For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

CHAPTER II:

THE SHOT OF AMBIGUITY

1

Classic art reduces the parts of a total form to a sequence of planes, the baroque emphasises depth. Plane is the elements of line, extension in one plane the form of the greatest explicitness: with the discounting of the contour comes the discounting of the plane, and the eye relates objects essentially in the direction of forwards and backwards.^93(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History.

The preceding chapter examined the notion of narrative causality in classical cinema and how the narrative could expand beyond this system. This chapter will analyse the notion of the shot in filmmaking through its involvement in the construction of a cinematic space.

From its various uses, the notion of «shot» is more complex than may appear at first. Because of its shifting meanings, it requires a theoretical introduction. From the early days of cinema, the word «shot» has been used, for editing purposes, as a technical term designating the `piece of film contained between two cuts'.^94(*) But, it gets more complicated when taken within the shooting context:

During the shooting stage, «shot» is used as an approximate equivalent for «frame», «object field», and «take». Thus, it simultaneously designates a certain point of view on an event («framing») and a certain duration.^95(*)

Jean Mitry found no problems to the overlapping of the notion of «frame» and «shot» applied to films made before 1915:

Since most shots were static, each one involved a different set-up; consequently shots and set-ups could be regarded one and the same thing.^96(*)

However, with the development of camera movements and therefore the multiplication of angles, places and focal lengths within the same shot, Mitry pointed out that the term had, in fact, split in two. He differentiated, on one hand, the term designating a specific set-up, the shot, and, on the other, the film unit, which `however long and convoluted', `forms an indivisible fragment', the take.^97(*)

Gilles Deleuze, in his theoretical work on cinema, Cinema 1, The Movement-Image (1983), establishes at the outset, the link between «shot» and «cutting»:

Cutting [découpage] is the determination of the shot, and the shot, the determination of the movement which is established in the closed system, between elements or parts of the set.^98(*)

Deleuze seems to bypass the notion of «take» and the ambiguities raised by Jean Mitry. ^99(*) However, he insists on the dual aspect of the shot, in effect integrating the ambivalence in its definition:

The shot in general has one face turned towards the set, the modifications of whose parts it translates, and another face turned towards the whole, of which it expresses the - or at least a - change. Hence the situation of the shot, which can be defined abstractly as the intermediary between the framing of the set and the montage of the whole, sometimes tending towards the pole of framing, sometimes tending towards the pole of montage.^100(*)

Thus the shot is associated with movement and is the intermediary film unit bringing about the transition from one aspect to another: `the parts of the set which spreads out in space, the change of a whole which is transformed in duration'.^101(*)

Early films from the primitive period, retained most of the staging of theatre. They were `organized as a series of fixed scenes, with a strict unity of time and place', `joined together as so many tableaux,'^102(*) as Stephen Heath explains in his Questions of Cinema. But this type of organisation raised problems of narrative coherence as the authors of Film Theory, Lapsley and Westlake, describe:

Actions might take place anywhere within the frame, including the edges and corners; events of narrative significance might occur simultaneously in different parts of the frame.^103(*)

The need for a clearer sequence of actions will lead to changes in the staging of space in cinema, as purported by Heath:

If life enters cinema as movement, that movement brings with it nevertheless its problems of composition in frame. [...] In fact, composition will organize the frame in function of the human figures in their actions; what enters cinema is a logic of movement and it is this logic that centres the frame. Frame space, in other words, is constructed as narrative space. It is narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and «read», and that determines the development of the filmic cues in their contributions to the definition of space in frame.^104(*)

The need to emphasize the actions encouraged the use of different type of shots and editing thus liberating the camera. The camera could be moved closer or farther according to the actions taking place: a long-shot for large movements, a cut-in to attract attention to an important detail, a medium-shot for a conversation or a facial close-up for the expression of emotions. However this fragmentation of space, according to narrative significance, had to be organised to allow for the orientation of the spectator. It was necessary to reconstruct a continuity:

Increasingly, the conception of quality in films came to be bound up with the term «continuity». «Continuity» stood for the smoothly flowing narrative, with its technique constantly in the service of the causal chain, yet always effacing itself.^105(*)

The authors of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, describe in detail the progressive elaboration between 1909 and 1917 of the rules composing what they term the «continuity system»:

The various continuity rules - establishing and re-establishing shots, cut-ins, screen direction, eyelines, SRS [shot-reverse shot], crosscutting - served two overall purposes. On the one hand, they permitted the narrative to proceed in a clearly defined space. On the other hand, they created an omnipresent narration which shifted the audience's vantage point on the action frequently to follow those parts of the scene most salient to the plot.^106(*)

The authors further state that the development of this omnipresent narration led to the conception of the shot as a narrative unit:

«Continuity» quickly developed from a general notion of narrative unity to the more specific conception of a story told in visual terms and continuing unbroken, spatially and temporally from shot to shot. [...] Thus the shot became not a material unit but a narrative one.^107(*)

