Chapter 4

Building Movie Stories

In This Chapter

Looking at visual storytelling

Breaking down film grammar

Distinguishing among plot, story and narrative

Listening to film sound

When you take a look at the very earliest films that still survive (which today you can do very easily online), you can be forgiven for thinking that cinema didn’t begin by telling stories. Films made before the turn of the 20th century by the Lumière brothers include a train entering a station, workers leaving the factory gates and a baby eating breakfast. They aren’t exactly packed with dramatic incidents.

Yet movement and dynamism are present in all these brief snapshots of (apparently) real life. And, perhaps inevitably, when you watch these earliest films, you can’t help but think of them as snippets from some much larger chain of events. Where has the train come from and who are those passengers streaming off it into a brand-new location? What will all those factory workers do now that they’ve finished their labours? Is the baby going to behave and eat his breakfast?!

The point is that humans can’t help but create stories – even when they have limited information. Storytelling is how you make sense of the world, understand the past, think through possibilities and plan ahead. In evolutionary terms, biologists believe that the ability to tell stories enabled early humans to pass down information from generation to generation and thereby gradually become cleverer and cleverer. Sorry, more clever. So human civilisation is composed of stories, and this chapter explores the techniques and approaches that filmmakers use to create the greatest stories ever told.

Uncovering Mise-en-Scène

Time for a French cinematic term. Mise-en-scène literally means ‘put on the stage’ and fittingly originates from the theatrical tradition that long predates cinema. If you think about everything that’s put on a stage for a play, you begin to understand basic mise-en-scène: props, sets, actors, costumes and so on. Fundamentally, mise-en-scène is stuff. But it’s also concerned with much more, including the following:

• How the stuff is lit, where it’s placed and how it sits in relation to other stuff. In other words, mise-en-scène is what the stuff means and what it’s doing to tell the story.
• Why the stuff is present – whether purely for verisimilitude (the appearance of reality) or for more interesting, symbolic reasons.
• As a signal of a film’s genre, in which case this stuff is iconography (see Chapter 5 for more on this subject).
• Being fundamental to a director’s toolkit to create a film (if you believe in the director as all-powerful; see Chapter 14).

The best way to appreciate mise-en-scène is to practise looking at it and for it. In this section I analyse one moment from a classical Hollywood movie as illustration. I also discuss mise-en-scène in terms of the notoriously complex issue of realism in film, as well as its use in one genre – melodrama.

Analysing a scene

Figure 4-1 is a film still from Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Max Ophüls’s meticulously constructed romantic melodrama. A note of caution: film stills are usually shot by a photographer on set and so aren’t quite the same thing as frames from the finished film. This example, however, clearly shows all the stuff in the scene and how it’s presented to the audience, and so for the purposes of mise-en-scène analysis it works just fine.

So what can you see in this one image of one scene from this film? At first glance, it appears to be a romantic image of a young couple taking an exciting train journey together. The train carriage is comfortable and plush, with grand touches such as the elaborate curtain tie. The male character, Stefan (Louis Jourdan), is smoothly handsome and well dressed and has a confident demeanour. His female companion Lisa (Joan Fontaine) is pretty in a girlish manner, her uplifted gaze and submissive pose suggesting her youth. She’s also dressed in white, the colour of innocence.

If you watch the scene from the film, however, you know that everything here is a fake. The train journey is an elaborate fairground ride that the characters are enjoying. The carriage is static while an old man shifts painted scenery by means of a bicycle and gears. The impression of movement works because it’s similar to rear-projection effects used in the cinema (flip to the later sidebar ‘Drive-in movies’ for more on this technique). So the mise-en-scène signals its own fabricated artificiality, while you watch an innocent girl being seduced by a lothario who has used the same trick on many other women. This scene becomes a fascinating example of how mise-en-scène can function as ironic commentary upon the action taking place on screen.

Looking deeply at all that stuff

Mise-en-scène is the basis of film style. Used in its broadest sense, the term can also mean not only what’s ‘put onto’ the screen, but also everything that viewers see, such as colour, shot composition and the framing of space, both on and off screen. Of course, you can’t literally see anything that is off screen, but nearly all films construct a space that is larger than the frame, often by showing characters looking or gesturing out of it.

In order to go deeper into appreciating Letter from an Unknown Woman, you need to watch the film to see everything in action – which is no bad thing because it’s one of the masterpieces of classic mise-en-scène analysis. At the very least, watch the train ride scene online, which should hopefully whet your appetite for the whole movie.

