PSYCHO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

One of the most influential examples of its use occurs in Hitchcock’s film Psycho, when Norman Bates pushes the car containing Marion Crane’s body into the swamp.

We know that this sequence was very important to Hitchcock. In his interviews with Truffaut (Hitchcock/Truffaut, 1966), Hitchcock revealed that, despite the shortness of the sequence (around one minute, with two setups) and despite largely self-financing the film through his production company, he spent a reputed 20% of the budget on the rig which controlled the car’s descent into the swamp.

Having discovered Marion’s brutally murdered body in the shower, Norman puts her and the $40,000 she stole in the boot of her new car, and pushes it into the swamp.

We cut between close-ups of him chewing and his point of view of her car sinking slowly into the swamp. But then the car stops, only half submerged. Norman looks around anxiously. The car doesn’t budge. Then with a gurgle it goes under, and we cut back to Norman’s CU to see a tiny bit of relief cross his face.

Just as Kuleshov’s audiences found themselves projecting their own feelings into the minimal performance, in Psycho, we find ourselves, almost against our will, empathising with Norman’s dilemma as he watches the car sink, stop, then finally go under. We share his anxiety, and then his relief.

Yet this is a character we hardly know, and don’t much like. We’re reeling from Marion Crane’s death – and despite the mythology, it’s not just because of the famous shower sequence. We were set up to believe that Marion was the central character, and despite her moral ambiguity – she was meeting a man for illicit sex in hotel rooms in her lunch hour, and then stole $40,000 from a sleazy customer so she could be with her beau – we have gradually come to accept, and even like her.

Hitchcock played his part in this – casting a sympathetic actress in Janet Leigh, then using a couple of subjective sequences with a suspicious traffic cop to connect us to her, and finally underlining it when she checks into the Bates Motel and has to deal with that weirdo Bates.

And then, just 45 minutes into the story, she’s snatched away. And now we’re being asked to emphasise with a strange, somewhat creepy man who is at the very least a voyeur, and could be much more. But such is the power of the Kuleshov effect that we all share Norman’s anxiety as the car refuses to sink.

[To be fair, the identification we feel with Bates at this point doesn’t come entirely out of the blue – Hitchcock has carefully set us up for the switch through the morally ambiguous experience of sharing in Bates’ voyeurism as Marion gets undressed, and through Norman’s ‘Mother, what have you done?!’ panic after he discovers Marion’s body. But the significant shift comes during the car-in-the-swamp sequence.]

THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967)

Chapter 5: 0:20:53 – ‘Taking a Dive.’

For his birthday, Benjamin Braddock’s unbearably materialistic, social-climbing yet gauche father has given him a scuba diving outfit. He insists that Benjamin reward him by demonstrating it to the guests at Benjamin’s party – all of them his parents’ friends. At this point, Benjamin appears to be friendless.

Mind you, Benjamin himself is not a man we readily empathise with. He’s anxious. Whiny. And far from movie star handsome. But by the end of this sequence, we’re certainly on his side. And ready to forgive his many coming failings.

Although the centrepiece of this sequence is an extended first-person shot through the mask of the outfit (Shot 2 in a classic POV sandwich), many other aspects underline the story’s subjective nature.

NOTE:

• We never see Dustin Hoffman’s face – his reactions are withheld to encourage us to project into his experience.
• The hand on the mask when he struggles to the surface for the first time feels very personal – we experience it from inside the mask, and identify with the character behind that mask.
• Sound, especially the exaggerated sound of his breathing, is used to emphasise both ‘what he experiences’ and ‘what he feels.’
• Even the set-up, with his father making the pitch to the guests around the pool while Benjamin waits inside, is ‘what he experiences.’
• Although there is a shot 3 (‘how they feel and react’), we still never get to see how he feels. Instead, the camera moves away from a CU of his mask to a wide shot of an isolated, lonely boy hiding at the bottom of the pool – and we supply his feelings.

ROBOCOP (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Chapters 6 & 7: 00:24:13 – 00:29:18

Hyper capitalism has led to a violent disconnected society, for which the hyper-capitalists have an equally violent solution – a robotic policeman. However, when the first prototype is demonstrated to the OCP board, the robot can’t distinguish between truth and demonstration and slaughters half the people in the room.

So they decide to go another direction, and when Police Officer Murphy is maimed and then murdered violently, they have their opportunity – they build a robot around his remains.

