This installment of the MadBlog will be decidedly less “mad” than usual—just an addendum, written without much interactive gimmickry, to supplement my previous post on Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s hit film, Gravity. A friend and compatriot of Cuaron’s, Alejandro González Iñárritu, has just released his latest film, Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). It will be worth your while to see this new film, a critical darling already, but when you do, please see it as being “in conversation” with Gravity. There is something slightly extraordinary about the two films, something they have in common. Please allow me to explain.
Birdman stars Michael Keaton as a loosely fictionalized version of himself, a washed up Hollywood star named Riggan Thomson. The film follows his attempt to mount a New York theater production, lurching through rehearsals and previews and on to opening night. Keaton’s character is on the edge of madness and appears to have telekinetic superpowers—or is he only imagining that? Thankfully Iñárritu leaves that question unanswered. This ambiguity makes the film mildly philosophical, as it encourages discussion about reality, metaphysics, and deception in theater and film alike. But this isn’t what makes the film extraordinary. We’ve seen plenty of films question reality, and often more effectively so. And it isn’t the story that makes the film extraordinary, either. We’ve seen backstage drama before. Nor is it the acting that makes the film extraordinary. The film places a huge burden on the performances (and some of the actors carry that burden very well) but this is merely a symptom of the thing that does make the film extraordinary: the fact that it has almost no cuts.
This, as I’ve said, is slightly extraordinary. But is it extraordinary in a big, meaningful way, or is it a one-off? Is it just a novel gimmick, or is it a major development in cinematic technique, worth examining at leangth? Well, dear reader, here on the Island of Dr. Thoreau, everything is worth examining at length.
Aside from the opening sequence and the denouement, both of which engage in a bit of traditional editing—that is, cutting from shot to shot—Birdman unfolds in a virtually seamless manner. Instead of breaking each scene into a number discrete camera angles, Iñárritu stages them continuously in long takes, and uses various tricks to hide any necessary transitions (within scenes and between them) that can’t be performed continuously.
Some of these tricks are old, and recall earlier attempts to accomplish the purely continuous film. The key example is Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which plays out in virtually one take, with only a few hidden cuts. These were necessitated by the practical constraints of shooting on film, as the longest any single take could run was about ten minutes. Hitchcock hid the cuts by moving the camera past a character or architectural element, blocking out the whole frame so that a truly invisible cut could be made. Iñárritu uses some similar sneak cuts, like when a character passes through a darkened stairwell to go into another space. A cut undoubtedly occurs somewhere in that dark interval. It is not perceptible, but it allows the crew to light and dress the two spaces separately, and allows the actors to perform the two sequences separately rather than all at once.
Less sneakily, Iñárritu makes a couple of transitions from one day to the next by aiming the camera at the sky and time-lapsing from dark to light, or vice-versa, before tilting the camera back down and “continuing” into the next scene.
However, the method Birdman uses more frequently to achieve seamlessness is digital compositing. Compositing (and related tricks, performed to blend separate elements and/or performers into a single continuous shot) allows Iñárritu to keep the action uninterrupted while simultaneously avoiding slow, plodding, real-time transitions. That was Rope’s big problem: movie audiences expect a certain amount of change, of dynamic movement, and this is tough to accomplish without cinema’s purest special effect, the cut; depriving himself of the ability to “cut to the chase,” so to speak, Hitchcock had trouble moving the story in cinematic terms.
The most obvious instances of compositing in Birdman are also the film’s biggest showoff scenes. The biggest of these comes during Riggan’s encounter in the street with his former superhero self, the titular “Birdman” of movie decades past. A veritable Hollywood special effects demo unfolds around him (shit blows up, etc.). Throughout the film, the same sort of trickery goes on, usually in more subtle ways—to move from one space to another, or to move from one day to the next in seamless fashion, or to make objects appear to move by force of Riggan’s mind. These more “invisible” cases of compositing are more in keeping with the typical purpose of CGI in Hollywood today.
However, to conceive of an entire film in the way this one does, where compositing replaces cutting—this is true bravado, ladies and gentlemen! And this is where Iñárritu’s effort begs to be placed up next to Cuarón’s Gravity, which also shows off with a lot of long takes, relying also on that green screen and the combination of multiple elements in almost every shot. Is Iñárritu trying to one-up his countryman’s bravado? To recreate Gravity’s Oscar statue gravitational pull?