The fake train-ride scene contains an example of director Ophüls’s careful framing of space to make the characters look as if they’re on a theatrical stage. Before they move together to embrace, Lisa and Stefan sit opposite one another with the scenery trundling past, framed by heavy velvet curtains. This set-up mirrors an earlier scene in a restaurant booth, which also frames the pair through curtains, emphatically drawn across the edges of the screen by a waiter. This repeated use of curtains to frame the image reinforces the sense that both the actors and the characters are playing roles.

Lighting is another key element of mise-en-scène because it influences the way you perceive all the other elements. In the train scene, the lighting is low, signalling night-time with romantic and sexual possibilities. The relative darkness of the scene also makes Lisa stand out all the more clearly with her pale skin and white blouse. In the following close-ups, Fontaine is lit in the high-key style often used for Hollywood stars, so that she appears to glow from within. This lighting choice illustrates her girlish happiness, as well as further suggesting an element of fantasy, of an impossible romantic ideal.

Actors themselves are partly just objects in the frame, and so you can also discuss their performances as an element of mise-en-scène in action. In this instance, the train scene is vital for Fontaine’s performance as Lisa; she must convince the audience that she’s a young girl trying to seem more sophisticated and older than she is. She accomplishes this through nervous gestures, such as turning a rose in her fingers, as well as her excitable speech patterns when she recounts a memory from childhood. Jourdan has less to do here, but his strutting walk over to pay for another ride says it all.

All these elements – the sets, costumes, actors, lighting, framing and performance – work together in complex ways to produce meaning for the audience. Letter from an Unknown Woman may be an unusually rich film for this type of analysis, but you can apply the same method to any film that you watch.

Presenting the world as you know it (sort of)

In fiction film, mise-en-scène is generally used in a relatively realistic kind of way. My vague phrasing is deliberate, because few things are more slippery than the concept of so-called realism in film studies. In this section I use realism to mean the ways in which filmmakers attempt to create a visual impression of real life within their fictional worlds. So try and hold onto this idea of realism as I explore it purely in relation to mise-en-scène.

To begin with, audiences have a commonsense notion of what looks realistic within a given film or scene. You can probably think of films ruined when you noticed a prop, a set or a hairstyle that just wasn’t realistic or was from the wrong historical period. Try mentioning Mel Gibson and kilts to any Scottish friends and then stand back (kilts weren’t invented until 200 years after the events of Braveheart (1995)).

But of course, strictly speaking, nothing is remotely realistic about any fictional scene arranged for the camera. Most films use carefully constructed sets as environments, and even when films are shot in real locations the space is carefully managed. When you accept that a film looks realistic, you’re choosing to believe in a carefully constructed lie. In addition, the rules and conventions surrounding what’s acceptably realistic and what isn’t are culturally and historically specific.

A sequence (or an entire film) can use extremely stylised, unrealistic mise-en-scène in the service of psychological realism (by which I mean presenting reality as seen or experienced by a particular character). Dream sequences, for example, are often heavily stylised, with the most famous one being the surreal sets and props designed by Salvador Dalí for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). Curtains covered in eyes are snipped by enormous scissors, and later a man stands on the roof of an impossible building with a melted wheel in his hand. Both elements represent memories that have been repressed by the film’s amnesiac hero. Take a look, it’s seriously weird.

Mise-en-scène also places a film in its historical moment. Just watch any film made more than about 15 years ago and try not to be distracted by the outlandish hairstyles or outdated costumes, elements which of course went unnoticed at the time of its release. Similarly, mise-en-scène marks a film as being set in a specific place and culture. Put simply, when stuff appears 20-feet high on a cinema screen, it starts to tell its own stories.

Creating emotional pictures: Melodramatic mise-en-scène

Melodrama is an awkward term (not the first in film studies), which is somewhere between a genre and a broader category of film-making. The film industry uses it to refer to any exciting or emotional film, such as crime thrillers or biopics. But film-studies scholars tend to use the term to refer to a smaller group of films, usually domestic dramas based around female characters. These movies are also known as women’s pictures due to their intended audience appeal.

German émigré Douglas Sirk directed many of the best-loved melodramas in Hollywood during the 1950s. In these films, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), wives and mothers go through emotional turmoil while attempting to maintain the illusion of a perfect American middle-class existence. Take a look at a clip from one of Sirk’s films (plenty are available on YouTube) and you get a sense of their distinctive elements: heightened emotion and gorgeous soft furnishings.

Feminist scholars including Laura Mulvey and Christine Gledhill argue that emotion and setting are fundamentally connected through melodramatic mise-en-scène. In certain film genres, notably the musical and the action film, characters have obvious ways to express excessive emotion, such as bursting into song or blowing stuff up. By contrast, in these domestic melodramas characters are restrained by social expectations, which means the visuals and sound have to express what the characters can’t.