After Murphy’s brutal death, we experience his failed resuscitation and reconstruction from “inside”, and it’s instructive to look at the many different ways that this is constructed as first person story-telling – right up to the first moment we ‘see ourselves’ on the TV screen in the laboratory.

The sequence begins with a helicopter landing on the roof of a hospital. Murphy’s horribly mangled body is rushed into the operating theatre, where an ultimately unsuccessful attempt is made to save his life.

In the beginning there are all the standard tropes of subjectivity in a hospital; point of view shots of the lights in the corridor, a nurse shining a torch directly into the camera lens to ‘check his pupils’ and so on, but it quickly gets more interesting.

While the battle to save his life continues to him and around him, we see a couple of quick flashbacks of his family life – his son and his wife – but shot so that they are both direct to camera, breaking the fourth wall, and inflected to imply emotion. As the camera moves down a corridor towards a bedroom, his wife leaps up from their bed to confront him direct to camera. Then, as he drifts off towards death, his family stands on the curb, waving farewell as the camera simultaneously zooms out and speeds away from them.

Then we drift into black as the voices of the theatre staff slowly fade away – ‘That’s it. He’s gone. Call it.’ Followed by a long silence, broken by the fizz of static, and the beginnings of a primitive computer boot sequence (probably state of the art at the time).

Now comes an extended sequence in which the screen becomes an ever-crashing, rebooting interface between ‘him’ and the scientists recreating him, during which they sometimes direct looks and questions to ‘him’ through his ‘eyes’. Then, in two extraordinary sequences, they firstly discuss further mutilating his battered body right in front of ‘him’ (concluded by the order from the ‘corporate scientist’ to wipe his memory and prep him for surgery); and later, he gets a big sloppy New Year kiss from a scientist.

All of this subjective storytelling keeps alive the idea that, underneath the emotionless robot they think they are building, there is still the spirit of the human he once was. We feel enormous sympathy for him – much more sympathy than we would have as an objective observer of the process. At one point, his new ‘arm’ threatens to crush the hand of his principal torturer, and we almost cheer.

Finally, Robocop is ready for his ‘birth.’ The camera fades up to reveal a gathering of dignitaries and scientists seen through a sheet of plastic. With a flourish, the corporate scientist whips off the plastic sheet, and gestures him forward. As the crowd applauds him (and themselves) off to the side we catch the first glimpse of ‘our’ new self in a TV monitor.

Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Chapter 27 1:53:18–2:03:00

Goodfellas is the story of Henry Hill, an ambitious Brooklyn street kid who becomes a ‘wise guy’ with the mob. For me, it’s the pinnacle of Scorsese’s masterful oeuvre. And this sequence is the pinnacle of collaborative creative filmmaking within the film.

Goodfellas is a portrait of the alluring thrills of pursuing money and power, and the devastating consequences of succeeding. This segment is an intensely subjective expression of Henry’s last day as a wise guy: he desperately tries to balance family life, his mistress, all his day-to-day responsibilities as a mobster, and a blistering coke habit as, second by second, his perception frays.

Don’t check your blood pressure while you’re watching this, because there’s no way you won’t be pulled into Henry’s growing paranoia and panic. This sequence goes well beyond the cinematic formalities of POV sandwiches to flood the screen with subjectivity in about as many ways as cinematic language can express.

1. Many literal POV sandwiches (Shot 1: looker; Shot 2: what is seen; Shot 3: reaction), including the present/absent helicopter, its presence or absence emphasised in the sound mix.
2. Imaginary POV sandwiches, including freeze frames to emphasise subjectivity, as he imagines what his runner, Lois, did while he was out of the house. Around 2:00:00 – firstly her ‘OK’ reaction to his ‘Just do it!’ on the phone, and then the completely imagined sequence of her threatening the entire enterprise by calling from the house – including a freeze frame to emphasise the subjectivity.
3. Direct address voice-over that attempts to put order to the chaos, from the constantly revisited checklist of tasks to in-the-moment reactions, such as ‘Right away I knew he didn’t want them…’ against POV shots of Jimmy fiddling with the guns he no longer wants.
4. An editing style that replaces neat transitions with jarring jump cuts and slivers of micro-moments – glimpses in the rearview mirror, the pot of sauce, guns shoved into a paper bag…
5. Music driving him on, sitting somewhere between external comment and internal propulsion, with various contemporary music tracks jostling their way to the top of the mix in a jangled, fractured accompaniment to the jangled, fractured editing.
   1. At 1:58, in a brief moment of respite for Henry and Karen, Muddy Waters sings, ‘Everything’s gonna be alright this morning…’.
   2. Harry Nilsson’s ‘Jump into the Fire’, with its driving bass riff, beginning his day, then surging up and down in the mix as paranoia ebbs and flows, finally reprising as Henry backs out of his driveway to take Lois home to get her hat – and has a policeman put a gun to his head.
   3. The Rolling Stones ‘Monkey Man’ as all the errands stack up.
   4. And, in a moment of ironic sweetness, George Harrison’s ‘What is Life’ as Henry and Karen seem to momentarily regain control of their lives, smashed across by Muddy Waters singing ‘I’m a Rolling Stone’ as Henry snorts at Sandy’s place, driving the camera into a sweaty close-up.
6. The near car crash at around 1:55:00, where the POV sandwiches switch from searching the sky for (temporarily absent) helicopters, to suddenly spotting the car stopped in front of him, followed by multiple reaction shots of his panicked attempts to avoid rear-ending the car: helicopter paranoia vs. immediate reality.
7. Even notionally objective shots of the car driving emphasise Henry’s erratic driving, which emphasises his urgency and paranoia.

