways contemporary films balance energising incoherence and legibility is through the use of micro-travelling shots. Our accrued understanding of travelling shots, derived from our long exposure to the shots’ traditions of attraction and contemplation, can be observed in the distilled connotative qualities of micro-travelling shots. So far this thesis has been about lengthy travelling shots, exploring how the modernity-wrought history of the travelling shot combined with the audiences’ own experience of travelling make audiences sensitive to experiential qualities of the shot. My discussion of lengthy travelling shots has been necessary because audiences need time to notice how a shot demonstrates mastery over space, reveals the characteristics of a vehicle to an audience or perceptually primes them to more contemplatively approach the passing landscape. However, most travelling shots now are only a few seconds long, and as such are termed micro-travelling shots or micro shots. It is in this section of the chapter that I explore how the history of the travelling shot has provided us with seemingly distilled travelling shots that provide information rather than experience of the passing world. Most micro-shots are found in the background of some action or dialogue sequence, but there are a number of micro-shots that act as purified versions of the lengthy macro-travelling shots. These distilled micro-shots, found in any contemporary Hollywood film whether a brief helicopter shot that isolates native wildlife in Avatar or an overhead establishing shot of New York in Zoolander, highlight the strength of audiences’ culturally acquired understanding of travelling shots. These connotations act as shorthand for what travelling shots normally take time to demonstrate. As a result these highly refined micro-shots improve the legibility of intensified continuity films through their more efficient cueing. The importance of micro-travelling shots’ connotative qualities in improving the legibility of chaotic intensified-continuity films can be seen in Paul Greengrass’s systematic use of them in The Bourne Supremacy. The Bourne Supremacy can be seen as a vulgar catalogue of all the different types of these purified micro-travelling shots. Shots that indicate authenticity, prowess over space, energy or subjectivity and contemplation are all to be found here. While examples could be drawn from almost any part of the film, a driving sequence from midway through the film is the most pertinent example thanks to its particularly aggressive approach to intensified continuity. Here I examine The Bourne Supremacy’s Moscow travelogue.18 While The Bourne Supremacy’s 2.4 ASL is almost iconically brief, singled out by Bordwell as an example of intensified continuity’s tendency towards furious disorientation (Hollywood Tells It 139), this

18 Though only The Bourne Supremacy is discussed here, it is only the degree to which it adheres to intensified continuity that singles it out. Otherwise its approach and construction is typical. As film critic Kent Jones observes: “Chases are notoriously tricky, though, often becoming monotonous (Ronin), ridiculous (The Rock), or utterly predictable in the alteration of points of view from windshield-looking-out to tire-on-asphalt to pursuing-car-in-rearview-mirror to long shot and so on” (173).

57 sequence, in which amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) attempts to cross Moscow in a taxi, more than halves that ASL with an ASL of 1.12. The sequence’s opening shots introduce us to both Moscow and the first type of connotative micro-shot: the second-unit authenticating travelling shot that establishes where a film’s protagonists are (figure 2.8). Then, following the tradition of the travelling shot as a demonstrative attraction we can see how the visual rhetoric of mastery over space is repeatedly reinforced by a variety of diegetically sourced shots that demonstrate Bourne’s ability to nimbly drive a variety of vehicles through Moscow — whether documenting near misses or the occasional close hit (figures 2.9-10). In doing so these analytic shots do not just document film’s ability to quickly move through space, but also Bourne’s own control over his environment and his own diegetic ability to move through the film’s space. Cut between these two types of shots are close-up shots of passing road or other nearby terrain that are so close to the ground that there only the texture of road — and that is whipped away by the movement of the car (figure 2.11). These shots have little action or orientation information bar the obvious. These are travelling shots that seem less designed to construct action, than to purposefully stud a greater sense of movement and energy into an overall sequence. Paul Schrader, commenting on Yasujiro Ozu an artist working in the diametrically opposite tradition of contemplation, sees Ozu’s practice as exemplified by mono no aware pillow shots to signify transcendent “permanence within transition” (Transcendental Style 32). The example Schrader uses is of “clothesline in the foreground and a moving train in the background – serene everyday permanence outlasting mobile change” (Transcendental Style 32). However, here, in these texture shots we have the opposite with immanent blasts of hype produced by studding a sequence with narratively unhelpful, but attractive and exciting firework (hana bi) shots. Even the field is reversed with the moving vehicle (in Ozu a train, in The Bourne Supremacy a car) now changing the foreground as it moves pass the film’s static background. This effect is exacerbated by the “intensified” handheld nature of many of the travelling shots. In Chapter One I discussed the importance of the small 1973 Panaflex camera for its ability to shoot synchronised 35mm inside a car, and here we see its application within the practice of intensified continuity. Here the 360º car-interior pan of Sugarland Express is replaced with 180º-360º whip pans whose composition-blur-composition (typically from front windshield view to rear windshield view and vice versa) structure effectively introduces a second, de- facto, set of cuts that still maintain (some) spatial integrity (figures 2.12-14). Likewise, the movement provided by the car is doubled by the nervous sway of the handheld shots. Nonetheless, the interior of the car confirms we are seeing travelling shots, not handheld shots, as they guide and clarify our vision. The type of micro-shot that is most important to this sequence is what I call the ‘trajectory micro-shot’. These subjective shots orientate an audience to a protagonist’s location as much through trajectory as indicated location by tidily clarifying that a shot is also the approximate POV of a character. It is these trajectory shots that are the most indicative of how travelling shots help intensified continuity cohere — the quality is achieved principally through their vignetting, which I understand as visual cues which can be used to provide information about 58 a given shot. As will be expanded upon shortly, I see the vehicle traces of a travelling shot as being able to clarify perspective and spatial position. As Salt notes, what is intensified in “intensified continuity” is actually discontinuity; filmmakers energise sequences through movement, abrupt shifts in composition and lighting (375). Vignetting helps compensate for the resultant loss in legibility. The vignetting of certain shots in early cinema played an important role in establishing the conventions of point of view and educating film audiences about these conventions. This can be seen by skipping back in time to when POV shots were first introduced in such G.A. Smith films as Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) and As Seen Through a Telescope (1901). During this period filmmakers had not developed the concept of the reverse angle, let alone presumed that their audiences would immediately recognise the perspective they were seeing and what it signified. Instead, as Salt notes, filmmakers clarified the perspective being shown through vignetting (53). In the case of As Seen Through a Telescope we are shown a man looking through a telescope before a second shot shows us a woman’s ankle; the film’s audience then only knew that this was the dirty old man’s POV because the second shot was vignetted as if the shape of a telescope lens (figures 2.15-16). Likewise, in the case of the Pathé’s “peeping tom” films, vignettes in the shape of a keyhole were required to help audiences understand they were seeing the peeping tom’s perspective. From this perspective vignetting can be seen as a sort of visual training wheel for the POV shot, helping to train or educate filmgoing audiences as to what this pattern of editing represents. The modern vignetted travelling shot functions in the same way that the vignetted POV shots of olden days did: they educate the audience as to what causes this perspective, where it is located and why. This increases the legibility of the vignetted-shot. This in part is what is also happening with travelling shots, discussed in the previous chapter, which are supposedly mounted on fantastic or futuristic diegetic sources of which the filmmakers can presume little knowledge, and must restart from scratch. Like the early cinema shorts, the audience is shown the cause of the point of view — people using a cart, dragon or a Delorean — and then the effect of the point of view, which will be so out of the ordinary that it will be hopefully impossible to recognise as anything but a point of view shot — while early cinema used stylised vignettes, modern travelling shots use diegetic vignettes and suggestive subjective imagery that suggest unusual movement. Such a travelling shot needs to be strange enough that an audience has no doubts it was the fantastic source that generated the shot. An audience so palpably understands the connections between the diegetic frame of the vehicle, the experience of travel and the link between vehicle and driver means that we readily identify vehicle perspective with protagonist subjectivity. More than that, at this point audiences are so comfortable with the visual traces of a car, bus or motorbike left within the shot that we can recognise the trajectory itself as a form of vignette that identifies POV. This knowledge is crucial to the efficiency of the micro-travelling shot as such a vignetted trace shot is its own shot/reverse shot montage as it suggests both viewer and viewed, allowing filmmakers to elide one shot. The result is that in the Moscow sequence from The Bourne 59 Supremacy, even if audiences are unable to orientate themselves through identifiable diegetic locations, the driving sequences are still made legible through the various vehicles’ trajectories; the different speeds and perspectives of each micro travelling shot marking out another protagonist or antagonist. Then there is what I call the contemplative, thinking micro travelling shot. The link between driving, contemplation, and subjectivity has become so palpable that travelling and driving shots, particularly those without any other signs of justification, have been turned into a sign of thinking. This is not to say it induces the audience into contemplation (though it may act as a cue towards this end), but that it acts as sign that draws on our memory and experiential knowledge of contemplation. As Michael Mann’s body of work suggests, at the right time of night or with appropriate music any travelling shot can become a depiction of elegiac alienation or introspection as per Heat (1995), The Insider (1999) or Collateral (2004). It may seem that the contemplative micro-shots should be absent from The Bourne Supremacy’s Moscow sequence, but they still bookend it. Contemplative micro-shots are a defining feature of the The Bourne Trilogy as a whole: much of the trilogy’s emotional pull comes from their vehicle-mediated nature; these brief contemplative shots provide some resonance to Bourne’s otherwise mad dash around an abstracted, paranoid Europe, bridging his amnesic status and probing journey to find out who he is. While I have problems with its application to real places, spatial theorist Marc Auge’s concept of non-places or places abstracted from their surrounding environment as a by-product of globalisation — highways, transit lounges, hotel rooms, airports — aptly captures the expressionistic tone, and visual rhetoric bought into by The Bourne Trilogy (77-81). As will be expanded upon in Chapter Four, whether based on reality or not, the concept of various spaces and their association with forms of perception, is an important part of how movies make meaning. When not destroying his environment, Bourne barely touches it. Bourne drifts through Europe; if he is not actually in a hotel room, airport, or travelling then he is inside an anonymous office building or being tracked by a satellite. Indeed, considering the continuing modern vogue for minimalist acting, it could be argued that a micro-shot can be more psychologically expressive than a reaction shot as an audience extrapolates what the protagonist is thinking based on what they are supposedly seeing. All we need is a glimpse of windscreen and we are there, perceptually identifying with an unseen protagonist; an audience equally cut off from Bourne and the world.

Acknowledging Spectacle: Travelling Shots and Narrative

The following section of the chapter continues the examination of what I term the vignetted travelling shot. Whereas the above section considered how the ‘vignetted travelling shot’ helps rapidly cut films cohere, here I examine how vignetting can help perceptually frame subject matter as spectacular. This section explores how travelling shots are used to help

60 foreground the spectacle of contemporary Hollywood’s technical and financial strengths via narrative means. As discussed above in the section of this chapter titled “A Bevelled Cinema,” this is a key priority of industrial blockbuster filmmaking. In both the preceding chapter and the introduction, this thesis has already addressed spectacle. In “Cinema of Attractions” Gunning intended to explore the connection between the similar monstration found in early cinema and the underground films exemplified by Jack Smith; however, his observation that “recent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects” (70) was turned into its own theoretical concept for dealing with contemporary blockbusters. While Chapter One examined the relationship between travelling shots and the spectacle of landscapes, this section applies these insights to the relationship between blockbusters and spectacle. I do not want to get bogged down in semantic word games regarding the precise meaning of “spectacle”. At one end, academics like Scott Bukatman, Brooks Landon and Justin Wyatt see modern filmmakers as having abandoned classical Hollywood priorities of narrative for vulgar spectacle. That, as in the early days of cinema, audiences did not attend films for a narrative but for a spectacle that would visually delight them. Consequently, the effects- driven blockbusters that started turning up into the Seventies before being established in the Eighties and Nineties — Star Wars (Lucas 1977), Top Gun (Scott 1986), The Terminator (Cameron 1984), Independence Day, Twister, Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991), Last Action Hero (McTiernan, 1993), and others— were a pretext for spectacle that de-monstrated Hollywood and film’s ability to present (Bukatman 266, Landon 63-68, Wyatt 26-27). At the other end we have the position held by academics like Bordwell, William Buckland and Shilo T. McClean who believe that contemporary Hollywood films follow the same basic precepts as classical Hollywood films. The sensuous matter of film is organised to emphasise narrative causality and this informs how audiences perceive screen information: we watch films for information that will help us understand the narrative, and therefore we are semi-alienated from a film’s presence as we see it as narrative information. As such, even if material may seem to be spectacular, within the body of a narrative film it ceases to be spectacular. In the middle, we have authors like Hall, King, Neale and Pierson who argue that films synthesise or integrate spectacle within narrative in a mutually beneficial way. For Hall and Neale, rather than evoke the earlier “cinema of attractions,” we should appreciate this contemporary form of filmmaking as a “Cinema of Spectacular Situations,” a cinema that does not pose “a conflict between spectacle and narrative” but rather acts as a bridge between them (250-51). As King writes, “(n)arrative and spectacle can work together in a variety of changing relationships and there is no single, all embracing answer to the question of how the two are related” (Spectacular Narratives 2). These are epistemological labels. King, probably the most notable writer on Hollywood spectacle, draws on John Mueller’s work on Astaire musicals to argue that the visual interest provided by spectacle either highlights a film’s theme or furthers a plot (King, Spectacular Narratives 63-65; Mueller 31-33). I would argue that the principle distinction between these various parties lie in two areas: whether spectacle 61 refers to description or impressive events that do not emphasise protagonist psychology19 and whether one believes that the tension between spectacle and narrative is a zero-sum game — to be more narrative is to be less spectacular and visa versa. For instance, as will be expanded upon shortly, King understands spectacle and narrative to work simultaneously,20 while Pierson examines how narrative films can “bracket” spectacle sequences within themselves (Pierson, “CGI Effects” 169-76). It is to this body of work that I offer my interpretation of spectacle. I see spectacle as description free from the framing of narrative organisation. As discussed at greater length in Chapter One, this thesis uses Branigan’s definition of narrative as a series of events whose cause and effect pattern is held together by a focal point, and that this focal point is typically a protagonist (Narrative Comprehension 100-01). Working with Branigan’s definition, the comprehension of spectacle as merely exciting visuals seems troublesome. Here action sequences, the vulgar spectacle, are revealed as a potentially more pure, heightened form of narrative: the visual information of gunplay and explosions are far more clear and pertinent regarding cause and effect and its importance than ambiguous psychology. As Bordwell observes, “you can find suspense at more micro-levels, working not at the level of plot action as a whole but rather within and across particular scenes” (“Arthouse Suspense” n.p.). As such, if an action sequence is removed from its context it is still a narrative, albeit one that organises a story about spatial positioning, steering, accelerating and crashing, but not much to do with in-depth psychological probing — but then deciding what is appropriate material for storytelling is not an aspect of narrative definition that I am interested in here. I approach spectacle in this way because it also aligns blockbuster spectacle with the greater question of perceptual disinterment. As noted in the introduction, notions of perceptual alienation, distraction and distinctions between experience and information were central to the concerns of early modernity thinkers. This is why I described Bordwell and McClean’s responses in terms of alienation; despite not being a term they would use, it aligns their thoughts with the greater historical lineage. In Chapter One, I addressed how landscapes, a different form of spectacle than the vulgarity discussed here, could be understood separately from their surrounding narrative. Likewise, in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, I detail how other forms of dedramatisation and demarcation can assist in viewer in appreciating a moment as description, and thus to properly regard its presence rather than simply understand it as narrative information. Whether seen positively — contemplative landscapes and experience — or negatively — vulgar spectacle and distraction — they equally describe the puncture of visual regimes or frameworks. However, while I see the tension between spectacle and narrative as zero sum, I am not interested in understanding a shot as purely spectacle or purely narrative, at all times, within Hollywood feature films they are both. I hold the position that these terms refer to a degree of emphasis: a tendency towards spectacle, a tendency towards narrative. For Carl Plantinga, rather than thinking of interest in terms of a “single entity” our interest derives “from a

19 The explosions, cool ship and car chase school. 20 Hence the title of his book, Spectacular Narratives. 62 variety of sources, including global, long-lasting emotions (suspense, curiosity, anticipation), local emotions (fear, surprise, disgust), desires, aversions, pleasures, and what have you” and that “these global and local emotions also mutually reinforce each other … [they] work together to create the contours of the particular experience offered by the film” (Moving Viewers 70). Though his emphasis on emotions shifts the subject matter slightly away from the content of this thesis, I recognise Plantinga’s mutltimodal understanding of how interests and perceptual framing, local and global, interrelate in my own experience of film. We are spectators whose film-viewing experience mingles and flickers through an array of related thoughts: comprehension of narrative, experience of description, appreciation of technique or cost, and acknowledgement of one’s viewing environment are typical, relevant, threads of thought. Each moment is followed by another moment that brings with it a slightly different context and a slightly different thought. As with Plantinga, I see these thoughts as interrelating, even if this comprises of a momentary, spectacular, appreciation of the technique of a sequence as buttressing what, in general, is comprehended as a narrative sequence within a narrative film. I argue that in a narrative film, the principle reason why audiences may understand perceptual cues as spectacle rather than narrative is mostly common sense: audiences perceive content and style as spectacle when it is more interesting than the story, despite the guidance of narrative schemata. As Plantinga observes, by and large these interests or perceptual framings are guided by the film’s cues (Moving Viewers 8-16). At any given moment cues may incline us to understand the screen as spectacle or narrative. This may be because the spectacle is too interesting to ignore or because the narrative can be taken as a given. In most situations it is a combination of unsuspenseful simple story events in conjunction with diverting visuals. This shifting of framing can be seen in the extended travelling shots of Contact (Zemeckis 1997), which Peter Krämer sees as “reflect(ing) on the very nature of the blockbuster spectacle” and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968), “the film which Contact resembles most in its thematic preoccupations and intellectual ambitions” (129-30). Near the end of Contact, Dr Eleanor Arroway (Jodie Foster) is whisked through an alien civilisation’s intergalactic highway and near the end of 2001, Dr David Bowman (Keir Dullea) lands on Jupiter. Both are sequences comprised of travelling shots interspersed with reactions shots of the relevant protagonist. Both are recognisably spectacular; separate from their context they could be abstract films about the spectatorial relationship between colour, light, rhythm and forward movement. Seen as part of a film, these are narrative moments. Contextualised, we cannot help but see them as information regarding the characters’ journeys, nor wonder what the implications of these visuals are for the characters and their future behaviour (particularly so with the more traditional Contact and Arroway’s search for a secular mystical epiphany). However, it also seems foolish to ignore the impact of the sequences. Though they provide narrative information, these two sequences shift into a spectacular mode through an excess of visual interest and an excess of time taken to portray the narrative event. As noted in the introduction, nowadays a brief succession of shots (indicating departure, journey and arrival) 63 is sufficient to convey necessary information regarding a given journey. It is the imagery in excess of this minimum requirement that becomes interesting; they are “a ‘contemplative’ brand of spectacle” (King, “Spectacle, Narrative” 116). At ten minutes and four minutes respectively, 2001 and Contact’s sequences are clearly in excess of the requirements of decency in depicting such lengthy trips. There is neither a suspenseful hint of danger nor any suggestion that the protagonists’ flight is unstable let alone in any danger. Likewise, there is no suspenseful music to cue us to such potential dangers. As a result the sequence becomes de-dramatized, our interest drawn out towards the spectacular visual nature of the sequences even quicker thanks to the unusual imagery of the two sequences. This approach is made explicit in Interstellar (scientist Kip Thorne and producer Lynda Obst also contributed to Contact) as Cooper and his fellow NASA astronauts fly through a cosmic wormhole. Interstellar has a more aggressive sound mix than Contact, but any cueing towards suspense is balanced out by NASA scientist Romilly (David Gyasi) informing Cooper that the spaceship “controls won’t work, we’re passing through the bulk (of the wormhole), all you can do is observe and report.” This is a preamble to the fact that tendencies towards the spectacular are strengthened by how they are visually framed by a film, for instance, via vignetting. For Pierson and King, amazed protagonists act as audience proxies: as the protagonists stare dumbstruck at unfolding CGI events they also cue the audience to stare dumbstruck at the film’s spectacle (King, Spectacular Narratives 44; Pierson, Special Effects 120). For Pierson, as with Lefevre’s discussion of landscape in Chapter One, this is a way of demarcating or bracketing spectacular description from its narrative surrounds (Special Effects 119-21). King, however, uninterested in perceptual framing, sees spectacle and narrative strengthening one another and he notes, ”To interpret this as a spectacular/special-effects interruption or bracketing of narrative, however, is to assume a rather one-dimensional model of the experience of film viewing — as if, for example, the normal experience of spectatorship was anything close to total and undivided engrossment or ‘suspension of disbelief’” and that, “the example of special-effects-led spectacle might be used, more helpfully, to illustrate the complex and multidimensional modalities in which any particular film, type of film, or individual sequence is likely to be consumed” (“Spectacle, Narrative” 121-22). This strikes me as an over- simplification of what Pierson (also Lefebvre) is probably claiming — which is that films can envelope or frame a moment so that we are inclined to understand audio-visual information slightly differently. Whether or not this is what Pierson is arguing, this is what I argue: that films can cue audiences to perceive moments as description. Travelling is often used to perceptually prime audiences for special-effects driven spectacles. There is a recurring trend of vehicles being used to introduce audiences to the spectacular sequences of iconic mid-Nineties blockbusters, as if the protagonists are on a roller-coaster. Jurassic Park provides the most literal take on this idea that blockbusters are theme park rides, with the protagonists travelling through a

64 theme park on lurid fluoro green Jeeps21; while Twister is so car bound that only Twister’s blockbuster status prevents it from being discussed as a road movie. Indeed, as Angela Ndalianis, amongst others, has noted, the theme park ride and the blockbuster effects sequence have literally become intertwined (Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium 56-72). As previously noted, the act of travel and gazing out past a windscreen shares strong similarities to the act of watching a cinema screen. For these films, showing a slack-jawed protagonist travelling in a vehicle is just reinforcing on perceptual cues. I do not want to argue that because travelling shots perceptually prime audiences to gaze at landscapes that this equally primes them to gaze at monsters (or spaceships or explosions or pan-dimensional rifts). However, I would argue that in the case of Lefebvre’s landscapes it is the subject-as-composition itself that cues an audience to treat it as a spectacle, in the case of travelling shots it is the framing of the subject. The travelling shot’s motion, and vehicular aspect help prime an audience to treat the subject as a spectacle, it does not matter what the subject is. A clear example of how contemporary filmmakers take advantage of the travelling shot’s perceptual priming can be seen in Independence Day, a story about the United States of America’s response to an alien invasion. While the immediate reaction is failure, an alien spaceship is eventually captured by USMC Captain and fighter pilot Steven Hiller (Will Smith). Hiller teams up with eccentric scientist David Levinson (Jeffrey Goldblum), and together the pair set out on a mission to land the captured spaceship inside an alien mothership so as to upload a virus and infect the alien fleet. The sequence in which Hiller and Levinson travel to the mothership can be understood in two different ways. As a narrative we follow the pair’s progress: their struggle to get inside the mothership, to upload the virus and then to successfully escape. As a spectacle we see a demonstration of the film’s special effects, the mothership, an entire alien fleet, their position in space, and what they can achieve. This epistemological division is replicated in the structure itself, the sequence can be broken neatly into two halves: one spectacular, the other narrative. At first the trip is comically suspenseful: Hiller struggles with the controls while Levinson looks embarrassingly nervous. Then a particularly enlightening moment occurs as they approach the fleet — an automatic tracking system kicks in. The question of how and where to fly is removed, all the pair have to do now is gaze out the cockpit windows — which they do (figures 2.17-20). At this point the pair joins the audience in watching a b-grade flick about invading aliens, and together we watch as the ship flies past the alien fleet, closer to the mothership and then towards a small, discreet entrance to the mothership. Once inside we are presented with another display to gawp at and discuss — as Levinson exclaims, “Look at that! There must be thousands of them, millions of them.” The ship lands and Levinson

21 The filmmakers behind Jurassic Park seem clearly aware of this kind of film as spectacle discussion and theorising. Aside from the theme park analogy Jurassic Park features one of the great monster conceits of all time, a Tyrannosaurus Rex that can only see movement. If a character acts and causes narrative events then they are spotted and in danger; however, if they stand still and merely watch then they will be safe. This is literally a spectacular monster, a monster that rewards watching. 65 uploads the virus, in suspense we wait for its success and watch as the pair get ready to escape. This is when the narrative half begins, with the pair’s escape mirroring their arrival (figures 2.21-24). The aliens, noticing our heroes, start this turn of events. Now the space becomes activated through narrative: the immense size of the mother ship, its twisting columns and army of aliens stop being distant spectacular pictorial elements and start being immediate problems as what was once a spectacular environment becomes a narrative environment. The audience has been readied for what may happen by the spectacular establishing sequence; while they may not know the precise nature of what will follow, they have been given ample time to peruse a catalogue of possibilities. As a narrative sequence the audience is now concerned with what will happen next rather than what will be shown next: attention is drawn to the success of Hiller in flying the pair’s fighter to avoid alien fire and the various internal pillars while covering long distance to the mother ship’s exit. Having achieved this, the pair then make their way past the rest of the fleet before safely crashing into Earth and emerging as heroes. This two-part sequence shows how the film and Hollywood take advantage of spectacle and narrative. The urgency of narrative is clearly minimised in the first half. Thanks to the mothership’s size and centrality in Emmerich’s compositions, we are never in doubt that they will spot their destination; this is equally true regarding the computer console once they are inside. Suspense is equally minimised: in addition to the engagement of autopilot, the audience’s attention is never drawn to potentially threatening aliens through inserts or movement with japes removing any residual threat. Even the music avoids any attempt to induce any drama into the action through stings or suspenseful undertones. It is made clear to the audience that what will happen on the journey is both obvious and inevitable, as a result they should just sit back and enjoy the spectacular details. The narrative sequence, what King would still see as spectacle, is the reverse. Hiller and Levinson’s excited yelps and the overly dramatic score audibly frame the pair’s situation as perilous. This moment of narrative suspense is somewhat abetted by Emmerich’s focus on the chasing hoards of aliens and the mothership’s obstructing architecture. The result is we are given a variety of excitement: both spectacular excitement and narrative excitement, and equally a demonstration of Hollywood’s ability to stage and to tell stories. This sequence from Independence Day is far from being a one off. For instance, take the previously mentioned Twister. Here a team of weather trackers seek out a twister. As they approach one for the first time the audience is given a prolonged study of the CGI twister from a distance, the car’s window vignetting providing us with information as to who is seeing what and their reaction. Admittedly, unlike Independence Day, there is no autopilot, merely cruise control and a straight road. Only after the audience has had a chance to marvel at the spectacle and devastating power of the twister does the twister intrude on our and the characters’ reverie and turn the sequence into a more suspenseful narrative sequence that forces many of the team to seek cover. I should note here that despite my focus on car shots, Twister is repeatedly discussed in terms of its helicopter shots. For instance, King refers to 66 the film’s spectacular alternation between “airy and exhilarating shots taken from a helicopter” that “underline the freedom, mobility and space within which the heroes move … almost unbound by any restraints” and the “tightly-framed action sequences” that “create the impression of presence at the heart of action” (Spectacular Narratives 34-35). Likewise Scott MacDonald notes that the “helicopter shots express the characters’ excitement about the adventure they’re on” and, more than that, he also argues that “the helicopter shots in Twister, as in so many other Hollywood films, reveal a typically American cinematic attitude toward moving through space” in comparison to the automobile-derived travelling shots of European art films (127). While I agree with both that the helicopter shot presents the exhilaration of free movement through space, I would like to observe these two things: that Twister also uses travelling shots (this time car shots) when in the heart of the action, the vehicle vignetting helps clarify point of view and situation when the film is rapidly cut, and that helicopter shot is less typically American and more typically Hollywood. Helicopter shots are used to infuse car travel with exhilaration because familiarity has stripped the car shot of its original awe; this state of affairs benefits Hollywood as it can easily afford this means of renewing vehicle exhilaration. Marginal American directors like Jon Jost are unlikely to use such helicopter shots. I think the critical emphasis on helicopter shots, revealed by King and MacDonald’s attention, is a telling example of how successfully helicopter shots have brought renewed energy to the travelling shot and made them salient when they appear within films. By paying attention to the seemingly more banal function of vignetting through travelling shots allows us to better understand recurring patterns of framing in special effects oriented movies. The vignetted handling of the spectacle/narrative divide is an ongoing pattern that can also be seen in such films as Jurassic Park, A.I. (Spielberg 2002) and Avatar. What we have here are not establishing shots, but establishing sequences that are in part guided by the audiences’ understanding of what travelling shots perceptually prime us for. The audience is given a chance to visually appreciate and come to grips with what they are seeing before this developed knowledge is taken advantage of. This guides audiences into appreciating Hollywood’s industrial prowess at staging these sequences.