This is further developed by Heath from a quote by Mitry:

`Shots are like «cells», distinct spaces the succession of which, however, reconstitutes a homogeneous space, but a space unlike that from which these elements were subtracted'.^108(*)

Heath compares this reconstituted homogeneity through the ordering of shots to the making of a composition:

In fact, we are back in the realm of «composition», were composition is now the laying out of a succession of images in order to give the picture, to produce the implication of a coherent («real») space; in short, to create continuity.^109(*)

This composition process aims to situate `the spectator at the optimum viewpoint in each shot', `as an invisible onlooker present on the scene.'^110(*) The authors of The Classical Hollywood Cinema further state:

This notion of the invisible spectator provides a neat reversal of the actual reason for the whole continuity system; while the classical cinema claims to follow the attention of he spectator, it actually guides that attention carefully by establishing expectations about what spatial configurations are likely to occur.^111(*)

This notion is also expressed by Lapsley and Westlake: `Segmentation and recomposition is a more effective means of binding the subject in place than the intolerable fixity of a series of tableaux.'^112(*)

Thus, editing according to the rules of the continuity system, seeks to control, on one hand the movements in space in front of the camera, and on the other, the spectator by `constantly organizing his attention.'^113(*)

2

Yet this classic plane did not last long. Soon it seemed as if things were being entrammelled if they were subjected to the pure plane: the silhouettes are dissolved and the eye is led around and about the edges: the proportion of foreshortened form is increased and by means of overlapping, intersecting motives, strongly speaking relations from front to rear are given: in short, artists intentionally avoid allowing the impression of a plane to arise, even if the plane actually exists.^114(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History

The beginning of the classical age of cinema corresponds to the homogenisation of the cinematic space according to narrative continuity. The continuity system of representation pretends to invisibility because of its commitment to the actions of the characters and their motivations^115(*). The discretion of its techniques allowed the classical style to become dominant, imposing itself as a transparent representation of reality. But, as Bordwell and Thompson pointed out in Film Art: An Introduction: `The classical Hollywood mode is, however, only one system among many that have been and could be used for constructing films.'^116(*)

Many filmmakers have disrupted the seamless continuity of narrative space by introducing heterogeneous elements. The use of camera movements not necessarily tied up to the action, for instance, could introduce a diverging view on the event represented. The lengthening of shots could integrate a sense of time and space existing beyond its purely narrative function. A full use of the depth of field could liberate new movement trajectories and multiply tensions in the screen space, just as the extended use of subjective shots could afford a more complex representation of reality.

Camera movements have been used at a very early stage in cinema, such as the panning/tilting movements of the camera or, for chases in particular, the tracking.^117(*) However, the use of camera movements is generally limited to reframing:

One of the main impulses toward the mobile frame, or moving camera, came from the effort to maintain centering. By far the greatest number of films that used camera movement before the mid-twenties used it strictly to reframe rather than to track or pan with an extended movement.^118(*)

Furthermore there has been a tendency toward a fast editing process, allowing for extensive planning, rather than long and elaborated shots:

Tracking, panning, and reframing movements remained in occasional use into the twenties. They were relatively infrequent, however. [...] The cutting rate was typically so fast that each individual action had its own shot; there was little impulse to combine several actions by adjusting the framing within a shot.^119(*)

Until late in the silent period, according to the authors of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, camera movements remained a `relatively minor part of Hollywood's stylistic repertory.'^120(*) German films, however, had made more use of the possibilities of a mobile camera:

The influence of German films in the mid-twenties was considerable. Some cinematographers began to move their camera as freely as they could, devising many sorts of elevators, cranes, and elaborate dollies to imitate the German visual acrobatics.^121(*)

Deleuze identifies phases in cinema according to the development of camera movements: a primitive state of the cinema where the camera is fixed and the movement is `attached to elements, characters and things which serve as its moving body or vehicle.'^122(*) A second state is one where the mobility of the camera and the possibility of montage started to extract movements from its vehicle (persons or things):

Now at the outset these two methods were in some sense obliged to conceal themselves; not only had the connections of montage to be imperceptible (for example, connections along the axis) but also the camera movements, in so far as they concerned ordinary moments or banal scenes (movements which are so slow as to be close to the threshold of perception).^123(*)

Thus the development of camera movements corresponds to an emancipation of the cinematic movement; what Deleuze calls «the Image-Movement». The beginning of a third phase could be identified with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)^124(*), which corresponds to the end of what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson call Hollywood's classical era (1917-1940).

In Welles' film, camera movements were no longer trying to be imperceptible. The camera circles characters remaining immobile, it moves in and out of the action, focuses on a detail on the side or goes through a window pane. However, this independence of the camera from the action does not necessarily means an independence from the narrative context. Rather, it tends to layer the dramatic situation by visualising certain subjective perception, such as the high angle shot of Kane standing over his pile of newspapers to mark his thirst for power.

