These are some recent learnings:
Examining The Past
Max Ophuls: Lola Montes (1955)
The use of the background in widescreen
Lola Montes is a film that illustrates the exciting life of the Lola Montes in retrospect. In the present she is part of circus that is re-enacting her life. The film jumps between the present stage show and actual flashbacks.
Ophuls was interested in the past and the present, represented in frame by the background and the foreground. The film begins with the circus master in the foreground and Lola at the back. As we are explained that this is a tale of the past – what has already happened, the camera moves back to reveal Lola.
Once the film has moved on to follow her story her position on screen fluctuates between foreground and background. This represents her life long yearning for centre stage and importance to her men that is never achieved.
The camera and editing are concerned with exploring the barriers to Lola’s happiness. When she is searching for happiness the editing supports her state of mind by cutting on motion. The style of editing follows meaning, rather than creates it.
Alain Renais: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960)
Melding past and present
For Renais, it is a collective of memories that creates a context for the actions of the character’s behaviour. He uses editing to illustrate to the audience the character’s past. Hiroshima Mon Amour is the story of a woman who falls in love with a man who reminds her of a previous lover who died in the war. Through her new man she relives her past – tragedy and all. Renais links the past and present through rhythmic montage of association. In a notable scene he cuts as follows: mid shot of woman watching man sleep – His arm is twisted – mid shot of woman – close up of hand – mid shot of woman – close up of her previous lover’s dead hand – mid shot of woman. In this sequence the shot of the woman is used to meld the past and present.
Alain Renais continued to explore the past and present relationship in his later films Night And Fog (1955), Muriel (1963) and La Guerre Est Finie (1966). He examined memory in Providence (1977) and the present in Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980)
I have been reading about the editing techniques used in the film Rashomon to represent the same incident from the perspectives of four different witnesses. After watching the film, I have decided to follow it with Jet Li's Hero, and then the Sin City, that have a similar narrative structure.