For example, in All That Heaven Allows Jane Wyman plays Cary, wealthy widow with two grown-up children. When she falls in love with the much younger Ron (Rock Hudson), her children emotionally blackmail her into giving him up to maintain appearances. Ron and Cary’s developing relationship is literally embodied in the film’s mise-en-scène, as Ron buys a dilapidated farmhouse and renovates it. When it’s complete, he invites Cary over to admire his handiwork.

Cary is suitably impressed by the friendly fireplace and the idyllic country view from the spectacular picture window. Ron finally admits what has been clear to the audience for some time – he’s been creating not just a house but a family home for them to live in together. After he proposes, Cary walks wordlessly to the window, where the couple stand silhouetted against the snow outside. Mournful music grows as Cary is forced to choose between Ron’s burning fireplace and the freezing storm outside.

Speaking the Language and Grammar of Film

In many ways, film is like a language of its own. Using film you can argue a case, pass on information and tell a great story. But just imagine for a minute that you’re an alien passing as human on the Earth (bear with me). You decide to watch a movie. Perhaps you can recognise people, gestures or words, but can you make any sense of space, character and story? Of course not, because you don’t understand the grammar of film – the rules and conventions built up over time, which audiences understand as tools in the service of the story.

Studying the grammar of a foreign language can be difficult and dull, but the good news is that you’re already a fluent speaker of cinema. So this section’s discussion of scenes, sequences and shots isn’t going to leave you feeling as if you’re from another planet.

Making a scene (and a sequence)

As with mise-en-scène (see the preceding section), the idea of breaking a story down into scenes, which are presented to the audience in larger sequences or acts, predates cinema itself. In the theatre, each scene requires an element of visible work – a scene changing – which clearly marks the boundaries between each element. In film, this work is largely invisible, and so audiences require different signals or cues to orient themselves to otherwise jarring shifts in space or time.

Here’s how these signals work traditionally to build up an understandable flow of information:

• A scene often takes place in a single location, which is usually clearly marked by an establishing shot (often an exterior or a wide shot of an entire room) before the action commences.
• After the scene gets going, it usually unfolds in real time until it reaches a conclusion. No disorienting gaps appear in the time line during the course of the scene.
• A scene can be a single shot, but usually it’s composed of a series of shots (see ‘Selecting shots’ later in this chapter for details). Shots are then edited skilfully together to create coherent space and time. Check out the later section ‘Solving the Puzzle: Editing Film’ for editing insights.
• Actions, eye-lines (where the actors are looking) and sound are matched across editing transitions to create a feeling of unity. Film-makers also add music to hold a scene together.
• All shots that are edited together have some sort of transition from the first to the next, the most common being the simple cut. Film-makers sometimes signal boundaries between scenes or longer sequences with more unusual transitions, such as the wipe or the fade to black. (You can find illustrations and examples of these techniques online – try the support websites for major editing software, such as Final Cut Pro, for example.)

Of course all these rules can be bent or broken. Space is frequently manipulated so that a scene includes multiple locations – through careful editing between the two locations or by using split-screen effects. For example, many of the telephone conversations in When Harry Met Sally … (1989) are presented with characters in bed on either side of the phone and the screen. Flashbacks are a means of incorporating brief temporal disruptions to a scene’s continuity without confusing the audience too much.

Sequences are larger sections of story built up from several smaller scenes. Many genres (see Chapter 5 for details) have conventional structures made of recognisable sequences. Consider horror films of the ‘teen slasher’ sub-genre. They typically have an opening sequence recounting one unexplained gory murder, followed by a sequence establishing a community of young nubile victims. The victims are dispatched in their own dedicated sequences before the final character (usually a girl) defeats the killer and/or escapes.

Selecting shots

As well as tennis players and bourbon drinkers, film-makers also need to think carefully about their shot selection. For film-makers, the shot is the basic building block which makes up scenes, sequences and films. This is illustrated by the common practice of turning a screenplay into a detailed shot list, which helps the production team to plan their resources. Film-making practice can create an infinite variety of types of shots, but for the purposes of this section I focus upon those that have well-established meanings within film grammar.

All the uses of close-ups or wide shots that I discuss in this section, and the elements that signal the transitions between scenes and sequences in the preceding section, are fundamentally conventions. Therefore, the elements’ meanings develop over time and require various degrees of audience knowledge to be recognised. They also work differently in other cultural contexts, for example in early Russian cinema the close-ups of Sergei Eisenstein’s films are to illustrate types of people rather than provide psychological depth (for more on Eisenstein’s cinematic style and theory, flip to the later section ‘Considering alternatives to the classical model’).