By taking some distance from the strict narrative order the movements of camera develop their own level of signification. Michel Chion analyses the use of tracking shots by Stanley Kubrick for instance:

Kubrick's very particular way of using a tracking shot with a wide angle lens to follow someone walking down a corridor, through a maze or a narrow passageway, and giving the character's progress an epic, fatal, conquering or irresistible air-which first came to general attention in Paths of Glory-often seems to mean: there is no living space for two men. I appropriate the space I cross: I clear the space before me...^125(*)

The use of long movement of camera also reintegrates a continuity in space, allowing the spectator some grasp of a larger three-dimensional world other than the carefully framed one of classical editing. The impressions of the long tracking shots of Danny cycling the maze of corridors of the Overlook hotel in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), could not have been conveyed by a montage of static shots.

Another change to be introduced in Citizen Kane is the use of the depth of field, which is defined by the authors of Aesthetics of Film:

Depth of field: The film image is sharp for an entire section of the field of vision and the term used to distinguish the extent of this clearly focused zone is depth of field [...] thus depth of field is defined as the depth measurement of the zone of sharply focused objects.^126(*)

Early cinema generally used a great depth of field, with the camera set at a distance from the action and the set evenly lit. But when a greater focus on the action was wanted, a shallow depth of field became desirable to isolate the foreground from a distracting background.^127(*) The possibilities of a new type of lens, as well as a desire for a new aesthetic led to the reappraisal of a deep depth of field.

What was striking about Gregg Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kane was the use of extreme contrasts within the same frame between object placed very near the lens and others very far away, as described by Brian O'Doherty in an essay on Welles:

Welles handled this deep space - roofed in, generally shot from below - superbly. As Gregg Toland, his cameraman, wrote, «scenes which conventionally would require a shift from close-up to full shot were planned so that the action would take place simultaneously in extreme foreground and extreme background» Figures enlarge and shrink, loom and vanish in that converging alley. Compositions reform with the turn of a head, the sound of a voice, a faraway movement. Foreground, middle distance and distance become characters that articulate themselves through objects rather than the reverse.^128(*)

Jean Renoir, in his film La Règle Du Jeu (1939), had also reactivated the possibilities of depth in the cinematic space. In Cinema 1, Gilles Deleuze explains what this use of the depth of field implies in the conception of the shot:

Depth is no longer conceived, in the manner of the `primitive' cinema, as a superimposition of parallel slices each of which is self-sufficient, all of them merely traversed by a single moving body. On the contrary, in Renoir and in Welles, the set of movements is distributed in depth in such a way as to establish liaisons, actions and reactions, which never develop one beside the other, in a single plane [shot], but are spaced out at different distances, and from one plane [shot] to the next. The unity of the shot is produced here by the direct liaison between elements caught in the multiplicity of superimposed planes [shots] which can no longer be separated: the relationship of near and distant parts produces the unity.^129(*)

What André Bazin saw in the cinema of Renoir and Welles was the reintegration of the event's ambivalence in the cinematic space; a space freed from the manipulation of montage:

In analysing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. [...] In short, montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression, on the other hand, depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image if not of necessity at least as a possibility.^130(*)

If Bazin's belief in the possible transparency of the medium was somewhat excessive, it remains that cinematic space, in gaining complexity, engaged the spectator in a more active relationship with the image.

3

Perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject. This is the very idea of Baroque perspective.^131(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.

The classical system of composition pretends to serve the characters actions, but it, nevertheless, maintains an omniscient narration: an authoritative point of view looking upon the action.^132(*) Thus the use of subjective shots or point of view (POV) shots, when considered necessary to understand the characters motivations, is explicitly framed. The first examples of POV shots were marked out by a mask supposed to imitate the vision of the character. They were cut-in for specific moments, such as looking through a magnifying glass, a keyhole, or binoculars. During the 1910s the POV shots became more discreetly framed by windows:

The glance through a window provided virtually the only such cue, since the window frame within the image placed the character spatially.^133(*)

The viewer always knows who is looking and can clearly differentiate a subjective point of view from the supposedly objective narration. If there is a narrator, he has authority on the narrative, and the viewer has no doubts on his conclusions.

A film like Citizen Kane disturbed this clear differentiation; there is no overall narration in the film, just a superposition of point of views, and added up, they do not constitute a whole. The film accumulates different perspectives without giving the viewer the key to its organisation. Point of view shots or subjective shots developed with the notion of a multiple reality, which could not be reduce to a single point of view.

