Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging

[1] Introduction

[2] Revising Our Sense of Feuillade

[3] Mizoguchi the Inexhaustible

[4] Cheerful Staging: Hou’s Early Films

[5] Staging and Stylistics: Some Further Business

[6] Misprints, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities

Introduction

In the early 1990s I became keenly interested in cinematic staging, the ways directors arrange
and move their actors within the frame. Staging is a powerful part of filmmaking, but there is
very little written about it, even by practitioners. Andrè Bazin gave us many powerful
indicators of what to look for, and Sergei Eisenstein, in his concept of mise-en-shot, also
offered intriguing suggestions. In the last chapter of On the History of Film Style, I sought to
develop these theorists’ ideas and to trace some major norms of depth staging across the
history of cinema.

This account remained rather general, so I wanted to refine my analysis of those norms and to
explore how particular directors had innovated or consolidated particular usage of them. The
result was this book, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, published in early 2005
by the University of California Press.

What artistic resources does cinematic staging afford? The first chapter is an introduction to
the problem, reviewing efforts to think about staging as an integral part of the director’s craft.
The technique is at once theatrical (involving acting and ensemble-performance factors) and
pictorial (demanding an effective two-dimensional composition). Here I propose a systematic
way to think about style in cinema, arguing that in narrative filmmaking, the directing of
attention to key information in the frame is a crucial concern (although not the only one). My
effort is to trace out some primary functions which style performs in cinema. I conclude by
examining staging in contemporary U.S. cinema, both Hollywood and off-Hollywood, as
constrained by what I’ve called “intensified continuity” style.

The central chapters examine four filmmakers, considered in chronological order: Louis
Feuillade, master of the French silent serial; Kenji Mizoguchi, the great Japanese director;
Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1970s; and Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, the distinguished Taiwanese director. Each chapter analyzes the director’s
principal staging strategies, situated in relation to the norms of his time, both national and
international.

The book is mostly an effort in theoretically guided film criticism, but a final chapter
broadens out to ask how analyzing cinematic staging can contribute to the theory of style in
film. Once more, this project is part of my ongoing effort to explore how a “poetics of
cinema”—one attentive to craft practice, design principles, and aimed-for effects—can
enlighten us about movies.

While writing the book, I made notes on issues which might be of interest to readers but
which would break the flow of the argument on the page. It occurred to me that a website
would be an ideal vehicle for these supplementary ideas. Thanks to the Internet, I can expand
the book in what I hope will be fruitful ways.

Revising Our Sense of Feuillade

Feuillade and Continuity Editing in the 1920s

So many Feuillade films remain unseen that generalizations about his work are risky. Yet the
available films indicate that during the 1910s he moved to adapt many tactics of Hollywood
continuity editing. True, his shot/reverse-shots are often miscalculated, and his camera
positions don’t always lend themselves to American-style clarity in the matching of
movements across cuts. Still, he largely gave up his staging-based techniques in the late
1910s. His films move from Average Shot Lengths of 10 to 17 seconds in the period 1915–
1918 to single-digit averages, usually around seven seconds, in the years immediately
following. The eight 1920s films I have been able to study consistently average four to seven
seconds per shot, the sort of cutting pace we would expect in Hollywood films of the period.

Just as important, however, is his evident realization that quick cutting allows him to present
action in exciting bursts. The packed prologue of Barrabas (1919), which crams a family
gathering, a high-society party, a roadside robbery, and a dance into eighteen minutes, allots
about three seconds per shot. Even more striking are montage-based passages in
L’Orpheline (1921). The auto accident which befalls Jeanette and Pierre (a very young René
Clair) is rendered in seven staccato shots. After a shot showing the couple driving toward the
camera we see:

1. Extreme long shot: Another car approaches (18 frames).

2. Long shot: Pierre and Jeannette continue in their car (31 frames).
3. Long shot: A curve above a cliff: The couple’s car comes around it (20 frames).
4. Extreme long shot, as 1: The approaching car races out of the frame (14 frames).
5. Long shot, as 3: The car swings toward them, they swerve (10 frames).
6. Long shot: The couple’s car crashes up onto bushes (7 frames).
7. Long shot: The car rolls over (12 frames).

A final shot shows Pierre and Jeannette, thrown free, lying next to the wrecked car.