The wide shot

Fiction films tell stories about people, and so any shot that favours the landscape over the human figure is unusual and is used to create specific effects.

Wide shots step back from the action to include the whole length of the human body (and often all of the characters in a scene) and extreme wide shots can be shot from miles away. Both are most commonly used as establishing shots, which give an overview of space at the beginning of a scene or sequence, but film-makers also use wide shots to create other grand gestures. (Flip to the later sidebar ‘How wide is wide’ for the technical details of wide shots.)

Wide shots are often required to capture the full impact of elaborate fight sequences, such as those between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and his cloned electronic enemies in The Matrix (1999), or dance sequences, as in StreetDance 3D (2010). Meanwhile extreme wide shots are often used to allow the audience to appreciate and wonder at grand, expensive set design or spectacular natural environments.

In The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), the frequent extreme wide shots of the New Zealand setting filled with enormous armies show off the film’s technical wizardry and reinforce the epic scale of the story. Conversely, an extreme wide shot featuring a solitary human figure can create a sense of vulnerability or loneliness. This approach is taken to extremes in Gravity (2013) when Sandra Bullock floats off into nothingness.

And finally … the extreme wide shot can also signal the ending to a story. For classic examples, check out the static, formal conclusion of The Third Man (1949) as the love interest Anna walks directly towards, and then past, the protagonist Holly. Or most famously of all, The Searchers (1956), which frames John Wayne through a front door overlooking Monument Valley. These endings are visually striking and provide a satisfying sense of closure, but they are also ambiguous and intriguing. The characters return to the world, but the world goes on, largely unconcerned.

The close-up

The close-up shot of the human face has special emotional power. For many early film-makers, the close-up was what made cinema magical and entirely different from any other medium. Unlike the wide shot, with its associations of spectacle and abundance partly drawn from the theatre, the close-up offered a new and thrilling intimacy. Within the emergent film grammar of early cinema, the close-up was reserved for moments of emotional intensity.

In Hollywood, director DW Griffith was famed for his ability to get right up close to his characters. For his long-suffering heroines, such as Lillian Gish in The Mothering Heart (1913), the close-up is a means to generate audience empathy, while his villains’ faces fill the screen in terrifying manner. This convention was so well established by the 1920s that Buster Keaton was able to subvert it for comedic effect, his famously impassive features giving away nothing even in close-up.

Close-ups can create other effects, such as:

• Drawing the audience’s attention to a crucial detail that other characters may miss. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), the ring falls out of Gollum’s pocket and into Bilbo’s grasp in a slow-motion close-up.
• Suggesting that audiences are entering a character’s memory or dream space after a close-up of a face dissolves to another scene. A good example here comes in Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) hears music that triggers the memory of his Parisian love affair with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman).
• Unsettling and disorienting audiences with extreme close-ups, such as the abstract, mysterious shots of eyes and mouths during the opening of the arty sci-fi film Under the Skin (2013).

Solving the Puzzle: Editing Film

Try sequence these into putting words the correct. Thanks, now you’re an editor. Read on to find out how film editors bring similar coherence to a collection of individual clips of film.

Getting the story moving

Early films borrowed from narrative structures with which audiences were already familiar:

• Theatrical: From plays, film-makers took the idea of scenes, in which the action is broken down into meaningful moments that all take place at one location. Early cameras were enormous and difficult to move around, and so the static viewpoint of the theatrical scene was also easy to achieve on film.
• Literary: From novels, film-makers took chapter titles and dialogue inserts, which were useful ways to cover editing transitions and orient audiences.

For certain types of early film, particularly literary adaptations, these techniques were all the editing required. But these films clearly didn’t make the most of cinema’s two biggest advantages as a storytelling medium: the excitement of movement and the ability to capture the vivid real world up on a screen.

The most cinematic story elements in this light are chase sequences, and early examples are central to the development of film editing.

The small British studio run by Cecil Hepworth produced several interesting chase films, including Rescued by Rover (1905), in which the hero of the day is a dog. Rover is racing against time to find his master’s kidnapped baby. He charges out of the house and then is seen running obliquely towards the camera in a similar direction across four separate locations, including crossing a river. This sequence builds a sense that the action takes place over a large area. Keeping the direction of Rover’s movement similar here is vital to the effect and the logic of the story.