Travelling Shots and the Relationship Between Auteurs, Industry and World Building in Modern Hollywood Filmmaking

I now want to re-read Chapter One’s initial observations regarding Van Sant’s Psycho and its use of the travelling shot to signal narrative control or power by comparing it to Hitchcock’s original Psycho. In 1960, Hitchcock opened Psycho with six shots that gradually brought the camera, from its opening rooftop pan, closer to a tall hotel, before singling out the film’s protagonists by entering to their room. In 1998, Gus Van Sant opened with a single helicopter shot that smoothly glides through the air towards a tall hotel, before singling out the film’s protagonists in their room and moving through a closed bedroom window. This change reflects a shift in technological norms. Hitchcock had also intended to open the film with a

67 helicopter shot, but technological limitations meant he was unable to film such a shot to his satisfaction and instead he realised the sequence through a series of shots that gradually brought us closer to the couple and the room they are cloistered in (“Psycho liner notes”, Newman 404). The development of the establishing travelling shot was gradual. It required the slow progress of relevant vehicle and film technology to reach a point where filmmakers felt comfortable that such shots could effectively execute such displays of power in a meaningful way. As such, the opening of Gus Vant Sant’s Psycho is actually a pointed display. Kim Newman observes that Van Sant’s Psycho is better understood as an installation with “(t)he howls of critics, fans and filmgoers decrying the enterprise (being) as much a part of the soundtrack as Danny Elfman’s remix of Bernard Herrmann’s score” (404). In a film whose selling point was its adherence to the form of the original film, introducing such elements as Vince Vaughn’s hyper-masculine face (to contrast with Anthony Perkins’ original, more tender face) and hot pink cinematography (to contrast with the original’s sombre black and white), and the successful helicopter shot, means these changes seem more salient as provocation or comment. Van Sant’s deviation from an otherwise near shot-for-shot remake highlights Hollywood’s gradual one-upmanship of its past. This section of the chapter addresses the travelling shot as an overt display of technological and technical prowess. While the previous section examined travelling shots as means of framing discreet spectacle, here travelling shots are examined as obvious spectacle. Previously, this thesis has attempted to avoid comparing tracking and travelling shots to avoid confusion. This was aided by the shot’s vehicle origins, but just as technologies have helped to strip away the perceptual traces of vehicle movement, under certain conditions the difference between travelling and tracking shots has also been stripped away. So while in Chapter One I noted that the first tracking shots were informed by travelling shots, now I want to explore how the practice of certain travelling shots have been informed by tracking shots and establishing shots. I do this for two reasons, it further demonstrates how travelling shots have been brought into industrial filmmaking practices and priorities, and it informs the discussion regarding fantastic world creation that follows this section. Virtuoso travelling shots share similarities with extended tracking shots in their ability to foreground the film industry’s ability to stage. While that may initially seem out of place within the context of rapid editing and “intensified continuity” as Bordwell notes, even though a consistent use of long takes in contemporary Hollywood films is rare, featuring “one or two seem de rigueur in every film” (Hollywood Tells It 184). There are reasons for this discrepancy — for instance, visual variety — however, I would argue that these extended takes provide an opportunity for both Hollywood as an industry, and individual directors to demonstrate their ability to plan and execute complicated camera movements that take in a detailed diegesis. In a film consisting of short shots, shaky movement, and divergent lens and film stock, the one-off extended tracking shot provides a repository for this otherwise lost staging. This repository creates a useful focus point for discussing the strengths of a director, as audiences and critics are provided with an obvious demonstration of a director’s ability to choreograph intricate camera movement in combination with careful blocking and/or crowd 68 sequences. These demonstrations of recognisable style and skill also help reinforce the auteur as a brand name, which improves the director’s marketability and helps with the behind-the- scenes recognition required to push for projects (Buckland, ”Raiders of the Lost Ark” 168; Corrigan 42; King, New Hollywood Cinema 91-95, 114-15). As Bordwell notes, in an artistic competition between craftsmen, once a new technique is developed, synthesised, or brought to prominence there is a cycle of invention within the technique’s parameters as various artists/filmmakers seek to demonstrate their own ingenuity leading to an outburst of one- upmanship (Bordwell, “2-4-6-8” n.p.). Virtuoso travelling shots offer a similar opportunity: like tracking shots, they are highly mobile shots of some duration, and extra-diegetically, they are both displays of filmmakers’ ability to stage and to document said staging. If the 1980s and 1990s high period of the virtuoso tracking-shot competition cycle – book ended by Scorcese’s Raging Bull and de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) – is now over,22 I would argue that this cycle has shifted to the virtuoso travelling shot. Like virtuoso tracking shots, these travelling shots stand out and demarcate both spectacle and an acknowledged moment within the film where the demonstration of technical skills is understood to be foregrounded. There are multiple reasons for this historical trend. In addition to Bordwell’s postulation regarding visual interest, as Plantinga writes, “(a)rtifact emotions are all the emotional responses that can be solicited directly by the artificial status of film as opposed to the content of the fiction” (Moving Viewers 74). Plantinga, in particular, singles out virtuoso camera movement, in this case tracking shots, for their ability to simultaneously evoke admiration and to evoke “malleability, fluidity, and energy” within the diegesis (Moving Viewers 74-75). As Plantinga, drawing on Lisa Fehsenfeld, observes, camera movement can “affect the viewer’s physiology directly and can initiate dizziness, nausea, motion sickness, autonomic reflexes, perception of effort responses, classic conditioning, mimicry, and basic stress responses” and that this is not just about “story and meaning”, it can “also evoke marked visceral, physiological, and emotive effects in viewers” (Moving Viewers 119). The modified travelling shot takes the tracking shot and increases its possibility to a striking degree, emotionally shaping how we perceive a newly established world — often to giddy affect. This is partly because, as Plantinga argues: [T]he affective trajectory of a narrative film for a viewer can often be characterized as one of synesthetic affects, that is, as a host of orchestrated affects that together are designed to characterize a kind of emotional experience, not necessarily by eliciting the paradigmatic emotions associated with that experience, but by eliciting associated affects that characterize the feel or phenomenological qualities of having an emotion or emotions. (Moving Viewers 10) This moment is where a film presents Hollwood’s ability to create. The modified travelling shots discussed in Chapter One — whether The Lord of the Rings which merges helicopter, CGI and model work or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which merges helicopter,

22 It peaked with Snake Eyes, whose use of CGI to merge several shots together to form a thirteen-minute tracking shot presages the assisted- travelling shot. 69 crane and CGI — are exemplary samples of the extension of this competition into a new direction. Now filmmakers do not just demonstrate their ability to construct long and complex camera movements, but also their ability to imagine and assemble the travelling shot from a variety of means of moving the camera — remote controlled helicopter, crane, and Steadicam all play their part in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — and to execute this on location. Part of Warner Bros and Yates’s achievement is that the Half-Blood Prince’s opening sequence was not filmed on some tucked away side street but amidst the City of London; they turned the greater city into a soundstage. However, the modified-travelling shot works less to showcase individual practice and more to showcase industrial practice. While the long-tracking shot is associated with auteurs, whether Preminger and Welles in the ‘40s and ‘50s or De Palma and Scorsese in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the modified shot is more likely to be deployed by journeyman directors, whether Yates, Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 2012) or Sam Raimi (Oz the Great and Powerful 2013) whose generic work better foregrounds Hollywood’s industrial, financial and technical prowess. The shift from directorial to industrial showcase that occurred as the technical competition shifted from the tracking shot to the modified travelling shot happened for a number of reasons. Filmmakers like Welles, De Palma or Scorsese are obviously reliant on industrial support for their tracking shots; there is a reason why it is only Welles’s studio films that feature virtuoso long takes. However, degree matters. While intricate tracking shots may only require technical support, careful planning and a relatively small amount of on- screen resources, the virtuoso travelling shot benefits from the type of epic staging that is usually only available to filmmakers with immense budgets. While Snake Eyes required a boxing ring and a large crowd, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince required London. The opening of Half-Blood Prince does not just demonstrate the mere ability to move through space, filmmaking technique or raising finance; it also demonstrates Warner Brothers’ ability to paralyse the City of London just to make a movie. Unlike many aspects of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking — handheld camera work, rapid cutting, single subject shots, location shooting, and so forth — the modified-travelling shot is not available to the poorly-financed filmmaker. The modified shot does not just demonstrate film’s ability to use technology to move through space, it also demonstrates Hollywood’s ability to develop and finance the technology used to move through and document space. This form of travelling shot revels in being an expensive way of depicting expensive staging. In 1905, the French company Pathé turned to the newly developed panning shots, which had previously only been infrequently used for outdoor actuality films, to demonstrate their extensive and, more importantly, rare and expensive large studio (Salt 43, 50); the modified shot is an update of this world-building or establishing practice. The modified travelling shot is an extension of two filmmaking practices: the demarcated competition sequence, and the “intensified” establishing shot. I would argue the modified shot has fallen into the role of establishing shot due to four inter-related reasons. The modified shot is an extension of the elaborate “arcing” establishing shot in which the camera moves briefly through the terrain before revealing the action, as happens in Deliverance 70 (Boorman 1972) where, for instance, a shot of a waterfall pans left to reveal the characters scrabbling off riverbank rocks as they flee the vicinity. Bordwell sees the arcing establishing shot as part of the rise of intensified continuity’s increased movement with the shot becoming a common trend in such Seventies films and he describes the effect thus: “as if pulling a curtain aside, the camera slowly unmasks the action” (Hollywood Tells It 136). This is an equally apt description of most establishing helicopter shots,23 and the assisted shot extends this trend — both in terms of duration and degree of movement. Here historical practice shapes its use. Mirroring the transition from auteur display to industrial display, the shift from tracking to modified travelling shot shifts us from proximate to distant imagery. Descended from the transparent aerial shots provided by cranes or helicopters, the modified shot is a statement of legibility. If a typical fast moving Hollywood tracking shot is mostly defined by a use of movement-blurred foregrounds, bustling surrounds and passing scrimmage to suggest a certain amount of chaos and density of staging — even if at the cost of some legibility — then in practice the travelling shot is almost its opposite. The typical modified shot is designed to draw attention to the greater diegetic space and the film’s ability to move through it. As a result, these shots have a stylistic tendency towards flitting from vantage point to vantage point, drawing attention to the filmmakers’ ability to move through space in great leaps and bounds from long shot to close up or visa versa. While the simplest modified travelling shots simply slip from long aerial shots to close-ups, like a more tangible zoom, bravura shots vary this by alternating back and forth between close and long shots. McClean captures the dynamics of a generic virtuoso shot (or as she labels them, digitally enhanced) thusly: Computer-generated elements can blend into live action footage by playing upon the established technique of an aerial flyover but adding CG elements to create the diegetic world. For example, a scene can commence with a live-action aerial shot over a field and river, the camera movement flowing smoothly toward a town that nestles in the bend of the river. The shot can linger to reveal the town undergoing the change of seasons, with the camera flying closer and closer to the buildings, revealing the narrow streets, establishing key buildings and exteriors and then, without any cuts, enter into a building where the first scene of live performance begins. (55) Regarding McClean’s description, I want to focus on two parts. Firstly, her explicit identification that virtuoso shot’s draw on the lineage of travelling shots when he notes that they draw play on “the established technique of an aerial flyover” (55). Though the modified travelling shot is clearly more removed from its vehicle origins, the practice of prior vehicle shots has shaped the use of modified shots, and in most cases, helicopter movement still provides the core of the shot. Secondly, his implicit understanding that these shots are more concerned with the dynamics of space rather than character, his generic shot closes when live

23 For instance, both Thelma and Louise (Scott 1991) and Twister feature flowing farm fields that only reveal car-driving protagonists after a decent wait. 71 performance begins. For instance The Half-Blood Prince’s travelling shot is given a certain rhythm by finding close-ups, wraiths, office workers and buildings as it explores London city. In the case of The Half-Blood Prince live performance is part of this shot (indeed the office workers looking up aghast at Voldemort’s face guide our emotional response) and yet clearly this practice privileges space over individual psychology. The assisted travelling shot is also compressed compared to the tracking shot. Whereas the extended virtuoso tracking shot can crack ten minutes, an assisted travelling shot is better measured in seconds — even if, as with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or Men in Black it does break the minute barrier. While the virtuoso tracking shot relies partly upon duration for an audience to notice it, the modified tracking shot almost instantly declares its existence through the combination of unusual vantage point and dramatic, impossible movement. Furthermore, the speed of the assisted travelling shot sets limits on the length of a given shot. The point of the assisted travelling shot is its impossible speed and movement, and this does not synchronise well with the movement of a human. While tracking shots can ably synchronise with human movement because they are human in scale and thus are able to follow, present or provide the action, the travelling shot is still there mostly to establish the action and its surrounds. As a result, there are no mind-blowing sequences of lengthy travelling shots completely given over to following the action of a sequence; even the Half- Blood Prince’s shot is mostly establishing a magical London. Rather than waste minutes on an uncuttable sequence, the assisted travelling shot allows for a virtuoso display of filmmaking in a relatively brief moment. Lastly, I would argue that aligning the modified shot with the function of the establishing shot reflects the subordination of the “artistic” potential of virtuoso movement to pre-existing Hollywood norms. The establishing shot, particularly the opening establishing shot, is a moment when spectacle is typically foregrounded by Hollywood blockbusters. Even McClean, an otherwise strong opponent of the notion of spectacle, concedes that establishing shots “straddle the fine line between narrative tool and spectatorial display” (207-08). Furthermore, McClean states that “Where CG environments extend beyond setting up the world to become the substance of the setting, the tension between the narrative drive of the scene and spectacularity of the images may be at its greatest” (207-08). This is because, as Seymour Chatman writes, “we can see precisely why the absence of characters endows establishing shots with a descriptive quality. It is not that story-time has been arrested. It is just that it has not yet begun” (“What Novels Can Do” 129). In Chapter Three I will return to this demarcation of spectacular description, but here I want to focus on the appropriateness of the virtuoso modified shot for use within contemporary Hollywood. Its compressed and legible nature allows the spectacle of technical competition to be fixed within pre-established, acceptable zones of description. In the modified travelling shot’s capacity to giddily describe a film’s world there is a happy meeting between two Hollywood tendencies. The first is a desire to best present Hollywood’s financial ability to stage and the second is a need to assist blockbusters in profiting from various secondary sources — to whit, treating a Blockbuster not just as an 72 individual film, but as the foundation of a franchise (Thompson Frodo Franchise 4-6; Schauer 191). As a franchise, a film’s diegesis becomes a catalogue. Spin-offs — not just sequels but also games, figurines, books, DVDS, Blu-Rays, VOD, etc. — can now be extracted, with each commercialisation exploiting a film’s characters and settings, and deepening our knowledge of it through a focused exploration. The common strategy is world building. As Thompson notes, “Franchises lend themselves to world-making, since the length of the storytelling and the breadth of the ancillaries offer the possibility of exploring the created world in a more leisurely fashion than is ordinarily possible” (Frodo Franchise 89).

The Fantasy of Blockbusters

Hollywood’s accommodation of franchise filmmaking can easily be seen in the modern resurgence of fantasy films and their iconic use of the modified travelling shot. As Thompson remarks, it was not until the first of the Harry Potter films and The Lord of the Rings trilogy arrived, that fantasy raised “its status as box-office poison to a position at the core of popular filmmaking” (Frodo Franchise, 9, 275).24 This in part is why the travelling shots of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings have received such considered attention: not only are they salient travelling shots, they are also key to the rise of fantasy filmmaking. This thesis has already discussed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in relation to fantasy, and to blockbusters, but not the relationship between fantasy and blockbusters. In this section of the chapter I explore the travelling shot as it pertains to a different form of spatial mastery. Instead of collapsing real space, here the travelling shot suggests the ability to create new space. The recent rise of fantasy films has been explained in a number of ways: post-9/11 escapism, as psychoanalytic theorist Kathy Smith supposes (69-70); continuing pre-globalisation nostalgia, as cultural theorist Katherine A. Fowkes explains (12); or burgeoning ecological collapse and technological disconnect as Ted Friedman speculates. However, I would simply argue that fantasy is a natural fit for blockbuster filmmaking practices.25 The time is right for fantasy films. They attract the right audience: like similarly popular superhero movies young adults are the key target demographic for both fantasy and films (Faire and Jancobich 199). Likewise, fantasy films do not require knowledge of a local culture; instead they envision a new culture. This means the audience of foreign markets find a fantasy film easier to understand than, for instance, a situation specific comedy, enabling a broadening of the target audience (Cucco 217). Most importantly, fantasy filmmaking offers a wonderful excuse for big budget filmmaking practices. As Ndalianis writes, “the ‘fantastic’ has become the mode through which to explore and push to new limits the technological capacity of the cinema” (“Special Effects” 256). The spatial practices used to fashion a

24 Following the financial success of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter film series big budget fantasy films became significantly more financially and artistically fashionable, with the work of fellow literary series such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material series, Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance trilogy (Eragon, Fangmeier, 2006 being the first), and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia saga all being adapted, not just into films, but franchises (Thompson, Frodo Franchise 274-79). 25 McClean expands on the particular application of digital effects for fantastic genre films in Digital Storytelling (89-93 149-170). 73 fantasy world also demonstrate the budgetary prowess and fiscal prowess behind this creation. In chapter one I dealt with fantasy in terms of the incredible; here I want to consider fantasy in terms of the credible. Fantasy films seek to compensate for the implausibility of their alternative diegesis by reinforcing cues that suggest a degree of realism. This “reality” is where world building comes in, it is the sense that a film’s diegesis is not merely what happens on-screen, but that there is a thriving world off-screen following its own rules and regulations as established by history and geography. The helicopter shots seen in contemporary fantasy films, most famously in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, help convey this credibility as they simultaneously depict large, seemingly explorable vistas without the connotations of everyday travel. As fantasy theorist David Butler notes of the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in this regard, “The Jackson films pay close attention to Tolkien’s richly detailed accounts of the geography and landscape of Middle-earth to portray an alternative expansive space quite unlike and far superior to anything realised in film before” (80), and that, “The diegetic depth and mimetic rigour available to Peter Jackson from Tolkien’s work provided the director with the kind of material that he sought in order to encourage the audience to accept Middle-earth and avoid the aforementioned ‘mumbo jumbo’ fantasy worlds such as Willow” (22-3). However, it is not just agoraphobia-inducing landscape shots that suggest this rich alternative world, the rigour that Butler observes also comes from Jackson’s attention to minute detail. As Bordwell notes, contemporary Hollywood films, when compared to their classical counterparts, have become filled with minutiae (Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It 59) and, as Thompson observes, recent fantasy films, in particular The Lord of the Rings, take this to almost obsessional degree (Frodo Franchise 75). It is this provision of detailed geographical realms cluttered with history, species and memorable characters that provide the fodder for the secondary markets of a franchise. Even in the case of The Lord of the Rings, for which Tolkien’s books provided an excess of detail, a cursory examination of any Lord of the Rings Games Workshop miniature or computer game will demonstrate key visual inspiration comes as much from the film as the original sources. The virtuoso camera movement that establishes Hollywood’s ability to stage equally establishes this world-building detail. As Sean Cubitt writes: Unlike film, reality contains infinite detail. The first-time theatrical viewer’s strong sense of having missed much of the detail suggests an evolving definition of realism: If reality is what exceeds perception, the realist film must constantly evoke an infinity of detail that a close-up or a wider pan would reveal. (“Realising Middle-earth” 191) This take on “realism” is ably handled by travelling shots, as Cubitt observes of one particular travelling shot, “The busyness of the scene is echoed by the camera’s constant movement, with the implication that the world of Middle-earth is never bounded by the frame and that, were the camera to swivel on its axis, we would see still more of it” (“Realising Middle-earth” 189). Indeed the travelling shot is the perfect one for this practice. As 74 previously noted, assisted travelling shots which have been modified or created through CGI, have a habit of gaining visual energy through shifting from long shot to close-up and vice versa; this practice finds its perfect match in the contemporary fantasy film’s need to present both detail and geographic scale. Take the fairly typical modified travelling shot sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring which bring us through Saruman the White’s (Christopher Lee) lair before introducing him: the motion of the shot is visually intriguing enough to present a sustained depiction of the despoiled land of Isengard, and what Saruman has done before plunging down into the mines/birthing pits of the orcs where the audience is then shown in a detailed procedural fashion the activities of the orcs, and their social organisation before finally bringing us to Saruman (figures 2.25-33).26 Fantasy’s interest in linking together disparate spaces has a long history in film. As Thomas Elsaesser notes of the fantastic German Expressionist Cinema from which Murnau and Lang sprang, “there was a preference for composition over montage” (“Social Mobility” 29). Fantasy films, because of their doubled fictionality (fictional story and fictional reality) cannot presume an audience’s knowledge of space and setting, cause and effect in a way that most other film genres can. There is a greater burden of proof and demonstration expected of fantasy films: space and the relationship between a film’s various settings needs to be clarified; while an audience’s knowledge of the difference between Paris and Washington D.C., or inner city and suburbia can be reasonably presumed, this is not true of fantasy worlds. The modified travelling shot’s superb ability to unify geographically disparate spaces within a single shot is a useful solution to this problem. There is a nice convergence between the Pathé-ian desire to demonstrate filmmakers’ financial ability to create and a legible Bazinian unified space. As Butler notes, contemporary fantasy’s superior creation of space stems from its ability to depict location from more than one vantage point, there is no longer the lingering sense that a fantasy film’s world only exists from the one point of view that allows a forced perspective shot (81). CGI allows the camera to move around within this space, the travelling shot allows the camera to move around this space a lot — further demonstrating the various vantage points, and the depth of the unreal realm. As Bordwell and Thompson note of camera movement, “Objects appear more solid and three-dimensional when the camera arcs” (Film Art 196); this is particularly important when depicting unreal realms whose “reality” needs greater demonstration than the reality we normally take for granted. As Butler observes of travelling shots, “CGI now allows a camera to roam around a diegetically-enhanced landscape, viewing fantastic structures and geographical features (such as the two giant statues of the Argonath standing over the river Anduin in The Fellowship of the Ring) from all angles” (81). In comparison Butler later notes that part of the few failings of Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) is that Boorman is limited to vantage points he can film it from (82), Camelot is always a distant un-lived in place. However, The Lord of the Rings’s Minas Tirith is a plausible city, “Mina Tirith is a vastly more convincing spectacle. A

26 This is a telling example of Jackson’s attention to detail, as Thompson notes the swords were hand made and individually approved by Jackson for their verisimilitude before inclusion (Frodo Franchise, 75). 75 combination of actual set, miniatures and digital imagery, Minas Tirith is a stunning achievement but what fully convinces is its convincing occupation of space: the city is seen from a variety of angles and distances, always maintaining a consistent relationship to the surrounding geography” (82). Not only does the travelling shot help build a world ready for marketing, the travelling shot also helps a film survive its transition from the big-screen to the ancillary markets of TV, DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming or download. The heart-swelling landscapes that establish a fantasy world lose much of their impact on a small screen. However, as King notes in regards to developing a film style that works equally well on the big theatrical screen as it does on a small television or laptop screen: “Spectacular impact created through explosive montage and/or hyperbolic camera movement is one form that translates particularly well. But broader expanses and vistas are still to be found on the big screen, even if few mainstream features rely entirely on these qualities for their spectacular impact” (New Hollywood Cinema 256). A quote like that evokes the helicopter shot and its capacity to combine “hyperbolic camera movement” and “broader expanses and vistas” together and synthesise both big and small screen appeal. Given the travelling shot’s myriad advantages, it is no surprise that fantasy films repeatedly use obvious assisted shots; however, this also works both ways — fantasy films are made because they can easily fit contemporary Hollywood’s approach to filmmaking. In these films, the travelling shot is no longer just demonstrating film’s ability to move through and document space, but Hollywood’s ability to create space. If the earlier incarnation of the travelling shot discussed in the first chapter demonstrated film’s ability to move through space, than the assisted shot discussed here demonstrates filmmakers’ ability to create a world to move about in. Instead of collapsing space, we have a spewing out of space — which the shot simultaneously demonstrates is also readily surmountable as it easily swims through its own creation.

Conclusion

At the start of this chapter I noted that Hollywood films aim to visually entertain while imparting a legible story in such a manner not just to take advantage of but also to foreground Hollywood’s financial resources. At every step, and at every length — from brief micro-shots to lengthy modified-shots — travelling shots support this endeavour. The first chapter examined how travelling shots demonstrate, the second chapter examined how filmmakers take advantage of this demonstration. The narratively integrated micro-shot’s connotative vignetted qualities helped establish POV and trajectory under trying circumstances. The same vignetted qualities helped slightly longer shots re-frame potentially narrative sequences as spectacle to better showcase Hollywood’s financial resources and imagination. Lastly, the lengthy assisted travelling shot did not just frame a film’s content as spectacle but joined it, providing its own spectacle. While the ways in which this was executed differed according to

76 the length of a travelling shot, the shot’s rapid mobility and concise ability to frame action remained the same. Travelling shots and contemporary blockbuster filmmaking are a seemingly perfect match of interests. At any length the travelling shot retains its visual energy and mobility, and as the ability to demonstrate staging and spectacle diminished along with the shot’s length the shot’s palpable connotative qualities kept it useful. There is a reason why vehicles became more prominent as the travelling shots grew shorter, it is the connotation of the vehicle that distinguishes these shots. Admittedly, there are occasional differences and misalignments between the effect of the travelling shot and the varied goals of the filmmakers. Much of the world building of fantasy films is designed to give an epic, astonishing scope to the world being created — touching upon the incomprehensible sublime at the most. The problem is that, as the first chapter noted, the travelling shot can be considered almost an antithesis of the sublime, the travelling shot’s easy coverage of the diegetic worlds potentially mock the idea that the world is immense and document the characters’ difficulty in traversing it. However, as will be expanded upon in Chapter Four, how fantasy films compensate for this is through the balancing of anti-sublime travelling shots with adventures that magnify the physical exhaustion of travel with the physical and or emotional exhaustion produced by narrative filmmaking. The travelling shot, whether within a blockbuster or a more niche film, complements contemporary filmmaking practice.

77 Chapter Three

Windscreen as Cinéscreen: The Travelling Shot and Contemplative Cinema

Vehicle-mounted camera movement is a paradox. Travelling shots simultaneously offer a rapidly moving frame and a static camera. This chapter examines how this paradox, formed by the division between vehicle interior and exterior, has been used to frame various, multiplying, conceptual binaries within cinema: interior/exterior, viewer/viewed, power/powerless, fiction/nonfiction, etc. It explores how the travelling shot’s paradoxical status works specifically in relation to contemplative cinema, with a particular focus on art films and arthouse cinema. Just as the excitement of Hollywood blockbusters make them a natural fit for continuing the discussion of travelling shots and attractions, so too does the meditative quality of many art films make them a natural fit for continuing the discussion of travelling shots and contemplation. The paradox is both formal (static camera/moving frame) and industrial (blockbuster Hollywood/arthouse). This chapter examines how travelling shots, in part thanks to their contemplative qualities, engage with reality. As Bordwell notes in “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” “the art cinema defines itself as a realistic cinema” because of its birth within the context of Italian Neo-Realism and the genre’s emphasis on indexical reality (both space and time)” (718-19). Bordwell’s piece is a provocation, and like any provocation it has its strengths and weaknesses. Bordwell narrowly defines art cinema, shifting other art-associated cinema that doesn’t fit into his definition (such Soviet Montage cinema or Underground cinema) into the box of avant-garde cinema.27 And yet Bordwell, in his attention to the importance of neo-realism on art cinema, clearly identifies a key tendency to the bulk of art films shown in arthouse cinemas. Likewise, as André Bazin observes of the depth of focus seen in Italian neorealist films, it “brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality” (Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 35-6). More importantly, Bazin argues that the realistic, unified, space of deep focus compositions provides the perceptual freedom for the audience to explore the image and thus encourages “a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his (sic) part to the action in progress” (What is Cinema? Vol. 1 35-6). It is how travelling shots negotiate this mentally active encounter with reality that I want to explore here. I argue that the travelling shot provides an intellectual chassis that sits over the chosen films and shapes how content is thematically organised and considered. It is not so much that travelling shots create a particular framework, but that they alert an audience to the framing. I argue that travelling shots clarify a film’s relationship with the world.

27 Principally, Bordwell is identifying what qualities a middlebrow milieu of a certain period associates with art rather than answer what art cinema is. This seems to be a deliberate choice of Bordwell’s. 78 After a précis of contemplative cinema, the first part of the chapter examines Abbas Kiarostami’s Zendegi va digar hich/Life and Nothing More… (1991). Life and Nothing More… is defined by its recurring use of travelling shots, the extensive use of which represents a revealing stylistic break from Kiarostami’s previous film work. Accordingly, travelling shots dominate in a manner rarely seen since phantom rides. By examining Jean- Luc Nancy and Laura Mulvey’s extended responses to Life and Nothing More…, in particular their response to the film’s salient travelling shots, an insight into how travelling shots help an audience ethically align with the world is developed. The second part of the chapter offers a counterpoint to critical responses to Life and Nothing More… through an examination of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Mr Thank You. Shimizu’s career predates the emergence of much readily transportable filmmaking equipment and shows how the jerry-rigged filmmaking practices of early location shooting led to an awareness of the travelling shot’s specific expressive capacity as a synthesis of vehicle motion and camera mount. I argue Shimizu’s decorative compositional approach to travelling shots foregrounds an aspect of the shot’s relationship with point of view. I propose that because they suggest both subjectivity and objectivity, travelling shots are capable of presenting an intra-subjective point of view, one that suggests point of view, but in a neutral manner adoptable by audience and multiple passengers alike. These meta-cinematic28 shots comment on how audiences form a relationship to the world through the act of viewing. The parallels between the cinéscreen and windscreen reinforce the conceptual division between fictional interior and non-fictional exterior, to clarify how we watch, and how audiences form a relationship with the world, diegetic or otherwise. Finally to reveal how meta-cinematic shots alter a movie, I compare Mr Thank You with a then contemporaneous film, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Like Mr Thank You, Stagecoach is another proto-road movie that can be seen as a state-of-the-nation address. However, unlike Mr Thank You, Stagecoach is a classical Hollywood film operating under a different set of formal priorities; a comparison between the two films highlights how the use of the travelling shot markedly shapes how films can connect us with the world. Through this series of case studies, I will demonstrate the distinct manner through which travelling shots depict and clarify a film’s relationship with the world and how they shape meaning.

Regarding Contemplation and Slow Cinema

As part of the analytical framework for this chapter, I draw on the discourse surrounding the modes of what is called ‘slow’ and ‘contemplative’ cinema. For Martin Flanagan, slow cinema is an approach to art that shares these salient traits: the preeminence of duration and stillness, provided by the combination of long takes that document prosaic everyday activities and thus produce a minimal or dedramatised from of narrative that privileges a

28With the term “meta-cinematic” this thesis refers to self-referential shots that evoke analogies with the process of watching a film. This is expanded upon in the section “An Overview of the Obvious Advantages that Travelling Shots Hold for Contemplative Cinema.”

79 “predominantly realist (or hyperrealist) mode or intent” (4). Both the cinema of contemplation and slow cinema rely on the passing of time to better allow an audience to appreciate film’s indexical status, and there is a substantial overlap in practice. The key difference is that slow cinema is defined by its post-narrative relationship to filmmaking rather than its pre-narrative relationship, particularly as defined by the dominant theoretical approach to slow cinema: Gilles Deleuze’s twin concepts of the movement-image and time- image.29 For Deleuze, pre-World War II filmmaking was defined by the movement-image, a concept exemplified by classical Hollywood cinema and the subordination of representation to action-causality. The trauma of the war allegedly shattered this approach to filmmaking, resulting in the time-image: a tentative array of stimuli whose excess of time, past the requirements of action, drowns causality and creates a situation in which “time ... rises up to the surface of the screen”” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 xi). According to Deleuze, the time-image, exemplified by neo-realism and the durational or temporally concerned cinema of Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Marie Straub-Daniéle Huillet, reveals a layered presentation of time that was formerly obscured by the movement-image. As Bazin noted of this new realism, in the process laying the foundations of Deleuze’s thinking, it is “becoming capable once more of bringing together real time, in which things exist along with the duration of action, for which classical editing had insidiously substituted mental and abstract time (What is Cinema Vol. 1 39). Furthermore, as Aumont notes of Deleuze’s work: the cinematic apparatus implies not only the passage of time, a chronology into which we would slip, as if into a perpetual present, but also a complex stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past (s), future (s) – and not only because we use our memory and expectations, but also because, when it emphasises the time in which things take place, their duration, cinema almost allows us to perceive time. (The Image 130) For example, when discussing Straub-Huillet’s work, “Deleuze proposes that the visual image becomes ‘archeological, stratigraphic, tectonic’ through the presentation of the “deserted layers of our time”— that is in the filming of places chosen for their ‘coalescence’ of history and the present” (Flanagan 142). Relying in part on the example set by Straub- Huillet’s work, whereby the time-image is revealed through audio tracks that use narrated texts or historical recordings to draw out the past layers from present-day footage, I propose that the travelling shot’s capacity to conceptually divide can also function to distinguish differing temporal layers of passing reality.

29 How convincing Deleuze’s claims are is not the subject of this chapter, though it should be noted this thesis is partly about the continuity of contemplative practice. As Eleftheriotis notes, the minimal attention Deleuze pays to travel films is quite “astonishing” (54-55), particularly, I note, in regards to early pre-narrative cinema. Nonetheless, Deleuze’s distinction between movement-image and time-image has become central to theoretical deliberations regarding film and its relationship with the world. 80 An Overview of the Obvious Advantages that Travelling Shots Hold for Contemplative Cinema

The difference between Hollywood and what I am referring to as contemplative travelling shots rests on a question of tradition. Salient Hollywood travelling shots evoke Gunning’s concept of attractions through their exciting demonstrations of new technology and Hollywood’s ability to produce them. By contrast, contemplative travelling shots deploy the same old traditional technology responsible for early cinema’s attractions: chiefly, cars and trains. Hollywood’s continuing invigoration of travelling shots through new mounts (jibs, cranes), vehicles, and now 3D and CGI have arguably left everyday vehicle shots looking less novel. Paradoxically, the distinction could be summarised thus: Hollywood cinema has a ‘traditional’ (high-tech, capital-intensive) approach to travelling shots, art cinema uses travelling shots untraditionally as it mobilises the three discrete forms of long takes identified by Jacques Aumont. The first one is “a static shot, organised in depth” (in which carefully arranged layers of action encourage an audience to contrast between fore, mid, or background). The second is “A very animated shot” (in which the camera moves rapidly through a world in order to present aspects of the world “one after the other”, showcasing each element before moving on). The third is “a long shot, held simply for a very long time and in which the passage of time becomes the most important factor” (Montage 25–6). I argue that, thanks to the travelling shot’s particular formal and connotative qualities, it is capable of synthesising these three types of long takes, and that this synthesis is drawn on by the contemplative wing of art filmmaking. The travelling shot is not a mobile shot; it is a static shot filmed from a mobile vehicle-derived camera mount. In the case of the helicopter shot common to recent Hollywood cinema, with its lack of everyday travel associations and thus its lack of signifiers of a behind-the-camera presence, this is a moot point. However, in the case of the typical travelling shot, whether the mount is visible or not, this contradictory static/mobile means of creation gives the travelling shot a unique means of presentation. As typified by the opening travelling shot from Life and Nothing More… (figure 3.1) the travelling shot presents the three forms of long takes as follows. Firstly, all travelling shots are organised in depth with a diegetic camera mount – even if the vehicle source does not frame the foreground of a shot, the traces of the shot’s production suggests the immediate presence of the vehicle which is contrasted with the exterior background. Secondly, the geographic scope of the shot produces a very animated shot, which is particularly apparent with side-mounted views. And finally, the long shot is energised through the travelling shot’s disciplined movement as movement through space that also visualises the passage of time. Together these aspects reinforce one another, for example, the foreground presence of the vehicle is what provides the point-of-view signification of travelling shots, this signification enhances the long shot’s presentation of the passage of time through connecting it to diegetic perception. Together these aspects allow contemplative films to frame a particular relationship between film and the world.