Although an American film of this period would probably have included more close views
(tighter framings of the cars, hands wrenching the steering wheel), this passage indicates that
Feuillade understood the power of rapid editing. Since L’Orpheline was meant to run at about
20 frames per second, the longest shot in the series lasts scarcely more than a second, and the
shortest is a mere third of a second. In addition, Feuillade employs cutting to accelerate the
rhythm. After shot 2, the shots get increasingly brief until shot 7, moving from 31 frames to a
mere seven frames.
 Fig. 2A.1
Esteban rushes to the window
on the right.

Fig. 2A.2
In medium close-up, he
shouts to his chauffeur below
before starting to leap
(6 frames).

Fig. 2A.3
An extreme long shot shows
him dropping into the car
(23 frames).
 Fig. 2A.4
From a skewed high angle:
his movement is completed,
as he lands in the back seat
(24 frames).

Fig. 2A.5
Pierre and the priest watch
from above (5 frames).

Fig. 2A.6
The car drives off, with the
priest and Pierre visible at the
window (15 frames).

Another scene is even more vigorous. The villainous Esteban visits Jeannette in the hospital,
but she and her friends charge him with being a catspaw for another villain, Sakounine.
Esteban flees by jumping out the window, dropping to his car and then speeding off. The
Feuillade of Les Vampires would have handled this fairly sedately: a shot in the hospital
room showing Esteban’s defenestration, then a full shot from outside showing his descent and
escape. But here we get a more dynamic rendition of his maneuver, backed by rhythmic
editing.
Again, Feuillade uses fast cutting to accentuate rapid movement, but here the shortest shots
are close, simple compositions, designed to be grasped at a glance. More remarkably, the
cutting slightly overlaps Esteban’s descent from the right-angled extreme long-shot to the
high-angled view, underscoring the stunt in a manner reminiscent of action cutting in
Douglas Fairbanks films like Wild and Woolly (1917). The high angle of Figure 2A.4 is also
cleverly justified in retrospect as Pierre’s and the priest’s point of view. The rising generation
of French filmmakers was eager to dismiss Feuillade as hidebound and out-of-date, but this
passage’s rhythmic cutting is a step toward the more pervasive and prolonged accelerating
editing in the Impressionist masterpieces of 1923, Abel Gance’s La Roue and Jean Epstein’s
Coeur Fidèle.

There seems little doubt that Feuillade deserves far more study. And if his hundreds of films
ever become available for close analysis, scholars won’t be the only ones to benefit.
Audiences will particularly enjoy his comedies, which, to judge from L’hôtel
de la gare (1913), Les millions de la bonne (1913), and other shorts from his prime years, are
consistently clever and often hilarious.

Feuillade in Two Dimensions

At the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in June of this year, I was watching Tih Minh again, and
I noticed another tactic Feuillade employs as part of his overall balancing-and-symmetry
approach to composition. When several characters gather in the frame, their heads are
commonly arranged more or less along a horizontal line—the isocephaly spoken of by art
historians, particularly in Renaissance painting. But in Tih Minh, often the story requires one
character to be sitting in a chair or on a couch while others bend over him or her—out of
curiosity, solicitude, or whatever. How to arrange these heads?

Fig. 2A.7Feuillade tends not to string the heads out in a perfect horizontal but rather to
present a graceful curve framing the seated figure. In Fig. 2A.7 (left), the corrupt maid has
been put to sleep by the drug she supplied, and the men of the Villa Luciola stand around her
in a pattern reminiscent of a question mark tipped over leftward: three-headed arch on the
left, an extra head on the right—with the maid Rosette’s face peeping out as a sort of dot.
Fig. 2A.8Or consider Fig. 2A.8. Jacques is on the phone getting news of the abducted
Tih Minh. The other players are arranged on a smooth slope around him. The giveaway here
is the stance of Jeanne, on the end of the line; she has half-risen and supports her head in an
awkward half-crouch. The image of an alert group is sustained by the abstract geometry of
the layout.

Fig. 2A.9An equally striking arrangement is shown in Fig. 2A.9 as the men question the
Marquise Dolores. Their heads form a smooth wave along a line driving our gaze toward her,
with her face, more frontal, abruptly stopping the pictorial flow—somewhat reminiscent of
the Yeames painting shown in Fig. 2.98 on p. 81 of Figures.

Fig. 2A.10
Fig. 2A.11These arrays of curious heads can yield movements as well. Once more, a group of
concerned people at the Villa Luciola assemble around Tih Minh, back from another brush
with death (2A.10). The heads cluster around her tightly. But when she revives and embraces
Jacques, the onlookers all simultaneously straighten up (2A.11). Even though the changes in
position are slight, the fact that everyone moves as a single unit creates the impression of a
slow burst in the shot’s center, like a flower opening. Such gentle geometries of movement
hard to find in today’s cinema, and observing them in Feuillade reminds us that long ago
some directors crafted their images as two-dimensional patterns of bodies in space.