Stephen Heath finds it necessary to clarify what exactly constitutes a POV shot and a subjective image since they do not quite coincide. In his Questions of Cinema he quoted Jean Mitry's categories of subjective images:

The purely mental image (more or less impracticable in the cinema); the truly subjective or analytical image (i.e. what is looked at without the person looking), which is practicable in small doses; the semi-subjective or associated image (i.e. the person looking + what is looked at, which is in fact looked at from the view-point of the person looking), the most generalizable formula; the complete sequence given over to the imaginary, which does not raise special problems; and finally the memory image, which is in principle simply a variety of the mental image but, when presented in the form of a flash-back with commentary, allows for a specific filmic treatment which is far more successful than in the case of other mental images.^134(*)

Heath points out that only the semi-subjective and the truly subjective shot are point-of-view shots because `what is «subjective» in the point-of-view shot is its spatial positioning (its place), not the image or the camera.'^135(*)

However, once the omniscient point of view is removed, all shots are subjective: they all are point of view shots. Their degree of subjectivity varies according to the mental state of the onlooker and the elements of fantasy. The film Spider (2002) by David Cronenberg for instance, is told almost entirely from the point of view of the protagonist Spider. Just coming out of a mental institution, he tries to remember what happened to his mother. However, the ambiguities are resolved for the viewer at the end.

In the films of Federico Fellini, fantastical elements are often added, but nothing tells the viewer whether they happened or were imagined by the protagonist. In Fellini's Roma (1972) the director makes the portrait of the city through his memories of it. Adding up the shifting perceptions that he has accumulated of Rome. All perspectives are valid part of what constitutes for Fellini the eternal city; whether they are childhood fantasies, history lessons, archaeological finds or cinematic memories. The image of the chemist's wife as a flamboyant Messalina, empress of the orgies, can be an allusion to how antic history fills the roman imagination, just as the antique monuments, we see during the final bike ride, fill the city.^136(*)

Fellini, and others, revitalized (to take Christian Metz' terms) what used to be called `subjective images'.^137(*) The hierarchy between the different points-of-view is abolished; the subjective image of the character is no longer corrected by the omniscience of a narrator.

4

The point of view is nothing like a frontal perspective, which would give the best conditions to grasp the form, but the point of view is an instance from which a series of forms is apprehended in its passage from one to the other: either as a metamorphosis; passage from one form to another or, as an anamorphosis; a passage from chaos to form.^138(*)

Gilles Deleuze, lecture on Leibniz

From one film to the next, Lynch has developed a characteristic cinematographic space. From the format ratio^139(*) he selects to the shooting angles adopted, in passing by his use of camera movements; his style has become recognizable. These stylistic elements, however, are not just formal figures; they reflect Lynch's personal approach to cinema.

His films are generally shot in anamorphic wide screen, accentuating the width of the image. Lynch explains this preference to Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch:

I like CinemaScope better. It's harder to shoot in it, because the lenses aren't quite as fast, so there are little compromises, but it's a great ratio. Incredible. It's the ratio of the rectangle. Composing for it you can get some beautiful surprises.^140(*)

This ratio combined with wide-angle lenses composes images of a tensed complexity across the screen. The series of shots at Ben's place in Blue Velvet, for instance: the scene is crossed by lines of tension going from one side to the other and has Franck as centre, but visually the scene is centered on Dorothy. Thus another axis articulates the scene in its depth, going from Dorothy and the door at the back of the room guarded by three women - behind which is kept her son. The rectangle ratio allows the scene to be filmed in a series of large shots encompassing several characters distributed in various combinations in space, instead of using a systematic shot-reverse shot editing. These large shots emphasize the spatial relationships between the characters (see Fig. 1).

A scene in Lost Highway is another example of the use of the possibilities of the large ratio: it is when Renee finds another videotape on their doorstep. It is a long static shot of the Madison's sitting room; at the top centre of the frame, beside the kitchen door, there is a little table with a lighted lamp on which Renee leaves the envelop with the tape before going into the kitchen. Fred appears at the bottom right and, while exchanging some remark about the dog next door with Renee off-screen, his trajectory is ineluctably drawn toward the little table. Having found the tape, he goes to the left of the frame to insert it in the video recorder and then goes to the right to sit down on the coach where Renee eventually join him to watch the tape (see Fig. 2). Fred is thus covering the cinematic space from one side to another: From the bottom up and to the left and right. This composition highlights the tensions provoked by the tape in the household, but also Fred's difficulties to situate himself.

The sense of depth in Lynch's images is often given by characters moving from the back toward the camera and exiting off-screen space after having passed the camera. This type of shot is mentioned by Abbas Kiarostami talking about the influences on his work of the cinema of Charlie Chaplin^141(*). The camera waits for the character to come nearer, leisurely like in the shot of the first appearance of the tramp in The Kid (1915), or rushing, like in many chase scenes, and eventually brushing pass the camera, on either side. The space thus crossed is made vividly present to the spectator, and it also emphasizes a sense of expectation.