This coherence of movement across several shots is an example of the 180-degree rule, a film-making convention designed to ensure that audiences understand where characters are located in space even if the camera moves or the action cuts. Similarly, two characters facing each other (in a gun fight, perhaps) should always be shot from the same side of an imaginary line that runs horizontally between the two figures. This keeps the same character on the same side of the screen to avoid confusing the audience. Of course you can find exceptions to this rule, but the fact that it exists at all reveals a key emphasis of narrative cinema: to create a coherent sense of space and time.

Piecing together a film: Continuity editing

When you hear people talk about a ‘classical Hollywood’ film style, they often mean a system of editing that aims to create a consistent flow of space and time in the service of telling a story. This system is known as continuity editing, because it tries to ensure this consistency. Continuity editing is built out of elements that developed at different times and in different countries, but it became the dominant style of editing in the late 1920s, and it arguably still is today.

The best way to understand continuity editing is to take an example of a scene from pretty much any Hollywood film of the studio era. Ideally, the scene you choose isn’t a particularly memorable or exciting one, just one that quietly advances the story. Watch the scene again and again until you’ve made a list of all the individual shots that build up the scene. Drawing little sketches can help, like creating a storyboard for the shot after the fact. Note the take length (in time), the distance (wide or close) and any unusual transitions.

You almost certainly find that a typical scene from a typical Hollywood film is constructed as follows:

• The scene is likely to start with an establishing shot, which identifies the space in which the action takes place; it’s usually a wide shot (see the earlier ‘Selecting shots’ section).
• The space is analysed into its components as the scene progresses, principally the characters and their relation to each other in space, normally without violating the 180-degree rule (which I define in the preceding section).
• Two characters interacting with each other follow the shot/reverse shot pattern, which repeats shots from two opposing points of view.
• The entry of a new character will be signalled by an eye-line match, in which one character looks off-screen in the direction of the new character and the next shot shows exactly what the character sees.
• If a character gets up and walks away, a match on action connects any required cuts together. For example, a shot on one side of a door will match up to one from the other side as a character exits the room.

This pattern is remarkably consistent throughout much of classical Hollywood cinema, and indeed remains the most familiar editing structure today. Influential film scholar David Bordwell has called the dominant editing style of contemporary cinema intensified continuity, because the overall system remains in place while certain elements have become more pronounced. Most notably, the average length of take is now much shorter than in the classical period, resulting in a more restless camera and a greater range of viewpoints upon the story space.

Considering alternatives to the classical model

When you think about it, film editing isn’t smooth or continuous in any way. Your eyes just get used to one space and set of objects and then, suddenly, everything changes. The use of the word cutting as a synonym for editing comes from the practice of chopping up the film to reorder scenes, but it’s a suitably violent metaphor for what can be a jarring assault on your senses.

Russian film-makers of the 1910s and 20s, such as Sergei Eisenstein, lived in tumultuous political times and understood the violence of the cut. Eisenstein argued that art was about conflict and that what matters in editing is the clash of meaning between two shots joined together. This clash creates montage, which presents complex ideas by cutting unconnected images together. The often abrasive and politically motivated results of Eisenstein’s editing aren’t likely to win over the popular audiences of Hollywood, although a technique similar to montage is used in children’s cartoons whenever visual elements are inserted as jokes. Here’s an essay title idea for you: ‘Discuss Eisenstein’s influence on the work of Daffy Duck’!

Other editing strategies that contrast with the classical model use different techniques to enhance the so-called realism of their films. The French critic Andre Bazin was an advocate of realism in the sense of removing artificial elements from the film-making process. Rather than the breaking down of space and time that happens with the continuity system, Bazin argued that takes should last as long as possible, and that deep focus (where both the foreground and background are sharp) should be used to present characters within their environment. Bazin’s key example of this technique was Citizen Kane (1941), with his arguments helping to create the formidable critical reputation of Orson Welles’s film.

Taken to an extreme, the long take favoured by Bazin can result in very few cuts, or even none at all. Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) takes place in real time in one apartment space and appears to be all one take (actually it’s several long takes edited together but the cuts are carefully concealed). In 2002, director Alexander Sokurov completed an ambitious project to create a full-length film from just one take. The result, Russian Ark (2002), is a magnificent achievement that’s barely concerned with realism, because it spans multiple timeframes in a dream-like manner.

The opposite strategy to the long take is to cut quickly and disregard gaps in space and time. This technique is the jump cut often found in French New Wave films such as À Bout de Souffle (1960). Although these cuts can be jarring, they do not incorporate elements from outside of the story world in the manner of Eisenstein’s montage. Instead they’re intended to represent psychological realism, in that your lived experience of events (and especially your memory of them) is often fractured in such a manner. Sorry, what was that? Drifted off for a second there… .