It’s difficult to know which parts of this extraordinary piece of cinema craft were scripted before the shoot, planned and executed during the shoot, or discovered during the edit – but the result is a perfect example of writer-director-editor collaboration, crystallised in editing great Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting, and the sound and music design.

Witness (Weir, 1985)

First 30 minutes

In storytelling terms, WITNESS is the mirror image of PSYCHO. Instead of having our central character snatched away, the central character of WITNESS doesn’t even appear until 15 minutes into the story.

Whose story is WITNESS telling? Is it:

1. Rachel? The story of a young Amish widow, who needs to get out of her small community to escape intense communal pressure to marry a good man she doesn’t love.

2. Samuel? The story of a young Amish boy who revels in the wonders of the world outside his small community, but whose life is put at great risk when he also witnesses the dangers of that world.

3. John Book? The story of an idealist cop who has become cynical and hard, who needs to protect a young Amish witness so he can defeat the evil in his world, and in doing so rediscovers a belief in humanity’s goodness as well as its evil.

For a short time at the very beginning, it seems that WITNESS will be the story of Rachel, Samuel’s mother. Then it becomes Samuel’s story – until finally Harrison Ford appears at around the 15-minute mark. But even then, it stays Samuel’s story for another 10 minutes, until Weir masterfully shifts focus using Subjectivity, an Ambiguous Narrative Ellipsis and two reversals – plunging the story into the second act with Harrison Ford at the wheel.

Around 6 minutes into the film, Rachel and Samuel are being seen off at the railway station by Rachel’s father-in-law Eli, and by Rachel’s prospective new husband, Daniel.

‘You’ll see such wonderful things’ Daniel tells Samuel.

‘You be careful out there among the English’ says Eli.

And with those tellingly contradictory views of the outside world, Samuel and his mother get on the train.

Up to this point the story has been Rachel’s, if it’s been anybody’s. She’s got the problem – she’s only just widowed, and already the community want her to get married again – to someone she respects but doesn’t love.

Samuel in the Train Station

But then it starts to become Samuel’s story, as we see his delight in this new world through his eyes – especially when their train is delayed, and they have to spend three hours in the railway station at Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love!?).

This sequence begins 9’ 29” minutes into the film, and concludes at 11’ 40”.

A couple of things worth noting in this sequence:

• Putting the camera at Samuel’s eye-height to boost our sense of identification.
• The little reversal, when we and Samuel both discover that the man we thought was Amish is a Hasidic Jew – which again boosts our identification with Samuel because we share his presumption, and therefore his surprise.
• The use of music to underpin his (and our) emotional responses.
• The ‘doubled’ POV sandwich – Samuel looking at the statue, the statue looking down at Samuel.

Then, the world suddenly turns very dark. Samuel goes to the men’s toilets, where he witnesses a brutal murder, and narrowly escapes being discovered by the murderer.

Witness: Murder in the Toilets

In this sequence, which runs from 11’40” to 15’ 34”, it’s worth noting:

• Several times where shot 2 of the POV sandwich (‘What is seen’) is replaced by ‘what is imagined and/or what is heard’, which turns the POV sandwich from three shots to one shot, because shots 1 & 3 run on together.
• The way POV is quite fluid from moment to moment. The sequence is definitely Samuel’s story, but some of the point-of-view sandwiches are from other characters in the scene – particularly McFee (Danny Glover), the principal danger to Samuel, as he suspects there’s a potential witness to the murder.