81 The contrast between attraction and contemplative traditions is the first function of the travelling shot in art cinema. Travelling shots work as a form of identity formation. Hollywood storytelling emphasises clear causality, removing distracting and irrelevant routine day-to-day content; this is the crux of the movement-image. The reverse is true of much of contemplative cinema. The curiosity provoked by this oblique withholding of narrative information acts as a counterbalance to the loss of narrative energy as the banal transitions and activities elided by Hollywood are returned to the screen. Furthermore: vehicle travel is vulgar meditation. Thanks to everyday travel, we are more accepting of longueurs if provided by travelling shots. Then there is the fact that even in arthouse cinema, travelling shots still operate somewhat as attractions. In this sense, they bridge both worlds, showing very fast movement in such a way as to produce stasis: dynamic stasis, dynamic contemplation. For instance, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Sud sanaeha/Blissfully Yours (2002) takes advantage of this dualism by interspersing an extended travelling shot reverie with the sudden intrusion of credits, which also deprioritises narrative attentiveness, halfway through the trip (figure 3.2). Together they reveal Weerasethakul relying on an audience’s acceptance of certain intrusions into narrative to introduce more contemplative moments. Everyday travelling shots also offer a workaround for the limitations imposed by the financial constraints of arthouse cinema and in this sense they can be understood as a component of the “poetics of poverty.” As Thom Anderson notes of Straub-Huillet’s contemplative, stratiographic, filmmaking, “they had found a way of working which enabled them do to what needed to be done, to do as many takes as they thought were necessary, by simplifying other aspects of production” (Anderson and Costa 44). By returning to the camera-movement practices of early cinema, filmmakers are freed from other limitations such as staging or documenting complex interiors or contending with many of the vagaries of exterior shooting. Away from art cinema, other, more genre-minded and low budget filmmakers also rely on this: an infamous example being the cult film Birdemic (Nguyen 2008), with Nguyen’s ridiculously extended travelling shots, meant as connective filler, accidentally re-creating slow cinema as much as they provoke mirth from bad-movie fans. Just as these shots offer an escape from economic limitations, travelling shots also offer an escape from poetic restraints. Sophistry is understanding a vehicle-mounted camera as a static camera resting on a moving vehicle, this is another way the travelling shot negotiates the contradictions between vehicle movement and camera movement. For example, Yasujiro Ozu is known for purging his cinema of showy gestures such as the track or the zoom, expressed through the eschewing of camera movement and re-framing (Schrader, Transcendental Style 22). Unspoken in this understanding is the fact that throughout his later films, Ozu maintained camera movement by the use of travelling shots (figure 3.3). The travelling shot as meta-cinematic trope is born of two interlocking tendencies: that the travelling shot is analogous to watching a movie (we sit on a seat and watch a screen); and that the geographic scale of the travelling shot provides a documentary quality to the

82 travelling shot30. This is explicitly evoked in one scene in Une Femme Marée/A Married Woman (Godard 1964) in which a woman Charlotte (Macha Méril) and her lover, Robert (Bernard Noël), travel by car. He suggests she should sit differently, and her obvious answer is “No!” This is how I sit in the cinema!” It is also implicitly evoked in innumerable films, including Life and Nothing More… and Mr Thank You as will be detailed later. If, as Aumont puts it, “The camera has its own metonymy in the lens” (The Image 135), then the car has its own metonymy in the windshield. Additionally, it is difficult for filmmakers to maintain creative control over the large geographic background and population typically filmed by travelling shots, particularly in the case of low-budget art films. Therefore we often find a division between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background, a split amplified by the division between vehicle interior and landscape exterior. The result is a binary: foreground/background, interior/exterior, fiction/non-fiction, viewer/viewed. And in this, we see how the travelling shot acts as a key device to disturb conventional cinema history’s neat (generic, aesthetic) categories. As Flanagan notes: Recent durational films are connected by an interplay of formal devices and observational tendencies that, I would suggest, cannot adequately be accounted for by referring to the standard categories that subdivide post-war art and experimental film: narrative/non-narrative, fiction/documentary, realism/anti- illusionism, and so on. Slow cinema is marked by a tendency to actively problematise these divisions. (24) Travelling shots act as both provocateurs and mediators of these divisions. For Weerasethakul, this binary acts as a doorway; in the case of Blissfully Yours, the travelling shots combine with the credits to announce the film’s diptych structure with a break from controlled interior to pastoral exterior. For Ozu, this binary acts as a bridge: at first glance many of Ozu’s travelling shots are barely functional, with three-quarters of a given landscape blocked by the vehicle (figure 3.4). However, on closer inspection of the formal qualities of these shots, we see that Ozu is strongly concerned with decorative patterning, and control over mise-en-scene. By framing his shots in such a manner, Ozu draws attention to his control over composition and pattern, compensating for his lack of control over any passing actuality; these shots are effectively suturing Ozu’s real and the world as one. However, it is with the works of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami that the mediating qualities of travelling shots become most apparent. Gaudreault claims that the “monstrative” showing of early cinema, phantom rides included, operate in the present tense, and that only narrative can develop a more complicated tense (“Narration and Monstration” 32). I would counter-propose that the immediacy of the travelling shot dates them quickly and this has an effect on the perceived tense. Unlike a narrative film whose mode of address ignores the

30 The question of film and its ability to capture reality is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, I hold to Serge Daney’s view: “the Cahiers axiom is this: that the cinema has a fundamental rapport with reality and that the real is not what is represented—and that’s final” (n.p.). Instead, this chapter examines how travelling shots organise a film’s rapport with reality through demarcating a film’s arche, or a spectator’s “knowledge of the genesis of the image” (Aumont, The Image 121), which as I will explore throughout this chapter, correlates to the world picture, into different fields.

83 viewer, a monstrative film directly addresses us in our present moment, and therefore the circuit of film-viewer has at least two tenses, that of the audience’s present tense and the past tense evoked by the film’s age. Accordingly, while Gaudreault was undeniably correct about the tense of the films in their original screening, this is not the case when we watch a film like A Trip Down Market Street in its present context. Conversely, narrative, through ignoring the audience and their present tense, and through the setting inferred from the film’s cues, can set its own tense. As Mulvey writes, “Narrative asserts its own temporality. There is a ‘here-and- now-ness’ that the cinema asserts through its affinity with story-telling” (Death 24X 183), which can be compared to “the there-ness and then-ness of the film’s original moment, its moment of registration” which will “tend to stay hidden” (184). The travelling shot, with its ability to split the world into fictional interior and nonfictional exterior, thus also has the capacity to demarcate temporality. In films like the Killer of Sheep (Burnett 1977), Underground (Asquith 1928) and, as I will carefully evaluate later, Mr Thank You this happens by accident as the passage of time pulls apart the tense of the fictional interior and the passing documentary exterior. However, I argue that Kiarostami uses travelling shots in Life and Nothing More… to deliberately manipulate this temporal split.

The Pedagogic Modernity of Abbas Kiarostami

Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami began his directorial career in 1970 at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) with his prescient short Nan va Koutcheh/Bread and the Alley. At Kanun, Kiarostami became the organisation’s preeminent filmmaker, creating such key films as Be Tartib ya Bedoun-e Tartib/Orderly or Disorderly (1981) and Mashgh-e Shab/Homework (1989). With Khane-ye doust kodjast?/Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), Kiarostami started to receive international attention, winning Locarno’s Bronze Leopard for his depiction of a boy, Ahmed (Babak Ahmedapoor), attempting to return a classmate’s exercise book so that his classmate, Mohammed (Ahmed Ahmedapoor), can avoid punishment. Ahmed travels from Koker to nearby Potesh to return Mohammed’s book. Unable to locate Mohammed, unaided by adults, and verging on lost, Ahmed returns home and completes Mohammed’s homework for him. Where is the Friend’s House? is also a story of power relations: intimations of child violence abound and parallel the film’s theme of child immobility as an expression of limited power. Where is the Friend’s House? is in thematic accordance with Kiarostami’s career as a whole. Bread and the Alley shows a young child trying to get past a dangerous dog to pass through a narrow alley. Like Where is the Friend’s House? it is highly concerned with child mobility and accordingly with power relations. Indeed, Bread and the Alley’s scenario is repeated within Where is the Friend’s House? Films like Orderly or Disorderly, Avaliha/First Graders (1984) and Homework broadened Kiarostami’s thematic interest in children and power relations by expanding his focus to also address institutional power and governance. Of these, Homework is most pertinent to Kiarostami’s future work. The film is ostensibly a documentary about the homework habits of young Iranian school children, but it 84 is also a documentary of abusive relationships with the school children recounting (sometimes blithely, other times tearfully) how their parents and teachers abused them to ensure their disciplined production of rote homework. Kiarostami also acknowledges his own role within this power system by keeping otherwise redundant moments in which interviewees try to confirm that they have answered him correctly, and by foregrounding the unfair relationship between interviewer and interviewee by intercutting the interviews with shots of the impassive gaze of a bulky 35mm camera and Kiarostami himself. As such, Homework unpacks what is at stake in Where is the Friend’s House? In 1990’s Klūzāp, nemā-ye nazdīk/Close-Up, made immediately prior to Life and Nothing More…, Kiarostami expands his acknowledgment of the power of the director from being an aside (albeit a highly important aside) to the central concern of the film. Documenting, re-enacting and interfering with the real-life story of an impoverished cinephile who passed him himself off as the noted director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (for reasons of hero worship and to gain access to different tiers of society), Close-Up’s commitment to self-reflexivity allows Kiarostami to expose and explore his (and cinema’s) power and the responsibility that comes with this power. This self- critique is clearly traceable to his next film, Life and Nothing More…. In 1990 the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake devastated the North-Western region of Iran within which the villages of Potesh and Koker are located, killing thirty to fifty thousand people and displacing half a million refugees to impoverished temporary camps. Life and Nothing More… is Kiarostami’s response to the cataclysm. A re-telling of Kiarostami’s initial attempt to locate and find out whether Babak and Ahmed Ahmedapoor31 survived the earthquake, Life and Nothing More… sees a director (Farhad Kheramand) and his son Puya (Buba Bayour) travel to the North-West, where, thanks to a series of delays, encounters and detours, the pair fail to reach Koker. Instead, Life and Nothing More… ends with the pair offering a lift to a man struggling up a hill. A formal, thematic and critical breakthrough for Kiarostami, Life and Nothing More… won the Prix Roberto Rossellini Award for the Film Career of Abbas Kiarostami, at Cannes in 1992. If Where is the Friend’s House? is about static cameras filming individuals, then Life and Nothing More… is about travelling cameras filming massed people. The film diverges from Kiarostami’s previous work, even in terms of its self-reflexivity seen in Close- Up, through its extended use of travelling shots, with over 50% being some form of travelling shot, and a plot given over to meta considerations with a ‘director’ touring the land — a tour whose flexible mobility contrasts pointedly with the poor forcibly displaced people visited. Mirroring Where is the Friend’s House?, Life and Nothing More… again presents an episodic journey to find a boy’s home in Koker. Again the film ends in failure with the pair equally unable to reach their intended destination. Whereas Where is the Friend’s House?, despite Ahmed’s failure to find his friend, still focuses on the resolution of their situation, Life and Nothing More… sees Kiarostami gradually shifting attention away from the boys to examples of mass suffering. As Kiarostami observed, “You can’t forget that over 20,000 children were killed in that earthquake. My two heroes could have been among them” (interview by

31 The principle child actors of Where is the Friend’s House? 85 Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa 20). Kiarostami’s re-thinking of his creative process and priorities is underlined by the self-reflexive conversations that take place within the film: among the film’s subjects encountered in the North West are other actors from Where is the Friend’s House? who are outspoken about Kiarostami’s poetic distortions of their previous appearances. Following Life and Nothing More…, Kiarostami released Zire darakhatan zeyton/Through the Olive Trees in 1994. Through the Olive Trees foregrounds Kiarostami’s poetic distortions by recreating a sequence in which the surrogate director of Life and Nothing More… encounters a newly wed couple coming to terms with the tragedy of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake and trying to move on. Here Kiarostami (now with two surrogates inhabiting the film’s diegesis) focuses on the difficulty in filming the sequence due to the class difference separating the actors playing the newly weds, and Kiarostami’s own manipulation of the actors in order to overcome the actors’ dispute, and to satisfy his own personal curiosity. Together, Where is the Friend’s House?, Life and Nothing More…, and Through the Olive Trees form the Koker trilogy in their interweaving of neo-realism, self-reflexivity and sensitivity to site-specific filmmaking. All three are concerned with the intersection of power and mobility, with Life and Nothing More…, and Through the Olive Trees (to a lesser extent) additionally using the travelling shot as a means of synthesising this interest (the privilege of car mobility is also more salient in poorer countries) while also conveying self-reflexivity and the re-thinking of filmmaking practice as it encounters the specificity of the real world. Life and Nothing More… is examined here because it is both the centrepiece of Kiarostami’s self-reflexive trilogy and the film in which his cinema starts to become defined by his use of travelling shots. As Hamid Naficy notes, Life and Nothing More… is typical of many of Kiarostami’s work: the film is self-reflexive, it features a proxy for Kiarostami, and is built around a searching narrative (192, 207). Life and Nothing More… can be analysed in a manner concordant with this thesis’s examination of the typical function of travelling shots in contemplative cinema. The film uses the car as means of cheap staging and to provide energy (principally it gives us scenery to look at as we listen to people talk). More importantly, it uses the windscreen as a means of evoking contemplation, and it uses the windscreen as a meta-cinematic device. Life and Nothing More… indicates the film’s preoccupations in the extended opening shot. Filmed through a highway tollbooth window, the image is framed by the regular gestures of the booth operator as we watch drivers pay their way. Overlaying this image is a radio broadcast concerning orphans. A driver, the Director (Farhad Kheradmand), singles himself out by asking whether the highway has been cut. The film then cuts to a frontal medium shot of the car, the director, and in the back seat, his son (Puya, Buba Bayour), before the car pulls away from the booth. Questions of mobility, searching, children and framing have already begun to intersect. Throughout the film, the Director repeatedly asks passersby about the state of the highway. In his first encounter he confirms that the highway is open to emergency workers, leading to an outline of the disaster that has befallen the region. Supplementing this conversation, we see our first travelling shot of the film, that of a communication tower that passed on the news of the earthquake and will later broadcast soccer matches. This use of the 86 travelling shot at this point is significant; it acts as a form of perceptual underlining of a potent image. One of the common responses to Life and Nothing More… was to focus on its vigorous depiction of life: though the tragedy exists as a structuring presence, the film is filled with the scuttling movement of people continuing with life. As Hamid Dabashi notes, this aspect was received poorly by local Iranian film critics who saw the film as technically incompetent and as trivialising the immense tragedy (Master & Masterpieces 286-91). This was exacerbated by the fact that, as Hossein Kosrowjah observes, the title Life and Nothing More... “declares its secular orientation toward life and death” (50). However, Dabashi himself see the film’s rambunctious approach to life as the film’s most distinguishable and enjoyable trait, and furthermore, that this approach is of “a vividly antimythological bent, a matter-of-factness that denies the intrusion of any thematic metaphysics, or aesthetics even, into the non-sensicality of the sheer force of being” (Close Up 69-72). Either way, positively or negatively, the tower synthesises the communication of both death and of joy. The travelling shot’s framing function draws attention to this significant totem (and arguably, mirrors the tower’s symbolism with the shot’s own synthesis of contemplation and excitement). The shot then concludes by panning through the car to gaze out of the front windscreen, a searching exploration of the land that matches the Director’s questioning of passersby. The protagonists continue on their journey. The boy urinates; they drive on. A tunnel produces a found cut-to-black within which the credits appear. The car exits the tunnel with a travelling shot of the devastated landscape. The Director urinates, they acquire refreshments and encounter a traffic jam. We discover the Director is trying to get to Koker, where the two boy leads of Where is the Friend’s House? reside. A hilly side route provides the Director and Puya with an exit and a view of the traffic chaos. It needs to be re-emphasised at this point how strongly defined Life and Nothing More… is by the recurring use of travelling shots, and these are not simple straight shots but curving, climbing and descending shots that reflect the vertiginous zigzagging mountains of the film. Despite hearing that Koker has been devastated, they continue; they drive past a fresh gravesite and then provide a lift to a villager to his home. (The villager performed in Where is the Friend’s House? and, not unreasonably, complains that Kiarostami made him look older and uglier.) As Puya wanders around, the Director meets a couple who decided to go ahead with their marriage, despite the tragedy. They provide a lift to one of the missing boys’s schoolmates to the devastated village of Poshteh. Puya and the schoolmate enthuse about an upcoming soccer match and so the Director leaves them with the schoolmate’s sister to watch the game while he continues on to nearby Koker. Enroute he meets a man setting up a satellite dish so Poshteh can receive the match and gives a lift to two boys from Juban. (As a conceit, these are the two real-life boys Kiarostami was looking for). His car stalls halfway up the mountain separating the Director from Koker, but a passing villager helps out by pushing the car; together they drive up the hill as the credits roll. The fact that Life and Nothing More… ends before answering whether the boys are alive is indicative of Naficy’s observation that many of Kiarostami’s films “resemble the search phase of the research process” (207). Life and Nothing More… is not a tight depiction of 87 searching; rather it is a rambunctious exploration of how to represent searching. For Dabashi, the film’s energy is indicative of why Kiarostami “is an antimetaphysician, but only by completely abandoning the metaphysical project, not by opposing it (Close Up 72). However, for myself, the film’s boisterousness is its metaphysics. The film’s energy is partly a result of the film’s searching for a way to represent searching. As a way of explaining how this searching could work, and more importantly how the travelling shot exemplifies this kind of moving contemplation, I now want to turn to Nancy and Mulvey’s writings on Kiarostami. Nancy and Mulvey are unusual choices for this thesis. Both approach Life and Nothing More… in a manner that is arguably discordant with this thesis’ cognitive-psychology informed approach; Nancy is a deconstructionist philosopher while Mulvey is most noted for her psychoanalytic and feminist informed approach to screen studies. Nonetheless this chapter engages with them for two reasons. These are significant works by significant scholars; to ignore them would be impudent. Furthermore, they both engage with concepts posed with by this thesis. Nancy uses Life and Nothing More… to analyse representations of the sublime, and in the process articulates how the meta-cinematic screen of the windscreen is part of the Director’s self-reflexive searching. Mulvey also engages with Life and Nothing More…’s representation of the sublime, but in a manner that is more attentive to the delayed response – to sublime tragedy, but also to film. As noted in the introduction, this thesis is retrospective in its approach. Though the films analysed in this film are given historical context, this thesis does not conceal the fact that these films are being watched and analysed now and that aspects of the various films have been submerged or revealed by the passage of time. Mulvey’s examination of how Life and Nothing More… revisits the site of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake becomes a parable about revisiting film from a temporally dislocated position. Accordingly, this section critically evaluates Nancy and Mulvey’s work as evidence of how they perceive travelling shots: it puts them side by side, contrasts, and probes them. Their insights are situated against theories that are significantly more complementary to this thesis’s cognitive psychology informed approach. Through this evaluation, new approaches for examining and, equally important, explaining how travelling shots relate to contemplation are developed. I argue that the travelling shot, and its particular ability to survey and frame reality, is crucial to Kiarostami’s attempt to negotiate and respond to the incomprehensible tragedy of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. The travelling shot is the thread that unifies the otherwise varying critical responses to Life and Nothing More… by Nancy and Mulvey. Nancy’s Kiarostami Abbas: The Evidence of Film sees Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More…32 as an example of how film can ethically present the world. Nancy argues for the importance of finding the right distance to do justice to the world, through life “exposing itself to the evidence of the images” (Kiarostami Abbas 72). This distance is not a question of a balanced, moderate distance, as Nancy notes, “the extreme close-up suits it just as well as the extreme long shot, or the most narrow frame (the windows of the car) just as well as the frameless

32Nancy refers to Life and Nothing More… by its alternate name, …And Life Goes On (“On Evidence” 77). 88 shot that fills the entire screen, the immobile shots just as well as the tracking shots going at the speed of the car” (Kiarostami Abbas 72). This section, addressing the narrow frame, argues for the importance of the particular capacity of travelling shots to negotiate the various conceptual divisions for Nancy’s understanding of film and its relationship with the world. As noted, an example of this can be seen in the first travelling shot seen in Life and Nothing More..., with a handheld shot panning from right to left within the interior of the protagonist’s vehicle (figure 3.1), an act that in addition to depicting the symbolically important communication tower, also manages to both convey the sense of searching and foregrounds the screen of the windshield and its association with mediation and contemplation. For Nancy, filmic representation is part of the world (Kiarostami Abbas 46). Rather than seeing the prefix ‘re-‘ meaning ‘again,’ with ‘representation’ thus referring to a copy of an original presence, Nancy reminds us of another Latin meaning for re-, as a prefix that indicates accentuation (in Balfour 32). Now representation means an accentuated presentation, not copying, but re-framing, to better present the preexisting world. Representation is the world accentuating particular features, demonstrating aspects of its existence to itself: the world looking at the world to see the world, “thoughtful evidence realizes itself” (Nancy, Kiarostami Abbas 56). Nancy’s thought is strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger’s concept of “presence.” However, whereas Heidegger is concerned with how ‘man’ can genuinely come, through overcoming the social disposition to see creation in terms of its technology-enabled, utilitarian function, to experience the presence or ‘Being’ of creation on its own terms, Nancy merges ‘man’ and ‘Being’ into the ‘world’ (Heidegger, 12- 19, 25, 130-32). This terminological shift, I would argue, decenters humanity and allows for a greater integration of apparatus such as vehicles and film into how existence is re-presented. As Laura McMahon notes, “At stake here is a cinematic ethics of presentation, an ethics bound up in questions of exteriority, respect, communication and the real” (78); she goes on to write that in doing justice to worldly existence, “cinema ‘takes care’ of the real, opening onto an ethics of looking” (74). This has implications for thinking about the travelling shot because of the shot’s capacity to not just connote contemplation, but to encourage spectator contemplation of our geographic world. Travelling shots re-present the world in a distinctive manner. To Nancy’s notion of representation we can add ‘evidence’ and its counterpart ‘regard.’ For Nancy, “(e)vidence refers to what is obvious, what makes sense, what is striking and, by the same token, opens and gives a chance and an opportunity to meaning” (Kiarostami Abbas 42) and yet evidence does not “work as unconcealment, for it always keeps a secret or an essential reserve: its very light is reserved, and its provenance” (Nancy, Kiarostami Abbas 42). As an example, as Flanagan notes of Apichatpong’s films, “The images…are often prone to mystery and illusion, but retain a sense of material aliveness that verifies a beauty and strangeness that is resistant to the immediacy of narrative containment” (27). Regard is the other half of evidence. It is “the power of a mobilized, activated, or animated look: that is to say the power of regard (égard) with respect to what presents itself to a look” (Nancy,

89 Kiarostami Abbas 38). Regard is a gaze encouraged by evidence; evidence is representation that encourages regard. For Nancy, the term “regard” allows one to distinguish between how one merely ‘looks’ at a Hollywood film and thoughtful observation of the world (Balfour 35). This invokes Martin Heidegger and his concept of ‘enframement.’ Heidegger argues that we enframe the world in a way that objectifies it for human use, alienating us from the world’s own presence (19, 22-26, 36-37). Following Nancy’s lead, and aligning Heidegger’s concept to cinema, this sees Hollywood enframing location so as to turn it into setting. Narrative organisation objectifies the world as story information. Nancy’s concepts are a way of grappling with how films can disinter the world from enframement. Hence the importance of mystery in Kiarostami or Weerasethakul’s work: not only does the ambiguity of surface encourage one to thoughtfully observe the world in order to understand, it suggests the world has its own agenda, separate from the objectifying look we cast over it. Note that here, as Nancy grapples with describing how film can provoke contemplation, he locates the same split behind the movement and time-image that Deleuze proposes. Likewise, one can understand travelling shots as landscapes that objectify space as something to be collapsed. One can also, as Nancy and I do in regards to Life and Nothing More…, see them as a technological synthesis of film and vehicle that indicates absorption and disinters description or presence from narrative’s enframing of the world. Nancy’s analysis is inflected with notions of technological specificity, arguing that film should be constructed so as to take advantage of its inherent qualities. As McMahon notes of Nancy’s study of Jean Renoir: Nancy rethinks the relation between art and techne in order to assert the technicity of art in its foregrounding of a relation to the event of world disclosure (in James 2007a). Cinema, as an emphatically technological art, arguably highlights the technical mode of the artwork’s presentation of world existence or sense. (77) Nancy’s premise synthesises realist arguments (as exemplified by thinkers including Bazin and Kracauer) and anti-realist perspectives (such as those advanced by Arnheim, Eisenstein, and Epstein) about film by drawing on film’s limited realism: film’s successful presentation of the world creates the sensible surface, while film’s failed realism creates the withdrawal required for regard. Evidence is the mystery of surface without annotation. To understand film as evidence, we have Kiarostami’s comment to Nancy: If you really consider it (cinema) an art, then you cannot do without its ambiguity, its mystery. A photograph, a picture can harbor a mystery since it gives very little, it doesn’t describe itself. You’re saying that a picture doesn’t represent itself, doesn’t give itself to representation, but announces its presence, inviting the view to discover it. (Nancy, Kiarostami Abbas 88) When the world presents something that is transparently sensibly there, but also constructed in such a way as to allow an audience to develop their own meaning, then you have evidence. Where realism for Nancy is more influential is in relation to the ethical prioritisation of the world and its disclosure. Nancy and realists such as Bazin privilege thought through 90 observation, but their considerations are diametrically opposed. For Bazin, the gaze’s freedom of movement is crucial (What is Cinema Vol. 1 34-9); for Nancy, the limitations on looking help create the gaps required for evidence. Both are grounded in an ethics based on thinking, but while Bazin’s ethics privilege the world and thought’s ability to traverse the world, Nancy’s ethics sees the sublime reality of the world as raising thought. The reason that Life and Nothing More… strikes Nancy with force is because it is film about an ethical quest to regard, filmed so as to present evidence to an audience for them to respond with ethical regard. On the face of it, Life and Nothing More… is a perversely singular film and not representative of cinema in general, and so it does not provide a sound basis on which to develop a theory of film. However, its distinctiveness is why Nancy theorises about cinema as he does; Kiarostami is a pedagogic filmmaker. Referring to Kiarostami’s Kanun films, Rosenbaum notes that: “(p)ractically all of them qualify in one way or another as didactic works, analogous to what Bertolt Brecht called ‘Lehrstücken,’ or learning plays” (Abbas Kiarostami 9), and I would argue that educational quality is maintained in Life and Nothing More… through the use of travelling shots. Even when Kiarostami withholds information, it is clear to an audience, and to film critics such as Nancy, why obliqueness is necessary. In Life and Nothing More… travelling shots are part of how Kiarostami makes apparent his conceptual organisation of reality and the world; their explicit framing teaches us how to regard. As Nancy observes, “The automobile carries around the screen or the lens, the screen-lens of its windshield” (“On Evidence” 81). The car and the travelling shots it provides are key to Nancy’s grasping of what the film is up to. The travelling shot, both bearing, and borne by the screen-lens of the windshield, is what clarifies the film-world’s relationship with the world. For Nancy, the travelling shot is what makes the film ethical. Drawing on “On Evidence: Life and Nothing More by Abbas Kiarostami,” Balfour notes that Nancy terms the ‘Kiarostamian’ car a ‘boîte à regard’ – a gazing box, a kind of camera non obscura” (36). Kiarostami’s use of the car reaches its culmination with Ten (2002) in which Kiarostami developed scenarios with actors before sending them off in a car to perform them independently of him, with the scenes filmed by small digital cameras affixed to the dashboard and pointing inwards towards the passengers. However, from Life and Nothing More… onwards, in particularly with Ta'm-e gilass/The Taste of Cherry, the car- mounted travelling shot has become Kiarostami’s signature shot: whether filming backwater Iran in Bād mā rā khāhad bord/The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) or the neon density of Tokyo in Like Someone in Love (2012). The travelling shot, due to its meta-nature and the highly visible nature of its vehicle transport, has a pedagogic, clarifying quality that provides Nancy access to the film world (figures 3.5-9). Kiarostami’s use of the travelling shot merely underlines its function, arguably making this approach easier for Nancy to observe. The approach to filmmaking that Nancy approves of is similar to the general style of contemplative cinema: denial of contextual information to energise shots lasting longer than what is considered requisite for the imparting of narrative information. This energising comes from positioning an audience to penetrate—contemplate or regard—a scene to appreciate what is presented. It is little wonder that the film Nancy chose to write his treatise of film on 91 is an icon of contemporary contemplative cinema. This thesis sees the purpose of contemplative cinema as being to encourage audiences, through duration, to see film not just enframed by narrative, but as a polyvalent force that can be appreciated in terms of narrative, art, documentary, a physical object and the outcome of a socio-economic regime, amongst other things, which is why, in this chapter, contemplation and regard are synonymous with one another. However, I would also observe that contemplation imagery can simply act as shorthand for thought and melancholia and can thus be understood by audiences as narrative information rather than as a differing perceptual approach. The contemplative micro-shots discussed in Chapter Two fit within this latter pattern. Life and Nothing More… starts in media res,33 is filmed with an emphasis on long shots that deny facial information/psychologisation34 or subjectivity, providing a ‘cosmic’ viewpoint as Rosenbaum would put it (Abbas Kiarostami 20-25), is elliptical and is premised around retarded action and development. Life and Nothing More…’s prominent travelling shots are also designed to encourage contemplation. As I have argued, we associate travelling shots with contemplation, we have a contemplative schema, this as Balfour adroitly summarises, is determined by the relationship of the camera with the subject. He notes, “Nancy makes much of the ‘dialectic’ of mobility and immobility at various levels of the film experience”, and that “he sees these dynamics lending themselves to regarding or thinking, the former being tantamount to the latter” (Balfour 36). The dialectic or paradox of the travelling shot and mobility is key to this. Just as I see this paradoxical mobility as important to contemplative cinema, Nancy equally sees this dialectic of mobility as important to the development of regard. There are still discrepancies between Nancy’s work and orthodox cinematic discourse on subjectivity. Nancy’s concepts of evidence and regard, at their purest level, rely on a film being empty of interiority. Take for instance the subjectivity provided by the travelling shot. This is Nancy’s view: (i)nteriority is avoided, it is voided: the locus of the gaze is not a subjectivity, it is the locus of the camera as camera obscura which is not, this time, an apparatus of reproduction, but a locus without a real inside (the tollbooth at the beginning…the inside of the car with the framing through its windows or windshield…) (Kiarostami Abbas 64). As McMahon notes, “Nancy reads this refusal of psychological legibility as a voiding of interiority which is key to Kiarostami’s approach as a filmmaker” (79). This understanding is what allows Nancy to write that Life and Nothing More… is a “true model” of “distanciation” as it is “not possible for the spectator of the film to identify with a certain point of view” (Kiarostami Abbas 66). Nancy fails to address the degree to which audiences are attuned to focalisation.35 Knowingly in contradiction to Nancy’s claims, I argue that part of the

33 …And Life Goes On, the alternate name which Nancy uses, speaks to this. 34 As Bordwell notes, denial of facial information (through long shots or through compositions that have the character’s back to the audience) encourages an audience’s gaze to shift from “figure to environment” (Figures 164). In Kiarostami’s work, this leads to contemplation of the whole rather than individual components. 35 In contrast to Nancy, note how Alberto Elena describes the travelling shots (similarly mounted) of Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994), Life and Nothing More…’s sequel: 92 intellectual process of regard is compensating for evidence’s absence of blatant subjectivity; regard searches out the hidden cues of subjectivity. The possibility that content may provide subjective psychological insight is always a valuable heuristic when understanding narrative film and thus we turn to it as one of our options. The importance of the basic travelling shot is that it offers an ambiguous point of view: the travelling shot presents a subjective point of view as much as it simultaneously presents Nancy’s surface evidence. The travelling shot being the founding shot of Life and Nothing More…, means Life and Nothing More… is still a film about a subjective encountering. Pace Nancy, Mulvey sees Life and Nothing More… entirely through the lens of subjectivity. In “Abbas Kiarostami: Cinema of Uncertainty, Cinema of Delay”, she argues that the relationship between Where is the Friend’s House? and Life and Nothing More… presents an allegorical example of Nachträglichkeit, “Freud used this term, translated into English as ‘afterwards-ness’, to describe an event that is not registered by the psyche as traumatic or significant when it happens, but that acquires traumatic significance in retrospect, in the light of later events” (Mulvey, “Repetition” 21). For Mulvey, contrary to Nancy’s evidential understanding, Life and Nothing More… is the depiction of a mind, an “allegorical mind”; the film, like a mind, re-works the past as it engages with the present (“Repetition” 21). This is the concept of the film, with the ‘director’ re-visiting past terrain and negotiating present terrain, and as he looks for past companions he finds present companions. This is also the execution of the film: Kiarostami’s original journey, the one the on-screen “director” recreates, happened immediately after the earthquake, and yet the filming of Life and Nothing More… took place months after the earthquake, with the new life of green vegetation over the earthquake rubble indicating a new season. In the world Life and Nothing More… travels through, the shock is over and reconstruction has started; Life and Nothing More… sees three separate terrains written over one another as a palimpsest: pre- earthquake, post-earthquake, and the present of the filmed world. Life and Nothing More… is both Nachträglichkeit and Kiarostami’s response to Nachträglichkeit. As Mulvey observes: The second and third Koker films develop with a looping narrative strategy in which a return to the past enables a move into the future. In the process, the spectator is engaged in an unusual way, forced to move backwards and forwards across the films not only through remembering but following a twisting path of reassessment and re-understanding earlier images and stories in the light of Kiarostami’s changing cinema. (“Repetition” 19) This is the key insight Mulvey brings to the analysis of repetition in Kiarostami’s work; as will be discussed presently, repetition and the layering this produces is essential to the form and meaning of Kiarostami’s films.