Charting the Roles of Characters in Narrative

Despite the almost endless possibilities of film form and structure, the vast majority of films that audiences consume tell similar stories in very similar ways. Things start out mostly okay, with a central character (or protagonist), and then Something Bad Happens. That character decides to sort it out, and after a bit succeeds. The end. These narrative patterns are so familiar because they’ve surrounded you since you were a small child. But this familiarity makes trying to understand them all the more important.

Causing an effect with an event

What makes a good story? Consider these two events:

• Poor girl loses slipper
• Poor girl marries handsome prince

This description doesn’t yet qualify as a story because you have no idea what connects the two events. You need more information: specifically that the poor girl met her fairy godmother who transformed her into a beautiful princess, that she went to the ball, danced with the prince and they fell in love, and that she left behind a glass slipper that enabled him to track her down. Now you can see that the first event causes the second – and you have the story of Cinderella.

Nearly all stories, including movies, rely upon this chain of cause and effect – or causality, to use a clever word. Causality creates momentum and pace, and keeps stories moving forward with a minimum of audience confusion. Causality is what answers the questions that hook you into the drama. How will Cinderella ever get to the ball? With the help of her fairy godmother. How will the prince find his true love again? With the slipper.

The slipper plot point is a crucial one in all versions of Cinderella (including the Disney movie of 1950), because the protagonist doesn’t know that she left it behind. As a result, the audience has more information than the protagonist, which creates dramatic tension. Sometimes the opposite can occur, and a character knows something crucial about a story before the audience does, such as the killer knowing exactly whodunnit long before we do in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

The classic whodunnit plot starts with an effect (a murdered body) and then plays a game with the audience to establish the cause (whodunnit, how and why). The figure of the investigator or detective is crucial in revealing these causes or uncovering red herrings to distract the audience’s attention. The detective builds relationships with the suspects in order to understand their characters, which may be the motive for the murder. Character traits such as jealousy, greed or lustiness are the ultimate causes of the killing and therefore the plot.

All these examples revolve around three key and distinct terms:

• Story: Everything that happens in the fictional world between the beginning and the end, including events that viewers infer or presume to have happened.
• Plot: What viewers see on screen and hear on the soundtrack to allow them to construct a story in their heads. Plots can begin anywhere on the chain of story events and can leap backwards and forwards in time and space.
• Narrative: Flow of story information constructed by the plot at any given moment. Narrative implies a point of view, which may be that of one of the characters or of an omniscient (all-seeing) narrator.

Characterising heroes and villains

When a film’s protagonist acts heroically and is on the side of ‘good’ that character becomes your principal point of identification within a story. The use of the term hero (who can be male or female) in this context is a specific one and partly a hangover from older traditions of mythic or epic storytelling, but it’s also appropriate for most narratives of popular cinema, because the hero is expected to display (and often acquire) positive, active character traits in order to achieve his goals. For example, in Star Wars (1977) Luke Skywalker needs to develop self-discipline, control and leadership to defeat Darth Vader. Oh, and a bit of magic (the Force).

Even in more complex, character-driven narratives the hero is usually called upon to display admirable heroic qualities at some level. In Amélie (2001) the lonely protagonist lives in a fantasy world. Her goal is simply to talk to the man she loves, proving that you don’t have to save the world to be heroic. Amélie’s shyness is an example of a character trait that puts internal obstacles in the way of her goals, in the absence of a recognisable external antagonist or villain.

Drama is about conflict, be it internal, as with Amélie, or external, as in Star Wars. Therefore the function of the villain in narrative terms is to provide a goal (his defeat by the hero) but also to complicate the plot by creating obstacles for the hero to overcome. Another common function of the great movie villains is to disrupt the happy balance of everyday life and cause a state of imbalance that has to be corrected. In Batman (1989), the Joker incites the action by killing Bruce Wayne’s parents, thereby creating his winged nemesis.

This circular model of narrative (balance, disruption, return to balance) was established by literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov through the study of Russian folk tales. The implication of this theory, along with others by Claude Lévi-Strauss (see Chapter 13), is that mythic storytelling is universal throughout human culture and history. Such ideas have been influential among Hollywood screenwriters. Check out The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers by Christopher Vogler (3rd edition, 2007, Michael Wiese). But be aware that turning film stories into universal myths has its dangers, principally because to do so excludes historical context and the elements that make film special: moving images and sound.