This last point is essential – a literal moment-to-moment point of view is not the same as an overall narrative point of view. Maintaining a strong, consistent narrative point of view from time to time requires us to understand what other characters see or perceive, which is sometimes told best by momentarily seeing their point of view.

In this case, to understand the threat to Samuel, we need to realise that McFee (Danny Glover) suspects that there might be someone in the toilets who witnessed the murder, and this realisation is done through his point of view.

So, although the scene is definitely Samuel’s story, and begins and ends with his point of view, we also visit McFee’s point of view.

Shortly after this sequence, John Book (Harrison Ford) joins the story, though Samuel remains the central character for a while longer. This all changes at 24’ 50” in the Narcotics Division Detective Room – and once again, control of POV is central to making the switch.

In the Police Station

The scene starts with a very paternal John Book showing Samuel a folder full of mug shots, which we see from Samuel’s POV. But then Book gets distracted by a phone call, so Samuel starts to explore this new space – all very clearly told from Samuel’s point of view.

Things worth noting:

• Use of subjective camera for the ‘what he sees/experiences’ shots in the various POV sandwiches.
• For all these shots, the camera is at Samuel’s height.
• The camera tracks around the space with him.
• After a while, nobody crosses between the camera and Samuel.
• The sound design also becomes subjective – after a while, instead of hearing the general sound of the room, we begin to hear what Samuel hears as he moves around the room – typewriters, conversations, chair scrapes etc.
• Samuel’s POV of the two men standing next to him talking, with a sign on the pin board between them reading ‘Illegal’ in bright red – this is an example of what I call comment, but it passes so quickly it doesn’t draw attention to itself.

But then Samuel discovers the trophy cabinet in which he sees a very prominent picture of McFee – the man he saw cut the victim’s throat in the toilets – receiving a ‘good cop’ award. A classic reversal. Told through a classic POV sandwich.

Book’s Story

As Samuel stares at this picture, we switch to Book’s point of view as he notices Samuel’s consternation, and from this point, Book takes over the central narrative point of view. But as we’ve already seen, momentary point of view can be quite fluid – what makes this change definitive?

Partly it’s because from here on the story starts to follow Book, but there are several other tools used here. Some work better than others. (I don’t like the over-cranked camera for Book’s cross to Samuel.)

The first is ‘Who’s Got the Problem Now?’

When Book sees what Samuel has seen, Samuel has no idea how big a problem this is. We know, and Book knows, but Samuel only has a vague idea. It’s perfectly feasible that Samuel is thinking that this is the solution – he’s found the murderer.

So Book has the problem now. To underline that, the Ambiguous Narrative Ellipsis that immediately follows is Book’s, not Samuel’s – which makes it Book’s story, not Samuel’s.

Here’s how this Ambiguous Narrative Ellipsis works. (0:27:54)

Switching POV using an A.N.E.

While we’re still digesting the consequences of the reveal that the murderer McFee is a decorated cop, and a colleague of Book’s, we cut to a young woman we don’t know in a house we don’t know. She is rushing to respond to someone knocking on the front door – ‘I’ll get it!’

We find ourselves thrown off balance.

‘Where are we? Who’s she? What’s this got to do with the story?’

The young woman opens the door, and there’s Book, wanting to speak to her father, his trusted boss Schaeffer.

So, this A.N.E. is set up by the confusing shot of the young woman, and resolved by discovering that Book is taking action to resolve the dilemma. In other words, because the resolution of the A.N.E. is what Book is doing about the crisis – not what either Samuel or Rachel is doing – we shift our focus to Book, without even noticing that we’ve done it.

Imagine if the cut had been to Rachel making Samuel’s dinner, and listening to him tell her about how he solved the problem, and now he has to keep it a secret, still oblivious to the implications. And then to Book eating a solitary meal in his apartment, disturbed by someone hammering on his door, and finding a furious Rachel there.

Putting those two short sequences together would definitely make Rachel the centre of the story. She’s the one taking the action to solve the problem, and so we would retrospectively decide that she has, offscreen, realised how much danger Samuel is in now.

A.N.E.s are powerful tools for moving the story along, and shifting points of view.

Because this A.N.E. finds Book in action, and so Book’s story it becomes, underlined at the 1^st act turning point when Book is shot at by McFee, and Book realises that Shaeffer is also part of the plot.