Mizoguchi the Inexhaustible

Preparing this sidebar for Figures Traced in Light, I can’t help but recall a fall day in 1969. It
was then that I came out of the old Bleecker Street Theatre in Greenwich Village, tears
pricking my eyes. Sansho the Bailiff struck me with an impact it retains on every viewing;
sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t watch it again, for fear that its lustre will dim. It’s a
wonderful film to see in your early twenties, based as it is upon the painful ties to your home
and the sense that going into the world can soil you forever. (Why is it named after him? I
always ask my classes. Isn’t it a bit like changing the title of Othello to Iago? My own view is
that for Mizoguchi the world we live in, unhappily for us, belongs to its bailiffs.) A couple of
years later I would see Chikamatsu Monogatari, Ugetsu, Life of Oharu, and Street of Shame.
By the late 1970s, I was convinced that Mizoguchi was one of the masters of world cinema.

Indeed, you could make a credible case that the two greatest directors in the history of film
were both Japanese. Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji are opposed in many respects; for
one thing, Ozu has a rich sense of humor and Mizoguchi displays virtually none. But both
understood that cinema is at once a narrative, performative, and pictorial medium, and they
explored all three dimensions. Their explorations were highly original, while remaining
deeply indebted to tradition. In Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton University Press,
1988), I tried to show that Ozu’s work is a thoughtful effort to build a stylistic system that
had the rigor of the mainstream continuity style but that permitted a range of more nuanced
and playful effects. Chapter 3 of Figures Traced in Light paints Mizoguchi as a more eclectic
artist. I emphasize his visual side while also trying to show how his pictorial intelligence
affected his storytelling and his conception of performance. In the following reflections I
trace out some issues I didn’t pursue in the book. I’ve had to restrain myself, for I’d love to
examine in detail virtually all his films. For the student of cinematic artistry, his work is
inexhaustible.

A Master of Editing?
Critics have rightly celebrated Mizoguchi as the supreme exponent of the long take, but his
early work displays a command of most of those resources of editing that emerged in world
cinema during the 1920s. As my chapter indicates, his earliest surviving film,
Song of Home (1925) displays thorough knowledge of the continuity system promulgated by
American cinema. Like his contemporaries, Mizoguchi made effortless use of the 180-degree
system, eyeline matching, matches on movement, cuts linking adjacent spaces, point-of-view
shots, and all the other editing devices we associate with mainstream commercial cinema of
the period. No long takes of the sort we’ll find in his 1930s silent films are evident in
Song of Home. Instead, Mizoguchi here enlists in the tradition of what I’ve called “piecemeal
decoupage,” the analytical approach characteristic of the contemporary-life films (gendai-
geki) made at the Shochiku studios. Like Ozu, Naruse, and other exponents of this style,
Mizoguchi varies his shot scales a bit more than an American would. For example, when the
scholar offers Naotaro a reward for saving his daughter, no setups are repeated across the
five shots.

1. (plan-americain) The scholar offers Naotaro some bills.

2. (close-up) Bills in the scholar’s hand.
3. (ms) Naotaro and friend, three-quarter view.
4. (ms) Naotaro’s point of view: the scholar extends the money to the camera.
5. (mcu) Reverse angle: Narotaro looks at the money extending into the shot.

Fig. 3A.1

Fig. 3A.2
Fig. 3A.3Still, if we’re looking for a prefiguration of Mizoguchi’s later work, this film
exhibits cutting patterns that show a sensitivity to foreground/ background relations. In the
climactic scene, when the professors come to Naotaro’s house to offer to fund his education,
Mizoguchi covers the entire scene in thirty-eight shots (plus eight intertitles), and although
some setups are repeated, there is a delicate variation in the framings, each of which brings
different dramatic elements to our notice. We start with the overall ensemble (Fig. 3A.1),
eventually move to Naotaro flanked by the two educators (Fig. 3A.2), before reaching the
climax, showing Naotaro and his mother and sister behind him, as he declines to leave the
countryside. “Getting an education is good, but I must be a farmer who is independent and
self-aware” (Fig. 3A.3).