Meeting sidekicks and helpers

Vladimir Propp (another smart Russian theorist) analysed 100 Russian folk tales and found that certain character types recurred in many of them if not all. You can boil down these stock characters as follows:

• The hero: Who goes on a quest.
• The villain: Who tries to defeat the hero.
• The dispatcher, helper or donor: Who sends off, assists or gives the hero some kind of magical object (such as a potion).
• The princess: Who’s also the prize for the hero. In folk tales and many types of film, the gender balance remains traditional. But, clearly, film genres exist where the hero is usually female and the ‘prize’ is a handsome prince of some variety – most obviously the romantic comedy.

Sidekicks and helpers exist to add interest to the plot, to create or resolve subplots, or to generate other emotional effects. The first film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is subtitled The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and is almost entirely about constructing a motley crew of sidekicks and helpers for the hero, Frodo (Elijah Wood). The wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), the warrior Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the faithful friend Sam (Sean Astin) are essential for Frodo to reach his goal of destroying the ring. But they also all have their own goals and journeys to complete, providing contrast and counterpoint, as well as constructing a huge world of characters and stories.

Sidekicks are also vital outside the realm of fairy tales and fantasy:

• Action adventure: Such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In the latter, the sidekick Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) proved more popular with audiences than the soggy romantic leads.
• Cop ‘buddy’ comedy: Such as Lethal Weapon (1987) or Rush Hour (1998) and sequels. These films force a mismatched pair to work together, generating laughs and possibilities for personal growth.
• Family animation: Such as Dory in Finding Nemo (2003) or Donkey in Shrek (2001). Again these pairings often start with animosity and then grow into mutual respect.

The fact that sidekicks are often mismatched with the hero adds further weight to the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that all narrative is built around binary oppositions (check out Chapter 13 for details). In Lethal Weapon, Murtaugh (Danny Glover) is black and a veteran family man who likes to do things by the book. His partner Riggs (Mel Gibson) is young, white and crazily irresponsible. This set-up allows the film to play with binary oppositions on race, age and masculinity to comedic or dramatic effect.

Listening and Understanding Film Sound

Film sound, which includes dialogue, sound effects and music, can be a tricky area for some film students (and scholars for that matter). Although the visual elements of film are relatively easy to describe, students often feel at a loss when discussing sound. How do you capture in words the quality of an actor’s voice? What type of music is playing and which instruments create it? How does sound design create or reinforce cinematic space?

Playing with emotions

To begin to understand what film sound does, just get rid of it for a moment. Try watching a section from your favourite blockbuster with the sound on mute. You quickly realise that the sound is doing a lot more than you realised. Apart from the obvious lack of dialogue and music, many layers of sound in a modern film are carefully designed to produce a response from the audience.

The functions of film sound include:

• Environmental context: Is the action in a busy street or a quiet park? What’s the weather doing? Are any sounds associated with specific locations (perhaps church bells, animal noises or the sea)?
• Establishing space: Modern multichannel surround-sound systems allow sound designers to create complex soundscapes in which particular sounds envelop the audience.
• Holding a sequence together: When a scene cuts rapidly but the sound remains constant, an audience feels less disoriented. Psychologists have a name for this feeling of being drawn into a coherent world: suture.
• Vocal performance: Not just what’s said, but how it’s said. Volume, rhythm of speech, accent and timbre (low and smoky or high and squeaky) all affect the meaning of a line or an entire scene.

All these elements are working on your brain while you watch a film, some consciously – for example when you notice a character’s accent and wonder where he’s from – and some on a deeper level. Neuroscientists argue that sound is fundamental to human consciousness because hearing develops very early, even before you’re born. Sound provides vital information about the world, and your hearing is always working directly with your emotional state to ensure that you respond.

Certain sounds seem to be hard-wired to provoke a response, particularly those that signal danger for loved ones. Few people can bear to hear a baby screaming without wanting to take action, for example. Other associations seem more likely to vary from person to person and culture to culture. Rain on a roof can make you feel restful or anxious depending on the context. You almost certainly have to learn to find wind chimes soothing. Or irritating!

Lack of sound can have just as profound an effect upon your emotions. In war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), silence is used as a counterpoint to the oppressive noise of battle. This choice can be expressive (as when an explosion temporarily ‘deafens’ the audience) or symbolic, silence having a deathly feel about it. In sci-fi films that aim at realism, such as Gravity (2013), the lack of air in space translates into long sequences of silence. After all, in space, no one can hear you scream.

Distinguishing between diegetic and non-diegetic sound

What’s this, a film-studies term that isn’t French? Sacre bleu!