The confusion between the various levels of reality and narrative is intensified by the absence of any ‘punctuation marks’ (the flashback to the cemetery), the numerous point-of-view shots (from inside the vehicles, basically) which nearly always restrict the audience’s view, and the constant use of off-camera (the whole conversation between the teacher and Mrs Shiva in the sequence that follows the credits): all this contributes to the narrative obscurity we have already discussed and which at times perhaps weighs the film down a little (115). 93 This layering is also a key function of the travelling shot. A travelling shot is a shot that reminds an audience of film’s capacity to document, to provide documentary evidence, thanks to its inherent geographic scale and its recurring function as metaphoric screen and bridge to the world. The vast background captured as vehicle-mounted travelling shots transit through real landscapes surrounds the fictional foreground (the diegetic space that characters occupy within the vehicle) with non-fiction. However, what is distinct to Life and Nothing More… is a temporal conceit provided by Nachträglichkeit and reinforced by changing vegetation in the non-fictional background, the non-fictional present, and the present’s new season as an inscription of temporal layering. This documentary link, and its reinforcement of Nachträglichkeit, is why the travelling shot is emblematic of Kiarostami’s break. As Mulvey notes of Kiarostami’s return to Koker, it was “his first film in which the cinema itself – its reality, its processes, its deceptions becomes an explicit matter of discussion and representations“ (“Repetition” 21), because, “(i)t was out of this encounter with the ruined site of his earlier film and the devastated survivors of the earthquake that Kiarostami’s characteristic cinematic style developed, particularly the elongated tracking shots from a moving car” (“Repetition” 21).36 Life and Nothing More… is a long-form reaction to the sublime: the film, is not just an instant depiction of the sublime, a photograph or landscape; Life and Nothing More… is an extended, durational response to the sublime, an allegorical mind probing, exploring various options as to how to present this unrepresentable tragedy. Mulvey also sees in Life and Nothing More… a reminder of Deleuze’s time-image and its stratiographic evocation of time, with Italy’s ruins being replaced by Iran’s ruins (“Repetition” 24). Nachträglichkeit captures a particular aspect of the time-image. Furthermore, Mulvey identifies in Life and Nothing More…’s surrogate director, “a surrogate observer” and the type of protagonist that Deleuze labels as a “seer”37 (Mulvey “Repetition” 24, Deleuze Time-Image 272). As Deleuze writes: These are pure optical and sound situations, in which the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience and to act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, comes and goes, vaguely indifferent as to what happens to him, undecided as to what must be done. But he has gained the ability to see what he has lost in action or reaction: he SEES so that the viewer’s problem becomes ‘What is there to see in the image?’ (and not now ‘What are we going to see in the next image?). (Time-Image 272) Deleuze is describing a response to being overwhelmed and, for Mulvey, his theory explains Kiarostami’s formal shift. First I want to strengthen this point. As argued in Chapter One, our

36 I, like Mulvey, would argue that Life and Nothing More… does reveal a shift in Kiarostami’s consideration of cinema. However, as noted in my introduction to Kiarostami’s career, Kiarostami had already explicitly revealed his interest in the meta-dynamic of cinema in the films he made immediately prior to Life and Nothing More…. 37 Film historians and theorists have identified this form of protagonist in many different ways. One can see the seer in P. Adam Sitney’s concept of ‘trance’ films where a mostly passive protagonist walks through a series of uncanny encounters (10-11). Likewise, as expanded upon in chapters One and Two, this behavior is what Lefebvre and Pierson refer to when they talk about characters focalising description for the audience, and therefore bracketing spectacle from narrative. From 1920’s Cesare (Conrad Veidt) in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Weine) to 2013’s female alien (Scarlett Johansson) of Under the Skin (Glazer), these seers have acted as a guiding thread through liminal narratives where spectacle is equally as important as story. 94 everyday understanding of vehicle travel, gazing out a moving window, primes us to see travelling shots as descriptions. This is for two reasons, we understand they suggest a focalising presence behind the windshield, and because we culturally appreciate that these views are landscapes. The former, focalising protagonist, and the latter, cultural appreciation of landscapes, mirror Deleuze and Mulvey’s concepts: our cultural appreciation is the contemplative, surrogate ‘seer’ and the focalising protagonist is the ‘accentuating’ surrogate director. Similarly, as expanded upon in Chapter One, Chatman argues that certain formal gestures, in particular temps mort or dead time, re-frame or demarcate certain shots as description rather than action. During temps mort, onscreen and camera movement becomes the exploration of a situation rather than the changing of a situation (Chatman “Description in Film” 7-10). In relation to Chatman’s claim, Kiarostami’s long shots transcend the causal details of living. Just as we do not consider leaves in the wind as an action, but as a static description of movement, we do not consider the movement of non-protagonists as action but as people milling. The image is evacuated of action, leaving only description. Likewise, David Bordwell describes the cinematic evacuation of clear causal momentum as ‘dedramatization’: this occurs when screen action is slow enough that an audience grasps a sequence’s cause and effect, the principle component of narrative, with time to spare (Figures 164). The justification for ending a scene, together with the resulting spare time, leaves an audience searching for alternate justifications for a shot. The primary result of this mental process is that an audience becomes more keenly aware of the use of non-narrative elements: texture, camera movement, framing, linking patterns, psychological detail, and so on (Bordwell, Figures 164-84). A by-product of this is that the longer a shot is held, the more an audience thinks about the making of the shot. In other words, the more a shot realises an approximation of ‘real’ time rather than ‘action’ or ‘story’ time, the more acutely aware an audience is of its artifice, albeit an artifice created through historicising indexicality. This is one difference between Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image. Deleuze’s time-image elides fictional time and through this connects registration time and screening time; Bordwell’s dedramatised-image provides the time for audiences to possibly infer this link between registration and screening time themselves. I raise these parallel discussions not to refute Mulvey or Deleuze, but to contextualise. Life and Nothing More… “conforms to this pattern” of Deleuze’s, but it also conforms to the patterns identified by Bordwell and Chatman (Mulvey, “Repetition” 24). Life and Nothing More…’s relationship with time, movement and description is more complicated than Mulvey suggests. Travelling shots exist in a continuum of action. At one end we have abstracted ‘cinematic’ movement, exemplified by stabilised helicopter shots, that suggests nothing behind the camera. In the middle we have everyday transport shots whose traces suggest the extra-diegetic presence of a vehicle behind the camera. And in Life and Nothing More…, at the other end, we have driver shots whose traces not only suggest the presence of a vehicle behind the camera, but also foreground the thought processes of the operator driving the vehicle. These driver shots are exceedingly rare. Most transport shots are 95 steady, and smoothly follow the track or trail they are on. Life and Nothing More… features pure travelling shots that slow down to take in ruins and chaos or pass points of interest only to brake, reverse and then revisit, before speeding up. Likewise, vignetted travelling shots track content from the side windows to the front windshield and vice versa. These practices not only suggest presence, important enough, but they also allow us to follow what precisely interests the driver – we can see the mind wander and probe (figures 3.5-3.9). Furthermore, Kiarostami frequently has his surrogate engage with soldiers and peasants through an open window, an everyday gesture but rare in cinema; this integrates the fore-, mid-and background typically separated by the travelling shot. This highlights how shots that indicate extra-diegetic presence change the information they provide. Transport and driver shots represent a prominent shift through the diegesis. They represent action. This is why driver shots are mostly seen in action movies; driver shots highlight engagement with their setting. However, in Life and Nothing More… this is balanced out by other cues. The central protagonist drives a boîte à regard and is a surrogate director surrounded by broken down causality and ruins. Though Life and Nothing More…’s travelling shots are not pure description, they are still the vision of a seer. The word that binds Mulvey and Nancy’s texts together is sublime: the sublimity of incomprehensible tragedy and the sublimity of knowing reality. (Here I use the same Kantian-Burkean definition of sublime outlined in the introduction to this thesis.) To that, I will add that the ineffableness of the sublime correlates strongly with Nancy’s understanding of evidence. Both are predicated on the desired impossibility of properly comprehending. Indeed, as Balfour notes, Nancy’s etymological reworking of the term “re-presentation” was originally in response to “the common throwing-up-of-the-hands” at the sublime “impossibility of ‘representing’ the Holocaust” (32). Life and Nothing More… is not just about coming to terms with reality but how to present the world through the world. Life and Nothing More…’s self-reflexive depiction of a protagonist confronting the overwhelming sublimeness of creation harkens back to the sublime and Romantic imagery seen in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, in particular Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). However, there is more to Life and Nothing More…’s grappling with representation than Friedrich’s work (or similar) thanks to the temporal qualities of film (and the specific palimpest qualities of The Koker trilogy) which permits the repeated re-engagement with the surface of the our indexically registered reality. Life and Nothing More…’s structural weavings are the presentation of an allegorical mind coming to terms with tragedy and simultaneously figuring out how to depict this tragedy. The self-reflexive content of Life and Nothing More…, whether through the surrogate director or through encounters with actors from Where is the Friend’s House?, helps fix the possible meaning of the travelling shot to that of a palimpsest. The travelling shot, with its Nachträglichkeit evoking the triple layering of time, and its simultaneous presentation of geographic scale consumed by contemplative action and point of view, synthesises these two states of sublimity. As Nancy writes, “the earthquake is present here as a limit of images, as the absolute real which is also the cut in the dark whence the film accedes to its first image” (Kiarostami Abbas 70), that the film is about “a question 96 of getting out of the catastrophe, of finding the road leading to the villages that have been razed, and of getting out of the dark to find the image and its right distance” (Kiarostami Abbas 70). This is the function of the travelling shot: inherent to its existence is its synthesis of action and description as it moves to regard properly. Life and Nothing More…’s structural weavings are the representation of the world regarding the world and simultaneously figuring out how to re-present this evidence of the world. To this I add Rosenbaum’s observation on Life and Nothing More…: The frequent shift in scale can even be felt in the metaphorical equation periodically made in the film between car and camera: both are perceived as middle-class instruments of entitlement and access, perception and circumscription. It might even be said that the hero is so closely associated with his Land Rover because he’s never shown with a camera; the numerous point-of-view shots from the front of the camera in motion effectively make the camera and car seem interchangeable. The car, like the (unseen) camera, is the only element in this devastated world that smacks of interiority; this is the first of Kiarostami’s features set exclusively in exteriors, but it would not be the last. (Abbas Kiarostami, 20-21) Cutting across the film’s allegorical search for a position to properly regard from is a critique of those privileged through their mobility (or those with power). Unexamined by Nancy or Mulvey is the importance of the director’s son. There are two key protagonists in the film: the surrogate director and driver of the boîte à regard, and his completely passive son. The most common editing pattern of Life and Nothing More… is the cut from father to son or son to father, as filmed from the perspective of someone riding shotgun. The film sees their behaviour mirror each other – whether it is deciding to piss behind a plant stalk or tree trunk, or pestering peasant women about taps – the difference being capability and mobility. Kiarostami’s films “propose enquiries into the ethics of middle-class artists filming poor people: they are not simply or exclusively demonstrations of this practice” (Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami 4). In addition, the key protagonist the surrogate director is searching for had played a child struggling, and failing due to his lack of resources, to find his friend’s house. Kiarostami is also interested in the capacity to move and the responsibility this entails. Rosenbaum also observes that Kiarostami’s films critique a “filmmaker’s distance and detachment from his subjects as well as his special entitlements” (Abbas Kiarostami 4-5). This is particularly pertinent in regards to Life and Nothing More…’s contemplative visual style and the detached nature of travelling shots in his films. Life and Nothing More… does not end with a travelling shot, it ends with an extreme long shot of our protagonists travelling up a hill in their Land Rover. As they do so, they pass a peasant struggling with his load, as they near the top their Land Rover struggles with its load. Forced to restart their trip, the pair again pass the struggling peasant, only this time they give him a lift (figure 3.10). Only then is their Land Rover able to make it up the hill. In miniature, we have the ethical question the film has been grappling with for its entire length: what does a contemplative position, born of 97 privilege, mobility and repetition, demand of the world? A similar ethical question shapes the next film under discussion, Mr Thank You.

Hiroshi Shimizu

Shimizu’s story is one of the continuity of travelling shots. As a filmmaker working within Japan’s studio system for Shochiku, Shimizu’s work is neither art cinema nor arthouse cinema (since the post-war arthouse distribution system had yet to arise), and yet I address Shimizu’s Mr Thank You principally because Mr Thank You shares formal and thematic similarities to Life and Nothing More…. Like Kiarostami, Shimizu frequently uses travelling shots to come into contact with the world, to visualise the thought process of this encounter, and through this negotiation with the world, to depict an ethical response to the world. Shimizu’s work is particularly interesting because his ethical response to the world does not come about due to tragedy (whether specifically in the case of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake or in terms of the post-war shift in art cinema norms), but is part of a continuum of filmmaking that can be traced back to early filmmaking practices and low-cost studio-system work. To obtain freedom from studio interference and to simply enjoy the outdoors, Shimizu and his troupe of technicians and actors spent much of their time travelling around Japan. It is this travelling that informs their work; their continuing vehicle travel shapes their understanding of how travelling shots can be used and staged. For instance, in Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy (Newmeyer 1922) most of the tracking shots are clearly filmed from the back of a truck, if the position and movement of the camera doesn’t tip the audience off, then the flattened grass left by tyres does. As tracks became cheaper, and laying them became easier, this option mostly disappears. Where it remains as an option is where its ease is most apparent: the travelling shots of La Ballon Rouge/The Red Balloon (Lamorisse 1956) are filmed from the road, it is already level, smooth, and it doesn’t hinder traffic. Shimizu’s work falls within this tradition. Being on the road meant that the easiest way to set up a tracking shot was not to lay tracks but to use a vehicle. The attention paid to the possibilities of travelling shots in Shimizu’s films stem from this tradition. In his earliest surviving film, 1929’s Fue no Shiratama/The Undying Pearl, Shimizu was already using relatively elaborate travelling shots. For instance, one of the film’s earlier car shots starts off as a typical travelling shot—statically mounted on the bumper/bonnet of a rapidly moving car—before panning to the left to take in the passing landscape, in an uncommon gesture. By Hachi no su no Kodomotachi/Children of the Beehive (1948) we have shots that synthesise the travelling shot and the dolly shot with complicated staging combined with the vehicle’s movement.38 However, the apotheosis of Shimizu’s use of travelling shots is found in Mr Thank You. Not only are the individual shots distinctive, so too are the patterns Shimizu arranges them into, and even that draws thematic strength from his use of the shot. Depending on how you

38 We also encounter the key anecdote regarding Shimizu: Children of the Beehive was a blunt depiction of children orphaned by World War Two; after filming concluded Shimizu adopted his child actors and started an orphanage. This empathy defines Shimizu and it defines Shimizu’s work. 98 define the travelling shot, like Life and Nothing More…, well over 50% of the film is constructed out of travelling shots of some form or another. Mr Thank You is a proto-road movie that takes us from Izu (100km south-west of Tokyo), through mountain villages to the outskirts of Tokyo. In doing so, the film tells the story of a bus driver who, thanks to the exhortations of his nosey passengers, increasingly empathises with a teenage girl being escorted by her mother to Tokyo for sale into prostitution.39The structure of the opening is as follows. With Mr Thank You, Shimuzu’s sharply outlines the film’s visual strategy through the opening sequence’s burst of travelling shots: (figures 3.11-25). Shimizu initially takes care to show each stage of an encounter before gradually removing unnecessary information. At first we see the bus (figures 3.11-12), its view of upcoming pedestrians getting out of the way (figure 3.13), Arigato-San thanking pedestrians for getting out of the way (figure 3.14) before providing departing a view of the pedestrians (figure 3.15). By the end, two shots – encountering and departing, connected by a dissolve will do (figures 3.19-21). To close the opening sequence, he shows the comical degree to which this approach will be taken with Arigato-San thanking wandering chickens. I argue that Shimizu is using travelling shots to depict a viewpoint that can represent all of the bus passengers’ viewpoints collectively. This group perspective helps express the film’s interest in empathetic relationships. Mr Thank You is about relationships between the bus’s occupants, the occupants and their surrounds, and between the audience and the film (figures 3.26-28). At the front we have Arigato-San (Ken Uehara). Immediately behind him sits a pompous, phony businessman and a sarcastic Moga or Modern Girl,40 whose sparring with the businessman establishes the film’s debate. At the back sits the escorted daughter and her peasant mother, whose situation is the subject of the film’s debate. And in the middle sit the changing and interchangeable passengers who act as the film’s Greek Chorus. There is also the relationship between Arigato-San and the various social groups encountered by the bus — ranging from children and villagers to the itinerant Korean immigrant workers. And since Arigato-San slows down the journey to assist the groups, there is also a certain disgruntled relationship between the passengers and the world of Mr Thank You. Travelling shots help Shimizu convey empathy41 in an unusual manner. Shimizu uses Mr Thank You’s travelling shots as metaphoric screens that align the audience with the bus’s passengers leading to both groups looking out onto a passing world and coming to ethically

39 Film critic Jasper Sharp describes Mr Thank You as “A throwback to the days when the words ‘arigato’ (thank you) meant something more sincere than a mere reflex action”, but this is only partially true, since one of the opening jokes of the film has Arigato-San thanking a chicken he passes (n.p.). Instead, to a certain degree, Mr Thank You is about the difference between politeness as a reflex action and the expression of genuine concern — almost the opposite of Ozu’s Ohayo-Good Morning (1959), which is a defence of reflex politeness. 40 The role of the Moga in Mr Thank You helps symbolise the break between tradition (personified by the teenage girl’s peasant mother) and modernity (the businessman, the Moga, and also the bus). 41“Empathy” is a highly debated term. What precisely is meant by empathy and how empathy occurs is an intensively discussed and disputed topic, to the point that Noël Carroll, in his analysis of “affective relations” avoids the word “empathy” because he has “been unable to find much consensus in either ordinary language or the relevant technical literatures about how we are to understand empathy” (“Affective Relations” 162-63). As Amy Coplan notes, understandings of empathy range from “[f]eeling what someone else feels” to a manner of inferring or imagining another’s situation or to some mingling of these processes (“Understanding Empathy” 4). A useful and exemplary overview of this debate can be found in Coplan and Peter Goldie’s “Introduction” to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. As a result, in order to be consistent, this thesis holds to Carl Plantinga’s definition of empathy as “a capacity or disposition to respond with concern to another’s situation, and often an accompanying tendency to have congruent emotions, that is, emotions that share a similar valence” (Moving Viewers 98). Plantinga’s work is informed by cognitive psychology, and as such, parallels the cognitive psychology informed approach to narrative (principally Bordwell) that underpins this thesis.

99 regard it. As in Life and Nothing More…, Mr Thank You’s shots suggest both a documentary quality, and a point-of-view. As noted already, the secret of the travelling shot is that foregrounds are fiction and backgrounds are documentary. As Barthes notes, a surplus of insignificant or useless details, often contrarily, signifies “realness” (15-16), here a travelling shot is a net used by a filmmaker to trawl for quotidian details. Equally, travelling shots bring the association of being both a metaphoric “screen” and a bridge to reality. The result is that when we see travelling shots we are primed to see them in a documentary fashion, we see them as framing a particular relationship with reality. This is not to imply that Shimizu is manipulating conventions, although he is, but to describe an entry point. The film does offer much that is of documentary interest. As with Life and Nothing More…, the vast background surrounds the fictional foreground with non-fiction. However, while Life and Nothing More… provided a temporal palimpsest layered through Nachträglichkeit, one reinforced by the change in season and earthquake rupture, Mr Thank You evokes Nachträglichkeit through the passing of time. Hal Foster, writing on contemporary art, invokes Nachträglichkeit in a slightly different manner to Mulvey, to articulate how an artwork’s meaning is retroactively revealed, its history re-written by the light of future work – as a form of “deferred action” or revelation (29-32). Nachträglichkeit reveals Mr Thank You as an art film, even if, as a palimpsest, we can still see its populist classical intent. Accordingly, even if the foreground is fiction, the background is non-fiction. And it is a beautiful non-fiction. Mr Thank You provides one of the greatest documentations of 1930s Japan. This is built into the film’s theme, which is a state-of-the-nation address. Robert Koehler describes a grouping of slow cinema films as belonging to a “cinema of in-between-ness” which rests between “hardened fact and invented fiction”, thanks to their shifting from nonfiction to fiction and back, and thanks to an actuality-informed presentation of everyday marginal subjects (13). I argue that Shimizu plays on this same liminality, but it is critically mediated via travelling shots and their ability to present both a compound view and bridge interior and exterior. The cast provides a fictional sampling of Japanese character types, the background a non-fictional sample of Japan. As such, the film is also partly about the relationship between the contextualising fictional foreground and the non-fictional background of Japan, an exchange supported by travelling shots. I want to contrast the form and structure of Shimizu’s Mr Thank You to Life and Nothing More… as it is another example of an allegorical mind in the process of examining a problem. Here it is social injustice, both as an abstract issue (whether a comment on Korean immigration or poverty) and as the concrete representation in the film of the teenager on her way into prostitution. As Sharon Hayashi notes, by “bringing the film on the road Shimizu was able to portray a whole section of society which had been for the most part neglected in cinematic representations of the time” (195). The reasoning of the bus’s occupants is just one part of the film’s allegorical stream of consciousness; the rest comes from the film’s gaze and its meandering structure. On one level, the film, through its bus stops, incidents and detours, depicts a delayed journey. On another level, with incident as thought, it is a film about a mind weighing up options, taking in context and drawing on opinion as it comes to a decision. Like 100 Life and Nothing More…, Mr Thank You uses the combination of travelling shots, landscape and the repetitive delays and encounters to both represent and invoke thought. Mr Thank You is a showcase on how to wring variety from travelling shots. The shots take in differing perspectives, and many are heavily framed by the film’s diegesis through bus or passengers. The staging of travelling shots is traditionally fairly limited, in part for the same reason that they add documentary aura—they are hard to stage over a large geographic area—but Shimizu’s long engagement with travelling shots allows him to circumvent this with complicated travelling shots that dovetail the bus into passing reality. In Shimizu’s films, the intertwining of the three parts, the vehicle, the land and the subject matter, enables these more complicated shots. It is very rare for a travelling shot to be seen at anything other than a consistent speed. In Mr Thank You Shimizu manipulates the speed of the vehicle, with the bus repeatedly slowing down to stop or starting up again. Likewise, winding passes play a role: as the bus travels along the road, the scenic view can shift from an open vista, to a cliff face blocking-off previously seen sights, to blurred close-ups of greenery as the bus pivots around a sharp turn. Finally there are the people, aside from the bus’s relatively permanent passengers and the other people the bus passes, the film is filled with incidental greeters who run and chase or hop on the side of the bus. The prevalence of the travelling shot in Mr Thank You changes Shimizu’s form, allowing him to extend the length of this shots. As Bordwell notes: The Shimizus we have conform to trends in Japanese films of the period. His silent films from the years 1931-1935 adhere broadly to the Shochiku house style, using plenty of cuts and single framings of individuals. Most of the surviving silents have average shot lengths between 5 and 6 seconds, completely normal for both Japanese and US silent movies. (“Pierced by Poetry” n.p.) Ignoring the opening and end credit sequences, which are discrete unintegrated sections, Mr Thank You, filmed only a year after Bordwell’s survey ends, contains 385 shots for an average shot length of 11.67 seconds. This is a doubling of average shot length. While some of this is accounted for by the removal of dialogue intertitles, which Shimizu had made extensive use of (Bordwell, “Pierced by Poetry” n.p.), I argue that Shimizu’s staging of his travelling shots further energises the shots while integrating the bus with the world.

Shimizu and Compound Point of View

I want to propose a new function or connotation for the travelling shot. Mulvey argues for the subjectiveness of an allegorical mind while Nancy argues for the neutral exteriority of evidence. As a synthesis of these two perspectives I propose the compound travelling shot. This is a travelling shot whose “secondary cues” connote a subjective point of view, but without linking the POV to a specific character (Branigan, “Formal Permutations” 57). Instead, audiences read it as common knowledge for the vehicle’s occupants. This type of compound perspective is taken advantage of by numerous films. For instance The Overlanders (Watt 1946) features a travelling shot from the side of an army convoy truck that 101 suggests the compound perspective of its cargo of soldiers (figures 3.29-31). The compound shot is a defining feature of Shimizu’s Mr Thank You. The particular arrangement and composition of travelling shots within Mr Thank You is unusual. Travelling shots typically present a vaguely recognisable vantage point, whether from the position of the windshield, the bumper bar or looking out a side window. However, this is not true of Mr Thank You. We are given a neutral position, not indicative of any particular passenger position. Instead the origin of the travelling shot is located in the dead centre of the bus — lower and more centrally positioned than any seat on the bus would offer. As Bordwell notes, throughout his career Shimizu had developed a practice of axial staging in which, rather than clarifying the diegetic axis of characters—for instance, by respecting the 180-degree rule—Shimizu developed decorative patterns derived from the initial, cardinal, placement of the camera (“Pierced by Poetry” n.p.). In Mr Thank You this is apparent from the opening decoupage with the reverse shot of any travelling shot precisely mirroring the angle of the initial shot, a mirroring enhanced by the brief lap-dissolves that connect and match the shot-reverse shots. This decorative approach shifts us faintly away from the characters, neutralising precise focalisation. Thus an audience is unable to identify these shots as part of a specific perspective and instead identifies them with the bus and its passengers as a whole. It is the mind-eye of the bus. This objective effect is amplified by how these shots are typically edited together. The distinct shot-reverse-shot coupling seen at the start of the film and which is used extensively throughout the film is typically meant to provide the 360-degree field of view from a location. It is just that this particular location is moving. If these were just individual shots, we could presume that this was merely an unusual perspective to take when filming from the front or back of a bus, but once edited together they imply we are located within the middle of an invisible bus. This weird sensation is exacerbated by the unusual placing of people within the diegesis; as per figures 3.19 and 3.20, the travelling shots run straight up to hikers before cutting to them as seen from the reverse-shot perspective as if the bus had slipped straight through them, being not just invisible but incorporeal, a ghost bus. It is this distinctiveness, or rather their neutral indistinctiveness that is the crux of my argument regarding Mr Thank You. Thanks to the surrounding context of the film, their lack of definition pushes them further towards what I think of as group point-of-view travelling shots. Thanks to the seemingly objective indistinctiveness of the shots, we are provided with a vantage point that is capable of representing the point of view of all the occupants on the bus, from Arigato-San and the businessman to the nervous teenager.42 As such, the travelling shot falls into an inter-zone of perspective, between the category of externally focalised point-of-view shot and literal point-of-view or “surface internal focalisation” (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 111-12). This is the cornerstone of how Shimizu conveys his story of developing empathy. These travelling shots are presenting a literal exchange, or merging

42 There are other circumstances in which an audience can presume what they are seeing is also seen by a group of diegetic characters. If shown a boxing match, depicted through a variety of medium shots and close-ups, we could presume we had witnessed an ideal version of what every character saw. However, this scenario is not associated with a particular view. 102 of points-of-view, which underscores a metaphorical exchange of perspectives. As emotion theorist Murray Smith observes, focalisation is a key part of how audiences align and become capable of empathising with characters (75, 146-59). What we have here is a shot that, if provided the right context, can adroitly represent this insight with a minimum of fuss. The only difference is that it is not just the audience that is given an insight into a character’s subjectivity but the characters are also being given an insight into each other’s subjectivity and asked to empathetically engage in their mutual situation and outlook. Furthermore, what we see is what they see — we are given an insight into their combined thought process, an act that also asks us to empathetically engage in their situation and outlook. The result is that we have a three step training as to why these travelling shots should be treated as compound shots: we have the initial introductory training as Arigato-San is introduced, then we have the formal abstraction suggested by camera mount placement, and lastly we have the reminders suggested by the passengers and most specifically the chorus of the middle rows. As Ryan Cook observes, “the passengers are seated in rows like an audience and so the bus also resembles a movie theatre” (19). It is not just the cinema screen that is being evoked by the windscreen here, but the entire cinematic apparatus, including an audience’s relationship to onscreen matter. Accordingly, our vision of Japan is being framed by the group point-of-view of Shimizu’s sample. We know we’re seeing what they’re seeing. Just as Ozu’s decorative three-quarter patterning indicated his film’s relationship with the world, Shimizu’s decorative axial patterning clarifies Mr Thank You’s relationship with the world. Jacques Rancière observes that, “The documentary, instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood (29); in Mr Thank You this is a burden shared by audience and passenger alike. The emotional evenness of the film’s decorative compositions is a microcosm of the film’s overall emotional tenor. The film’s withdrawal of meaning applies equally to suspense. There is hardly a sense of danger to Shimuzu’s film. When a sign warns of “Dangerous Road” its threat is eased away by the humorous gentle music that saturates the movie. The only reason attention is drawn to the sign is to justify immediately following the shot with more travelling landscape shots, this time of the cliff edges passing near the bus’ wheels. The cliffs are forgotten for almost half the movie, until Arigato-San, distracted by the brothel- bound daughter’s situation nearly drives the bus off a cliff. Here Shimizu plays tricks with action genre conventions. Without suggesting that there are any urgent or suspenseful matters, Shimizu cuts rapidly from Arigato-San to the girl and back repeatedly to show his concern and worry for her future. Only as it reaches the crescendo of cutting does any emergency appear with another series of shots showing Arigato-San suddenly sharply turning the wheel and the bus nearly driving off the cliff. Arigato-San’s interest in the girl provides the justification for the editing pattern of danger and then the fact that he pays attention to her and is distracted from the road causes the danger. We can see the particular relationship travelling shots form with the world by comparing Mr Thank You with its unlikely American twin, Stagecoach. Stagecoach is a Hollywood Western, but like Mr Thank You it is also a proto-road movie that documents a journey 103 through the countryside. Admittedly, Stagecoach is a period film set in the American Wild West and the action takes place in a horse-drawn coach. However, both films combine the social-mingling interior confines of public transport with location-shot exteriors to better present a sample of a nation, to the point that both films feature a socially abject prostitute and a phony businessman, one the subject of concerned empathy, the other of scornful contempt. Both films even tease out the potential of smoking indoors and regard for other people. However, there are obvious differences. Mr Thank You is more humble in both action and setting. Its bus takes us through prosaic rural areas and outer suburbia, and it features characters endemic to that location, and action that springs naturally from this scenario. The reverse is true of Stagecoach. The coach takes us through Monument Valley, a desolate desert as icon of the West. As such there are no endemic characters43: instead lived-in detail is replaced with incident. In Stagecoach we are entertained by a recurring plot line about a fleeing businessman, fears of outlaw trouble, and an extended Apache attack that acts as the film’s climax but also helps further abstract the film into genre. This emphasis on narrative concerns reframes the film away from a regard of the world to focusing on relevant story details. The shift in content is mirrored in the films’ different approaches to landscape. Despite his love of the outdoors, Ford maintains studio standards of lighting and control, which results in a different approach to filming landscape. For instance, travelling shots filmed from the interior of the coach were created through rear-projection and kept to a minimum. Conversely, the spacious carriage of Mr Thank You’s bus helped Shimizu avoid such workarounds, maintaining the verisimilitude of his location shooting. In Stagecoach, only a few rare shots are traditional travelling shots that show us the front view of the moving coach. Here the camera wildly bumps along with the horses framing our view, both reminding us that the creator of the travelling shot is the coach, not an anachronistic car. Instead, the bulk of Stagecoach’s travelling shots appear during the Indian Attack sequence. In light of the contemplative world picture outlined here, these barely qualify as travelling shots; they are more correctly parallel action shots, designed to keep up with the galloping horses of the coach.44The travelling shots of the Apache attack were mounted on trucks driving parallel to the fast-moving action. Our focus is on the action, abetted by shooting on a salt flat that removed judder and keeping the truck firmly in sync with the carriage. It is only when vehicle and subject movement falls out of sync that the anachronistic dissonance is in full effect. Instead the film’s landscape shots come as traditional static long shots that depict the coach within the setting. While Mr Thank You’s typical landscape shot is a travelling shot, Stagecoach’s is either a static landscape shot or a travelling shot that treats the coach as

43 Unlike many of Ford’s films, in Stagecoach the Apache are treated as an anonymous environmental hazard, de-psychologised. 44 The analysis here can be seen as a response to Aumont’s note: [A]mbiguity of movement has frequently been addressed by film theorists. Jean Mitry discussed camera movement at length in cases where interpretation is unclear. A common shot in Westerns is one in which a driver and his sidekick are shown riding on a moving stagecoach. Should this be considered a fixed shot of the two characters? As a tracking shot in relation to the background? Or neither? It does not make it any easier to reply that the shot can be filmed in a variety of technical ways: putting a camera on a real stagecoach moving in a real landscape; placing a camera on a mobile platform moving at the same speed in front of it; or even shooting the scene on a sound-stage with a filmed background (The Image 167-68). 104 the centrepiece of the shot. A different relationship with the landscape is formed in such a shot, for there is no non-fictional background when one includes a coach moving through that world. Either way, it is a target awaiting attack from Indians or outlaws. What we have here is a difference in how characters and audiences bond. In Stagecoach the protagonists verbally exchange identity, but are bonded by action and mutual defence. The violence of the frontier is an aid to group-actualisation. The frontier, or more precisely, the pushing against the frontier, is required to provoke the Apache attack that bonds the group together. By contrast, mainland 1930s Japan lacks such a useful violent frontier. Instead, everyday encounters there with itinerants are used to provoke an external sympathy that leads to empathy within the group. What this approach lacks in brute force it makes up through travelling shots. Their ability to adroitly depict a compound point-of-view helps support Mr Thank You’s theme of empathy. Stagecoach creates bonds through violence, while Mr Thank You bonds through a shared gaze that joins the vision of travellers and audience alike.