Other editing trends were at play in world cinema of the 1920s, and Mizoguchi seems no less
aware of them. French, German, and Russian directors, as well as some U.S. filmmakers,
experimented with rapid cutting, made rhythmic by increasingly brief shot lengths. This tactic
was also pursued in Japan, particularly by directors working in the swordplay genre
(chanbara). It’s likely that some of Mizoguchi’s lost films would bear traces of this
influence, but even in the condensed version of Tokyo March (1929) we can glimpse this
tendency in a fast-cut tennis match. A similar moment of visual rhetoric appears in
The Poppy (1935), when Ono, walking the street with his sweetheart, encounters the wealthy
young woman who’s out to seduce him. Their encounter is played out in a flurry of very
short shots:

1. Ono and Sayoko talking; she runs into close-up.

2. Low angle: After Sayoko nearly bumps into a rickshaw, Ono steps up.
3. (ms) Ono looks right. (25 frames)
4. Reverse-shot: Fujio in the rickshaw, stares. (15 frames)
5. (ms) Ono, as 3, still looking. (13 frames)
6. Fujio, as 4. (39 frames)
7. (ms) Ono and Sayoko, looking. (35 frames)
8. Slight jump cut: Ono looking, as 5. (13 frames)
9. Fujio, as 6. (11 frames)
10. All three; after a pause, Fujio orders the driver to continue. Ono and Sayoko stare
after her.

The accelerating/ decelerating editing, reminiscent of Feuillade in our the webpage extract
from L’Orpheline, is a good example of the sort of visual flourish that was common in silent
cinema. It was infrequent in the mature sound cinema, though we can find it in Hitchcock’s
work and in Hollywood’s “montage sequences” of the 1930s and 1940s. This rhythmic
editing scheme recurs in several films of the 1960s, e.g., A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and the
climax of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966).

Fig. 3A.4

Fig. 3A.5

Fig. 3A.6Such editing flourishes are also on display in Taki no shiraito (White Threads of the
Waterfall, 1933), in a swift montage that inserts pulsating flashbacks to a coach ride into a
scene showing Taki making up for a performance with. No less impressive is the climactic
courtroom scene. Taki faces the judges, one of whom is the young man she has supported
through law school. My chapter points out that there are some forty-five camera setups for
the scene’s eighty-five images, and I indicate the remarkable way that Mizoguchi creates
dramatic impact through insisting on rapidly cut singles of Taki and her judges, with tight
depth-composed close views (Figs. 3.19 and 3.20, p. 100). The whole effect is reminiscent of
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). And despite the film’s frequent long takes,
Mizoguchi can always spare a moment for a very creative cut, as when after Taki has begged
Kin to save her, they pass to the bars of her cell. Amid several aperture framings (for
example, Fig. 3A.4 (right); compare Figs. 3.116 and 3.117 in the book, from Sansho the
Bailiff), Mizoguchi gives us a startling graphic match showing the two of them in similar
positions, the slats maintaining the aperture conceit (Figs. 3A.5 and 3A.6).

On the evidence we have, it doesn’t seem that Mizoguchi simply went from being a cutting-
based director to being a staging-based one. The fancy cutting just mentioned occurs in films
that also rely on long takes and ensemble staging. It seems that for a time he held both
approaches in balance (as Welles did in Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello,
and Touch of Evil). In the surviving films from 1936 to 1941 Mizoguchi favored staging-
based effects, but after the war he resumed the pluralistic approach seen in the earliest
surviving films. Audacious though his editing occasionally was, he didn’t construct an
alternative, full-bodied system as Ozu did over the same period.

The Love of Sumako the Actress (1947)

This remarkable film, as I note in the chapter, recalls the daring experiments in depth and
darkness Mizoguchi undertook in Naniwa Elegy and Story of the Last Chrysanthemum. It
might be regarded as his last effort in this direction before moving toward the flexible,
pluralistic style of his last decade.

Mizoguchi’s audience would have recognized Matsui Sumako as a scandal-plagued celebrity.

Between 1912 and 1919 she and her mentor-lover Shimamura Hogetsu helped create modern
westernized drama in Japan (shingeki), and her tours and recorded songs made her a
household name and the prototype of the free woman. Shimamura’s associates often
portrayed Matsui as an unsophisticated prima donna who lured the weak-willed director away
from his wife and children. (See Phyllis Birnbaum, Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of
Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], pp. 1 to 52.) But
Mizoguchi wanted Yoda’s script to present her as “feminine and sympathetic,” displaying
“the psychology of a modern woman” (quoted in Yoda Yoshikata, Souvenirs de Kenji
Mizoguchi, trans. Koichi Yamada, Bernard Béraud, and André Moulin [Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma, 1997], pp. 70, 74). In this he was following not only Occupation censorship
guidelines but also an alternative view of his heroine. For many, Matsui showed that a
woman could find success in a rigid society on her own terms. Her demands, even her
tantrums, showed her supreme dedication to her art and to Shimamura’s goal of modern
theatre. This dedication, admirers pointed out, explains why she committed suicide soon after
his death and following her triumphant portrayal of Carmen.