Diegetic sound comes from the Greek diegesis, which means ‘a story that’s spoken to an audience’. Within the study of literature, the term describes the world of the story. So if something is diegetic it belongs within the story world. Think about this in relation to a novel for a moment. Many novels have a narrator, a voice telling the story that’s outside the world of the characters. So not everything in many books is diegetic.

The same principle extends to filmed stories. Although films go to great lengths to create engaging and believable worlds, be they realistic or wildly imaginary, some elements of a film don’t strictly belong to this world – the opening credits for example. Although rare, non-diegetic shots can also be inserted into films. One example is the opening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), when a herd of sheep dissolves into factory workers as they rush out of the gates.

The situation with sound is, however, completely different. Audiences are conditioned to accept elements of the soundtrack that are outside the story world, particularly the musical score, but also voice-over narration. These elements are commonly called non-diegetic sound. By contrast, diegetic sound is located within the world of the story, such as most dialogue and sound effects. This distinction sounds simple enough to understand and maintain. But as sound theorist Michel Chion describes, films are full of examples that don’t quite fit in either category, or deliberately play with the categories to create particular effects:

• Music often starts in one category and then shifts into another. For example, Bernard Herrmann’s famous saxophone theme for Taxi Driver (1976) is used as score throughout, but it also plays on a record when Iris (Jodie Foster) dances with her pimp.
• Voices can be heard on screen without viewers seeing their source, such as relayed voices from radios or televisions. Are these properly from within the story world or not?
• Internal dialogue or voices can also sometimes be overlaid as the character’s thoughts. For example, Look Who’s Talking (1989) features Bruce Willis as the voice of an on-screen baby.
• General background sounds (birds singing, wind in trees) aren’t always tied to a visual source. Are they still diegetic? After all, most ambient sounds are added in post-production, just like a musical score.

Listening to unheard melodies: Film music

Some people believe that to notice and study film music is to destroy its effects. According to this viewpoint, film scoring is designed to work at a level somewhere beneath conscious thought, on the emotional rather than the rational plane. The music is therefore encouraging the dreamlike state of losing yourself within a film. Asking how film music works disrupts this effect, making it impossible to study.

That’s all very well, but you know from your own experience of watching films that your level of attention upon the musical elements of a film naturally fluctuates. You experience certain points when you forget that the music exists, but equally you have moments when you do notice it, whether for positive or negative reasons. In addition, when you hear music that you recognise in films, be it pop or classical, your own memories of that music are bound to affect how you respond to the story.

This model of unheard melodies – to use film scholar Claudia Gorbman’s term – has a strong connection to the other elements of classical Hollywood storytelling. Just as with editors who employ continuity editing (for a definition, check out the earlier section ‘Piecing together a film: Continuity editing’), the theory is that if you notice it, it isn’t working.

Like continuity editing, film scoring has developed its own set of codes and conventions that audiences recognise:

• Music needs to be subordinate to narrative form and dialogue. Scores are written to fit the length of the scene, not the other way round. Furthermore, the voices of the actors must be louder in the sound mix.
• Music has to be familiar and tonally appropriate to the scene, which is why romantic, orchestral scoring dominates classical Hollywood: audiences were already comfortable with that style.
• Music can signal the beginning and end of a film, particular historical periods or locations, or even narrative point of view by associating musical motifs with major characters.
• Music provides a smooth, continuous experience for audiences by ‘plugging the gaps’ between dialogue scenes, and adds interesting patterns of repetition and variation through musical themes.

Above all, music means emotion. Films that create powerful emotional responses often have memorable soundtracks. The creeping undertow of fear in Jaws (1975), the dreamlike film noir atmosphere of Blade Runner (1982) or the nostalgic romance of Drive (2011) would be very different without their accompanying music. Although research demonstrates that some elements of music have a measurable effect on physiological states, particularly pitch and tempo, many more of these associations are learned, cultural and vary from individual to individual.

On a completely different note, film music has an important economic function for the film industry. Scores from popular films have always generated extra income for producers, whether through sales of piano sheet music, vinyl LPs, CDs or digital downloads. Many of the biggest selling albums of all time are soundtracks, including those for Saturday Night Fever (1977), The Bodyguard (1992) and Titanic (1997). Hit songs are valuable promotional tools for films, particularly since the advent of the music video.

Buying a soundtrack of your favourite film is a strange decision when you think about it. You don’t pay for a silent DVD, and so why purchase the film without the moving images? The fact that millions of film fans do suggests that the music is performing an interesting set of functions, including acting as an emotional trigger to remember the film itself. But it also provides the music itself with a life separate to its movie origins. For many people the only classical, jazz or world music albums that they own are film soundtracks. Soundtracks seem to be able to open people’s ears to musical diversity.