Conclusion

Travelling shots are a paradox. Initially an attraction, they now function as a connection to Musser’s cinema of contemplation. In Chapter One I noted how travelling shots had come to connote contemplation. This chapter has expanded upon why they sometimes do not just connote contemplation, but through framing, encourage spectator contemplation. Kiarostami’s pedagogic background and Shimizu’s decorative and nomadic background foreground how travelling shots in general help clarify a film’s relationship with the world. Mr Thank You also illustrates how this approach draws from a contemplative well that pre- dates the time-image: what is a Hale’s Tour but the world contemplatively regarding a compound point of view of the world? While for Mulvey, Life and Nothing More… is an example of a searching allegorical mind and for Nancy an example of how film’s capacity for objective presentation encourages regard, for myself Mr Thank You reveals it is the importance of how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies intersect that is important. The travelling shot’s capacity to suggest a neutral registering of reality and indicate an unspecified but present gaze draws upon both Mulvey and Nancy’s concepts of how films attempt to encounter reality. In subject and execution, Mr Thank You is about how to ethically engage with the world through an encounter between mind and indexical sign However, it shouldn’t be thought that meta-cinematic shots only contribute to ethical investigations. Unlike Nancy, I see such theorisations of cinemas as more pertaining to a given film’s relationship to the world than proof of being intrinsically ethical. For the opposite we can look at such filmmakers as Ulrich Seidl and Gasper Noé who act as a counterpoint to Kiarostami, Shimizu and other empathetic directors. Whereas the latter use documentary to comment on power relations and empathy, directors like Seidl and Noe use travelling shots to implicate the world in their fictional fantasies. For instance, Hundstage/Dog Days (Seidl 2001) features recurring compositions of two thick, crass people 105 creating a fictional vignette that frames the passing non-fictional milieu that they are driving through, while Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone (Noé 1998) closes its stylised grotesquerie with a series of travelling shots that present the horse butcher protagonist’s view of passing Paris (figure 3.32) Nonetheless both cruel and empathetic travelling shots function in a similar way. Mulvey’s palimpsest and Nancy’s regarde-box are merged in the travelling shot, which, through its paradoxical status, mediates a film’s presentation of the world.

106 Chapter Four

Driving Memoirs: The Road Movie Genre Considered as a Series of Tactics for Depicting Landscape and Location

The travelling shot is the axiom of the road movie. As Tim Corrigan writes, “in the road movie the camera adopts the framed perspective of the vehicle itself” coming the “closest of any genre to the mechanical unrolling of images that defines the movie camera” (146). Accordingly, this chapter thinks through the relationship between the travelling shot and the structure of many road movies. As Jason Wood writes, “the evolution of the road movie in American Cinema is closely aligned with the development of the motorcar itself and the way directors, including D. W. Griffith, utilised them to provide effective travelling shots;” these travelling shots, particularly once they gradually interpolated the framing of the windscreen, are one key formal and iconographic traits of the road film (J Wood xv). These travelling shots, later framed so as to include front and rear windscreens, would become one of the key visual road-movie motifs in terms of composition and style (J Wood xv). This chapter reflects on the previous chapters to examine how road movies use travelling shots to comment on technology, transport and the perception of space. In “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema,” Lefebvre’s follow-up to “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema,” Lefebvre notes the importance of memory, and its mental substrata of narrative tropes, to filling out landscape and distinguishing it from nature (70-1). He suggests that while landscape needs “contemplative autonomy” from narrative, it also draws on narrative to gain its significance (“On Landscape” 74). As such, we can demarcate between two types of narrative experiences “either as that which conceals landscape or that which may be interpreted to reveal it” (Lefebvre’s italics, “On Landscape” 76). This chapter examines how road movie narratives draw on our cultural memories of modernity to reveal new landscapes. This chapter makes three inter-related arguments regarding the use of travelling shots within road movies. Firstly, that the road movie genre is a liminal genre that synthesises populist and art filmmaking tactics. Secondly, that as a given road movie alternates between populist and art modes of vision, this mirrors the protagonist’s own attempt to change modes of perception. As Michael Gott observes, road movies are a “platform for discovery and growth” (143). Lastly, that weaving contemplative engagement with the land with a narrative or causal engagement with that same land sees the collapsed space associated with modernity returned to its original sense of scale. Together these points reveal the road movie’s engagement with film and modernity’s history. The structure of Chapter Four reflects these three arguments. Following a gloss of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s consideration of the collapse of space, the first part of this chapter reflects on the history of the road movie and the relevant social practices (whether vehicular, cinematic or the spread of contemporary civilisation) that inform the genre. Particular attention is paid to the genre’s relationship with films noir, westerns, and location-based shooting. This leads into the second and central section of the chapter, which examines the road movie and its various generic motivations for regarding space. As Orgeron observes, 107 road movies “create in the viewer the seductive illusion of motion by locking the viewer’s gaze into the three elements that make up the road film—subject, vehicle, and landscape” (104). Here, exemplary road movies such as Cars (Lasseter & Raft 2006), Easy Rider (Hopper 1969), Vanishing Point (Sarafian 1971), and Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman 1971) are compared to Voyage to Italy (Rossellini 1954) and Mulvey’s analysis of said film. Where Mulvey sees distinctiveness, this chapter finds typical road movie practice. For Mulvey, Voyage to Italy, like Life and Nothing More…, is a film that exemplifies Deleuze’s concept of the time-image with its presentation of time, in combination with visits to sites associated with the past, assisting Rossellini’s (and Mulvey’s) meditation on film’s relationship with time. By analysing road movies in relation to how they foreground geographic location, I argue that the rambling encounters Mulvey sees as evidence of an allegorical mind coming to terms with the past are actually one of the defining characteristics of the road movie. While most road movies avoid the motorway, part three considers four road movies — Locke (Knight 2013), Trafic (Tati 1971), Radio On (Petit 1979) and The Brown Bunny (Gallo 2003) — for how they creatively exploit the motorway: whether contrasting potential gazes with Trafic or by foregrounding self-absorption in The Brown Bunny. These four exceptions-to- the-rule foreground the importance of the idea of the motorway to road movies and lead us to the conclusion of the chapter. Throughout this chapter, I argue that road movies reveal a reverse of the conception of modern collapsed space described by Kirby and Schivelbusch. Instead of demonstrating the collapse of space, road movies contemplate space. As Aumont observes, “time does not contain events, it is made up of events themselves in so far as we apprehend them” (The Image 76); road movie narratives are the arranging of such events. As Bennet Schaber writes, “The road film builds up its conceptual vocabulary by linking territory and memory, terrain and time, event and meaning, initiation and representation, narration and image” (26). The actions and tribulations of protagonists help document bypassed space, and address motorways and the gaze they produce. The road movie genre is often understood as a continuation of the Western genre (Cohan and Hark, “Introduction” 1; Laderman, Driving Visions 11). However, the main theme of the Western is the frontier and open space (and all that is associated with this, including contact with nature, physical experience and the perception of the world this entails), and the encroachment of civilisation (typically indicated by icons of modernity such as rail, capitalist enterprise and the law) (Kitses 11). The main theme of the road movie genre, I argue, is the attempt to find open space (and its attendant shift in perception) after modernity (and its collapse of space) has passed through and closed the frontier. As Orgeron notes, the recurrence of America and its iconography (drawing heavily on Western frontier tropes) as a star of road movies is an “integral part of a longstanding international cinematic conversation about the human price of modernity” (8). In Chapter Three I discussed the Western Stagecoach in relation to the proto-road movie Mr Thank You in order to highlight how Mr Thank You, in contrast to Stagecoach, utilised the contemplative aspect of travelling shots to open up perception and encourage understanding. I would argue this difference is indicative of the two genre’s approaches to space (and reflective of the technological shifts produced by modernity and our adaptation to it).

108 Cumulatively, the road movie takes the frame of the windshield and uses it to re-frame an audience’s experience of narrative and the world. During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the nation’s topography began to be marked by straight lines that demarcated transport routes. As Schivelbusch observes in his classic The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space, even before the coming of rail, early industrial England was marked by the optimisation of stagecoach routes (7, 8). Curves that mirrored geography were replaced by geographic-abstracted passages that ploughed from known destination to known destination.45 As Schivelbusch observes, “Pre- industrial traffic is mimetic of natural phenomena” (9). This is why there is always a nostalgic hue to modernity, it requires a re-assessing of what has come before — the awareness of collapsed space is a sense of relative collapse, requiring a prior sense of distance. The shift to straight transport routes was followed by a loss of environmental proximity. With the arrival of trains, to avoid entanglement and disruptions, routes were kept physically distinct from their surrounds (Schivelbusch 22-3). Engine noise also blocked out any chance of being enveloped by local sound while speed turned near and mid-range objects into an abstracted blur that cast a colourful tint over the slower moving objects in the distance (Schivelbusch 55). This removed a sense of comparative scale with no mid-range objects to compare and link us to the passing background. The consistent speed of vehicles also abstracted movement: trains never struggled for breath or floundered for loss of wind. Losing these variations, and the physical toll exacted on a hiker or beast of burden removed a key marker of the cost incurred in travelling such a distance (Schivelbusch 12). The rise of new vehicle technology, whether cars and motorways, or planes and airports, merely replicates this estrangement. These shifts ushered in a form of sensory deprivation, but only in regards to some of our senses. Arguably, observation is in many ways enhanced when there are no distractions or variations to disturb us from the passing scenic flow. For Schivelbusch, this produced a panoramic, modern gaze that was both anaesthetic and observant (192); in my research it is the basis of the travelling shot’s evocation of contemplation. This chapter examines the return of this learnt gaze to pre-modernity, prelapsarian places: landscapes, rural towns, and farms. These are places whose difficulty to reach imbues them with an aura lost to modern, readily accessible places (Schivelbusch 41).

An Incoherent Genre

The road movie genre is a disparate genre. Its history is a history of incongruent and conflicting sources. I argue that this internal conflict is, in part, what permits the genre’s synthesis of attraction and contemplation, and its balance between narrative information and spectacular description. At its core, the road movie typically portrays one or more protagonists as they embark on a rambling journey that will lead them to become outsiders, if

45 This itself was a return to the optimised transport of Roman roads, for example the Via Appia, and their straightness and relatively smooth sealing. 109 they are not already, as they use the freedom granted by the car and the road, to escape the strictures of everyday society. This broad proposal of a genre draws its salient characteristics from the specific context of its birth. The road movie reflects the perception of space brought about by two shifts. First, Eisenhower’s introduction of the Federal Aid Highway Act 1956 and the resulting Interstate Highway System46. Second, the infiltration of cars into everyday life, which led to what David Laderman describes as the rise of the “automobile as a fundamental expression of individuality” (“What a Trip” 41) and the baby boomer driven emergence of youth culture and its resistance to pre-existing social norms (“What a Trip” 41, Cohan and Hark 2). As a literary backdrop to such a shift, key works such as Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1947), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958)47 and Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road (1957) also appeared. Indeed, Kerouac’s On the Road, as Laderman observes, provides a “’master narrative’ for the road movie” thanks to its evocation of road travel and an almost “mystical fusion” between the protagonists and the car (Driving Visions 10). As Kerouac wrote to Marlon Brando: “I visualize the beautiful shots that could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak” (n.p.). (Though it should be noted that Walter Salle’s adaptation of On the Road (2012) dissipates this effect through minimising the use of travelling shots48 and instead focusing on the dramatic sequences that dot the rambling narrative.) However, when it comes to the road movie genre as a film genre, critical emphasis diverges. Leslie Dick and Jason Wood (amongst others) see in the genre’s attention to American iconography, its contrasting of personality and outdoor long shots and powerful close-ups, a merger of the urban film noir and the rural western (Dick 22-24, 26; J Wood xviii). David Laderman and Tim Corrigan (amongst others) see in the genre’s balancing of narrative drive and tangents, its ramshackle combination of Hollywood decoupage and location shooting enlivened by unusual editing practices and oblique storytelling, an integration of Hollywood vernacular and European modernist ideas (Laderman “Driving Visons” 2-6, Corrigan 143-51). This is not to say Laderman and Corrigan do not see the film noir influence: Laderman explicitly notes that films noir were important for their themes of cultural isolation, but that they were less important in defining the sensibilities of the road movie (Driving Visions 26). Furthermore, as James Naremore argues, the film noir genre itself occupies a “liminal space” as its dark subject matter, low-key lighting and location shooting equally synthesise European influences (such as the lighting patterns seen in German Expressionist films or the location shooting of Italian Neorealist films), even if influences from an earlier period (220). I see the film noir’s importance as a previous example of a genre creatively attempting to re-perceive modernity, hence its emphasis on cultural alienation in combination with novel (for Hollywood) approaches to filmmaking. However, whereas the film noir is concerned with the city, the locus of modernity, the road movie genre is concerned with the space outside the city, where modernity maybe more

46 And, as Ron Eyerman and Orvar Lofgren observe and as I will later explore in depth, a corresponding nostalgia for the byways and outdate routes is exemplified by Route 66 (59). 47 Robert Frank, alongside Rudy Wurlitzer, would later go on to direct the great road movie Candy Mountain (1987). 48 Which nonetheless are typical in their indication of epiphany through the synthesis of exhilaration and contemplation. 110 negotiable. As Laderman argues, the “rambling picaresque narrative path” of road movies distances the genre from classical Hollywood structure and as such “the road movie evokes a countercinema in relation to classical narrative (just as its themes generally tend to be countercultural)” (Driving Visions 17). I argue that this structural divergence is exacerbated by the “bold traveling shots” that Laderman also sees as directly lifted from European modernist cinema (Driving Visions 5). This chapter uses my prior exploration of the travelling shot to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the form and meaning of the travelling shot and the picaresque structure of the road movie. Academic literature on road movies includes diverse interpretations of the genre and its manifestation in locations such as America and Europe, among others. As Wendy Everett observes, there was a “considerable degree of cross fertilization” between European and American travel movies (166). For example, research on European travel films usually takes a broader definition of the road movie genre. Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli observe an “under-representation of a European perspective in the existing literature seriously distorts the current perception of the history and characteristics of road movies” (7) and as such their work takes care to highlight both the importance of European literary and cinematic antecedents to the genre, and the many European road movies whose use of tropes derived from a different cultural background has been ignored by American scholars. The pair delineates two road movie genres: the capital Road Movie genre and the mere road movie or journey films. The former concerns the previously discussed iconic American films that comprise the corpus that most people think of when encountering the generic label road movie. The latter journey films are indebted to other antecedents: literature, early travelogue films, and older, often more European traditions: the Grand Tour, the Bildungsroman and the odyssey. This corpus could be seen to include such films as Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries (Bergman 1957) Voyage to Italy or To Vlemma tou Odyssea/Ulysses’ Gaze (Angelopoulos 1995). Similarly, Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt distinguish between European road movies with “open roads” which are thematically similar to the American road movie and “closed borders” road movies, which focus more on immobility rather than freedom (3). Likewise, Michelle Royer and Miriam Thompson, in their analysis of European road movies, distinguish between traditional road movies and those that fit within Tim Corrigan’s broader definition of the genre as movies about mechanised transport, be it cars, trucks or train (190). As Orgeron notes, the road movie’s “conflicted lineage” shows the genre’s recasting of American mythologies through a European lens (4). This lineage informs the road movie’s blending of narrative and contemplative approaches to vision. As such, a film like Voyage to Italy, though European, is understood as a key precursor of the American road movie and Rossellini’s cinematic handling of space and time make clear the genre’s preoccupations. This chapter focuses on the ‘traditional’ road movie for three key reasons. Firstly, as noted, this is the type of road movie most people typically understand as comprising the road movie corpus. Secondly, this research focuses on how mechanised transport and depictions of travel have been used broadly by film, whether as travelogues or within discreet moments. Thirdly, there is enough internal incoherence within the traditional genre that a broader range does not need to be sought. 111 This internal incoherence is also inevitable due to the timing of the traditional road movie genre’s consolidation. The birth of the genre falls within the transitional period between the decline of Hollywood’s “producer-unit” and the rise of the “package-unit” system (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 330). Within the producer-unit system, which was the default mode of classical Hollywood, the producer had a “commitment to make six to eight films per year” and worked with a “self-contained studio” that came with a permanent staff, acting body, wardrobe, technical support and other facilities, which allowed the steady mass-production of films (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 330). Conversely, the package-unit system relies on a producer setting up a bespoke package deal in which the funding, actors, staff, support and general infrastructure had to be individually negotiated and arranged (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 330). This shift entailed (and was in part caused by) a reduction in the number of films being produced, particularly more anonymous genre films (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 331-33). No sooner had the genre developed its historical foundation than it lost the possibility of forming a solid generic core through the countless reiteration of overlapping stories, incidents and iconography. Instead, a handful of American road movies filmed in the late Sixties and early Seventies stand in this ideal’s place: Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, and Badlands (Malick 1973). These otherwise narratively and formally disparate films are unified by a few core characteristics: their appearance at the birth of New Hollywood and its celebration of the joining of studio and artisanal filmmaking. Indeed, as observed at the start of Chapter Three, the qualities that would have given the genre such strength within poverty row studios (for instance, small casts, cheap longeurs and location shooting – often the same advantages that benefited the Western genre) equally allowed low budget artistic experiments. Lastly, the films are unified by the structuring of technology itself: the filmmaking practices that vehicles lend themselves to, the new opportunities that opened up to filmmakers with the development of smaller and cheaper film equipment,49 and the development of motorways and the modes of perception they encourage. As Laderman writes: The structure of the car, designed both to conform to our body’s shortcomings and powerfully extend them, has become how we regard the world (through the screen-like, Panavision-shaped lens of the windscreen and, like a miniature movie within a movie, the rear view mirror. (Driving Visions 3) Forward and backward looking, the car’s relationship with film makes visually manifest what Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark see as the “informing relation of modernity and tradition” that typically organises road narratives (3). This is mirrored by the genre’s deployment of contrasting contemplative and attraction-oriented travelling shots. As Leslie Dick records, “early road movies are often B pictures” that use rear projection, but by the time Easy Rider appeared “the mobile camera situates a moving car (or bike) in a real location: contemporary America” (22-4, 6). At one point, rear projection cleanly separated documentary second-unit shooting from fictional studio-bound shooting. Now the travelling shot, as discussed in Chapter Three, is capable of bridging and questioning this distinction. The genre utilises

49 As Orgeron notes, “New lightweight and highly portable cameras were being manufactured that not only made taking the show on the road more convenient but more affordable as well. Easy Rider takes place on the road, in part, because the road is accessible in ways that it had not been before” (112). 112 high-speed travelling shots to represent, amongst other things, freedom, excitement and control over space. Car shots were the first beneficiary of these, but as discussed in the previous chapters, despite smaller cameras allowing more novel angles that further exaggerated speed (placed lower to the ground, by a spinning wheel, etc.), they lost their sense of wonder, as Pierson would say (Special Effects 120). As such, in relatively more recent films like Thelma and Louise (Scott, 1991) or Twister we see plane and helicopter shots appearing in order to recreate this lost sense of wonder with the shots’ freedom rhyming with the exhilaration of the protagonists’ sense of freedom as they drive (4.1-3). Similarly, the car shot’s gradual loss of wonder has increased its contemplative possibility. This shift, which will be discussed later in this chapter, has been drawn upon by such recent road movies as The Brown Bunny. Moreover, new camera and sound technologies have further increased the genre’s depiction of subjectivity. In Chapter One, I discussed how the reduction in size of cameras and recording equipment allowed the shift from Gun Crazy’s sawn-open limousine to The Sugarland Express’s use of the Panaflex 73 to easily shoot 360 degree shots within the confines of a truck’s cabin; this technological shift aligns the camera more closely with the perspective of the protagonist(s). I do not think it is a mistake that both films mark important staging points in the road movie’s development: from Gun Crazy’s proto-road movie to The Sugarland Express as the last counter-culture road movie and a precursor to the more studio-driven road movies50 that would appear in the ‘80s (Laderman, Driving Visions 130-31).

Digression as Experience

For myself, when trying to understand the road movie genre, I cannot help but return to the late film noir or proto-road movie Plunder Road (Cornfield 1957). Edward Dimendberg sees the proto-road movie Plunder Road as representing an important cultural moment, one where the promise of car culture and centrifugal motorways faded (132-4). Here thieves pull off a daring train robbery before attempting to smuggle their goods across the country. The thieves speedily use the then new motorway system where they are gradually, systematically, caught at various roadblocks and checkpoints. Only the boss escapes this net, instead he is killed fleeing police in a Los Angeles traffic jam. Road movies learnt from the lesson of Plunder Road, every detour from the abstract space of the motorway brings them closer to their generic core. In Easy Rider and Vanishing Point, the delivery of drugs takes the lead characters away from the motorway, while in Two-Land Blacktop the slightly more respectable work of car racing leads the protagonists to the byways.51 Elsewhere a murder leads the eponymous characters of Thelma and Louise off- course and in Kalifornia (Sena 1993) the protagonists track down famous off-beat murder sites. These diversions change the setting a road movie passes through and provides them with a series of motivations for encountering the world. I argue that the road movie typically

50 As Laderman notes, The Sugarland Express, relative to its predecessors, is marked by storytelling that is “much more reflective of the classical Hollywood model, rather than the European modernist narrative of existential wandering,” an approach which ultimately sees “the genre’s rebellious core get psychologized and depoliticized” (Driving Visions 130-31). It is reasonable to ask how much the shifting possibilities of camera proximity have to do with this transition. 51 Furthermore, as Ina Rae Hark observes, just by travelling by car, rather than plane, which is the contemporary way of collapsing space, protagonists are already expanding their spatial experience (207-08). 113 functions by narratively reversing the abstraction from space that Schivelbusch identifies in that, rather than following the motorway, protagonists leave the motorway and follow the wandering, geographically proximate space of byways and older routes. Genre theorist Rick Altman differentiates between the narrative crossroads faced by protagonists, which marks a moral choice or other turning point for them, and the genre crossroads by which a film denies or re-affirms its generic qualities — altering how audiences evaluate and understand what they are perceiving (Film/Genre 145-47). I argue that the road movie has made unified and made literal these two decisions: every turn away from the motorway system is a choice made by protagonists and a re-confirmation of the film’s genre. Once the justification for departing the motorway is plausibly established, the urgency of the cause often fades away. For instance, Vanishing Point, famous for its commitment to speed, opens with Kowalski (Barry Newman) just escaping a roadblock, before flashbacks within flashbacks take the film into a reverie, and once the film returns to the present, it leaves Kowalski wiping out at the roadblock. Two-Lane Blacktop, technically a racing film, drifts off into a series of delays, ignored bets, and ambling restarts before the film seizes up in a loop of burning flames. Accordingly, narrative emphasis, whether by race or chase, often shifts away from suspense. This means the speed of the vehicles matters less in terms of specific distance covered, and more in terms of how it affects their relationship with passing space. In ‘on the run’ road movies like Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point, both of which cut between fleeing protagonists and chasing police, a suspense framework is often used to look backwards rather than focus an audience’s attention as to whether the protagonists would get away. Antagonistic chasers create opportunities to revisit a film’s various locations. A multifaceted examination is thus created as the antagonists revisit the protagonists’ stops and note how the protagonists are perceived by society. When antagonists ambush protagonists, road movies signal future problems along the protagonists’ intended route, and yet typically ambushes do not depict a destination; instead they act as an obstacle and thus they motivate the protagonists’ departure from the main roads. If suspense exists, it exists to push protagonists off their intended route, to delay rather than to hasten them — slowing them down and introducing new places. These narrative detours and roundabouts highlight a thematic split in the meaning of speed. Railway lines and motorways have come to represent state and social control because they act as physical proof of the state’s ability to move quickly through space, demonstrating their control over it. However, in the road movie, though speed maintains its thematic link to technological prowess and control over space, this link has been split between state control over air, rail and motorways, and the protagonist’s control over their own movement. The protagonist’s diegetic demonstration of how they produce travelling shots means that speeding car shots are associated with the drivers and their control of space. As such, road- movie travelling shots embody the conflict between individual freedom of movement and the state’s provision of controlling reach. This is reinforced by the motorway’s enabling of modern lifestyles and social conventions. Plotting protagonist movement away from motorways exhibits a desire to escape state control; by then re-associating their movement 114 with the travelling shot’s embodiment of mastery over space the protagonists are set up in abstract conflict over control over space. As Rama Venkataswamy et al. observe, “the road is in itself a constraint, the journey ends where the road ends” (79). The road is a “’zone’ of transit” that symbolises “journey, escape and freedom” but to varying degrees it is also a signal of the extensive reach of urban, socially integrated, culture (Venkataswamy et al. 79). Eleftheriotis expands on this by noting that the road movie genre’s (and travel films in general) capacity “to push the limits of the frame further and further, in journeys which reveal a succession of new images, amplified by narratives that see the possibility of movement in itself” can become “an act of freedom, an escape from the constraints of social conventions” (49). Through this, the travelling shots of road movies opt in to the network of meaning created by modernity. It is in the road movies’ diegetic and plot-based contextual framing that the original historical meaning of travelling shots is reinforced or modified. For example, contrast Vanishing Point with Plunder Road. In Plunder Road the protagonists adhere to the motorway, they travel quickly, but are then inevitably, grindingly, crushed by the society through the state’s control over the motorway; tellingly, travelling shots are effectively absent from the film. Conversely, Vanishing Point follows Kowalski who, having previously rejected the state over issues of brutality witnessed as a police officer, becomes the state’s opposite: a drug-running hippy. As carefully explained by Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind soul DJ, Kowalski is “the last American hero to whom speed meant freedom of the soul,” for celebrating his vehicular freedom by promising to deliver drugs to San Francisco by 3pm the next day (a deadline well ignored). Highway patrolmen attempt to hinder his free soul, but through his individual control and speed, Kowalski defeats them, as documented by many travelling shots. Moving further and further away from motorways and highway patrols, off byways and into and then through the desert, Kowalski defeats the police’s attempts to stop him. However, in order to deliver the drugs, Kowalski returns to the motorway and encounters a roadblock.52 The story of Vanishing Point ends with Kowalski both choosing to crash and to swerve away from San Francisco into the freeing desert. Most road movies’ thematic understanding of motorways is similar to if less explicit than the approach of Vanishing Point. Even if protagonists are not fleeing state control, they are fleeing a version of social control associated with the motorway. Thelma and Louise are forced off motorways by their crime, and this step both initiates the process of freeing them from social control and expectations, and forces them to travel in such a way that they move towards new experiences and ways of perceiving. By speeding, they and we viewers, find space to slow down and contemplate – liberating us from society’s alienating gaze. As Jean Baudrillard opines, “speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility” (7). This is a desire that is perfectly captured by the trance of long-distance driving and travelling shots. The road movie genre, through its use of travelling conventions and expectations, motivates a form of contemplation that runs against the excitement of typical Hollywood

52 As per Plunder Road, roadblocks are the ultimate expression of government control of movement and freedom. 115 practice. As David Brodsly observes in his examination of Los Angeles driving: “driving provides a scheduled opportunity to do nothing. The freeway commute is Los Angeles’ distinctively urban form of meditation” (41). This expectation and understanding of driving runs through the genre. Rudy Wurlitzer’s script for Two-Lane Blacktop exemplifies this: the road genre is the perfect resolution of this conundrum, using the depiction of contemplative landscapes, and the experience of driving — a vernacular form of meditation — to propel the sparse road movie plot of moving from A to B forward. As Rosenbaum notes, Wurlitzer’s career wrestles “with the challenge of reconciling the rewards of meditation with the forward motion of film narrative” (Essential Cinema 354). An audience’s knowledge of this form of everyday meditation primes them to empathise with the character’s sense of travel, lulled by travelling shots into the same contemplative trance state. The push/pull effect between contemplation and speed is further found in Thelma and Louise, and other similar road movies, within their epiphanic drifting through Monument Valley (figure 4.4). As Laderman describes this sequence “Watching the desert landscape simultaneously recede in the rear-view mirror and unfold through the window, Thelma (Geena Davis) reveals to Louise (Susan Sarandon) that she feels ‘wide awake’ and that ‘everything looks different’” (Laderman, “What a Trip” 54). It is this perceptual breakthrough that sees Thelma and Louise prepared for a complete rejection of society and its social constructs and thus an act that builds to the violent movement of the film’s end.53 The plots of road movies are a reaction against the perceptual shift identified by Schivelbusch in his analysis of modern travel. Every narrative interruption sends the protagonists closer to the world that modernity forgot: nature, farms, and small-bypassed towns or hippies, god-fearing cults, and hicks. These loaded spaces provide a taxonomy of rural things with “aura,” that patina of history and uniqueness which Walter Benjamin famously sees as allowing us to intimately infuse and experience a given object or subject (“Work of Art” 220-24). As a mechanically reproducible item, the road film strains against this notion. Equally, a smooth unvaried trip also disappears, every interruption that detours the protagonists also jolts their trip. If contemporary motorway, airline or rail travel abstracts passengers from passing reality, then here reality returns with the flurry and details of interruptions. Proximity breaks through the car’s veneer, protagonists do not just come closer to byways and more proximate space, they often are forced to engage with their environment. As Schaber discerns, “The best road films of the postwar era…refuse abstract freedom in favor of generally open-ended passages through series of concrete experiences” (34-5). Accordingly a sense of physical toll returns: road movies find a way to reflect how we understand travel — not just as a distance but also as an exacting journey. While early cinema saw phantom ride attractions that embodied the abstract collapse of space and Schivelbusch diagnoses modern travel as lacking the physical toll that allows us to register distance travelled (12), narrative fills the void of physical exhaustion as the protagonists’

53 Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point share a similar concluding strategy: where as Vanishing Point simultaneously sees Kowalski dead and escape, Thelma and Louise captures the pair in a freeze-frame that sees them simultaneously exultantly free and doomed. Thomas Schatz writes “the most significant feature of any generic narrative may be its resolution – that is, its efforts to solve, even if only temporarily, the conflicts that have disturbed the community welfare” (572).

116 physical or emotional toll marks the cost of their journey. In some ways this approach reaches its conclusion (or is parodied) in The Straight Story (Lynch 1999). Though based on a true story, the film’s use of a lawnmower as a means of conveyance for the main protagonist, Alvin Straight’s (Richard Farnsworth) trip to see his brother, and Straight’s stubbornness in sticking to the lawnmower acts as a reductio ad absurdum of the genre’s approach to the representation of travel. Straight’s willfulness creates a motivation for detours, contemplative and slow travelling shots, and a means of travel that exacts a physical toll on Straight – turning what could have been a simple straightforward trip into a journey that provides the psychological catharsis and epiphany that Straight needs to see his long estranged brother. Narrative detours work in conjunction with the contemplative possibility offered by the travelling shot: narrative events exhaust us as travelling shots encourage us to contemplate.

