The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

Shakespeare. When they were banned from dialogue, with a little prodding here and there, they would soon get into shifting their brains into the mode for thinking visually. It was not an insuperable problem, it didn’t require radically new skills, just the exercise of a mode that existed in their heads but had hardly been consciously exercised their whole lives, a whole continent, a galaxy awaiting exploration.

      It was fascinating to watch their brains tick over, searching for the mode that was required in the absence of dialogue to visually express jealousy. Very soon they began to imagine how a man and a woman might stand, facing each other, perhaps facing slightly away from each other. The jealous person might hold themselves differently, their shoulders could be tense, hunched up. Perhaps the others would avoid eye contact if they felt guilty, or look challengingly if they felt the jealousy was unfounded. You could see a whole world of possibilities whirring around in their heads and coming out in suggestions between each other, negotiating the visual, the emotions, forming the drama visually, seeing it in the characters’ physical stances and behaviour.

      It was like clicking a switch. With a simple shift of thinking, instead of resorting to Language it is quite possible to think visually in terms of emotion and its expression. Only a small shift, but showing how we are conditioned to turn to language, yet have the channels of thinking visually easily available, as it were next door. There is a price to Logocentrism, a whole world of thinking differently that it seems to exclude, and exclude forcibly.

      Film-making has a lot to do with presenting information in such a way that the audience takes it in – in the right order and at the right time. If the film-maker misses out an important link in the chain, the audience will start to get lost straight away. The result tends to be that the film-maker sets out to cover all the bases, so that the audience has all the information it needs to follow the story. Experience soon tells you that a lot of that information is missed or not recalled, some by some people, some by others. However, I began to think that in fact audiences take in a lot more information than they realise. In other words, a lot of the information that goes in does so unconsciously, just as it does when we meet a new person for the first time.

      As a sort of experiment to test those ideas I once took the rather risky strategy of teaching a single film to a class of fine-art and graphics students for a whole term as their introduction to Cinema. I was a little nervous at taking the chance, because if I was proved wrong the students would soon get bored and I would have done them – and Cinema – no favours. When I told the students we would be spending a whole term studying a John Wayne Western from the 1950s, the sense of anticipation was negligible. The film was The Searchers. The title-card, a painting of a brick wall, accompanied by what today sounds like a corny cowboy song did not augur well for my bold experiment. As we began to look closely at every element of the film and spot the details, the atmosphere changed. The students were surprised that, through a broadly Socratic method in which they were repeatedly questioned about what they were seeing, they were discovering that there was far more to this film than they had assumed and that they had seen far more than they realised. Each session began with a student presentation and a few weeks in the fine-art student who had been among the most sceptical and a leader of opinion among the group made his presentation, in which he declared that John Ford was a genius. I was delighted and relieved. The experiment had paid off. I learned a lot myself, in fact I was probably the greatest beneficiary as, despite making and analysing films full-time, I had not realised the depth that a film I thought I knew well contained.

Some years later I did something similar on Psycho, and again the same sense came across that there was so much information, and what has been called ‘exformation’¹, the material discarded in the process of creating something, in this case perhaps with regard to the finessing of the screenplay, elaborating back-story for the characters. The overall sense was what Freud called, in relation to the unconscious, the iceberg-effect. Ninety-percent or more of the ‘hidden-history’ around the characters and the story is either invisible or only hinted at, but in this case the fact that it existed in some way and at some time in the process gave a feeling of immense solidity to the film. It is fairly well-known that Hitchcock would spend a lot of time and money on preparation of the screenplay for his films, spending $225,000 on Marnie, for example, a substantial investment in 1963, and my modest work on Psycho began to reveal to me the depths of story that investment of time and money had facilitated.

      That feeling of solidity was even more marked when I happened to see a presentation of Vertigo as part of a gallery installation. I chanced upon the scene where the recreated Judy emerges from the bathroom in the hotel room, surrounded by a green glow. The feeling I had watching it on a small screen in a warehouse-gallery setting was that the scene was carved from rock. Somehow there was nothing arbitrary about it, it felt as though no element in the scene could have been any other way. It somehow communicated a feeling that it was perfectly constructed, an immovable depth to it that defied the fragility of film-making as a craft.

      In the course of making films I had learned that the most unlikely instincts, and without exception, turn out to be the most valuable. In this case it gave further support to the feeling that films contain more information than we are aware of, but also that when they are built with great skill they can realise the potential of the medium in such a way that they give a glimpse of the immanent depths of which it is capable.

      That feeling was extended in relation to Classic Hollywood Cinema where, in certain films, I felt that you knew ‘where you were’ much more clearly, knew what was going on, what the film was about, what was at stake. A prime example was Mildred Pierce, a Hollywood film-noir of 1945. The odd thing was not so much the comfort of knowing what the story was about, but a feeling that you knew the emotions that Mildred, played by Joan Crawford, was going through. It struck me forcibly that the heart of the Classic Hollywood period was what Sam Fuller said in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, that Cinema is, in a word, Emotion. What a film like Mildred Pierce succeeded in doing was somehow to make emotion visible. It was not a question of dialogue but of being able somehow to see what emotions were at stake and absorb that information in the course of the story.

      Looking at Hollywood films from earlier in the sound period, they generally lacked that lightness of touch, that sureness in guiding the audience, but things seemed to change, not in a formal sense, but perhaps in the confidence and experience with which film-makers applied the formal paradigm that was already in place by around 1930. That ability to ‘know where you are’ is no mean achievement, as I had learned from numerous errors making films myself. We tend to take it for granted that a story will be reasonably clear in Cinema today, but the work by generations of film-makers, by which I mean to include screenwriters, directors of photography, editors and hands-on producers as well as directors, was a gradual improvement of firstly technique and then its use, to tame the recalcitrant medium of moving-pictures in the cause of narrative clarity. I had a sense that around 1939, often described as a landmark year for Hollywood releases, the skills had been honed to the degree that a film like Mildred Pierce feels distinctly modern, where films from the early 30s usually feel stagey and static, only partly due to the limitations of sound-recording technology in the early years of sound.

This is all informal and subjective, but experience gained in film-making has time and again suggested to me that informal knowledge, often unspoken and ‘tacit’, of the kind wordlessly or incoherently passed between an editor and a director in the cutting-room, is considerably more valuable than the more formal kinds of knowledge that we associate with the Academy. However splendid and irreplaceable instinct may be as a place to start, it was however only a starting-point. The story of this project is my setting out from there to see where I might find evidence one way or the other to test those instincts. Film Theory² had an almost lordly disregard for the visual, so unconsciously in league was it with the Word. I was quite lost as where to start with the ideas that I was then familiar with from those brave and exciting days of the mid 1970s, when the new approaches from France poured in to the staid English scene. They had nothing to say about Vision, as though it did not exist, and indeed for them effectively it did not. It seems to me now a perverse impasse that we gave over Cinema to what were in effect its natural enemies, but as a result I found myself in a dead end.

      The only