Lynch has brought that sense of expectation to a maximum in a couple of scenes. In Eraserhead, when Henri, hearing a knock, opened his door on darkness from which slowly emerges, after what seems like eternity, the face of his beautiful neighbour. There is a similar scene in Blue Velvet, for the first appearance of Sandy, the camera frames the portion of dark space from which her voice came from, and Sandy appears.

This filling of the screen space can also be found in a sort of reverse figure of the tracking shot made by Stanley Kubrick and described by Michel Chion. David Lynch often uses tracking shots in a backward movement. Instead of following the advancing character, the camera precedes him, pointing back, thus the viewer cannot see where the character is going. The resulting impression of the shot, far from the: `I appropriate the space I cross: I clear the space before me' of the Kubrick's, is that the character is going to be absorbed by the space toward which he advances.

The first meeting between special agent Dale Cooper and the sheriff Harry Truman, in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks is an interesting example of this use of camera movement. The scene is filmed in one long shot with a wide-angle lens. Cooper and Truman meet at the end of a hospital corridor, the camera is about half way down. As remarked Michel Chion about Lynch's style for the series, this made the characters quite small:

His long shots were vaster and deeper than the American cinema and, a fortiori, television usually dares to make them, so that the characters are reduced to the size of peas.^142(*)

This moment is the usual confrontation of local and federal authority, after introducing themselves; they start walking down the corridor toward the camera. They exchange some trivia about travel and pies. Truman welcomes Cooper as they reach the camera, which start back-tracking them. Suddenly serious, Cooper brings Truman, and the camera, to a stop, and he asserts his authority in the proceedings concerning the murder. Truman, however, reiterates his welcome, the problem of precedence has thus been cleared. With a childlike delight on his face, Cooper then asks:

`What kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here?' thus submitting to the local knowledge of the sheriff. All tension is then gone; they resume walking, preceded by the camera, sharing equal space. Cooper does not conquer Twin Peaks; he becomes part of it (see Fig. 3).

This tendency in Lynch's film to let the characters come to the camera echoes a particularity of Lynch's heroes pointed out by Martha Nochimson; their receptivity:

In film narrative this has translated for Lynch into a heroic ideal opposed to the prevalent Hollywood understanding of the hero as one who takes control by means of violent domination strategies. For Lynch, a hero tends to be one who can unlearn that absurd lesson, one who can become receptive to life.^143(*)

Like Lynch's heroes, his camera does not conquer the world, but waits for the world to come to make itself known. In Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, the first image the viewer is given of the living Laura Palmer is a back tracking shot. Laura is walking forward, along the street, enjoying the sunshine on her face, a small smile on her lips. She is coming toward the spectator, filling the screen with her presence. This image almost feel like a gift to the viewer of the series Twin Peaks, who only ever saw Laura Palmer as a photograph or a body wrapped in plastic.

Lynch also regularly uses other types of camera movements, such as forward tracking, crane or aerial shots, but they are seldom identified with a character. In fact they often seem to indicate a super-natural presence. The opening of The Straight Story is a series of aerial shots of the farm belt country before the camera moves down to the window of Alvin Straight, the main protagonist. This aerial presence will accompany him during his subsequent journey through the American midlands as Michel Chion described it:

Finally Alvin leaves with his strange apparatus. From then on, ground level scenes of his travel will alternate with shots made from helicopter. These shots as well as describing the countryside crossed, seem to mirror the ground journey with another in the sky, tracing an imaginary trajectory, more sinuous, above and around the slow and linear progression of Alvin on his land mower. Like if another character or a guardian angel was accompanying him.^144(*)

Aerial shots are usually used as establishing shots: to set the scene to come. The sense of presence inherent to these shots in The Straight Story gives them another dimension (see Fig. 4). There was a similar opening sequence in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), where the series of aerial and crane shots ended in with a medium shot of Harry Powell addressing himself to his avenging God.^145(*)

Another example of aerial shots is found in Mulholland Drive, they occur at regular intervals, hovering over Los Angeles. The shots move slowly over the skyline, or look down the skyscrapers to the streets below. Whereas the aerial shots of The Straight Story were usually accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti's ballads - contributing to their benign presence - in Mulholland Drive, they are scored by a low droning sound, enforcing a sense of threat over the city (see Fig. 5).

The sense of threat, of obscure forces at work, is constant in Mulholland Drive and is generally conveyed by the movements of camera. Like the tracking shot coming down the street toward the Club Silencio's door while Betty and Rita enter; it starts slowly very close to the ground and accelerates progressively until it crosses the door and penetrates the Club (see Fig. 6).

This sense of an advancing penetrating threat was also present in Lost Highway, particularly in the shots from the videotapes the Madison find on their doorstep. The video camera goes further into their intimacy with each tape. The internal structure of the house evokes an organism with corridors more like arteries. The last tape shows an odd tracking shot moving toward the bedroom from a high angle position and disclosing Fred murdering his wife.