Cars and Cars

For an understanding of how road movies talk about space and contemplation, I examine the unlikely choice of Cars. Despite being a road movie, the film is completely comprised of CGI animation and as such does away with documentary reality of the background landscapes seen in travelling shots and makes impossible the contemplation of some possible connection to the real. There is no moment of indexical registration. However, Cars is revealing for two reasons. Firstly, Cars’s story is explicitly about speed, the coming of the motorway and the effect this has had on the characters’ perception and relation to reality. (I would argue that the explicitness of this theme is partly due to an anxiety over CGI’s detachment from reality, it is over-compensation.) Secondly, Cars CGI construction permits the visual integration of nature and technology as one seamless thing rather than an unreconcilable contrast to be negotiated. Whereas most road movies treat these two concerns as subtext, in Cars it is text. Cars presents spatial contemplation as text because the film lacks the formal leeway for such contemplation to exist as subtext. It is a film about contemplation rather than being contemplative. Cars is a CGI Pixar film and Pixar routinely anthropomorphises animals and objects: the world of Cars is a world of cars in which every living creature is a car or moving vehicle — right down to the dead flies that pepper window sills. Cars are so in tune with nature that even the hills and mountains of the movie are shaped as car bonnets and wheel hubs connecting the normally mechanical cars into a new natural state. This anthropomorphisation of the diegesis highlights presumptions made when filming cars (and other vehicles) and their relationship with the land. Of the two landscapes depicted in figures 4.5 & 4.6, the first is a cartoonish take on Schivelbusch’s modern transport system: the roads bisect the land heedless of any natural organisation — mountains are split in two, rivers passed over. The second type of landscape is the older, less efficient prelapsarian form: the roads follow nature’s design principles — mountains are skirted around or tunnelled through to maintain the mountain’s original integrity, rivers are passed over, but only when needs must. Cars tells the story of how this came to pass, and how this shifted our perception.

117 Cars is about Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), a racing car on his way to an important meet when he takes a detour and finds himself at the rural town Radiator Springs. Having accidentally torn up the town’s main street, McQueen is imprisoned by the locals and sentenced to repair the street. Initially impertinent, McQueen gradually accepts his fate and discovers the importance of slowing down and contemplating life, the land, and the people of Radiator Springs — in particular Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) with whom he falls in love. Having repaired the road McQueen makes it to the meet where it is his contemplative epiphany that allows him to succeed at the race, not by winning the event but by winning the love of the people instead. Even more than the typical blockbuster, Pixar follows the guidelines of classical Hollywood storytelling (Thompson, “Reflection on CARS” n.p.), and this turns Cars’s thematic text into its organising principle. The narrative expresses two interlocking and reinforcing stories that are resolved through the psychological epiphany of the main protagonist. The catalytic theme of Cars is the fundamental theme shared by road movies, and Lasseter is conscious of this. The end point suggested by anthropomorphic cars is mirrored in the film’s own historically aware take on road movies and their cultural conditions. The point when subtext becomes text is when McQueen has his moment of epiphany: as a reward for repairing the town’s road, Carrera takes McQueen out for a mountain drive (figures 4.7-8). After a beautiful winding drive the pair reach the peak and look out towards Ornament Valley. Carrera then explains the town’s downfall as a result of the development of an interstate motorway that bypassed old Route 66, and Radiator Springs — all to save a few minutes. This explicit discussion is where the two prior landscapes are drawn from. The film’s theme is of space allowing empathetic contemplation, how we can escape the dictates of modern life, slow down and come to an understanding of things. Pixar trades in the aura of nostalgia: glorifying signifiers of authenticity and age by drawing attention to forgotten toys, beaten bottle cap badges, or film grain. Whether this is meeting a technical challenge or a form of CGI-induced self-loathing, these worn icons are given a privileged aura of attention that distinguishes them. This privileging of patina finds a strong outlet in the plot of Cars: Radiator Springs is rustic and it is no coincidence that neon shine and flashiness are associated with self-absorption. This is apparent in the broad strokes of the film narrative: at the start of the film, McQueen loses his pit team thanks to not valuing their expertise, while in the end he gets the pick of sponsors thanks to his concern for the previous winner’s accident and he is united with Carrera thanks to his contemplative concern for her and Radiator Springs. Anthropomorphic CGI even allows these motifs to physically manifest: McQueen loses his way at the start because as a fast race car he lacks headlights and cannot see, then, later, his hick tow-truck friend Mater (Daniel Whitney) shows up McQueen’s reversing skills because again being a race car means not reversing. As Mater boasts, “it’s easy if you know where you’ve been”. This efficient structure also demonstrates the important function of spatial longueurs to road movies, if such a tightly constructed film retains these seemingly excessive landscapes it says something about their important role in helping road movies make thematic meaning.

118 Motivating Contemplation and Landscape

The road movie motivates an encounter with landscape in a number of ways. Multiple detours result in multiple landscape-scale establishing shots. The average Hollywood film depicts uneventful vehicle travel by means of constructive editing: departure, transition, and arrival. Each of a road movie’s delaying detours restarts the process of depicting the protagonists’ travel and requires further new depictions of their departure, transition, and arrival. Each of these provides a motivation for landscape. Significantly, we do not just see these views as any form of landscape, but a historically prescribed form of landscape: one tailored around our own experience of vehicle travel, but also derived from prior historical representations of vehicle-informed landscapes. For instance, Easy Rider neatly falls into this pattern of using episodic travel to present vistas, but furthermore, as Barbara Klinger observes, the landscapes of Easy Rider do not just draw on the concept of landscape in general, but prior travelogues and imagery from such magazines as National Geographic (188-191). The distinct characteristics of vehicles also provide a motivation for the road genre’s emphasis of landscapes associated with contemplation. As observed, every aspect of Cars’s anthropomorphic diegesis suggests cars are at one with nature, particularly in the backwater McQueen finds himself in. However, also observe the stills 4.7 and 4.8. Both are long shots; both differ in scale. The former is to human scale, the latter to anthropomorphised cars. Pixar manipulates anthropomorphisation with its depiction of the film’s car protagonists, with the front of a car, as close-up, depicting a face while similarly distant shots, from a different angle become long shots. The speed and size of cars pushes the camera backwards, the typical background now tends towards a more landscape scale. However, contrary to Cars, vehicles typically lack faces for audiences to emotionally engage with. This is reflected in their cinematic depiction since they are as likely to be filmed from the side and behind as the front. Even if we could make out the protagonists within, this option is ceded by such composition, shifting what we are considering from people in a car to the car itself (with people in it). This has a de-psychologising effect: adept at interpreting facial information, we are drawn to faces in order to better interpret what is happening (Smith 95-100). As Bordwell observes, removing the human face and figure frees up the rest of the shot for greater attention (Figures Traced 167). This removal of the face as focal point is, in part, also the formation of the evidence that Nancy privileges, as a car lacks the psychologising or subjective description provided by the human face. It is also part of the justification for the travelling shot, cars do not enable psychological engagement with the audiences looking at the land rather than the face to comprehend narrative flow. This, in the context of an undramatic location-crossing shot as discussed above, results in a landscape shot in which the vehicle sweeping across the land sweeps the eyes along with it. A typical example of this type of shot can be seen in Vanishing Point. The landscape in figures 4.9 and 4.10 offers two possibilities in the form of a crossroad. Rather than come forward into the vertical axis, in which it would seem as if the protagonist was barely moving, the protagonist tears across the horizontal road, maximising the impression of movement. Contrast between before and after is maximised, foregrounding the car and its dominion over the landscape. 119 Arbitrarily, road movies also take advantage of audience tolerance for the film’s generic conventions to make formal choices that would be considered excessive in another genre (Altman, Film/Genre 147-8; Schatz 564-67). This is a genre where we expect, even want, to see passing landscapes. However, these non-arbitrary fixtures also motivate the road genre’s foregrounding of landscape. Audiences tolerate landscape longueurs because of the manipulation of road movie and Hollywood norms.54 Furthermore, as Corey K. Creekmur argues, in the interplay between narrative and spectacle, between a “regular pattern of forward motion and more static ‘set-pieces’” the road movie resembles the musical (94-5). The musical genre is accepted for negotiating visual spectacle. However, whereas Creekmur sees the rest stops as the set-pieces similar to musical moments (94-5), I would argue the travelling sequences, particularly the musical montages,55 bear a stronger likeness to a musical encouragement of spectacle. As such, the use of rapid movement and music increases a tolerance for landscape footage. Through this, counter intuitively, a more contemplative world is presented to the audience. Audiences and protagonists both physically and mentally encounter the world.

Digression as Thought

In the light of my analysis of Cars and contemplation, I wish to explore Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Voyage to Italy. Mulvey sees Voyage to Italy as a means of expanding upon her thesis regarding film’s dialectic of motion and stillness and its relationship with the past, thanks to being one of the neo-realist films that introduced Deleuze’s time-image. Voyage to Italy opens with a travelling shot; its protagonists Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) are driving to Naples, where they are required to arrange the sale of recently inherited property (figure 4.11). Unable to quickly sell the house, the pair kills time by exploring Naples and this engagement with their environment, with the past, brings divisive, underlying relationship issues to the surface. On the last day of their stay, the pair travels to Pompeii and its mummified preservation of the past. Later, departing Naples, the pair is again blocked by local traffic, this time in the form of a religious procession. In the confusion, vertiginous panic sets in as the crowd separates the pair, until finding one another in the crowd, the pair are ‘miraculously’ reconciled. For Mulvey, Voyage to Italy is a stratified film that delineates these layers in such a way as to clarify film’s relationship with time. This engagement with the past shapes Voyage to Italy’s relationship with Naples and southern Italy. Pompeii’s display of the past, its petrified bodies symbolic of film’s own indexical capturing of the past, merely clarifies Voyage’s conversation with the past (Mulvey, Death 24X 106). As Pompeii’s indexical mummies

54 In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, road movies abhor being deprived of landscapes, either making meaning through their defining absence or slipping them in elsewhere. For example My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant 1991) does away with the traditional transitional landscape shots by replacing them with intertitles to announce the film’s current location, Roma, Portland, or Idaho. However, dream sequences rush to fill the gaps, re-asserting the structural logic of the road movie by restoring contemplative landscapes to the film’s sense of geography. 55 Typically rock driven musical montages, even if rock music is not traditionally associated with contemplation. As Creekmur notes, Thelma and Louise contains seven songs compared to a traditional musical like Gold Diggers of 1933‘s five (101-02).

120 clarify the film’s discourse with the past, so too do the characters further demarcate temporal boundaries. The Joyces make manifest opposite approaches to time and cinema: Alex is an avatar of the movement-image and Katherine is of the time-image (Mulvey, Death 24X 109-12). Their marital disharmony is discord between two approaches to narrative: “Katherine carves out a space for reflection and for the journey into the past. Alex is impatient to drive the action forward. Katherine allows the plot to wander. Alex tries to keep it on track with an ordered sense of movement and event” (Mulvey Death 24X 110). Their wanderings through the south, their contact with the country, draws this opposition out. As Mulvey observes, “For Alex there is something demasculinizing about the southern time and his recurring rant against the ‘laziness’ of Naples is, on some level, a complaint about the plot, its lack of energy and direction” (Mulvey, Death 24X 109-112). In contrast, Katherine, as a passive female who, “by tradition and convention, has had less control over the cinema’s ‘action image’ than her male equivalent,” acts as a guide who uses Naples’s sharpened sense of the past to lead Voyage into “mythical spaces” which draw out the film’s themes (Mulvey, Death 24X 112). Here I want to contextualise Mulvey’s analysis in regards to the road movie genre. In line with my comments in Chapter Three, again we see an allegorical mind working through an encounter: Voyage to Italy starts with a travelling shot that simultaneously represents Alex and Katherine’s shared viewpoint as they travel through the world, before, having exhausted all options through separate, discovering, encounters, re-merging at the end. Rather than revealing neo-realism’s break with the movement image, it sees the two image’s reconciliation through a compound psychological epiphany. Either in discussing the Koker trilogy or Voyage to Italy, Mulvey is interested in films that pedagogically clarify film’s own capacity to analyse. While the Koker trilogy foregrounds film’s palimpsestous qualities, Voyage to Italy foregrounds time and movement images through the characterisation of and dynamic between Alex and Katherine. Each is a clarifying split, the same pedagogical technique I see operating in the contemplative practice of the travelling shot. As Laderman notes of the travelling shot when framed by part of a vehicle, “the road movie makes use of the formalistic frame-within-a-frame so as to foreground the crucial act of looking and seeing while driving” (Driving Visions 16). In combination with the “reflection of characters in glass and mirrors” that projects “the character onto the car, and into the space being travelled” we have a means of aestheticising the “theme of self-exploration as a projection of self through space” (Laderman, Driving Visions 16). This is the pedagogical travelling shot. Road movies reveal the same allegorical mind, just slightly less explicitly. I see these characteristics as true of road movies in general. The character’s detours and encounters recreate the probing of a mind, while the visiting of the past is a constant part of most road movies, as the detours they take lead them to forgotten parts of the world that have become emblematic of the past – even if this is typically found in the south of America rather than the south of Italy and Europe. The physical visitation of the past is often mirrored by the mental visitation of the past. Even a film like Vanishing Point, sold as a film about speed and the craving for it, uses speed and the contemplation associated with travel to justify a series of flashbacks. Action is not followed by re-action, but by re-evaluation. 121 What follows are notes on how the tendencies that exist in the films examined by Mulvey and myself function in other road movies when less pedagogically driven. Antagonistic contemplation is central to the road movie. As Eleftheriotus notes, “While every cinematic traveller is in a fundamental way active, he/she also embodies the potential of passivity, a vulnerability and openness to the experience” (90). This can be divided amongst characters or internalised within one character. For Mulvey, the identification of Alex with the aggressive movement-image and Kathleen with the contemplative time-image is what makes Voyage so distinct and also marks cinema’s transition to the time-image. I would argue that this split is how the road genre makes meaning. Central to a road movie’s representation of a toured land is the division of its gaze into the depiction of looking in, and the depiction of being looked at. It is not the patrician-like Captain America (Peter Fonda) in Easy Rider who riles the locals of the towns and roads they pass through, but the obnoxious Billy (Dennis Hopper). Mulvey is noticeably squeamish about linking contemplation with passivity and femininity, but she still does. It is a pity, because within the road movie, the contemplative character is more likely to be male. Captain America is noticeable for his withdrawn curiosity regarding where they are passing through, an aspect particularly romanticised as he, and the film, take time out to visit a hippie commune being visited. Captain America is, as Mulvey would describe, a surrogate seer. Together, antagonist and contemplator function in a manner akin to Mr Thank You’s bus as the contrasting views suggest the jostling of a mind. Equally, the past, the south, contrary to Mulvey assertion that it is demasculinised, is typically associated with aggressive masculinity. In Duel (1971), Spielberg contrasts a weak contemporary man, driving a meek functional family car, with an aggressive rust-bucket hick truck, while Twentynine Palms (Dumont 2003) erases the aura of old poverty by having its rapist rednecks drive SUVs.56Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (Varda 1985) takes the depiction of a location through a protagonist drawing reactions from locales to its conclusion. Vagabond presents the last months of Mona Bergeron, an alienated and divisive woman, as recounted by people met along the way. This study of Bergeron, and its resulting depiction of French rural society is emphasised by Varda’s delineation between actors — like Rossellini, casting local non-actors as villagers, and professional actress Sandrine Bonnaire as the vagabond. The antagonistic characters scratch the surface of politeness. Synthesised these manifestations of the time and movement image present a penetrating ‘deep’ look. The use of couples helps define the road genre (Eyerman and Lofgren 65, Hark “Fear of Flying” 204-10, Kinder 2-10). As Christ Petit, the director of Radio On notes, “For practical reasons, a road movie’s ideal unit is two. Two in a car is easier to shoot than three or four” (xii). Likewise, as Cohan and Hark argue, this matches typical Hollywood storytelling: “Two people in the front seat of a vehicle makes for easy classical framing and keep the dialogue going” (8). Expanding on these practical observations, I would argue that the use of odd couples to contrast or combine observational or reactive behaviour (or time and movement- image avatars) is central to how numerous road movies present space. However, while buddy

56 As Darren Hughes notes, the town of Twenty Nine Palms, from which the meek protagonists make their daily excursions, is set near a military base that provides a background of soldiers — creating a film that is sick with unavoidable testosterone (“The New American Old West” n.p.). 122 movies may seem to be a perfection of this mechanism as they contrast differing images and provide drama, this duality of gaze can be readily split over more than two characters or concentrated within one protagonist. The contrast of image avatars can now plays a key role in the storyline of a film; the tension between the two personality types and its resolution is what is required for the tidy conclusion of the narrative. By returning to Cars we can see that the psychological epiphany that resolves the film’s plot is based on McQueen’s shift from an aggressor to a contemplator — the final act that wins him glory relies on empathy for the old previous champion. The relationship between protagonists and the world is also marked by the protagonists’ typically outsider status. By dint of continuing movement and fluctuating identities, road movie protagonists are outsiders almost by default (Corrigan 150, Laderman, Driving Visions 5). Road movie narratives are normally focalised through a protagonist encountering an alien space. Voyage’s Joyces are doubled outsiders: they are professionals amidst amateurs, and they are interlopers from the north to the south. As Mulvey writes: Rossellini managed to create … a style of cinematic fiction, with reality, documenting places and people, passers-by in the street, as well as his stars. The fictional joinery undertaken by Alex and Katherine Joyce is partially pushed to the side by history, geography and geology. (Death 24X 113) This distinction is also found within the road genre: the exigencies of low-budget, location- shot, genre filmmaking often result in a gulf between named cast and hired locals. Here the actors’ celebrity status and professionalism (sometimes), combined with film’s indexical inclinations, helps distinguish between highly-shaped diegesis (professional actors, performing) versus minimally-shaped diegesis (non-professional actors and scenery) in the same manner as Mr Thank You does through travelling shots and the division provided by a vehicle. With the decline of rear-screen projection, we need different ways of arranging world concepts. Simple Men (Hartley 1992) synthesises these two ways of demarcating the diegesis. The film is bereft of any travelling shots, framed entirely in mid-range shots. Only as McCabe has his epiphany and comes to appreciate the locale and its people is there a brief swing of the camera away from him to take in the land passing by. Here the travelling shot presents contemplation as the outcome of outward epiphany rather than cause. It is here that the travelling shot comes to doubly represent a contemplative breakthrough. As principally outlined in Chapter One, the travelling shot is capable of disinterring the spectacle of landscape from the frame of narrative.57 In the road movie genre, this mirrors the

57 In summary, for Lefebvre, bracketing of description from the mental framework of narrative characteristically happens in two ways: characters can cue audiences to perceive screen content as description rather than as causal information, and that our cultural awareness of what a landscape looks like can cue us to see a landscape as autonomous description rather than setting (“Between Setting and Landscape” 29-39).

I extrapolate Lefebvre’s work to the panoramas provided by travelling shots. However, rather than our cultural awareness of art, it is our everyday awareness of travel that informs our vision. At its simplest, this is a transposition of Lefebvre’s argument to a slightly different form of landscape – we are used to seeing panoramas as landscapes, and therefore we see travelling shots as landscapes rather than setting. However, the nature of the travelling shot shapes their form of description differently. Travelling shots move, despite everyday travelling shots losing their ability to completely excite the screen, they still energise the screen and permit longer landscapes. These combine with our association of travel with the everyday meditation of commuting to further associate the imagery with the act of contemplation. Everyday travelling shots like car, bus and train shots are associated with the viewpoint of a passenger or driver, they suggest a presence behind the camera. As such, even when there is no visible character focalization, we are still cued to see such shots as point of view. The cumulative effect is that the travelling shot provides a distinct bracketing effect; they can provide an everyday, extended, presentation of description. 123 genre’s theme of encountering a ‘genuine’ experience, a coming into the presence of the real, and can be disinterred from its social framing. Just as characters move from the alienated vision of the motorway to the byways and memories of the past we are moved from narrative vision to landscape vision. The genre’s balancing of art and populist cinemas enables this; it is only within the confines of a mostly narrative film that such mirroring breaches can occur, otherwise there is no epiphany, just normalcy. The travelling shot speaks to the film as a whole: as it drives the protagonist to their encounters, so does it drive our vision. This is just a tendency within the genre. Cars is so explicit about contemplation and perceptual alienation because it treats it as a subject rather than something to be raised within an audience. Conversely, as we are about to see, exceptional road movies like Trafic avoid travelling shots, and yet Jacques Tati’s non-hierarchal compositions and editing rhymes find a different way for the audience to break free from the perceptual framing of the motorway and the typical narrative film.

Motorways and the Lure of Landscape

Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) divides depictions of Los Angeles into those made by what he designates as low or high directors: the low, the common, head towards geography easily made picturesque, beaches, hills, skyscrapers and night lights; the high settle on the flatlands of Los Angeles and find their form, often a strain of American neo-realism (with all that temporally implies in terms of causality and Deleuze’s time-image) tracing the contours of how less privileged people live. This division is also found in road movies. Long-distance driving typically involves motorways and yet, as observed, it is a rare road movie that stays on them let alone spends time considering it. One has to wonder how much our traditional sense of landscape aesthetics drives this development and the resulting meaning produced. Road movies aestheticise the land by seeking out picturesque views. Bypassed space hews closely to the historical notion of the picturesque: a balance of humanity and nature, with time made manifest through decay and ruin that naturalises humanity by breaking down the abstract straightness observed by Schivelbusch (22, 23, 41). Our privileging of contemplative space stems from an aesthetic privileging of the picturesque and visa versa. Exceptions, like Locke, Radio On, The Brown Bunny and Trafic, are thus both distinctive and revealing in their engagement with motorway aesthetics. This section examines how road movies which stick to the motorway make meaning through their varied engagement with the motorway. The first film under discussion, Locke, provides a case study of what happens when we continue to be alienated by the motorway. The latter three demonstrate how the motorway aesthetic can be manipulated to create a new worldview. I would argue that these films, like more typical road movies, work to free our perception from spatial alienation but in a way that avoids potential clichés of appropriate perception. In doing so they give audiences new tools for experiencing our everyday environment.

When this combines with the shot’s ability to demarcate between past and present, and between the fictional within and the nonfictional without, the travelling shot becomes capable of delineating description from narrative in a distinct way, one that is, in part, about perception of the world.

124 Locke is concerned with distracted driving. Thus far the films under discussion in this chapter have dealt with how protagonists, and the audience come into contact with the passing world. Locke is an exception to this tendency and the film’s distinctive approach, narratively and visually, highlights how audiences can become distracted and thus perceptually alienated. As responsible drivers, we are encouraged to be spatially aware of our environment. This, in part, is what conditions us to link travelling shots with an engaged perception of our passing space. Accordingly, we are discouraged from indulging in such distractions as mobile phone conversations, drinking and reading whilst driving. Locke sees its protagonist, a construction foreman name Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) indulge in all such distractions as he becomes immersed in an unfolding drama that takes place during a nighttime drive from Birmingham to London, along the M6 to attend the pre-mature birth of his child to Bethan (Olivia Colman). The film’s visual style offers parallels with the protagonist’s distraction. Rather than using road movie conventions to create a space for contemplation, Locke adheres to the populist contemporary visual style that Bordwell labels “intensified continuity” (Hollywood Tells It 121-23). As elaborated in Chapter Two, this is the dominant style of contemporary populist cinema and it is designed to energise on-screen information. In part this is because of the film’s central conceit: the film restricts itself to a scenario with Locke as the only on-screen character, one location (bar a brief glimpse of a construction site at the film’s opening, the film’s takes place within Locke’s BMW), and one period of time (the film plays out in the eighty-odd minutes of real time Locke’s trip would take). Locke attempts to maintain a sense of balance. To compensate for these restrictions, Knight (as director and scriptwriter) has energised the film through an artificial compression of events and dense visual style. This approach throws in sharp relief the manner in which the road movies previously discussed circumvent this perceptual distraction. Locke’s scenario focuses on Locke’s external problems rather than when or how he will get to London. Locke never suspensefully stresses whether Locke will make it to the birth in time, nor are there any detours that take him from his path. As such there are no new encounters with the world, but rather a working over of his past and how it relates to his present situation. In Lefebvre’s terminology, this is a narrative that conceals rather than reveals (“On Landscape” 76). Instead, what propels the film is Locke’s current situation which forces him to explain to his employers why he is abandoning his job, and explain to his wife that he has cheated on her. These two problems drive the barrage of conversations Locke holds (managed via a Bluetooth speaker phone) as he tries to manage his personal and work life. Locke must juggle Bethan’s fear and his wife’s anger while ensuring that the large-scale concrete pour he was meant to oversee goes according to plan. These conversations see Locke, always while driving, sort through planning documents, folders for phone numbers, and drink what looks to be screw-capped medicine. Any possibility of a contemplative caesura (for Locke or the audience) is ameliorated by conversations with his deceased father58 with whom Locke expands on his motivations, particularly as it pertains to being a good father. As the movie closes upon Locke’s arrival in London, he finds himself in a

58 This conversation is represented by rear-view mirror framed shots of the backseat of Locke’s car. Locke is about looking to the past rather than the future. 125 situation where his child has been born without him, his wife has left him, he has been fired, but it looks as if the scheduled concrete pour will go smoothly. Locke’s emphasis on distraction from one’s environment is carried over into the visual style of the film. The signature shot of the film is the reflection shot in which the car interior is overlaid with reflections of the exterior motorway and its lights. Though this effect is achievable through choosing not to place a polarising filter on the lens, in Locke this was magnified by the affixation of a see-through mirror (traditionally used to refract imagery for 3D cameras) to the lens and manipulating it to maximise the amount of reflection seen (Murphy n.p.). As the film’s cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos notes, this produces a “barrage of moving reflections and colors and lights” (Murphy n.p.). In some directors’ hands, the reflection shot may work to synthesise environment and vehicle as one,59 but in Locke the nighttime environment means that instead we see abstract lights continually streaking across the screen and Hardy’s face, and providing visual stimuli (figure 4.12). This passing light courses across Locke’s face, seeming to visualise his contemplation of the night’s events. The reflection shot structures the rest of the film’s visual style. Overlapping dissolves are repeatedly used in Locke resulting in four overlapping planes of imagery (doubling the two contained in each reflection shot). This insistence on visual energy also sees a continual alteration of perspective, whether through rapid cutting, rack-focus shifts, and shaking camera movement that creeps across the car and Hardy. Locke does use travelling shots, but rather than provide space for the audience to contemplate or to indicate character contemplation, they become just one of the many camera angles flicked through as the film seeks to visually energise what could otherwise be presented as a radio play. In Chapter Two, I wrote about the how travelling shots function with the contemporary visual norm of “intensified continuity” when abbreviated into micro travelling shots. Of these micro-shots, the most relevant to Locke is the firework micro-shot, which briefly depicts a barely-legible piece of landscape passing by in order to imbue a scene with energy. The temporal conceit of Locke may seem to make the film a perfect fit for this thesis’s analysis of contemplation in regards to travelling shots. Locke’s narrative plays out in real time over a real location. However, here we must distinguish between diegetic real time (which Locke abides by) and dedramatised time, which is utilised, at least in part, by the rest of the films under examination in this chapter. Though Locke’s temporality and spatiality may seem to be unified overall, individual shot and moments never cohere long enough to dis-inter the viewer from the narrative and cue them to perceive the passing motorway as description. Accordingly, rather than providing a link or frame of the outside world, Locke is disconnected from any non-fictional exterior. As Knight observes, “the continuity of background, in this case, wasn’t an issue” (Murphy n.p.). Rather than repeatedly drive past the same scenery the anonymity of the motorway, obscured by night and the film’s busy visual style, meant that the relationship between car interior and exterior was mostly irrelevant. What matters is that the backdrop signified motorway, rather than captured a particular sense of the M6 as a specific construct.

59 A beautiful example of this can be found in Kiarostami’s Copie conforme/Certified Copy (2010) as the Italian countryside glides over the windscreen of the protagonist’s car.

126 The setting of Locke on a motorway is nonetheless important. As raised in Chapter Two, the motorway and its semiotic relationship with the world (in that the passing world is mediated by signs telling us where to turn off to reach a specific destination rather than actually passing through and experiencing these destinations) is why Auge sees the motorway60 as a non-place redolent of capitalism and globalisation (77-81). Auge’s concept ties in neatly with Schivelbusch’s understanding of how the coming of industrialisation disconnected us from the world (22-3, 192), only Auge updates this to account for contemporary transformations in social infrastructure. The same perceptual anxiety regarding modernity remains in place.61 Locke’s dilemma, apart from informing his wife about his adultery, derives from his immersion within a capitalist system. The suspenseful question that shapes the film does not derive from the film’s contact with the world, but whether Locke can fulfill his responsibilities (and this problem itself is dealt with through information rather than a physical response to the construction site). Locke’s fulfilling of this objective, despite knowing that he has been certainly fired for attending family matters, reveals a profound internalisation of social expectation and constraint. This trickles down to Locke’s relationship with his employees. As film critic David Jenkins notes, “the virtuous Locke is utterly unruffled at the prospect of roping in cash-in-hand immigrant labour to finish the job” (n.p.). That the film’s rendering of the motorway functions more as a distracting sign than a place to be experienced simply makes its presentation more thematically apt. Though we see a depiction of contemplation, in that we are evocatively shown a man grappling with his past and current life and situation, Locke does not create an alignment between the audience’s and protagonist’s capacity for contemplation. Radio On leaves the motorway, like an interrupted road movie, but it does so to find the motorway in the pastoral. After departing from London, Robert (David Beames) grudgingly approaches Bristol via prevaricating routes that, like non-motorway loving road movies, retards plot development through touring rural fields and small villages. But before leaving London, Petit drags Robert’s departure out, building up a head of steam revelling in the glinting aesthetic wonders of a black, white, and mechanised London — and building imagery of industrial modernity along the way. Petit deals with a lack of picturesque qualities by aestheticising the run-down motorways and industrial estates of pre-Thatcher Britain according to a different criteria — that of the expressionistic industrial dystopia whose postpunk logic of romanticised fetishistic alienation runs through Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rossi/Red Desert (1964) and the literature of J.G. Ballard, as well as the music of Radio On’s heavily foregrounded soundtrack: Kraftwerk, Eno, Fripp and Bowie.62 The film is so enamoured with this postpunk aesthetic that Robert seems to leave the motorway, not to avoid it, but to bring it along with him — soaking the English countryside in industrial hum. Rather than spuriously hiding the signs of modern England that jut out into the picturesque, Petit draws attention to them both compositionally, and conversationally as