At first, however, the film gives us very little access to Sumako. One might expect that a
biography of the actress would begin with her early life, or at least the circumstances that
lead up to her joining drama school. Instead, as so often in Mizoguchi’s films, the man’s life
is presented first, and the woman enters it. The opening scenes show Shimamura teaching,
conferring with his colleagues, and casting Sumako as Nora in A Doll’s House. The plot
traces his growing affection for her, emphasizing the damage it does to his family and the
contrition he feels. In the sequence when he leaves his household forever, he apologizes to
his wife, his mother, and his daughter—who has lost a suitor because of her father’s affair
with Sumako. In this version of history Shimamura emerges as no weakling, but rather a man
so committed to the ideals of modern drama, including the liberation from convention, that he
must live them outside the theatre.
The plot has a fascinatingly “staggered,” or shifting-spotlight structure. Shimamura has the
initiative in the first eighteen sequences, and he is present in every scene except one, when
Sumako is pushed to leave her home after Shimamura abandons his family. The result of
concentrating on Shimamura is to deny us access to Sumako’s mental life when she isn’t
around around others; we are given only one glimpse of her dutifully studing her part. Once
Shimamura starts living with her, the narrational focus fastens on the couple, usually seen
among their theatre troupe as they struggle to find and sustain success. Nine sequences trace
their life together, and in these scenes Sumako is shown as short-tempered but also supremely
committed—urging the actors forward, demanding a decent rehearsal hall, accepting endless
tours to pay the bills. Once Shimamura collapses, the narrative’s focus shifts decisively to
Sumako as she confronts Shimamura’s wife and mother and decides to struggle on.

Fig. 3A.7 Fig. 3A.8

Fig. 3A.9 Fig. 3A.10

Kinugasa Teinosuke filmed a Sumako biography at the same time (Actress, 1947) and filled it
with close-ups, but most scenes in The Love of the Actress Sumako consist of distant
framings, often in chiaroscuro. In one daring shot, as Shimamura walks out on his wife and
mother, his departure is barely visible in a slot just above the heads of the two weeping
women (Fig. 3A.7). In keeping with the plot’s roundabout treatment of its heroine,
Mizoguchi reserves the closest shots of Sumako for performances or rehearsals, as if to
sharpen the difference between theatre and life. A major turning point in this stylistic pattern
occurs when, as Sumako is ill, Shimamura gives her a ring pledging their love. The camera
tracks in with him to a medium-shot of her lying down, the closest the camera has come to
her so far; she admires the ring, then carefully turns back to studying her text (Figs. 3A.8
to 3A.10). Even in this intimate moment, the narration is fairly circumspect about her
affection for her lover, instead stressing her dedication to her art. Once Shimamura has died,
however, we get the first and only scene of Sumako alone. It is handled in a manner which
we instantly recognize, but it is followed by a shot-change which, in the context of this film,
is little less than shocking.

Fig. 3A.11 Fig. 3A.12

Fig. 3A.13 Fig. 3A.14

Fig. 3A.15 Fig. 3A.16

Sumako comes home from a performance and refuses to eat, sitting disconsolately in the
distant foreground (Fig. 3A.11). As so often, Mizoguchi’s simple panning movement turns a
long-shot framing into a closer one, as she comes forward and rightward to kneel before the
memorial shrine she has created for Shimamura (Fig. 3A.12). After lighting an incense stick,
she asks how her performance was tonight. After long pauses, she responds to his silence by
breaking down—first with her face more or less turned toward us, then covered by her hands
(Fig. 3A.13); then she curls up in grief (Fig. 3A.14). She rises to beseech him one last time
before turning definitively from the camera and pressing into the wall as the image fades out
(Figs. 3A.15 to 3A.16). It is a typical Mizoguchi emotional transition, from a full-face but
distant view to a closer but oblique one, until finally, as the character’s despair reaches its
height, dorsality and a retreat from the camera take over.