A scene in Mulholland Drive plays the game of identification in a disconcerting manner: when Betty learns from a phone call to her aunt that Rita is in fact an absolute stranger. While she talks on the phone the camera moves away in the house to the bedroom where Rita is waking up. Then Betty enters to confront Rita with her lie. The movement of the camera is made from a person walking point of view but it could not be either of the occupants of the house. The slippage is slight but enough to introduce unease in the so far idyllic world of Betty; it may be taken as a forerunner of the composite nature of her identity.

The already-mentioned use of unusual camera angles emphasizing a variety of perspectives that are unsettling to the viewer is another aspect of Lynch's style. As was commented by Michel Chion about Fire Walk With Me:

From a visual standpoint, however, the film's most original and striking aspect is its use of subtly upsetting shooting angles and frames, generating a sense of imbalance.^146(*)

Ron Garcia, the cinematographer of the film, who also worked on the pilot of the series Twin Peaks, tells Stephen Pizzello some of the differences between the two shootings:

`We got a bit more unbalanced in the design of the film, using high and low angles. The high-angled shots reflect an angelic presence that continues throughout the film, with an unseen angel looking down the evil events below.'^147(*)

The importance of the camera angles to generate a particular perspective had already been used in Blue Velvet. The shot, at the beginning of the film, which is going through the grass at ground level to find a mass of scrambling insects, is an often-mentioned one. Less spectacularly perhaps, but just as unsettling, is the scene between Dorothy and Frank in her apartment, as seen by Jeffrey hiding in the closet. The cinematographer, Frederic Elmes recounts the shooting to Ron Magid:

`Another consideration was that many of the scenes in which Jeffrey is in the closet take place from his point of view. A suitable arrangement was necessary so the audience would believe that he could see as much as he does from such a constrained vantage point. [...] We never shot anything that he couldn't actually see from the closet. The set was designed in such a way that the closet was in a special spot where Jeffrey can see the living room, he can see down the hall to the bathroom, and he can see part of the kitchen, but he can't see around the corner which is the place where Dorothy sneaks up on him with the knife.'^148(*)

The subjectivity of the shots is further accentuated by the sound effects echoing the emotions of the characters. When Jeffrey, while waiting in Dorothy's apartment for her return to be signalled by Sandy, flushes the toilets, it sounds like a waterfall. Or when Henri in Eraserhead waits for the return of his beautiful neighbour, the sense of expectation is projected into the magnified sounds of the building, which could announce her coming: the elevator ascension, the opening of the door, the footsteps in the corridor and so on.

The cinema of David Lynch never offers a comfortable position from which the viewer might look upon the action. Even reassuringly controlled establishing-shots are permeated by a sense of presence, which cannot be identified with any certainty. The screen is a surface sensitive to the movements and energies emanating from the characters relationships. The different attributes of this cinema convey the image of a world infinitely layered by its multiple perspectives and crossed by flux of energies, which cannot be controlled.

* ⁹³ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 15.

* ⁹⁴ Aumont, Bergala, Marie and Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, p. 27. `Le plus souvent, le plan se définit implicitement (et de façon quasi tautologique) comme «tout morceau de film compris entre deux changements de plan.»', Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 26.

* ⁹⁵ Ibid. ` Au stade du tournage, il est utilisé comme équivalent approximatif de «cadre», «champ», «prise»: il désigne donc à la fois un certain point de vue sur l'événement (cadrage) et une certaine durée.' Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 26.

* ⁹⁶ Jean Mitry, Semiotics and the Analysis of Film, trans. Christopher King, London: The Athlone Press, 2000, p. 61.

* ⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 66.

* ⁹⁸ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: The Athlone Press, 1986, p. 18. `Le découpage est la détermination du plan, et le plan, la détermination du mouvement qui s'établit dans le système clos, entre éléments ou parties de l'ensemble.', Cinéma 1, L'Image Mouvement, Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1983, p. 32.

* ⁹⁹ It seems that the theoretical questions surrounding the «shot» have essentially concerned French theorists. This may be because of a French propensity to be very specific about the terms used, but it may also be because of the homonymy between the French for «shot» and «plane», both named plan, thus reinforcing the possible ambiguities.

* ¹⁰⁰ Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., p. 19-20. `Le plan en général a une face tendue vers l'ensemble dont il traduit les modifications entre parties, une autre face tendue vers le tout dont il exprime le changement, ou du moins un changement. D'où la situation du plan, qu'on peut définir abstraitement comme intermédiaire entre le cadrage de l'ensemble et le montage du tout. Tantôt tendu vers le pole du cadrage, tantôt tendu vers le pole du montage.' Cinéma 1, L'Image Mouvement, p. 33.

* ¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 20. `Le plan, c'est le mouvement, considéré sous son double aspect: translation des parties d'un ensemble qui s'étend dans l'espace, changement d'un tout qui se transforme dans la durée.' Cinéma 1, L'Image-Mouvement, p. 33.

