Time for Epic Cinema in an Age of Speed

Abstract

Time for Epic Cinema in an Age of Speed Dudley Andrew (bio) I still drive a stick shift. Perhaps that’s why in this excursus on screen tempo, I start in first gear with early theory, then shift into second to cruise alongside André Bazin, before upshifting to merge into the fast lane where contemporary issues and ideas jostle. Evolving Techniques for Producing Narrative Tempo Early spectators and critics had a firsthand feeling for cinematic speed because mechanical variation was built into the hand-cranked apparatus. Comic scenes and chases are recalled as quite frenzied and jerky, with hyperkinetic actors and racing automobiles or horses given a technological boost through undercranking the camera or overcranking the projector. Among the early theorists who fastened on this property, Jean Epstein was the most eloquent and insistent. The revelatory possibility of spatial magnification via extreme close-up shots, he argued, found its temporal analogue in the dilation achieved via stop-motion and time-lapse techniques. Starting with his own Chute de [End Page 135] la maison d’Usher (1928), Epstein demonstrated and theorized the dramatic possibilities of temporal distention or compression in films of the narrative avant-garde.1 And not just the avant-garde. So common was slow motion in movies of the 1920s to express the interior pressure of rising emotion that Buñuel and Dalí satirized it in Un chien andalou (1929). The sound era restored normalcy, both because the apparatus had by then become electrified, and thus regular, and because speech and sound effects became ridiculous if stretched or compacted. Coincidentally, a realist tendency began to dominate the industry and theory. Roger Leenhardt’s 1935 essay “Cinematic Rhythm” assumes that the editor’s basic unit is no longer “the image” (a moving pattern on the screen that represents something) but “the shot” (a continuous block of space-time captured by the camera, whether on location or in the studio). While editors in the silent era had felt invited to manipulate the image to the point of deforming the representation, only an extraordinary motivation could lead editors of the 1930s to rework the physics constituting the blocks of space-time that hung in strips in their editing bins and that would in most cases be married to tracks of sound of equivalent length, whether recorded simultaneously or added later. In any case, the job now was to order these shots for their best cumulative thrust, trimming each unit to its most effective length. By 1945 Bazin, greatly influenced by his friend Leenhardt, would quarantine special effects like superimposition, slow motion, negative footage, and reverse action as quaint throwbacks to an earlier expressionist era. He considered these to be parasites, seldom healthy for the living organism of a narrative film, whether realist or fantastical. Yes, even fantastical films do well to respect common laws of motion, Bazin implied, since credibility evaporates when obvious technological manipulation seems imposed. Instead, after a baseline realism has been established, spectators can be nudged toward the eerie and the “fantastic” through suggestions of the preternatural.2 When he pointed out that the superimpositions of The Phantom Chariot (Victor Seastrom, 1920) may have originally been effective but seem quaint and so no longer usable in the 1940s, he could have added that the accelerated pace of Thomas Hutter’s coach taking us deep into Transylvania in Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) would appear comical if used two decades later. The genre these films belong to requires ever-new techniques because spectators evolve, in tandem with developments in technology and their correlative applications.3 Bazin’s “realism” is ample enough to accommodate expressionist deviations, so long as these register as distortions of a consistent norm.4 One such norm, the synchronization of motion-picture capture and projection, can be temporarily inflected by oneiric or balletic techniques of the sort tried out in La belle et la bête (1946) and later Orphée (1950) by Jean Cocteau, Bazin’s close friend. And so I doubt [End Page 136] this defender of realism would have objected to the return, shortly after his death, of elastic temporality in the evolution of dramatic films. The new-wave mentality of the 1960s...