Fig. 3A.17 Fig. 3A.18

Fig. 3A.19 Fig. 3A.20

As I indicate in the chapter, this moment stands in for Sumako’s suicide, which takes place
between sequences at the end of the film. This is the most private and intense display of
Sumako’s emotions to be found in the film. True to form, however, Mizoguchi contrasts his
reticent staging with the following shot, which presents Sumako as a turbulent, demanding
Carmen (Fig. 3A.17), challenging us full-face as Ayako did at the close of Naniwa Elegy
(Fig. 3.47 in the book). Then, after showing us the performance in a mix of tightly composed
shots and flamboyant depth (Figs. 3A.18 to 3A.19), Mizoguchi provides a fascinating long-
take scene of Sumako’s backstage outburst, using one of his distant-depth compositions
(Fig. 3A.20). There remain only her death as Carmen onstage (another substitute for her
suicide); the discovery of her hanged body; and her funeral. As so often in Mizoguchi, the
woman enters an already-established world of men and money, and she leaves them behind
puzzling over what she has done.

Cheerful Staging: Hou’s Early Films

Fig. 5A.1
Chimes at Midnight (1966)Around the world, from the late 1930s through the 1960s, many
films relied on wide-angle lenses—those short focal-length lenses that allowed filmmakers to
stage action in vivid depth. One figure or object might be quite close to the camera, while
another could be placed much further in the recesses of the shot. The wide-angle lens allowed
filmmakers to keep several planes in more or less sharp focus throughout, and this led to
compact, sharply diagonal compositions (Fig. 5A.1, right). Although Citizen Kane (1941)
probably drew the most attention to this technique, it was occasionally used in several 1920s
and 1930s films made throughout the world. (I sketch a history of this technique in the last
chapter of On the History of Film Style.) The great French critic André Bazin was the most
eloquent analyst of the wide-angle aesthetic, and his discussion of Citizen Kane,
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Little Foxes (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) has strongly shaped our understanding of this technique.

Fig. 5A.2
A Man and a Woman (1966)The 1960s saw the development of an opposite approach, what
we might call the telephoto aesthetic. Improvements in long focal-length lenses, encouraged
by the growing use of location shooting, led to a very different sort of imagery. Instead of
exaggerating the distances between foreground and background, long lenses tend to reduce
them, making figures quite far apart seem close in size. (In shooting a baseball game for
television, the telephoto lens positioned behind the catcher presents catcher, batter, and
pitcher as oddly close to one another.) Planes seem to be stacked or pushed together in a way
that seems to make the space “flatter,” the objects and figures more like cardboard cutouts.
The style was popularized by films like A Man and a Woman (1966; Fig. 5A.2, right) and
Elvira Madigan (1967), in which the soft haze yielded the long lens added a degree of
romanticism. The telephoto look quickly spread, employed by directors as diverse as Sam
Peckinpah and Robert Altman, whose 1970s films also use the long lens, controlled by
zooming, to squeeze a crowd of characters (M*A*S*H, 1972; Nashville, 1975) into the fresco
of the anamorphic frame.

Fig. 5A.3 Fig. 5A.4

Diary of Didi (1978). Cropped image from Love Story (1970)
anamorphic widescreen.

Fig. 5A.5 Fig. 5A.6

Love Story Love Love Love (1974). Cropped image from
anamorphic widescreen.

Hou Hsiao-hsien came to filmmaking via the romance films so common in Taiwan in the
1970s, and this genre employed the long lens extensively. Working with low budgets,
filmmakers relied on location shooting. The telephoto allowed the camera to be set far off and
to cover characters in conversation for fairly lengthy shots (Fig. 5A.3). In this respect, the
directors were not so far from their Hollywood contemporaries; Love Story (1970) employs
these techniques on a bigger budget (Fig. 5A.4). Indeed, Love Story (a big hit in Taiwan) may
have pushed local filmmakers toward using this technique in their own romantic melodramas;
sometime the influence seems quite direct (Figs. 5A.5 and 5A.6).

Chapter 5 of Figures Traced in Light argues that Hou’s early romance-musicals led him to
principles of staging which became refined in his later work. These principles were
developed almost completely, I believe, in the context of the telephoto aesthetic. Hou’s
inclination toward location shooting and the use of nonactors, along with his attention to the
concrete details of everyday life, allowed him to see the power of a technique that put
character and context, action and milieu on the same plane. His crowded compositions are
organized with great finesse in order to highlight, successively, small aspects of behavior or
setting, and these enrich the unfolding story, as I try to show in his masterpieces of the 1980s
and 1990s. Using a long lens (usually 75mm–150mm) he began to exploit some “just-
noticeable differences” that the lens produces as byproducts. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, Eastern or Western, he saw the pictorial and dramatic possibilities of the
telephoto lens, and they became central to his distinctive way of handling scenes. A purely
technological innovation yielded artistic prospects which he could explore in nuanced ways.