* ¹⁰² Ibid., p. 39.

* ¹⁰³ Lapsley and Westlake, Film Theory, p. 130.

* ¹⁰⁴ Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema, London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1981, p. 36.

* ¹⁰⁵ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, p. 194-195.

* ¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 213.

* ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., p. 196.

* ¹⁰⁸ Heath, op. cit., p. 40.

* ¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 41.

* ¹¹⁰ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, op. cit., p. 214.

* ¹¹¹ Ibid., p. 214.

* ¹¹² Lapsley and Westlake, op. cit., p. 139.

* ¹¹³ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, op. cit., p. 213.

* ¹¹⁴ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 107.

* ¹¹⁵ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, op. cit., p. 210.

* ¹¹⁶ Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art An Introduction, p. 71.

* ¹¹⁷ `Traditionally, we distinguish two large types of camera movements: tracking and panning/tilting. A tracking movement (or dolly) involves shifting the base of the camera, often along a line parallel to any movement by the film object (strictly defined as a track), or trucking in toward or out away from the object, as in a dolly movement. A special kind of camera movement is the crane shot, in which the camera actually leaves the ground, moving up and down. (A more recent development, the steadicam, allows for even more elaborate and free-wheeling camera movement, which also makes camera movement more difficult to categorize). A panning movement, on the other hand, involves pivoting the camera horizontally while the camera pedestal remains fixed. A variation on the pan shot is the tilt, which pivots the camera vertically.' Aumont, Bergala, Marie & Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, p. 26.

* ¹¹⁸ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, Classical Hollywood cinema, p. 227.

* ¹¹⁹ Ibid., p. 229.

* ¹²⁰ Ibid.

* ¹²¹ Ibid.

* ¹²² Deleuze, op. cit., p. 24. `Le mouvement n'est donc pas dégagé pour lui-même et reste attaché aux éléments, personnages et choses, qui lui servent de mobile ou de véhicule.' Cinéma 1: L'image Mouvement, p. 39-40.

* ¹²³ Ibid., p. 25. `Or les deux moyens se trouveront à leurs débuts dans une certaine obligation de se cacher: Non seulement les raccords de montage devaient être imperceptibles (par exemple, raccords dans l'axe), mais aussi les mouvements de camera pour autant qu'ils concernaient des moments ordinaires ou des scènes banales (mouvements d'une lenteur voisine du seuil de perception)'. Cinéma 1: L'image Mouvement, p. 40.

* ¹²⁴ Ibid., p. 26.

* ¹²⁵ Michel Chion, Eyes Wide Shut, London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2002, p. 67.

* ¹²⁶ Aumont, Bergala, Marie and Vernet, op. cit., p. 22. `L'image filmique est nette dans toute une partie du champ, et c'est pour caractériser l'étendue de cette zone de netteté que l'on définit ce qu'on appelle la profondeur de champ. Il s'agit là d'une donnée technique de l'image et qui se définit comme la profondeur de la zone de netteté.' Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 22.

* ¹²⁷ Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, op. cit., p. 221.

* ¹²⁸ Brian O'Doherty, `Kane's Welles, The Phantom of the Opus', Artforum, Vol 26, December 1987, p. 90.

* ¹²⁹ Gilles Deleuze, op. cit. , p. 26. `C'est que la profondeur n'est plus conçue à la manière du cinéma `primitif', comme une superposition de tranches parallèles dont chacune n'a affaire qu'avec elle-même, toutes étant seulement traversées par un même mobile. Au contraire, chez Renoir ou chez Welles, l'ensemble des mouvements se distribue en profondeur de manière à établir des liaisons, des actions et des réactions, qui ne se développent jamais l'une à coté de l'autre, sur un même plan, mais s'échelonnent à différentes distances, et d'un plan à l'autre. L'unité du plan est faite ici de la liaison directe entre éléments pris dans la multiplicité des plans superposés qui cessent d'être isolables: c'est le rapport des parties proches et lointaines qui fait l'unité.' Cinéma 1, p. 42. In brackets is the original translation, which I think is erroneous. It comes from the homonymy already mentioned of the French for plane and for shot, in this paragraph Deleuze writes about the composition in planes of the shot, but all `plan' were translated by `shot', which made no sense. I replaced the word shot when it was intended as plane.

* ¹³⁰ André Bazin, What is cinema? Vol. I, p. 36. `En analysant la réalité, le montage supposait, par sa nature même, l'unité de sens de l'événement dramatique. [...] En somme, le montage s'oppose essentiellement et par nature à l'expression de l'ambiguïté. [...] Au contraire, la profondeur de champ réintroduit l'ambiguïté dans la structure de l'image, sinon comme une nécessité, du moins comme une possibilité.', Editions du Cerf, 2002, p. 75-76.