60 Along with motorways, Auge also identifies such physical icons of globalization such as airports, shopping centres and satellites communication as non-places (77-81). Locke’s reliance on mobile phone communication also ties tightly into Auge’s schema. 61 As detailed in introduction to this thesis. 62 Petit tweaks the typical road movie convention of saturating the soundtrack (whether diegetically sourced from a car radio or roadside diner jukebox, or non-diegetically overlayed) with raucous rock music that ties the genre to rebellion and youth culture. As Michael Atkinson writes, “Road movies have become ineluctably tied to the cheap-and-nasty aesthetic of rock ‘n’ roll” (“Crossing the Frontiers” 16). 127 protagonists approve of electrical power lines (figures 4.13-14). An exemplary scene sees Robert acerbically stating that, “Pylons spoil the countryside, that’s what everybody says” only for Ingrid (Lisa Kreuzer) to reply: “But they are so beautiful.” Whereas Locke uses nighttime shooting to effectively void the land, Radio On uses nighttime shooting to impart its gloomy postpunk aesthetic onto the passing land. Just as Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (1976) sees Wenders use Americana music to represent the sonic overlay of America’s cultural colonisation of Germany, Radio On sees Petit (both stylistically and financially indebted to Wenders) use Krautrock and European- indebted glamour as a sonic overlay to represent Europe’s cultural colonisation of England. If traditionally film landscapes are read expressionistically, expressing the mind-state of the protagonist passing through, even if as just a flat sign of contemplation, then Radio On, through visual, conversational, and musical overlays, is attempting the reverse, hoping that Robert’s dismal mental state will permeate outwards and re-frame greenbelt pastoral farmlands as light industry. Radio On sees high aesthetics sour complacent English pastoralism. This approach is summed up by the shots seen in figures 4.15 and 4.16 that show the interruption of an indoor conversation with a travelling shot’s passing view of Bristol and the lonely pair. Whereas Radio On aestheticises modernity, The Brown Bunny avoids this approach. Though shot on super 16mm, The Brown Bunny’s 1970s naturalistic aesthetic is limited when dealing with the motorway. Where a generic road movie finds contemplation through interruption and manipulation of convention, The Brown Bunny is a slow cinema take on the road movie and thus can stay on the motorway and compensate for the absence of interruption through long depictions of road travel in which narrative de-dramatisation allows time for contemplation. Initially The Brown Bunny mirrors the opening of Cars: following a racing meet, a self- absorbed racer (here named Bud Clay, and played by Gallo) heads back to the west coast. While Cars is about interruption leading to external life and community, The Brown Bunny is its internal, solipsistic reverse. Clay is haunted by his partner Daisy’s (Chloe Sevigny) death, a state revealed only retrospectively after he arrives home. Throughout the trip, it is only alluded to through Clay’s unhappiness, stilted conversations with her parents and strange sexual conversations with other girls named after flowers. Poorly received at its Cannes premiere, The Brown Bunny obtained its theatrical release only after being shorn of 25 minutes (Gallo and Murray). This is a pity, for the film’s gruelling sense of duration and mental exhaustion has much to do with the film’s prolonged bug-splattered windscreen shots of dreary motorways. This is the travelling shot stripped of any sense of attraction, and deliberately so. Nonetheless, the film’s grinding take on the motorway remains intact, for it allows Gallo the opportunity to manipulate the de-dramatising evidence of slowness to his own ends, encouraging disengagement rather than engagement with the world (figures 4.17-18). The film is a catalogue of attempts to distract oneself from one’s thoughts and failures to do so. Abstracted from reality by the motorway, when time wells to the surface it brings the past of interior reflection rather than the past of exterior events. Daisy, Lily, Rose and Violet make diegetically manifest the protagonist’s past interiority. The Brown Bunny conveys the dread sensation of having a terrible thought and 128 having no means of distracting oneself from it; the motorway makes the distractions of physical proximity and interruption from one’s thoughts scarce. Film often makes meaning by having the emotional responses of the characters and the audiences parallel one another. Typically audiences and protagonists are excited for different reasons – a character is excited because he is being shot at, we are excited because we are watching him being shot at. In The Brown Bunny we are exhausted for different reasons. The film’s dismal car shots rhyme with Clay’s inability to escape from his thoughts and we are asked to empathise with this sense of being trapped. Exhaustion comes not from narrative excursion, but from travel duration that exceeds filmmaking norms. As Iain Borden observes of the film’s approach, “the effect is at once terminally banal – a never-ending stream of everyday roadside paraphernalia – but also occasionally profound, for we see Clay suffer and contemplate loss” (79-80). When at one point Clay attempts to cut loose and escape the trap of the windscreen by riding his bike on a salt pan, the scene is filmed to stymie any audience excitement. Trafic confronts the bleakness of motorways through re-emphasising vehicles and their occupants. In a reversal of The Brown Bunny’s position, it is about looking past oneself. The film sees a car designer named Hulot (Tati) driving his employer’s prototype car from Paris to a car show in Amsterdam. Along the way, incidents divert and slow him and his team down so that they end up arriving too late, and miss the show. Like the rest of his work, Trafic sees Hulot dealing with American-associated modernism and its encroachment on France. Geographically this is symbolised by the motorway and physically personified by Maria (Maria Kimberley), a gauge for how the film is progressing as a whole. A company PR accompanying Hulot, her career and stiff needle body, needle car and needle movements see her exist as a living monument to modern living. Gradually accidents, or causal imperfection, humanise Maria by turning her into somebody who can relax and enjoy herself. While Trafic is considered to be a conceptual step back from his 1967 film Playtime (Rosenbaum, “Tati’s Trafic”; Chion 35-38), the film is still notable for its use of non- hierarchal compositions that encourage one’s gaze to wander across the film’s mise-en-scene. It is not just the plot of Trafic, nor its accompanying action that deals with modernity; Tati’s long shots are in their own formal qualities designed to thwart the control over space and how modern space strategically controls our gaze (Rosenbaum “Tati’s Democracy” 38). What motivates our gaze is the film’s status as a comedy, but what I think of as a “white comedy,” it is comedy understood as an organisational principle, the graceful inverse of a black comedy. We are expected to gaze, search around, and look for the connections between otherwise obtuse depictions. Tati’s approach highlights a split in Bazin’s vision. Much of what has been discussed in this thesis has invoked Bazin’s interest in indexicality, but the freedom of gaze is also important; where freedom and indexicality merge within slow cinema is that duration gives us time to look around. A way of understanding this distinction is through the works of Michel de Certeau. Like Bazin, de Certeau was a leftwing Catholic concerned with how humanity can properly appreciate god’s creation. As part of his questioning, de Certeau distinguished between “place,” a location devoid of presence and defined by its physical manifestation, and “space,” a location used and defined by the behaviour of its inhabitants (117-23). It should be noted that most prominent spatial theorists, 129 for instance Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan reverse this distinction and attribute the qualities of lived behaviour or experience to place, and not the more abstract concept of space (Tuan 3, H Lefebvre 25-6). Twinned with this was de Certeau’s understanding of the terms “strategy,” which refers to the top-down control of people through the control of their environment, of place, and “tactics,” which refers to how people redefined the meaning of a location to their own ends as their individualised behaviour rehumanises a location as they turn it into space (35-9). As suggest by this chapter’s title, I would argue that this is in part what road movies, with their reaction to motorways and the motorway’s control of movement and perception is about. As Stuart C. Aitken and Christopher Lee Lukinbeal argue, de Certeau’s ideas regarding “spatial stories” are central to the road movie mythology (349-59). For de Certeau, spatial stories describe our everyday itineraries and actions and how our itineraries re- organise places – drawing them together or cutting across – to redefine them as space (115- 30). Within this context, Tati’s filmmaking emphasises an approach closely aligned with de Certeau’s concepts: Tati’s films are about how people, through the accumulation of incidence and disruption, adopt their modern and unsympathetic environment and re-define modernist places as more humane space. Trafic relies less on non-hierarchal shots than Playtime and this shift is in part due to the importance of the motorway to Trafic. Compare Trafic to Playtime and its predecessor Mon Oncle (1958): one of Playtime’s opening gags sees a nun’s sharp movements mirroring her surrounding hard-edged architecture, this is obscure, since she is hardly hemmed in by the walls, unless you have already seen an earlier set of gags in Mon Oncle where two friends greet each other, spouting pleasantries as they walk towards each other. However, by politely observing the winding impractical path they are turned into fools who talk away from one another with their otherwise normal gestures turned into comic flailing. Compared to Playtime, this joke about modern architecture and control is far more explicit as the confining path is far more explicit. Trafic is set entirely on explicit pathways. The use of a motorway is an act of legibility on Tati’s behalf. While his previous films also explore and confront how modern architecture and design shape how people move through space, none included legal instructions on how to move through space (figure 4.19). The explicitness of the motorway aligns visual and spatial control; through its disruption Trafic provides an alternative means of rejecting the motorway to the road movies’ engagement with contemplation. Trafic’s form abandons the travelling shot to re-conceive driving as a dense communal event. Instead, the camera is held at a distance: allowing us to better perceive the totality of the event; show how the setting of a motorway influences action, and to hide gags around the entire shot — forcing us to pursue the line of cause and effect around the screen. If Trafic cuts to close-up, it is rarely to a protagonist as Tati knows we are already paying attention to them. Instead, Tati cuts in around similarities of action. The role of Hulot is less to be the focus of the gags, and more to draw attention to the gags created by the film — whether by the other protagonists, or background extras. The point of Tati’s work is that there is neither background nor extras. As Maria’s failures humanise her, so the motorway’s failures humanise it; the more passengers are slowed down, the more the jokes reveal themselves. Tati envisions everyday nature defeating regulation, mimetic space over abstract non-place, as such there is no reason 130 to flee the motorway. If Tati’s Playtime is his take on a flâneur gaze or commitment to appreciating the space of a built-up, dense city, then Trafic sees the reconciliation of this gaze with the panoramic gaze. While some conceive of the view from a vehicle as an updated form of this linking, appreciative gaze, the driveur (Juhlin 113-25, Young n.p.), I argue that this is not true, particularly within the sparse environment of the motorway. A vehicle gaze is a forced gaze, one’s eyes sweep, and outside the city this benefits the decreased density of attractions. Trafic’s situations seem designed to create a flâneur-friendly situation that enables Tati’s ethics of observation. The accidents and failures slow down or stall the passing cars enough for us to appreciate what is going on, and, through their newfound proximity, to compare and contrast, to appreciatively link, the various vehicles and drivers. A similar approach to traffic jams is seen in such films as Week End (Godard 1967) and Vendredi Soir (Denis 2002) with all three directors using traffic jams to induce proximity, to create density and thus to turn centrifugal space into centripetal space. In combination, the relatively dense mise-en-scène of these three French films argues against too closely aligning the panoramic gaze of typical driving with the proximate, comparative gaze of the flâneur. Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin disagreed whether the flâneur is “of the crowd”, but they are certainly within the crowd (Benjamin, “Motifs in Baudelaire” 174). Conversely, in Plunder Road, the traffic jam creates a centripetal environment that allows police to closely examine the robbers’ car and discover the stolen gold. Manipulating the density of traffic chaos is the foundation of Trafic’s gags: they extrapolate from every happenstance and draw out observed similarities into absurdist images, such as when cars become animals and chase balls/wheels, or how different people pick their noses (figures 4.20-21). Disturbance is not an interruption that takes us to a new space, but something that encourages people to understand that a seemingly abstracted non-place is actually a space. These disturbances have the characters (major and minor), leave their lanes, require mechanical assistance from locals, and wait and absorb. Trafic may be hostile to modernity, but it equally acts as a rebuff to films that flee the motorway rather than tactically engage with it.

Conclusion

If there is a case for seeing road movies as a synthesis of the time and movement image, it lies not in Voyage to Italy, but Richard Franklin’s exploitation film, Roadgames (1981) which cogently illustrates the connection between a thoughtful, imaginative drive state and road movies. Franklin’s film can be likened to a road movie version of Rear Window. Truck driver Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach) is hauling goods from Melbourne/Adelaide to Perth, through the outskirts of the Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. To pass time he picks up romantic interest and hitchhiker Pamela “Hitch” Rushworth (Jamie Lee Curtis), and together they play guessing games that turn the vehicles that they pass into stereotypes: Newly Weds, Salesman, and, after hearing a report over the radio, a psycho-serial killer (figure 4.22).63 The rest of the film sees the pair attempting to confirm their suspicions before a final confrontation.

63 Films like Roadgames and The Brown Bunny are the by-products of contemplation. If The Brown Bunny is the story of someone attempting to escape forced contemplation through imagination and failing, in which every thought of Clay’s brings him back to Daisy, then Roadgames is the story of someone too successful in his imagining, in that Quid’s delusions of boredom come alive and attack him. 131 As D.N. Rodowick observes, “Rear Window occupies a curious position in Deleuze’s arguments. It certainly belongs to the regime of cinematic movement-images, yet its status there is uncertain” (72-3). It does not provide the rupture of movement and time-image that neo-realism saw, but sees the movement-image, like an expanded balloon, simultaneously reach its apotheosis and breaking point. Deleuze sees this stress in Hitchcock’s “requirement that the actor acts in the most simple, even neutral way, the camera attending to what remains” (201) with action and awareness split with Rear Window most clearly attending to this because the hero “is in a state of immobility: he is reduced as it were to pure optical situation” (205). For Deleuze, Hitchcock is trying to ward off the onrush of reality, the time- image, by narratively integrating it (205). What is interesting about Roadgames is not its indebtedness to Rear Window, but how smoothly this subject matter has been transposed onto road movie tropes. While some thematic exploration is changed, the proximity of the windscreen to the passing world opens Roadgames up to the world in a manner impossible within the confines of Rear Window’s closed studio setting. The contortions required in Rear Window, but deftly managed by Hitchcock, find their natural fit in Roadgames and the road movie genre. This is a genre whose experiential logic comes from the experience of being trapped in a seat and watching the world pass by. The temporarily wheelchair ridden man whose fixed observation point motivates the audience’s perspective on the action in Rear Window is replaced by a protagonist sitting in a car in Road Games, wherein the fortuitously timed window activities of Rear Window find a parallel in everyday passing vehicles, with an apartment’s window frame replaced by a car’s windscreen. Ka-Fai Yau writes, “Rear Window is an example that turns the interactions between spectators and spectacles into spectacles that trigger further responses about these interactions themselves.” (54-55); Roadgames is about the relationship between watching the screen and watching the road. The metaphoric function of the windscreen combines with the practice of the road movie to integrate action with contemplation. This is the basis for the two great thematic threads that run through the genre’s recurring subject matter and style. This is a genre about social and state control. This is also a genre about contemplation. And by and large these two threads intersect through the genre’s synthesis of centrifugal, and centripetal or prelapsarian space. Movement, as embodied by the travelling shot, is the point of intersection, liberating us from control and creating a new perspective to contemplate from. It is no coincidence that films noir and road movies are both liminal genres: each derives this liminal status from how they depict space. Both genres take advantage of art film tactics that re-vitalise space, whether dramatic low-key lighting, landscapes, location shooting or contemplative travelling shots; and consequently make thematic meaning from their revived surrounds, and in return give back meaning to the filmed locations. Deviating from this baseline, like deviating from the motorway, is how road movies make meaning. Even when road movies stay on the motorway, this becomes a comment on differing spaces. Examining how the road movie uses travelling shots to bridge movement and contemplation reveals the importance of modes of perception in how films arrange and explore their themes. Clichés of space, everyday and film, shape our perception; the travelling shot both frames and un-frames our vision.

132 Conclusion

I’m interested in a cinema of fiction that’s documentary as well. You see Taxi Driver (1976) today, and it’s fascinating because it’s fiction, but it’s also New York in 1975. You can see how New York was—roads, traffic lights, places that don’t exist anymore. It interests me to film scenes that not only function dramatically, but also show the surroundings. So I had to film in a way that was generously open. Only at certain moments I then closed the space, to say, “Look at this face, this face is important right now.”

– Kleber Mendonça Filho (66)

This conclusion develops through two stages. In part one, I discuss three films whose investigations of cityscapes both problematise and illustrate this thesis’s concerns. The first is Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver. Though barely noted until now, Taxi Driver (along with Life and Nothing More…) was foundational to the thinking behind this thesis. Our temporal estrangement from the film’s 1975 New York setting provides an interesting contrast between its expressionist interest in the world and its documentary revelations. Then two contemporary films are examined for their meta use of travelling shots: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) and David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012). Both are contemporary films made by historically-minded directors: both demonstrate how the form and accrued history of the travelling shot can be drawn on to comment on the nature of film and cinema. These three films manipulate how we come into contact with the world and experience it: Taxi Driver presents the exterior world as contamination, Holy Motors examines how the exterior world can be presented, and Cosmopolis makes meaning by denying the exterior world. Stage two then proceeds to identify what each of my thesis’s chapters demonstrated, and how they function as a whole. The conclusion then closes the thesis by pointing to fields of further research.

Taxi Driver and the Contaminated Mind

This thesis, in its exploration of the history of the travelling shot, has examined two broad tendencies within the shot’s history. The first tendency is the shot’s history as excitement, as an attraction that demonstrates modernity’s collapse and control over space. On an individual level, this control is typically represented by a character’s mastery of their vehicle and its movement through space. This representation provides a connection between vehicle shots and character subjectivity. The second tendency is the shot’s history as contemplation, as a vernacular form of meditation that brought us into contact with the world. Taxi Driver upends both of these categories. Taxi Driver tracks the New York wanderings of a disturbed Vietnam Veteran and now nighttime cab driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Disgusted by what he encounters in his nighttime driving, Bickle attempts to find solace through dating Betsy (Cybil Shepherd) and then bonding with a pre-pubescent prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), whom he had previously seen dragged out of his cab while working. Bickle fulfills his dreams of violence 133 by murdering Iris’s pimp (Harvey Keitel) and the pimp’s colleagues. Recovering from wounds, Bickle receives a letter from Iris’s parents, lauding him for his heroic rescue. In genre terms, Taxi Driver is a vigilante film, defined by action. Its bloody set pieces and aggressive, highly quotable, dialogue have shaped how Taxi Driver is appreciated in contemporary culture. However, Taxi Driver is also an arthouse film, directed by a noted auteur and shaped by a multitude of contemplative longeurs. As with the road movie genre discussed in Chapter Four, the travelling shot helps mediate these two tendencies. In Chapter Four, I noted that the film noir genre developed its own aesthetic apparatus in order to visualise the modernity of the city. As Sabine Haenni and Amy Taubin note, Taxi Driver is strongly indebted to this noir tradition (Haenni 67-9, Taubin 19).64 Though it is not a road movie in any way, Taxi Driver also uses the travelling shot to revitalise our perception of the city and to balance the film’s genre and action priorities with its contemplative aspect. The film’s travelling shots provide us moments in which the audience can be cued to contemplate the city. However, the travelling shots of Taxi Driver also do more than this. As the credits roll, Taxi Driver opens up with a shot of a taxicab, then a close-up of Travis Bickle, and then we see their synthesis in a travelling shot that presents Bickle’s view through the front windshield of his cab (figures C.1-3). This is presented in an expressionistic fashion; as Taubin observes of the first shot: “The sound, the vaporous cloud, the slow motion and the low angle of the shot conspire to suggest that this taxi has just risen out of some underground inferno” (40). In the second shot, like Locke, the driver’s face is lit up by a shifting array of lights that seem to coax emotion out of his face; and the travelling shot is filmed through a water-smeared windshield that foregrounds the subjective nature of the shot. This formulation holds true for the rest of the film, Taxi Driver is an expressionist film in which the fears and fantasies of Bickle ambiguously inhabit the film’s diegesis. As elaborated in Chapter Three and Four, the vehicle becomes part of a person, inseparable but also a mediator between subjective/fictional interior and objective/non- fictional exterior. Taxi Driver places a distinct spin on this. It does align with this basic tendency in that the vehicle and the driver are both merged into one. The film’s travelling shots visualise Bickle’s perspective. However, as a cab driver, Bickle lacks control over his destination because he must drive where customers ask him to drive. Nor does Taxi Driver compensate for this through visuals or storytelling that foreground his driving mastery. In contrast, Collateral sees the protagonist cab driver, Max (Jamie Foxx) fight for control of his driving, and life, against a hitman, Vincent (Tom Cruise) who hijacks his vehicle and forces him to drive from target to target.65 Similarly, though the travelling shots work to connect

64 For Taubin, the stylistic influence of film noir is obvious due to Taxi Driver’s use of “first-person voice-over narration, the expressionistic camera angles and movements, and Bernard Herrmann’s moody jazz-inflected score” (19). 65 Though a fantasist like Bickle (Max’s cab is filled with documents for a long unfulfilled plan for a limousine company, a bucolic island and a love interest), Collateral’s taxi driver is equally interested in control. Narratively, this is asserted through the driver’s struggle and final success in removing the hitman (onto public transport, of all things), and thus saving his love interest. Psychologically, this is revealed through Max taking on Vincent’s disciplined and controlling persona. This is indicated through Max’s quoting of Vincent, like a mantra, before Max undertakes a particularly bold action. Visually, this is indicated by Max’s control of his cab and his movement: he precisely controls his car and has a knowledge of Los Angeles as a changing environment that allows him to know exactly how long it will take to get from one destination to another, no matter what time of day or night it is.

134 Bickle (and the audience) to the exterior world of 1970s New York in which the film takes place, their function changes from being about experiencing the world and coming to a greater understanding of it to being contaminated by a world that is expressionistically shaped and poisoned by Bickle’s mindset. Bickle is simultaneously alienated from the world and contaminated by the world. His inability to process this contamination, to respond to the world on its own terms is what leads to his alienation. His cab, a thing that simultaneously acts as a container or expression of his identity and a means for other people to infect his identity, is used to convey this sense of contamination. As Bickle’s voiceover describes his work routine we get a sense of this: “Each night when I return the cab to the garage I have to clean the come off the back seat. Some nights I clean off the blood.” Barbara Mortimer identifies Bickle as synthetic, postmodern personality, a person who constructs his identity from an “amalgam of images and slogans drawn from popular culture” (28-29). I would argue that Mortimer’s diagnosis is partially correct but it neglects the role of Bickle’s vehicle. Bickle’s passengers intrude upon his mind. His first encounter with Iris is when she tries to escape her pimp by catching Bickle’s cab, but she is wrestled away by her pimp before this can happen. Other passengers further prompt Bickle’s behaviour. The most salient example of this is when a passenger, credited as the Silhouette Watching Passenger (and played by Scorsese himself) extols the damage a gun can do to a woman’s face and genitalia, and in doing so pushes Bickle onto a more violent trajectory. Taxi Driver’s theme of contamination and Bickle’s ultimate reaction has a significant racial component. It is not so much the film’s subtext but rather displaced to the film’s visuals, particularly the film’s travelling shots (figure C.4). The travelling shots capture this aspect through their selective focus on New York’s African American street life, this is what Bickle is disturbed by and rails against when he tells Palantine that the president “should clean up this city here because this city here is like an open sewer, you know. It’s full of filth and scum.” Similarly, in terms of narrative events, the pimp whom Bickle slays at the end of the film (and his associates) was originally meant to be black, but in pre-production this was deemed to be racially problematic and instead the white Harvey Keitel was cast to alleviate such tension (Taubin 21-23). Scorsese and Schrader have both acknowledged the influence of The Searchers (Ford 1956) on Taxi Driver (Schrader Schrader on Schrader 115, Taubin 25). The Searchers details the quest of a violent ex-military outcast (John Wayne) and his rescue of a young girl (Natalie Wood) from Native Americans as a means of thematically exploring the relationship between alienation and a fear of miscegenation. As Taubin observes, “if Travis is a cowboy,” then Keitel’s costuming, his long straight hair, bandana and Indian beads, links him to the antagonist Indian chief, Scar (Henry Brandon), of The Searchers (75). This parallel with Taxi Driver’s own concerns, would have been particularly apparent if the Iris’s pimp (Natalie Wood’s equivalent) had been black. Bickle’s disgust at the cum and blood that suffuse his car after work, that he has to cleanse, embody both the sexual and racial dimension of miscegenation. In some ways Scorsese’s displacement of this anxiety onto a white pimp ruptures the film’s formal patterning, and yet these aspects are still there, 135 just with the film’s racial motifs disconnected and resting side by side with the various aspects of the film. In the same way the travelling shot mediates interior and exterior, the travelling shots of Taxi Driver bring the film’s themes, if not in contact, then in association with one another. It is this association, along with the grindhouse expressionism of 1970s New York that gives the film its expression of contamination by the world rather than experience of the world. Nonetheless, the film under discussion above is not the Taxi Driver of today. Because Taxi Driver is now forty years old, contemporary audiences see it differently.66 As Scorsese notes, “Although every shot in the picture had been drawn beforehand, with the difficulties we encountered, including losing four days of shooting because of rain, a lot of stuff taken from the car had to be shot as documentary” (60). This non-fictional aspect of Taxi Driver informs our current appreciation of the film. Part of the contemporary appeal of Mr Thank You is its para-documentary depiction of 1930s rural Japan. As with Mr Thank You, the passing of time has meant that Taxi Driver’s documentary aspect has come closer to the surface of the film. Like Taxi Driver, Mr Thank You features a protagonist whose job sees his identity subsumed by his passengers. In Mr Thank You, the protagonist is accepting of this, and his passengers and their viewpoints, combined with the film’s travelling shots, convey a group point-of-view that, combined with the film’s wandering engagement with the non- fictional exterior world that the film passes through, produces a compound allegorical mind. Under this formulation, the passing of time and our accordant shift in the perception of the film’s exterior helps strengthen this effect – we are more likely to see the passing exterior as distinct and thus join the passengers in gazing outwards. In Taxi Driver, the protagonist is not accepting of this, he feels contaminated. Here the passing of time strengthens the film’s documentary tendency and weakens the film’s expressionistic intentions. Arguably, Scorsese’s selectiveness with the film’s travelling shots is less obvious to a contemporary viewer. That we can view Taxi Driver’s exterior scenery as both expressionism and documentary is possible because the shots now work as legend rather than fact; Taxi Driver’s grindhouse vision of 1970s New York has become our received understanding of pre- gentrification New York.

Structuring Information: Holy Motors, Cosmopolis, and the Saliency of Thought

Both Holy Motors and Cosmopolis feature a protagonist in a white limousine, driven through a city, over the course of a day. This coincidence was immediately noted at their Cannes 2012 debut; however, since popular cinematic discourse occurs around cinema release dates, further examination of their parallels fell away with the divergence of the films’ theatrical release dates. I argue their central connection is more specific: that they use white limousines to engage with concepts of cinema, and, through this, questions of perception and media specificity. Cosmopolis is the negative of Holy Motors: whereas Holy Motors uses the

66 In addition to the passing of time, Taubin also emphasises the changing of media with Taxi Driver now screened from 4K DCP rather than 35mm (10). 136 limousine to embrace cinematic tropes, Cosmopolis uses the limousine to rebuff cinematic tropes. This can be seen in divergent way both films tour their respective cities (Paris in Holy Motors and New York in Cosmopolis). Holy Motors provides a striking catalogue of differing travelling shots while Cosmopolis does not take advantage of locationism and the moving image in the way that would be expected of a film set largely in a car travelling through Manhattan. This argument draws on the preceding body of the thesis to examine how these quasi-road movies make meaning through how they adhere to or deviate from baseline audience expectations of film and car travel as mediated by travelling shots. Holy Motors’s narrative purposefully never coheres. As the movie closes, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) returns home as the patriarch of a family of chimpanzees, having assassinated the businessman he started the day as. In between, Oscar is driven to a number of appointments where he enacts an assigned role as an elderly gypsy woman, an abject-other Godzilla, or motion capture artist. Holy Motors is an exuberant elegy. Thirteen years after his previous feature, Carax designed Holy Motors as a low budget showreel for his and actor Denis Lavant’s talents, letting this format dictate the film’s structure and its episodic nature. Carax revels in the opportunity to show what he and Lavant can do, and he succeeds (Holy Motors Press Book 12-3). A showreel was needed as it had been thirteen years since Carax’s last feature and his partner committed suicide during Holy Motor’s pre-production. This distinctive quality is continually reworked: exhaustion, enervation and death leading towards a film a teetering on mise-en-abyme, with a couple’s relationship ending in suicide, with Oscar, dressed as Carax, looking on. Between performances, Oscar complains of his work being hindered by changing technologies and the ever-continuing reduction in camera size that impedes his ability to play for a visible audience. In Holy Motors, the travelling shots, produced by the film’s stretch limousine tour of Paris, merge attraction and contemplation, exuberance and elegy. The context and variety of the travelling shots in Holy Motors means that we are cued to see the travelling shots as paradigmatically organised rather than narratively organised Carax arranges the film’s presentation of travelling shots (context and variety) in such a way that we are cued to see travelling shots as paradigmatically organised (default bonnet shot contrasted with nightvision bonnet shot contrasted with infrared bonnet shot) rather than narratively organised. Holy Motors is organised into a matrix of meaning. In Holy Motors, Carax humbly defines himself in relation to the death of analog film. His exhaustion (as personified by his avatar Lavant) is film’s exhaustion. As Chris Wisniewski writes, “Though Holy Motors was shot digitally, it both celebrates and eulogizes the analog technology” (n.p.). Equally, the death of analog film is defined in relation to the death and redundancy of large machines, bulky film cameras and large white stretch limousines (when compared to smaller vehicles and digital cameras). A two-way analogy could be written off as simple symbolism, but a three-way analogy starts changing how an audience understands a film. Holy Motors offers a flow of co-mingling suggestiveness, thematic ripples refracting amongst one another. As Bordwell observes, we understand in pattern: if the pattern is cause and effect we organise our perceptions in terms of narrative, and if the pattern is a list of types, then we think in 137 terms of paradigm (Narration 282-86). Holy Motors’s weak and probably impossible narrative, its aggregate of analogies, encourages an audience to understand the film paradigmatically. The organisational privileging of motifs foregrounds Holy Motor’s examination of what it is we understand as film. This approach is buried within Holy Motors on a number of levels,67 but it is particularly explicit in Carax’s use of travelling shots. Here the implicit equation between windshield and cinema screen is made explicit: Oscar does not just look out through the limo window, but watches travelling shots of passing Paris on a mounted television (figures C.5-6). This is extended through Carax’s juggling of the travelling shots between normal, night-vision, thermal-vision, and in one of the key moments, a Cocteau-esque night-drive through a cemetery whose takeover by datamoshing68 gives way to Oscar waking up with a start, a deeply subjective travelling point-of-view shot inscribed with the artifice of compression artefacts (figures C.7-11). Holy Motors has a pattern of using paradigmatic patterns. Once this visual vocabulary, in that we understand the shot’s source is a diegetic monitor, is established, we are primed to see later appearances of tracking shots, even without the television screen, as much for Oscar’s benefit as ours, and equally as an explicit reference to watching movie images. This same form of balanced paradigmatic organisation can be found throughout the film amongst other sections, for instance age and death. It is this paradigmatic filmmaking that has ensured Holy Motors’s critical reception has been overwhelmingly in regards to its niche thematic concerns (Brody n.p., Lim n.p., Vincendeau n.p.). As Eric Kohn observes, Holy Motors “is a movie that dares you to understand it” (n.p.). Cosmopolis is about the relationship between adaptation and what we understand as cinematic. Cosmopolis sees financial wizard Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) travelling through New York to get a hair cut. Packer’s limousine is an office, and his much delayed trip is a death-drive that sees him engage in a series of conversations with his advisors and partners as he self-destructively loses his wealth in order to embrace physicality. Delillo’s Cosmopolis is the third ‘unfilmmable’ novel Cronenberg has adapted: Naked Lunch (Cronenberg 1991) relied on an interpolation of the text and William Burroughs’ life while Cronenberg’s version of Crash (1996) saw him more trusting of traditional cinema’s capacity to convey his and J. G. Ballard’s mutual interests. Cosmopolis sees Cronenberg self- consciously embracing literary qualities. If the first fallacy of adaptation is that fidelity should be maintained, then the second fallacy of adaptation is that fidelity should not be maintained (Hutcheon 6-8). As Walter Benjamin observes, “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his

67 For instance, another paradigm foregrounded by the movie is the presentation of the human body, in particular Lavant’s. Two axes can be cut through his appearance: most salient is his multiple roles, asking for a cross-comparison between performances and thoughts regarding a core persona, but almost as prominent is the film’s paradigm of capturing the body. The film is bookended by Etienne Jules-Mary’s early film studies of the body in motion, typically a muscular but wiry body similar to Lavant’s and this is most obviously contrasted with Lavant’s performance as a covered-up, abstracted motion capture artist — the contemporary equivalent to Jules-Mary’s attempt to record human movement — which is used to create post-light CGI bodies. Outside of this, during Lavant’s in-between performance, Oscar laments how difficult is to act for small invisible cameras, another notation on filming reality. We have a paradigm of indexicality and performance.