We can watch this process unfolding in what many consider Hou’s most disposable movies,
the boy-meets-girl romances Cute Girl (1981) and Cheerful Wind (1982) and the pastorale
The Green Green Grass of Home (1983). These charming films show him developing, in
almost casual ways, techniques of staging and shooting that will become his artistic
hallmarks. Chapter 5 provides the detailed argument, but let me highlight three points here.

Fig. 5A.7
Cheerful Wind (1982)

Fig. 5A.8
The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983).
Fig. 5A.9
The Green, Green Grass of Home.One byproduct of the long lens is a shallow focus, as we
can see in the examples above. Because the lens has little depth of field, one step forward or
backward can carry a character out of focus. Savoring the effects of gently graded focus is a
common feature of Hou’s later work. The masher at the train station in Dust in the Wind
(1987) moves eerily in and out of focus in the distance. In Daughter of the Nile (1988),
there’s an amazing shot showing gangsters approaching a victim’s SUV outside a nightclub:
at first they’re only barely discernible blobs (seen through the vehicle’s narrow windows) but
then they gradually come into ominously sharp focus in the foreground, preparing to attack
one of the boys inside. The slight focus changes train us to watch tiny compositional elements
for what they may contribute to the drama. Hou’s three first films don’t use the option quite
so daringly; here the degrees of focus concentrate on the principal players but still allow us to
register the teeming life around them (Figs. 5A.7 and 5A.8). Hou can even put different
dramatic situations on different layers. In The Green Green Grass of Home, the departure of
the little girl, saying farewell to her host family, plays out slightly closer to the camera than
the departure of the eccentric teacher (Fig. 5A.9). This principle operates just as well in the
wonderfully distracting street and train-platform scenes of Café Lumiere (2004), in many
ways Hou’s sophisticated return to shooting techniques used in his 1980s films.

Fig. 5A.10 Fig. 5A.11

Cute Girl (1981). Cheerful Wind.

Fig. 5A.12 Fig. 5A.13

Cute Girl. Love Story.
Fig. 5A.14
Millennium Mambo (2000).

Secondly, the long lens yields a flatter-looking space. It has depth, but the cues for depth
that it employs are things like focus, placement in the picture format (higher tends to be
further away), and what psychologists call “familiar size”—our knowledge that, say, children
are smaller than adults, even if the image makes them both of equal size. One favorite Hou
image schema is the characters stretched in rows perpendicular to the camera, and the
telephoto lens, by compressing space, creates this “clothesline” look more vividly. We can
find the clothesline composition in many early films (Figs. 5A.10 and 5A.11). Another
favorite schema is the “stacking” of several faces lined up along a diagonal (Fig. 5A.12).
Interestingly, this can be seen as a refinement of a schema that was in wider use, as an
example from Love Story indicates (Fig. 5A.13). But Hou uses this sort of image more subtly.
The telephoto lens lets him stack faces in ways that encourage us to catch a cascade of slight
differences (Fig. 5A.14 [from Millennium Mambo (2000)]). In the table scenes of Flowers
of Shanghai (1998) this principle is carried to a degree of exquisite refinement without
parallel in any other cinema I know.

Fig. 5A.15 Fig. 5A.16

Cute Girl. The Green Green Grass of Home.

Fig. 5A.17 Fig. 5A.18

The Green Green Grass of Home. The Green Green Grass of Home.
Fig. 5A.19
The Green Green Grass of Home.

In general, because Hou is committed to a great density of information in the shot, the
compression yielded by the long lens tends to equalize everything we see. Minor characters,
or just passing strangers, become slightly more prominent, while details of environment can
get pushed forward as well. The zoo scenes of Cute Girl enjoy showing us our characters in
relation to the creatures around them (Fig. 5A.15), and the tile rooftops of The Green Green
Grass of Home, secured by bricks and pails and tires, become just as important as the father
and son crouching below (Fig. 5A.16). In the latter film, Hou develops the equalized-
environment option in quite a precise way in one particular scene. A long-lens distant view
catches the teacher coming to the father’s house along a corridor of rooftops (Figs. 5A.17
and 5A.18). When the teacher confronts the father, instead of tight framings on each man,
Hou cuts to another angle that activates yet another range of environmental elements—
principally the train passing in the background, prefiguring the trip that the man’s son and
daughter will take in an effort to find their mother (Fig. 5A.19).