* ¹³¹ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 20, `Le perspectivisme chez Leibniz, et aussi chez Nietzsche, chez William et chez Henri James, chez Whitehead, est bien un relativisme, mais ce n'est pas le relativisme qu'on croit. Ce n'est pas une variation de la vérité d'après le sujet, mais la condition sous laquelle apparaît au sujet la vérité d'une variation. C'est l'idée même de la perspective baroque.' Le Pli, p. 27.

* ¹³² Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, op. cit., p. 238.

* ¹³³ Ibid., p. 207.

* ¹³⁴ Jean Mitry quoted in Stephen Heath, op. cit., p. 46-47.

* ¹³⁵ Stephen Heath, op. cit., p. 47.

* ¹³⁶ Messalina was the infamous wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, she was known for her appetite for lovers and her decadent orgies. In Fellini Roma following a scene at the local cinema where the children are seen to spy on the behavior of the chemist wife, we see her in toga inviting an endless queue of men to come into her car.

* ¹³⁷ Christian Metz, Film Language, p. 220.

* ¹³⁸ Gilles Deleuze, lecture on Leibniz, 16.12.1986, my translation: `Troisième caractère du point de vue : le point de vue n'est pas du tout une perspective frontale qui permettrait de saisir une forme dans les meilleures conditions, le point de vue est fondamentalement perspective baroque, pourquoi? C'est que jamais le point de vue n'est une instance à partir de laquelle on saisit une forme, mais le point de vue est une instance à partir de laquelle on saisit une série de formes, dans leurs passages les unes dans les autres, soit comme métamorphoses de formes : passages d'une forme à une autre, soit comme anamorphose : passage du chaos à la forme. C'est le propre de la perspective baroque.'

* ¹³⁹ The format of the cinematic image is express by the ratio between its width and its height. The original ratio was 1.33, which gives a nearly squared format. In 1952, Twentieth Century-Fox bought the patent of the anamorphic lens process from Henri Chrétien (1879- 1956) and used it as the basis for their CinemaScope system. The ration of an anamorphic widescreen is 2.35:1. Eric Rohmer celebrated the coming of the new ratio in the Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954: «The new process brings more than it takes away. Fluidity of movement or the entry of a detail into the general scene operates with no less facility.» Eric Rohmer, «The Cardinal Virtues of CinemaScope», Cahiers du Cinema Vol 1, the 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New- Wave, edited by Jim Hillier, London: Routledge and Kegan, 1985, p. 281.

* ¹⁴⁰ Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 176.

* ¹⁴¹ Abbas Kiarostami is a contemporary Iranian filmmaker and artist, he was invited to comment Charlie Chaplin's work in a documentary by Alain Bergala: Chaplin Today: The Kid (2003).

* ¹⁴² Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 102. `Cependant, Lynch a osé, dans certains moments qu'il a réalisés, quelques entorses au style télévisé habituel: principalement des plans généraux plus vastes et plus en profondeur qu'on ne se le permet d'habitude au cinéma, a fortiori a la télévision, et qui relèguent les personnages à la grosseur d'un petit pois dans le champs: par exemple, dans le pilote, la première rencontre Cooper/Truman et la conférence de Ben Horne aux Norvégiens; ou bien la scène de la banque dans l'ultime épisode.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 121.

* ¹⁴³ Martha Nochimson, The Passion, p. 11.

* ¹⁴⁴ Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 255, my translation: `Finalement, Alvin part sur son équipage insolite. A partir de là, les scènes sur terre de son périple alterneront avec des plans filmés d'hélicoptère. Ces plans, en même temps qu'ils décrivent les paysages traversés, semblent doubler son voyage sur terre d'un autre dans le ciel, dessinant une trajectoire imaginaire plus sinueuse au-dessus et autour de la lente et linéaire avance d'Alvin sur sa tondeuse. C'est comme si un autre personnage ou un ange gardien accompagnait Alvin.'

* ¹⁴⁵ About the relationship of Laughton's film and David Lynch: Michel Chion is convinced that it is a referential film for Lynch; without being able to source it, because of the many relation between The Night of the Hunter and Lynch's films. (Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 27). Supporting Chion's impression, I think the parallel between the openings of Laughton's film and The Straight Story is too striking to be coincidental.

* ¹⁴⁶ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 151. `L'aspect le plus original et le plus frappant, cependant, de ce film sur le plan visuel, ce sont ses angles de prise de vue et ses cadres subtilement inquiétants, générateurs d'un sentiment de perte d'équilibre.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 176-177.

* ¹⁴⁷ Stephen Pizzello, `Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer's Phantasmagoric Fall from Grace', American Cinematographer, Vol. LXXIII, No. 9, September 1992, p. 60.

* ¹⁴⁸ In Ron Magid, `Blue Velvet - Small Town Horror tale', American Cinematographer, Vol. LXVII, No. 11, November 1986, p. 70-72.