68 ‘Datamoshing’ is the term used to describe the artistic use of compression artifacts in digital video. 138 language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (“Task of the Translator” 81). In his adaptation of Cosmopolis, Cronenberg uses the foreign tongue of literature to question what we understand as cinematic through the application of modernist-primitivism tropes and an elision of content associated with cinema. Here I want to identify a particularly niche cinematic tradition: ‘literary-primitivism’. This tradition avoids many of the tropes, such as travelling shots, which are seen as “cinematic.” Literary-primitivism follows the same practice as primitivism or as Adrian Martin terms it, “archaic-innovative” in that it uses a society’s folk tradition (typically ancient or tribal work) to circumvent dominant realist practices (“Long Path Back” n.p.). However, with literary-primitivism it is now literature and theatre, civilisation, modernism, that is the folk tradition being used to shape the structure and logic of a given medium (“Long Path Back” n.p.). This tradition would include such work as Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978), Llinás’s Historias extraordinarias-Extraordinary Stories (2008), de Oliveira’s Amor de Perdição-Doomed Love (1979) and Eugène Green’s entire oeuvre. While none are the same, and the tradition is too small to even pretend to have a core (though Green’s blending of Paradjanov’s more traditional primitivism and Bresson’s parametric sparseness comes closest), these films are defined by a number of characteristics: a surfeit of dialogue, diegetic or not, which covers philosophical ideas considered better shown than told in cinema, an affectless delivery of the dialogue, and a tendency towards the shallow frontal tableaux compositions Bordwell describes as “planimetric” and sees as suggestive of pre-renaissance icons (“Shot-consciousness” n.p.). These qualities are buttressed by an absence of invigorating cinematic tropes: whether camera movement or expansive varied locations. Cosmopolis is part of this tradition. Rather than use passing landscapes to present contemplation or thought, Cosmopolis relies on literary tactics. Its wealth of affectless philosophical dialogue is immediately apparent and, while nowhere near as explicit as Green’s, Cosmopolis also often invokes a found tableaux through the limousine interior Packer spends his day travelling in (figure C.12). The planimetric tableaux is the antithesis of the travelling shot: the former denies space while the latter foregrounds space through movement towards the vanishing point identified by the road, rail or horizon. Accordingly, under these conditions, it is no surprise that the most literary moments occur as Packer is stuck within the car. As Packer embraces physicality Cosmopolis becomes more ‘cinematic’. This is more apparent when Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is contrasted with Delillo’s original novel. As Alfred Hitchcock observed, primarily in regards to plays, one traditionally “opens up” or “ventilates” a text to make it more cinematic—moving scenes away from their original setting to provide more visual variety, to take advantage of film’s ability to collapse space (Truffaut, Hitchcock 210). Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis reverses this tactic. Not only are no scenes moved away from the limousine, but some of Delillo’s own “ventilation” is undone, most significantly with Packer’s meeting with his financial advisor shifted to inside the limousine. Similarly, a flagrant use of green screen destroys the sense that the limousine is travelling through real Manhattan; instead it passes through an “Inter-Zone” constructed from 139 downtown Toronto (Nayman 7). Cronenberg also trims Delillo’s text of tropes associated with cinema, surveillance, a film shoot, and most importantly, travelling shots. In Delillo’s Cosmopolis, surveillance and travelling shots are merged with a number of travelling descriptions provided by a bonnet-mounted security camera. (Similar to the diegetic source of many of Holy Motor’s travelling shots.) The removal of the film shoot is minor, it is merely one incident in a crowd of incidents. However, the removal of the book’s surveillance is significant – In Delillo’s Cosmopolis, surveillance is an important running motif. In addition to capturing and mediating passing New York, Packer’s surveillance in the novel is also turned on him, sometimes providing footage of himself moments hence. This narcissistic surveillance, also publicly broadcast, is what enrages and empowers Packer’s would-be assassin. Cronenberg’s removal of the surveillance motif elides both an option to dynamically vary the film’s visual texture, but more importantly to examine the book’s concerns regarding surveillance at its cinematic home turf. However, it is the avoidance of travelling shots that is most noticeable, unlike surveillance the justification for travelling shots is still apparent. This is a film about a limousine trip in which we expect to see vehicle- mounted shots, yet we do not. A view from one of the limousine’s portholes is only provided when very clearly providing narrative information; for example, the arrival of a new character (figure C.13). Of all Cronenberg’s choices, the elision of travelling shots is most telling. Tableaux and affectless delivery require a certain understanding of artistic traditions, other alterations require familiarity with Delillo’s text. However, the presence of a vehicle in combination with a travel narrative primes us to expect travelling shots. Imagine Cosmopolis as a contemporary blockbuster, one that adhered to the norms of intensified continuity and representational prowess discussed in Chapter Two. Superior or inferior, this version would be strikingly different to Cronenberg’s take. It would be a film full of cinematic travelling shots, from the air, from the limo and as florid impossible travelling shots that slip through New York—mocking the limo’s inability to traverse Manhattan as the film encountered blockages, whether the President’s visit, riots or a Sufi rapper’s funeral. Surveillance would return, with the director delighting in the contrast between low-resolution security cameras and the latest digital camera. In comparison, Cronenberg nonchalantly uses the most film-like digital camera, the Arri Alexa, and flaunts the absence of travelling shots in his Cosmopolis. In the end there is just one travelling shot, a telling one. As the limousine nears its journey we are granted one travelling shot, through a windshield smeared with filth and covered with graffiti, again it is a travelling shot denied; it is a travelling shot as epiphany. Cosmopolis is a classical example of the conflation of capital and perception: Packer is an alienated financial wizard who thinks in data or standing- reserve, and whose journey sees him encounter reality. The travelling shot only appears after Packer abandons his backseat office and, having discovered his driver’s refugee history, joins him in the front; thus, it is a compound, empathetic travelling shot (figures C.14-15). The road film arc of modernity to prelapsarian space has been transposed to city-scale. The denial of travelling shots in narratives that take place in a moving car draws attention to the aesthetic choices made in such films. In Holy Motors, abundance draws attention to 140 choice. Travelling shots are both symptomatic and key to understanding these films. Adaptation is not just a process but a mental framework for audiences. In Cosmopolis, Cronenberg makes the adaptive process noticeable — guiding us to think in terms of media. In Holy Motors, Carax is making the film’s paradigmatic organisation more obtrusive, encouraging an audience to think in terms of thematic patterns as much as organising their perceptions as a narrative. Both films use cross-comparison to prompt reflection on what film is. Cosmopolis questions what is cinematic, Holy Motors questions what is filmic.

Organising Information

Taxi Driver, Holy Motors, and Cosmopolis are all filmed largely from the vantage point of a car in an inner-city environment, yet each exemplifies a different element of the core concerns around which this thesis has been structured: cinemas of attraction and contemplation, and the relationships between technology, modernity, progress and time. Taxi Driver saw, like the road movie genre, the travelling shot used to balance the film’s contemplative and attractions tendencies; this balance also negotiates Taxi Driver’s theme of contamination (appreciation versus threat) and the film’s shift in meaning due to the passage of time. Holy Motors, and its paradigmatic approach to organisation, used the limousine’s built-in monitor to make the relationship between cinéscreen and windscreen explicit. Cosmopolis denies our expectations of travelling shots to re-envision perceptual alienation and what is “cinematic.” In Chapter One, I provided a precise definition and a tentative historical lineage of the travelling shot by exploring its origins as an examination of both vehicle and film technology before tracing its adaptation to new developments in filmmaking practices: new vehicular technology, new cinematic technology, and the rise of narrative cinema. Tom Gunning’s concept of a cinema of attractions, and Charles Musser’s concept of a cinema of contemplation are used to frame and inform differing aspects of travelling shot practice (Gunning “Cinema of Attractions”; Musser “Cinema of Contemplation”). Though both were developed to address early cinema practices, Chapter One demonstrates how the meaning accrued from the travelling shot’s original practice is continually returned to, up to the present. The cinema of attractions is essentially demonstrative, and narrative filmmakers’ adoption of the travelling shot to reveal control over space, control over vision and control over narrative, is carefully plotted. The cinema of contemplation is essentially discerning, and narrative filmmakers’ adoption of the travelling shot to draw on audience awareness of everyday travel and its capacity to signify contemplation and delineate the spectacle of landscape, is also carefully plotted. Both frameworks are shaped by the travelling shot’s capacity to convey vehicular traces through the distinct perspective of respective vehicle mounts to lens stabilisation strategies, from the unstabilised shudder and quotidian perspective of a car-shot coding as vehicle movement, to the stabilised serene and atypical perspective of a helicopter-shot coding as cinematic movement. The prominence or absence

141 of these traces guides an audience’s understanding of the shot and the framework within which they are examined. Moving into Chapter Two, I examined the relationship between the travelling shot and contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. This examination focused on two salient tendencies of blockbusters: the need to visually distinguish themselves from other filmmaking product through Hollywood’s easier access to finance and support, and the need to maintain audience interest through visual stimulation of increased movement and rapid editing, as outlined in David Bordwell’s concept of “intensified continuity” (Way Hollywood Tells It 54-55). Seeing the blockbuster aesthetic aligning closely with the cinema of attractions, the first part of the chapter analysed the function of the extravagant, rapidly-moving CGI-enhanced helicopter shot for its ability to demonstrate both Hollywood’s ability to create a lavish world, and its ability to move through it, simultaneously expanding and contracting space. Part two addressed rapid editing. While CGI-enhanced shots provide cinematic movement, the vehicle movement of travelling shots palpably inscribed with the means of their creation creates an unseen but understood vignetting that identifies the source and perspective of the given shot. As argued, this clarity of perspective helps filmmakers balance out the discombobulation of spatial incoherence and rapid editing which would otherwise give audiences little time to understand what is indicated by a shot. Together, these two parts detailed how contemporary Hollywood uses travelling shots to provide narrative information and world building over world experience. Chapter Three balanced the examination of blockbuster travelling shots with an analysis of the use of travelling shots within arthouse cinema. As blockbusters align closely with the cinema of attractions, so does arthouse cinema align closely with the cinema of contemplation. To understand the shot’s function within arthouse cinema, I placed emphasis on the travelling shot’s paradoxical status as a statically-mounted but geographically mobile camera. I argued this paradoxical status allowed the travelling shot to bridge or clarify a film’s various epistemological layers. Part one overlayed Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Laura Mulvey’s understanding of Abbas Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing…(1992) to illustrate how such layers can be breached and bring us into a position to properly regard the world, or unified as a palimpsest of simultaneous tenses (Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami; Mulvey, Death 24X). The second part of the chapter related this illustration to Hiroshi Shimizu’s use of the travelling shot in Mr Thank You (1936). Here I further expanded on how travelling shots work to relate the fiction of a film to non-fictional reality. This principally involved demonstrating how travelling shots help delineate fictional interior from non-fictional exterior. However, it also required the identification of the gestalt or compound travelling shot, which is distinguished by its capacity to indicate the viewpoint of multiple characters, uniting them. I then drew attention to how this form of unified vision, one that regards the exterior world through the travelling, like using the term “we”, draws the audience into the same unified gaze. Lastly, Chapter Four synthesised the perceptual modes of contemplation and attraction cinemas, and Hollywood and arthouse, through an investigation into the broader tendencies 142 of the road movie genre. By identifying the travelling shot as an axiom of the genre, this chapter explored how the genre moves through various spaces and in doing so through perceptual modes of understanding. Part one outlined the various types of perceptual space, whether the abstracted city or the proximity of the country. Part two detailed the recurring tactics of road movies: exploring how, despite the genre’s association with speed and movement, the road movie is equally defined by generic motivations for derailing journeys and providing landscapes and longueurs associated with contemplation. The road movie’s typical journey from alienated, non-place to prelapsarian, engaged space becomes an allegory of epiphany, whose structure, as much as it aligns with Hollywood conventions of narrational psychology, also breaks with narrative cohesion through the intrusion of both attraction and contemplative spectacle. Part three analysed unusual road movies; this illustrated how their deviation from the genre’s typical approach clarifies how road movies make meaning through the discourse of spatial perception. Through this chapter, I argue that the bracketing effect of the travelling shot, most comprehensively discussed in Chapter One, mirrors the perceptual epiphany that road film protagonists typically undergo in their travels. Together, this provided an illustration of how the form and iconography of travel provide an important touchstone for film to address the aftermath of modernity. What has emerged over these four chapters is an analysis of the travelling shot as a filmmaking practice that is deeply indebted to not one but two traditions of appreciation: attraction and contemplation. These two traditions may seem antagonistic but are actually complementary and allow the travelling shot (as cultural practice) to integrate and adopt new technological, narrative and production developments into this aesthetic practice. As a new form of travelling shot (whether a new form of vehicle mount, filmmaking technology or narrative context) is introduced, it passes through both novelty and the renewal of obsolescence and in doing so invigorates and expands both the tradition of attraction and of contemplation. In the introduction of the thesis, I noted that pre-existing analysis of the travelling shot exists in piecemeal, typically focusing on one vehicle, one period or one genre. This thesis, cumulatively, demonstrates the importance of holistically examining the travelling shot and acknowledging its internal variations and how these variations relate to one another over time. Only by addressing the travelling shot in its totality does the pattern of travelling shots’ integration of new forms become apparent. It is this understanding that grounds the multitude of narrow observations found within this thesis. These include (but are not limited to) the helicopter shot’s typical coding as ‘cinematic’ movement (Chapter One), the travelling shot’s ability to indicate point-of-view and thus clarify rapid cutting (Chapter Two), the travelling shot’s ability to negotiate fiction and non-fiction as a palimpsest (Chapter Three), and the travelling shot’s importance to the road movie’s synthesis of attraction and contemplation (Chapter Four). In addition to these narrow observations, the thesis’s all-inclusive approach allowed me to properly set the history of the travelling shot against the broader question of perception, in particular how an audience can be cued to shift through various forms of perceptual experience. 143 In the introduction, I referred to the perceptual regimes of modernity and narrative and throughout the thesis I engaged with this subject. The question of how one breaks free to experience presence rather than information, or description rather than narrative, underpins much of what was written here. The theories of David Bordwell, Tom Gunning, Laura Mulvey and Charles Musser heavily informed my work, while Martin Lefebvre’s “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema” provided a means of unifying their work. Lefebvre’s approach illuminated cinematic landscapes and provided a sensible model for understanding how Bordwell’s theory of narrative filmmaking as foregrounding of narrative pattern can be complimented by Gunning, Mulvey and Musser’s respective non-narrative readings of film in terms of attraction, temporal return and contemplation. Lefebvre’s concept helps address how audiences can cease being alienated from reality as much as they are alienated from setting. This thesis’s holistic approach, in combination with these concepts, allowed me to demonstrate how the history of the travelling shot relates to the epistemological anxiety of what access we have to the world, whether it is the world of the film or the world at large. One of the key outcomes of this thesis is a grounded understanding of how perceptual negotiation, as it relates to aesthetic and technological practice, is worked out over time. “Moving Landscapes” takes the frame of the windscreen and uses it to see how the technology behind the travelling shot both frames and unframes our vision.

Notes for Future Research

Despite taking an all-inclusive approach to my examination of the travelling shot, clearly not everything could be addressed (as acknowledged in the introduction). In concluding this thesis, three omissions nag at me. Firstly, I believe an extensive study of the integration of the travelling shot into narrative cinema would prove illuminating. A focused exploration of travelling shots in films from 1900-1920, one that identified their type, length, approximate purpose, percentage of film and degree of vignetting would clarify the process of integration, further distinctions between national or regional cinemas (for instance, contrasting Nordic and American cinemas), and expand upon the broader analysis of perceptual shift and the integration of attraction to narrative. This would, in and of itself, require an entire thesis. The initial research of this thesis can at best tentatively note that that early filmmakers, after the immediate period of concatenated cinema69 showed caution in their application of travelling shots. For instance, whereas Bordwell sees the extensive diegetic framing of travelling shots in Phillip Smalley and Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913) as “compressing several lines of action into a single frame” to produce the effect of cross-cutting (“Lucky ’13” n.p.), I also see them as an attempt, through vignetting, to clarify the point-of-view that can be suggested by travelling shots (figure C.16). Alternatively, this thesis could have offered a diachronic study of a particular director and their application of travelling shots. A number of names suggest themselves through a

69 A label for when early narrative was still partially assembled from disparate films or informed by this process — for instance, the famous monstrative gun shot of The Great Train Robbery (Porter 1903) or the versions of The Kiss in the Tunnel (Smith 1899, Bamforth 1899). 144 combination of their extended, prolific filmmaking, which allows appreciation of gradual change; approach to form; and availability of their work. These include: Howard Hawks, whose visual style closely adheres to classical Hollywood style and would thus help further align the diachronic study with broader trends; Yasujiro Ozu, for his disposition to both contemplation and camera movement; and Steven Spielberg, for a contemporary filmmaker whose career and ready access to available technology maps closely, indeed arguably instigates, the development of intensified continuity, and its belief in movement, and the rise of the blockbuster. Even Alfred Hitchcock, a seemingly exhausted subject, could be renewed by an appreciation of his work in terms of travelling shots. Not only did Hitchcock, in particular through his ‘30s English thrillers, explore the narrative possibilities of journeys, he also showed an acute awareness of how vehicle and cinematic visions intersect. Lifeboat (1944) alone deserves a treatise for how he carefully frames the boat to suggest setting, individual point-of-view, or, towards the end, a communal point-of-view. Further attention could have been paid to new cinematic and vehicle technologies. For instance, the burgeoning independence of travelling shots, due to the liberation of reduced camera size and costs, offers new dynamics. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, whose airburst resulted in wide-spread damage to south-west Russia, was documented thanks to the saturation of miniature bonnet-mounted cameras in Russia due to a practice of insurance companies of reducing rates for policyholders who self-surveil (Sample n.p.). The experimental documentary Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel 2012) was created primarily through saturation covering a fishing vessel with cheap tough GoPros to create something that, thanks to its vessel-wrought, independent exploration of all three axes, can be considered akin to a found version of Michael Snow’s automatic landscape film, La Région Centrale (1971) (Williams n.p.). This process, with its distinction between power and spatial collapse, has a history: Abbas Kiarostami’s exploration of the nexus between mobility and power relations, touched upon in Chapter Three, was foregrounded through the digital medium in Ten (2002), with Kiarostami using miniature dashboard-mounted cameras to cede directorial control by sending the actors and their vehicle away from his ability to interfere. Nevertheless, films regularly reassured me that my general thesis was correct: at the moment, my particular favourite is a scene from Déjà Vu (Scott 2006). This film itself is fascinating, a meta-work on the relationship between trauma, time, and the possibilities of cinema as both surveillance and action. Early on Special Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) leaves his office to ride around in a tram; we are told, via third parties, that it “It’s part of his process, he says it helps him think” while we watch Carlin stare pensively through a tram window (figure C.17). Later on, we see a visualisation of the palimpsests discussed in Chapter Three with a car-chase sequence constructed primarily from a past-tense and rapidly-expiring surveillance stream and present-tense engagement. Other films extend points made in this thesis. The difference between the tracking or the travelling shot’s movement through space and the zoom’s flattening of space is picked up by films such The Long Goodbye (Altman 1973) and The Car (Silverstein 1977). In The Long Goodbye, the travelling shot indicates point-of-view, while the zoom’s distortion visualises 145 thought as particular subjects are picked out without straying from the visual field indicated by the travelling shot. In The Car, a film about a driverless, demon-possessed car, the same strategy of conflating two separate practices of re-framing, along with a demonic orange filter, help convey thought in an animate object (figures C.18-19). I also want to touch upon the work of Claire Denis. This is no standardised approach to travelling shots amidst her work, bar thought in practice. In many of her recent films, Denis uses handheld, lengthy telephoto lens to capture her vehicle's views. This creates a contradictory crushed coverage of on-rushing space that makes it seem as if the shots barely move and instead weirdly drift. The telephoto lens also exaggerates the handheld movement as any bump swings the camera wildly through space. Instead of strong axial movement in depth, we have a strong lateral movement over surface. In Les Salauds/Bastards (2013) this works primarily to give an uncanny pulse, while in L’intrus (2004) and White Material (2009) they mesh with content — night crossings of refugees and yellow dogs, respectively — to create a connection between the two films’ dissection of borders, intrusion, rejection and expulsion of foreign matter. Her intervening film, 35 Rhums/35 Shots of Rum (2008) handles travelling shots in a manner that reminds me of Michael Fried’s discussion of Adolph Menzel’s train sketches, paintings and gouaches. Fried contrasts the common understanding of rail travel as “sitting still while looking through a stationary window at a moving landscape” and thus a forerunner of film, with the physical exertion presented in Menzel’s work (68-70 my italics). Menzel’s work departs from the precise, gridded, alignment of viewer and vehicle to show alternative, changing, angles that also lead us to “ imagine the wind from the train’s motion … in Menzel’s face as well as the bodily contortions by which he must have held a difficult position and executed the drawing at the same time” (69). Normally, in rejoinder, I would observe that the struggle of movement and vision is smoothed out by perception; this is why Steadicam shots code as more human than handheld shooting. But in 35 Shots of Rum the main character Lionel (Alex Descas) is a train driver, and to capture the imagery of his job, Denis shoots the vehicle shots, in which, bar glass, there is no diegetic framing, with a handheld camera, this gives a floating presence to the viewpoints presented by the train shots. Denis’s twist could be seen teleologically, now we see a more realistic travelling shot. But then, if so, it should not be bookmarked by two films with alternative approaches. I would argue that the shots of L’intrus and White Material are similar as both approaches set up a tension within the travelling shot. In L’intrus and White Material it is the tension between the means of collapsing space, movement versus flattening, and in 35 Shots of Rum it is the tension between approaches to space, smooth and abstracted versus exertion and proximate. The importance of this thesis lies in its provision of a model for researching and contextualising these (and other) omissions and outliers. By taking a narrow approach (the practice of a single form of shot) to a broad topic (the entire history of cinema), “Moving Landscapes” has provided a body of work that can illuminate a wide range of future studies, whether they concern auteur analysis, the historicisation of narrative, new visual and vehicle

146 technologies, or new media. Addressing the entire history of the travelling shot has emphasised the ongoing importance of tracing the tension between poetics and perception.

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166 Fuqua, Antoine, dir. Shooter. Paramount, 2007.

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167 —, dir. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. New Line, 2002.

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168 Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1977.

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—, dir. The Insider. Touchstone, 1999.

McTiernan, John, dir. Last Action Hero. Columbia, 1993.

Méliès, Georges, dir. Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon. Star films, 1902.

Miles Brothers, dir. A Trip Down Market Street. Miles Brothers, 1906.

Murnau, F.W., Faust. Ufa, 1926.

Newmeyer, Fred C., dir. Grandma’s Boy. Hall Roach, 1922.

Neveldine, Mark and Brian Taylor, dir. Crank: High Voltage. Lionsgate, 2009.

Nichols, Mike, dir. Catch-22. Paramount, 1970.

Nguyen, Brad, dir. Birdermic: Shock and Terror. Moviehead, 2010.

Noé, Gasper, dir. Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone. Canal+, 1998.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. Interstellar. Warner Brothers, 2014. de Oliveira, Manoel, dir. Amor de Perdição/Doomed Love. Centro Portugues, 1979.

Ozu, Yasujiro, dir. Ohayo/Good Morning. Shochiku, 1959.

Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. Warner Brothers, 1967.

Petit, Chris, dir. Radio On. British Film Institute, 1979.

Pialat, Maurice, dir. La gueule ouverte/The Mouth Agape. Gaumont, 1974.

Pollack, Sydney, dir. This Property is Condemned. Paramount, 1966.

Porter, Edwin S., dir. The Great Train Robbery. Edison, 1903.

—, dir. Hold-up of the Rocky Express. Biograph, 1906.

Promio, Alexandre, dir.Panorama dy grand Canal pris d’un Bateau/Gondola Down the Grand Canal. Lumiere, 1896.

169 Raimi, Sam, dir. Oz The Great and Powerful. Walt Disney, 2013.

Ray, Nicholas, dir. They Live by Night. RKO, 1949.

Reinert, Robert, dir. Opium. Monumental-Film-Werke Berlin, 1919.

Renoir, Jean, dir. La Fille de l’eau/The Whirlpool of Fate. Les Films Jean Renoir, 1925.

—, dir. Une partie de campagne/A Day in the Country. Panthéon, 1946.

Rohmer, Eric, dir. Perceval le Gallois. Les Films du Losange, 1978.

Rosi, Francesco, dir. Le mani sulla città/Hands Over the City. Galatea, 1963.

Rossellini, Roberto, dir. Voyage to Italy. Italia, 1954.

Sarafian, Richard, dir. Vanishing Point. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1971.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. Raging Bull. United Artists, 1980.

—, dir. Taxi Driver. Columbia Pictures, 1976.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Robin Hood. Universal, 2010.

—, dir. Thelma and Louise. MGM, 1991.

Scott, Tony, dir. Déjà Vu. Touchstone, 2006.

—, dir. Enemy of the State. Touchstone, 1998.

—, dir. Top Gun. Paramount, 1986.

Seidl, Ulrich, dir. Hundstage/Dog Days. Allegro, 2001.

Sena, Dominic, dir. Kalifornia. Polygram, 1993.

Shimizu, Hiroshi, dir. Arigato-San/Mr. Thank You. Shochiku, 1936.

—, dir. Hachi no su no Kodomotachi/Children of the Beehive. Shochiku, 1948.

—, dir. Fue no Shiratama/The Undying Pearl. Shochiku, 1929.

Silverstein, Elliot, dir. The Car. Universal, 1977.

Smalley, Philips and Lois Weber, dirs. Suspense. Universal, 1913.

Smith, G.A., dir. As Seen Through a Telescope. George Albert Smith Films, 1901.

—, dir. Grandma’s Reading Glass. George Albert Smith Films, 1900.

—, dir. The Kiss in the Tunnel. George Albert Smith films, November 1899.

Stiller, Ben, dir. Zoolander. Paramount, 2001.

Stone, Oliver, dir. Platoon. Orion, 1986. 170 Snow, Michael, dir. La Région Centrale. Michael Snow, 1971.

Sonnenfeld, Barry, dir. Men in Black. Columbia, 1997.

Spielberg, Steven, dir. A.I.. Warner, 2001.

—, dir. Duel. Universal, 1971.

—, dir. Jaws. Universal, 1975.

—, dir. Jurassic Park. Universal, 1993.

—, dir. The Sugarland Express. Universal, 1974.

Tati, Jacques, dir. Mon Oncle. Gaumont, 1958.

—, dir. Playtime. Jolly, 1967.

—, dir. Trafic. Les Films Corona, 1971.

Tsui, Hark, dir. Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo/Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. China Film, 2010.

Turin, Victor A., dir. Turksib. Vostokkino, 1929.

Van Sant, Gus, dir. My Own Private Idaho. New Line, 1991.

—, dir. Psycho. Universal, 2002.

Verbinski, Gore, dir. The Lone Ranger. Walt Disney, 2013.

Veyre, Gabriel, dir. Le village de Namo - Panorama pris d'une chaise à porteurs/ Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rickshaw. Lumiere, 1900.

Varda, Agnès, dir. Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond. Cine Tamaris, 1985.

Vigo, Jean, dir. L’Atalante. Gaumont, 1934.

Vláčil, Frantisek, dir. Marketa Lazarová. Studio Barrandov, 1967.

Watt, Harry, dir. The Overlanders. Ealing, 1946.

Webb, Mark, dir. The Amazing Spider-Man. Columbia, 2012.

Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, dir. Sud sanaeha/Blissfully Yours. Kick the Machine, 2002.

Weine, Robert, dir. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Decla-Bioscop, 1920.

Wellman, William A., dir. Wings. Paramount, 1927.

Wenders, Wim, dir. Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road. Westdeutsher Rundfunk, 1976.

Welles, Orson, dir. Touch of Evil. Universal, 1958.

171 Witt, Alexander, dir. Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Columbia, 2004.

White, James H., dir. Black Diamond Express. Edison, 1896.

—, dir. Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower. Edison, 1900.

Winer, Jason, dir. Arthur. Warner, 2011.

Ulmer, Edgar G., dir. Detour. PRC, 1945.

Yates, David, dir. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Warner Brothers, 2009.

Yates, Peter, dir. Bullitt. Warner, 1968.

Zemeckis, Robert, dir. Contact. Warner, 1997.

172 Appendix Chapter One

1.1 Gondola Down the Grand Canal (Promio 1896) 1.2 Namo Village, Panorama Taken from a Rick- shaw (Veyre 1900)

1.3 Through the Haverstraw Tunnel (Bitzer 1897) 1.4 Psycho (Van Sant 2002)

1.5 Psycho (Van Sant 2002) 1.6 Psycho(Van Sant 2002)

173 1.7 Psycho (Van Sant 2002) 1.8 Psycho (Van Sant 2002)

1.9 Psycho (Van Sant 2002) 1.10 Psycho (Van Sant 2002)

1.11 Psycho (Van Sant 2002) Notice that the shot 1.12 Psycho (Van Sant 2002) impossibly penetrates a window. Spatial power.

1.13 Shooter (Fuqua 2007) 1.14 Shooter (Fuqua 2007)

174 1.15 Shooter (Fuqua 2007) 1.16 Shooter (Fuqua 2007)

1.17 Shooter (Fuqua 2007) 1.18 Shooter (Fuqua 2007)

175

1.19 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) Hair twisting in the 1.20 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) impossible wind.

1.21 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) 1.22 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950)

175 1.23 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) 1.24 Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950)

1.25 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) The 1.26 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) and 360 degree shot opens... follows a police car around...

1.27 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) being 1.28 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) and lead by action... conversation....

1.29 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) be- 1.30 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg 1974) and fore wrapping around... returning to the beginning to close. 176 1.31 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 1.32 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 2009)

1.33 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 1.34 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 2009)

1.35 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 1.36 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 2009)

1.37 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 1.38 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 2009) Note the bricks knocked out of the way. 177 1.39 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 1.40 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates 2009) 2009)

1.41 Faust (Murnau 1926) 1.42 Faust (Murnau 1926) Shadow to suggest source.

1.43 Faust (Murnau 1926) 1.44 Faust (Murnau 1926)

1.45 Faust (Murnau 1926) 1.46 Liliom (Lang 1934)

178 1.47 Liliom (Lang 1934) 1.48 Liliom (Lang 1934)

1.49 Liliom (Lang 1934) 1.50 Liliom (Lang 1934)

1.51 Liliom (Lang 1934) An elaborate matte paint- 1.52 Liliom (Lang 1934) ing of shifting perspectives.

1.53 Liliom (Lang 1934) 1.54 Liliom (Lang 1934)

179 1.55 Liliom (Lang 1934) 1.56 Liliom (Lang 1934)

1.57 Liliom (Lang 1934) 1.58 Liliom (Lang 1934)

1.59 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 1.60 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966)

1.61 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 1.62 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966)

180 1.63 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 1.64 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966)

1.65 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 1.66 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966)

1.67 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966) 1.68 This Property Is Condemned (Pollack 1966)

1.69 The Fast and the Furious (Cohen 2001) 1.70 You, The Living (Andersson 2007)

181 1.71 You, The Living (Andersson 2007) 1.72 You, The Living (Andersson 2007)

1.73 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) 1.74 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974)

1.75 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) 1.76 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) Documentary footage as bystanders notice the camera.

1.77 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) 1.78 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974)

182 1.79 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974) 1.80 A Mouth Agape (Pialat 1974)

1.81 Pola X (Carax 1999)

183 Chapter Two

2.1 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013) 2.2 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013)

2.3 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013) 2.4 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013)

2.5 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013) 2.6 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013)

184 2.7 The Lone Ranger First Trailer (2013) 2.8 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) Establishing

2.9 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) 2.10 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) Point of view Mastery over space

2.11 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) 2.12 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) Fireworks

2.13 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004) 2.14 The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass 2004)

185 2.15 As Seen Through a Telescope (Smith 1901) 2.16 As Seen Through a Telescope (Smith 1901)

2.17 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) 2.18 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996)

2.19 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) 2.20 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996)

2.21 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) Mastery 2.22 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) of space, as per The Bourne Supremacy. 186 2.23 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996) 2.24 Independence Day (Emmerich 1996)

2.25 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the 2.26 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001) Ring (Jackson 2001)

2.27 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the 2.28 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001) Ring (Jackson 2001)

2.29Te Lord of the Rings: Te Fellowship of the Ring 2.30Te Lord of the Rings: Te Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001) (Jackson 2001) 187 2.31 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the 2.32 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001) Ring (Jackson 2001)

2.33 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001)

188 Chapter Three

3.1 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) The 3.2 Blissfully Yours (Weerasethakul 2002) windscreen as divider. 42 minutes in

3.3 Late Spring (Ozu 1949) 3.4 What Did the Lady Forget? (Ozu 1937)

3.5 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) 3.6 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991)

189 3.7 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) A 3.8 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) shop front passed... pondered about...

3.9 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) 3.10 Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami 1991) before being returned to.

3.11 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.12 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.13 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.14 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

190 3.15 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.16 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.17 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.18 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.19 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.20 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.21 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.22 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

191 3.23 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.24 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.25 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.26 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) The bus as movie theatre.

3.27 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936) 3.28 Mr Thank You (Shimizu 1936)

3.29 The Overlanders (Watts 1946) Unframed 3.30 The Overlanders (Watts 1946) Its source compound shot. 192 3.31 The Overlanders (Watts 1946) A framed com- 3.32 Dog Days (Seidl 2001) pund shot, underlining its source.

193 Chapter Four

4.1 Thelma & Louise (Scott 1991) The mirroring 4.2 Thelma & Louise (Scott 1991) speed... of...

4.3 Thelma & Louise (Scott 1991) as excitement. 4.4 Thelma & Louise (Scott 1991)

4.5 Cars (Lasseter 2006) 4.6 Cars (Lasseter 2006)

194 4.7 Cars (Lasseter 2006) 4.8 Cars (Lasseter 2006)

4.9 Vanishing Point (Sarafan 1971) 4.10 Vanishing Point (Sarafan 1971)

4.11 Voyage to Italy (Rossellini 1954) 4.12 Locke (Knight 2013)

4.13 Radio On (Petit 1979) 4.14 Radio On (Petit 1979)

195 4.15 Radio On (Petit 1979) 4.16 Radio On (Petit 1979)

4.17 The Brown Bunny (Gallo 2003) 4.18 The Brown Bunny (Gallo 2003)

4.19 Trafc (Tati 1971) 4.20 Trafc (Tati 1971)

4.21 Trafc (Tati 1971) 4.22 Road Games (Franklin 1981)

196 Conclusion

C.1 Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976) C.2 Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976)

C.3 Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976) C.4 Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976)

C.5 Holy Motors (Carax 2012) C.6 Holy Motors (Carax 2012)

197 C.7 Holy Motors (Carax 2012) C.8 Holy Motors (Carax 2012)

C.9 Holy Motors (Carax 2012) C.10 Holy Motors (Carax 2012)

C.11 Holy Motors (Carax 2012) C.12 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg 2012)

C.13 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg 2012) C.14 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg 2012) Compound epiphany... 198 C.15 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg 2012) C.16 Suspense (Smalley and Weber 1913) the source of compound epiphany.

C.17 Déjà Vu (Scott 2006) C.18 The Car (Silverstein 1977) Wide-angle...

C.19 The Car (Silverstein 1977) zoom to telephoto as a demon tracks distant bike riders.

199