Merce Cunningham on Film

"The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be ... The two media do not compete, each abides in its own territory."

In a way, a piece such as 'Changing Steps' (choreographed 1978, filmed 1989) is ideally suited to film, it has a proto-cinematic quality to it. The indeterminacy of the piece - its various solo and group dances can be performed in any order, separately or overlapping as space allows - suggests the process of editing, offering up all sorts of possibilities for montage and juxtaposition. In the filmed version (of which an extract is embedded above), dances cut and dissolve into each other, sometimes hanging suspended in superposition. In the fragment above, the great wooden frame, separating the foreground dance from the background, suggests a cinema screen. Similarly, in 'Beach Birds for Camera', a sequence of the dance takes place on a soundstage, before a vast blue screen, suggesting the future presence of some fantastical imagery that is yet to be filled in. The film of 'Changing Steps', as presented in Amsterdam-based Total Film's 2003 DVD, The Merce Cunningham Collection, presents a collage of film and video, the latter is often severely degraded, blurring the dancers' features, and giving the whole an eerie, spectral feel. At one point we dissolve from the flickering lines of TV static to ripples on a pond, almost perfectly matched (but not quite).

'Deli Commedia' (1985) is Cunningham's tribute to the physical comedies of the silent era. While Pat Richter's Carmen-quoting music evokes the piano accompanist in a pre-war picture palace, the dancers movements frequently evoke, not just Chaplin, but also the not-quite-silent films of Jacques Tati. It is a curious feature of Cunningham's work for camera that, despite the presence of a non-diegetic musical score, a sound recorder is employed to record the footfalls of the dancers. In his introduction to 'Deli Commedia', Cunningham says, "One of the first things I saw through the camera was that you saw things faster ... That is, you caught the image quicker ... You did not have to dwell on it as long ... " For Cunningham, as for Paul Virilio, the emergence and mastering of new technologies is a question of speed. It is through speed that the twentieth century's artworks relate to its wars.

'Beach Birds for Camera' (1993) presents the human as but a brief mediating force between two non-human technologies: the Lifeforms software Cunningham used to choreograph the dance and the camera for which the staged version (entitled simply 'Beach Birds') was later adapted. But long before he began engaging with cinema and software, Cunningham had set out, in the words of Dee Reynolds, "to discover new parameters of the ‘human’ ... These assaults were frequently seen by contemporaries as attacks on the ‘human’ itself." The notion of the expressive human subject has always been extremely fragile in his work from the very beginning. As Reynolds continues, "Many critical comments on Cunningham in fact focus on the ‘undecidability’ of movements involving interactions between the ‘human’ the ‘natural’, and the ‘automated’." Perhaps nowhere is this slippage more uncertain than in the (1999) work 'Biped', for which motion capture software is used to allow the movements of the dancers to animate computer graphic lines and shapes projected on a scrim between the stage and the audience. Watching videos of 'Biped' (a piece not designed for camera), the scrim appears scarcely noticeable and the graphic lines and figures seem to take on an astonishing 3D quality, not just leaping out at the audience, but also effectively conveying depth, and drawing the audience further in to the performance.

"They need to be reminded of the order of things" : Clash of the Titans

Not quite 3D, no longer really 2D, the new Clash of the Titans multiplex-filler, shot in two dimensions but re-processed into three to cash in on the success of Avatar, survives in an odd kind of not-quite-flatness. The credits come zooming out towards you, but everything else just seems to hang precipitously over the edge of the screen, like a limp phallus poking out of its fly.

As has become standard practice in mainstream action movies lately, the film is composed almost entirely of great, swooping aerial long shots, to show off the locations and the detail of the production design in the manner of the French heritage films of the 1980's. These are juxtaposed with fast-moving close-ups, edited in the style of an ADHD sufferer's stream of consciousness. What this means is that the film contains almost no mid-shots, and it is mid-shots that tell the story.

As in Deleuze's tripartite distinction (with the perception-image usually in long shot and the affection-image characteristically in close-up), the action or impulse-image takes place in medium shot and is the most important element of naturalism. Of course, this is not to say that nothing happens in Clash of the Titans, simply that when it does, it is enormously disorientating due to the lack of mid-shots - or at least it would be if it wasn't for the presence of Io (played by Gemma Atherton, last seen as tracksuit-wearing hostage in The Disappearance of Alice Creed).

The character Io plays no part, either in the original (1981) film, Clash of the Titans, nor in the myth of Perseus upon which it is based. Her function here is largely as a kind of onscreen narrator, informing the otherwise bewildered viewer what the plot is in lengthy expository dialogue during the rare moments of calm between fight scenes. Such characters have become increasingly necessary in recent Hollywood films due to the almost complete inability of contemporary directors to make the most elementary cinematic gesture of telling a story through images.

In mythology, Io is the lover of Zeus who is transformed into a heifer and sent to wander the earth, tormented by a gadfly. None of this plays any part in Clash of the Titans, but it does point towards the second function of this character in the film. One of the major changes made by Louis Letterier's new Clash from both the 1981 film and its classical sources, is that the mother of Perseus, Danaë, raped by Zeus out of vengeance for the hubris of mortals, is no longer the daughter, but the wife of Acrisius. This makes the prophecy sent to Acrisius, that his wife's son will grow up to kill him, the exact double of the prophecy revealed to Laius in the story of Oedipus.

