Chapter Title: NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE Chapter Author(s): Bruce Isaacs Book Title: New Punk Cinema Book Editor(s): Nicholas Rombes Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2005) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r28gs.13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Punk Cinema This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:46:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8. NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE Bruce Isaacs The Golden Age of Hollywood Charting a revision of ± or diversion from ± a particular kind of cinema presumes that cinematic trends are coherent and that such trends can be identified through a series of texts, authors and what can loosely be defined as distributors.This is often less instructive than it initially appears, and can sometimes lead to broad and occasionally meaningless generalisations.Con- temporary critical writing, however, distinguishes classical narrative cinema as the zenith of the Hollywood studio film of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, exemplified in the work of Frank Capra (Mr Smith Goes to Washington [1939], It's a Wonderful Life [1946]), Howard Hawks (Scarface [1932], The Maltese Falcon [1940]) and John Ford (Stagecoach [1939], The Grapes of Wrath [1940], The Searchers [1956]).Though directors such as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock had produced films that constituted a departure from the classical model (Welles's Citizen Kane [1940]) and Hitchcock's Rope [1948] spring to mind as deliberate attempts at formal innovation), the studio film thrived on the founding principles of an often reworked and imminently recognisable formula.I use the phrase `founding principles' to avoid the over- simplified (and yet perennial) notion that a single homogeneous film structure constituted an entire cinematic tradition, which is clearly not the case.This essay will not take the position that the studio film offered one product in a variety of disguises.It was rather a rich and complex body of texts (reflecting numerous aesthetic traditions) that informs a contemporary American cinema as much as it offers a vital point of departure. David Bordwell's influential work on narrative highlights a number of 126 This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:46:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE features common to the studio film (Bordwell 1986: 17±34).Though there were anomalies (we will consider Welles shortly), the focus of the classical narrative was on realism, both aesthetically (photography, lighting, editing, etc.) and thematically (in the choice of plot-lines and characters). The dominant formula ± introduction ± development ± denouement ± constructed the staple narratives of Hollywood melodrama (Gone With the Wind [1939], Casablanca [1942]), the social/political treatise (Mr Smith Goes to Washing- ton, The Grapes of Wrath), film noir (The Maltese Falcon [1941], The Big Sleep [1946]) and the biblical epic (Samson and Delilah [1949], The Ten Commandments [1956]).Though diverse in subject matter and produced in response to a variety of social and historical phenomena, these films ex- emplified the abiding narrative formula.Hollywood productions reflected the dominant ideology (resulting in a demographic mainstream, a concept that exists in current studio marketing strategies), particularly its conception of an American `reality' that functioned self-evidently on relations of cause and effect in the pursuit of historical truth (the quest for narrative truth offered a cinematic substitute).Thus, a remarkable number of studio films depict protagonists who attempt to solve a mystery using a prescribed set of clues that amount to a comprehensive back-story, the plot (what was actually depicted) and probable future developments (the causal consequences).Nar- rative closure was presumed, in spite of increasingly convoluted story-lines (Raymond Chandler confessed to a less than comprehensive picture of the plot of The Big Sleep such that even he as author and, later, a script consultant on the Howard Hawks film, was not certain who was responsible for the death of the chauffeur), and rarely challenged. A second feature to which Bordwell alludes ± and on which Robert Ray significantly expands (Ray 1985: 32±55) ± is an hermetically sealed frame of representation.Action depicted on film was required to cohere within the sacrosanct boundaries of the film narrative.Formal cinematic technique was predetermined by the story, of which narrative was merely a necessary and unobtrusive function.Simply put, cinematic narrative was an enclosed, insular world that functioned without intrusion of an extraneous agency, whether creative or administrative.While a Howard Hawks film drew audiences because it was a Howard Hawks film and a Selznick production stamped an authority of big budgets, glamorous stars and soaring melodrama (alerting audiences to a particular cinematic `reality'), the narrative itself rarely functioned with an acknowledgement of the director's input or the studio's interference; Hitchcock appeared momentarily in each of his films, but few cinema-goers of the 1940s and '50s would have recognised him.The conventional narrative presented the story according to the dictates of a `real world' that was presumed to inform the cinematic world holistically.Indeed, directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford, were esteemed in American 127 This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:46:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NEW PUNK CINEMA popular culture because of a fidelity to the `real'.Ford's long shots of Monument Valley in The Searchers are an elegy for that which makes the American frontier what it is in the collective (and reflective) imagination. Paradoxically, the hermetically sealed world of the Hollywood narrative assured the lasting influence of realism in American cinema.The greater part of contemporary American cinema seeks to erase the `screen' that separates the image from the audience.In spite of (and perhaps even due to) alternative cinematic trends (beginning with the Hollywood New Wave of the 1970s), the dominant aesthetic of American cinema is founded on realism.A mass audience view films in a darkened room, insulated from an external reality, as audiences once did in the presentation of silent cinema or at the advent of sound, to sustain disbelief that it is viewing a world fundamentally divorced from its own, a world based upon a technological and textual construct. Classical Hollywood cinema, in forbidding the intrusion of the cinematic conceit, at least in part constructed the foundations of what Andre Bazin termed `the myth of total cinema' (Bazin 1974: 17±22). Locating the impetus for a new punk cinema, particularly in terms of narrative experimentation, requires us to return to Welles and Hitchcock, and to dabble somewhat in the notion of the `auteur'. Auteur theory, championed by the French film director, FrancËois Truffaut and his Cahiers du CineÂma colleagues, located the creative force of a film in the director, or more correctly, the director/writer; Truffaut was less accepting of material that was not directed by the script-writer.Among other things, auteur theory, apart from a philosophy of film, collected a group of young French film- makers into what was later (though remarkably quickly) termed `The French New Wave' (Marie 2003: 13); whether this wave represented anything cohesive, aesthetically and thematically, is still debated.What is indisputable is that Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (two iconic figures of the French New Wave) made films partially as a response to a tradition of French cinema founded on classical narrative structures, high production values and a reified cinematic realism.Thus we have in Godard's Breathless a protagonist who addresses the camera, collapsing the boundary between filmic (narrative) reality and the medium that once merely reproduced a `real world' in complete and unerring form.Indeed, Breathless represents a seminal moment in the dawning of cinematic self-awareness (if not the first) since the advent of talking pictures and the shift from theatricality to realism in Hollywood cinematic narrative. The film-makers of the French New Wave identified themselves almost immediately within a tradition of auteurs, including Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock and, significantly, Orson Welles.Welles epitomised the auteur in his experimentation with the classical Hollywood film and his incompat- ibility with the auspices of the studio system. Citizen Kane is a landmark in the 128 This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:46:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE transition from a classical to a post-classical narrative film and informs substantially the experimental narrative cinema of the French New Wave, the Hollywood New Wave, and the rise of the `Hollywood Independent' in the late 1980s.If Welles had not conceived of a cinematic self-awareness as