In both movies, the actors bear the weight (puns are okay with me) that long takes place on them. They are required to do a kind of acting more like that demanded of the stage actor, opening up the space for showoff performances. In a “classical” film structured by conventional editing, an actor performs her/his role piecemeal, one camera angle at a time; the fragmented performance is sewn together by the editor, who may use techniques of continuity editing to make the whole thing feel less fragmentary. On the stage, by contrast, an actor’s performance is “whole,” unified, continuous (read Walter Benjamin’s reading of Luigi Pirandello’s insights from long ago on film vs. stage acting). In both Gravity and Birdman, there is a shift toward theater-like acting, but let’s not kid ourselves: Sandra Bullock and Michael Keaton are not simply acting out their roles on a stage. The demands of this kind of filmmaking are very complex, and very different from that of the theater. The new challenge for film actors is to overcome the awkwardness of life in the blank space of a green screened studio or a motion-capture volume. Whether they deserve awards for it or not, well… that’s not up to me.
My main point is that this kind of filmmaking is markedly different from the classical model, and not just in its approach to performances. I wonder, is it so drastically different as to be “post-cinematic?” Is digital cinema migrating away from editing altogether? This was my first question, as I meditated on Birdman after seeing it.
Editing has long been considered the most “cinematic” tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox. No previous art form had anything quite like film editing: the ability to make dramatic movements occur within the instant, that is, within the imperceptible fraction of a second between frames, in the cut. What Cuarón and Iñárritu have done is to deemphasize that tool. Why? Mostly to show off, but also, maybe, in order to advance the art of cinema in a digital age that constantly threatens to destroy it. After all, compositing is part of the art of cinema, too. It was one of the primary tools used by cinema’s earliest storytellers (see Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, R.W. Paul...). Editing, as we think of it today, came along relatively late in the process. For early filmmakers, any cuts were considered tricks and had to be carefully hidden—just like in Birdman. Both cutting and compositing have been integral from the first, as two different ways to combine elements on the screen.
In the educational video below, John P. Hess of FlimmkaerIQ.com illustrates this very point, and tries to make the case that CGI is worthy of being called “cinematic.” Please, for education’s sake alone, take the seventeen and a half minutes to view the video before reading on:
At the end of the video, Hess makes a fairly sensible argument: “There are cynics today that believe modern film is too reliant on CGI, that we should return to a simpler form of ‘real filmmaking.’ But as I hope you learned, that era never existed. Filmmakers from the very beginning have sought to push the medium with special effects.” So far, so good. Compositing is, indeed, about as old as the movies themselves. It could even be taken one step further. Photographers were playing similar tricks with still images before movies existed. And you could say that Eadweard Muybridge, well-known inventor of pre-cinematic motion picture technique, practiced some compositing when he silhouetted his trotting horses to abstract them from their backgrounds. [Interestingly, if perhaps tangentially, Muybridge did his technically virtuosic work in the U.S. after emigrating from elsewhere, just like Cuarón and Iñárritu.]
But let’s not be too hasty. Hess’ argument takes a dubitable turn when he claims that “the undeniable truth about filmmaking is the only thing that matters is what’s on that screen.” Frankly, he couldn’t be more wrong here. For one thing: sound! More to the point, however: Sure, “what’s on that screen” is essential, but the only reason a movie is a movie—the only reason it moves—is because of what is not, and never will be, on that screen. Movies move between the frames of film, between the images, not in them. Or, putting it differently, the cinematic image comes into existence as the difference between what’s on the screen in one frame and what’s there in the next. This is where editing does, perhaps, deserve its rep as the most “cinematic” component of filmmaking, since cuts work between frames.
That said, compositing is “cinematic,” too. From Porter’s static matte technique to the more versatile travelling matte, and from the precise frequency of the sodium vapor lamp to the CGI-enhanced green screen of digital cinema, the real trick with compositing has always been the sheer numbers: the number of frames and, by extension, the number of differences between them. A convincing composite effect in one photo is not so hard for a human to pull off, but in thousands, if not millions, of frames? That requires technology. Special effects that blend multiple elements into a moving picture are made by mechanical (or electronic, or digital) appendages to the movie camera, reinventions of cinema that go beyond the basic photographic capture of the image, stretch the potential of “what’s on that screen” 24 times per second. In this sense, in agreement with Dziga Vertov if not Sergei Eisenstein, compositing is montage.
Continual refinement in this area has the important task of adding to cinema’s total number of possible expressions of change, difference, movement. Compositing feeds cinema’s voracious appetite for images, always to make them disappear before our eyes. Our eyes: ever hungry for novel visions, just as film artists are ever hungry to manufacture them. Here’s to the showoffs!
Anyway, consider Birdman recommended.
Humbly Yours,
Dr. Thoreau