Throughout the new Clash of the Titans, Io is cast in a maternal role, saying to Perseus, "I've watched over you for a long time now. I've always been there." So when, at the end of the film, after Perseus has slain Acrisius and been reunited with Zeus (his 'real' father), his final coupling with Io (despite her onscreen death several sequences earlier), must be seen as the ultimate completion of the film's somewhat contorted Oedipal triangle. The order of things is thus restored and Io, the only character in the film (barring perhaps the gorgon, Medusa) to do anything other than get raped, sacrifice herself or get saved, is safely re-domesticated.

Looking In or Leaping Out

Watching Death in Venice again the other day, I was particularly struck by how often the camera is drawing you into the picture. Throughout the film, the gaze of Dirk Bogarde's Gustav von Aschenbach is redoubled by a roaming, searching lens, forever zooming in and moving towards some object or person in the middle distance. Nothing ever seems to come towards the camera of its own volition - the camera will always move out to meet it. The very next day I found myself watching the Marx Brothers' At the Circus, and found, this time, precisely the opposite effect - of things forever leaping out towards the camera, and by implication, beyond the screen and into my living room. Each performance of the circus itself is opened by an acrobat or an elephant looming straight towards the lens. At one point, Groucho turns straight to the camera, in the middle of a scene in which the money he is looking for is hidden in Eve Arden's brassiere, and says, "There must be some way of solving this without circumventing the Hayes code." Unlike some cinematic asides delivered straight to camera, Groucho is here clearly not inviting the audience into the picture, but rather himself leaping out of it so that he can comment on certain institutional factors governing its production. The few films I happen to have seen in the few days since this all tend to fit broadly in to one or other of these tendencies, drawing in or leaping out, that strike me as two different approaches to what might be seen as one of the fundamental problems of cinema - making a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional space. So, of the latter tendency, what we might call extensive cinema, I have seen both At the Circus and All of Me, both characterised by things seemingly leaping out of the screen, or otherwise moving from the back of the shot towards the camera; and of the former, intensive cinema, since Death in Venice, I've watched Deep Red, and Who Saw Her Die, both of which feature a lot of point-of-view shots that sneak up on, and follow, various characters, lots of zooms and jump cuts into people and objects, bringing them into sometimes extreme close-ups. When George Lazenby is wandering the streets of Venice (in Who Saw Her Die), knocking on doors and windows in search of his daughter, when the door or window in question is opened, it is always the camera that enters the house, not Lazenby.

Obviously this is far from an exhaustive or even vaguely representative survey, nonetheless it may be worth remarking that both of my 'extensive' films concern performers (acrobats and singers in At the Circus, a lawyer and a musician in All of Me), whereas our 'intensive' trio are all about voyeurs and the act of looking, the testimone populare. From this we might expect other films which foreground cinema's voyeuristic mode, such as Rear Window or Peeping Tom, to fit into this tendency, and those films which foreground cinema's spectacular mode, disaster movies and musicals for example, to tend towards extensivity. Likewise, At the Circus and All of Me both have some sort of roots on the stage. Though At the Circus was written exclusively for the screen with no prior stage performance, its format and a great deal of the brothers' material comes from their Broadway years. Likewise, All of Me, though adapted from a novel, is, like The Jerk before it, still something of a showcase for material from Steve Martin's stand-up routines, such as his man who is not entirely in control of his own body, and of course his by then legendary catchphrase, "Well, excuuuuuuse me!" By contrast, those films I have labelled intensive all have some sort of literary origin. Death in Venice is adapted from Thomas Mann's novella, and our two gialli, though neither of them are adapted directly from novels, nonetheless pay a certain homage to the gialli filone's origins in the cheap detective thrillers published in Italy in the thirties and forties, bound in yellow covers (giallo in Italian means 'yellow'). In Deep Red, several buildings, even, at times, the sky itself, are a violent, bright yellow. Two of the film's characters are writers, one a journalist, the other the author of a book about urban myths which becomes itself a significant plot device and the object of a long big close-up during which David Hemmings's character opens the book and thumbs the pages as if to invite us into the very text itself. Who Saw Her Die is also not adapted directly from a book but does bear certain striking resemblances to Nicholas Roeg's (later) Don't Look Now which was adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story (having not read the Du Maurier I can't comment on whether the similarities between the two films are equally present in the short story, suggesting that it was a likely inspiration). Similarly to Deep Red, texts, albeit newspaper clippings, play a significant role in the plot of Who Saw Her Die, providing the vital clues that lead to the solution of the central mystery, and as Gary Needham argues it is characteristic of gialli in general to base their narrative structures on those of the literary genre that preceded them. Although, obviously, not all films are adapted from books or stage material, all films must in some way engage with the projection of three-dimensionality from a two-dimensional screen. In the current issue of Sight and Sound, for instance, during an article about the return of the 3D movie, that most, traditionally at least, extensive of cinematic novelties, a brief aside about Joe Dante's new film, The Hole, states, "3D movies traditionally poke the audience in the eye, " before citing Dante's wish for his new film to use the 3D imaging  to do precisely the reverse, "to make us reach instead of recoil." I wonder how many films will fit consistently into one or the other of these two tendencies, and whether there might be a third type, characterised by a certain flatness - I'm thinking for instance of the long, still takes of Stranger than Paradise, or the way in which Crash, despite being a literary adaptation and, in some ways, quite an 'interior' film, nonetheless has this rather forbidding metallic sheen to it that seems to forbid the audience from diving in and getting involved.