Fig. 5A.20 Fig. 5A.21

Cute Girl. Cute Girl.

Fig. 5A.22 Fig. 5A.23

Cute Girl. Cute Girl.
Fig. 5A.24
Cute Girl.

Because the long lens has a very narrow angle of view (the opposite of a “wide-angle” lens;
see Figures, p. 197), it affects the image in a third major way. If you use a long lens in a
space containing several moving figures, people passing in the foreground will block the
main figures: they pass between the camera and the lens. Hou elevates this blocking-and-
revealing tendency to a level of high art. Throughout Figures Traced in Light, I argue that
many great directors, from the silent era forward, have staged action in the shot so as to block
and reveal key pieces of information, calling items to our attention at just the right moment
with unobtrusive changes of figure position. The possibility of blocking and revealing arises
from the “optical pyramid” created by any camera lens. (See the discussion on pp. 62–63.)
What I’m suggesting is that using the telephoto lens on location probably made Hou
exceptionally sensitive to the resources of masking and unmasking bits of the shot. So we get
not only passersby drifting through the foreground (Fig. 5A.7 above) but also quite refined
use of slight character movement to attract our attention in the course of the scene. The
loveliest example I know in the early films is the Cute Girl shot analyzed in Figs. 5.23 to 5.28
on page 200 of Figures, when Fei-Fei confronts the surveyors and the man in the red shirt
serves as a pivot for our attention (e.g., Figs. 5A.20 and 5A.21). A less drastic example
occurs when the surveying team starts quarrelling with the locals around a walled gate: The
team’s blocking of the gate (Fig. 5A.22) gives way to movement into depth (Fig. 5A.23) and
a struggle there between them and the townsfolk (Fig. 5A.24).

In all, it seems to me that these three resources of the long lens—the shallow focus, the
compressed space, and the narrow angle of view—supplied bases for Hou’s shooting and
staging in the later films. This is not to ignore his use of the wide-angle lens on occasion,
particularly interiors. Once the lessons of the long lens had been absorbed, he could apply the
staging principles that he’d developed to other kinds of shots and story situations. Nor am I
claiming that other directors hadn’t also explored some of these options. Years before Hou,
Kurosawa and other Japanese directors used the long lens to create very abstract
compositions (Figures, p. 201). Still, the Japanese directors tend to use the lens more
flamboyantly than Hou does. His style is fairly unemphatic. (One indication of Hou’s skill in
keeping our attention on his unfolding story is that as far as I know, no other critics have
noticed the staging strategies I’ve pointed out here and in Figures.)

Overall, I think that Hou saw certain pictorial possibilities in the long lens, and after
developing them to a certain point in popular musicals, he recast them when he took up
another kind of storytelling. He realized that leisurely, contemplative narratives permitted
him to refine these visual possibilities, and they could become powerful, nuanced stylistic
devices. A more general lesson follows from this. Norms of form and style are resources for
artists. Some artists follow the schemas that they inherit, while others probe them for fresh
possibilities. A few can even make a handful of schemas the basis of a rich, comprehensive
style. Ozu did this with the techniques of classical Hollywood editing; Mizoguchi did it with
depth staging in the long shot. Like these other Asian masters, Hou reveals how much nuance
a few techniques can yield, even when deployed in crowd-pleasing, mass-market movies.

Staging and Stylistics: Some Further Business

I hesitated to launch counterarguments in the final chapter of Figures Traced in Light. The
standard strategy is to disarm your critics at the outset before proceeding to mount a positive
case. But this would have created problems for the book. First, as Figures was in some ways
an extension of On the History of Film Style, to defend the earlier book from objections at the
outset might have put readers off. (“Is this guy touchy or what?”) Moreover, I wanted to
show how my approach to staging worked in detail before rebutting critics of that approach.
If the reader followed my analyses up to the final chapter, I hoped that my reply to objections
would carry more conviction. Finally, I wanted the final chapter to push my detailed studies
into a broader realm, and my critics offered me many opportunities to do that—exactly
because they usually objected to my approach on general grounds. A couple of Web
correspondents have mentioned that the last chapter seemed to them a bit daunting, so I
probably lost as much as I gained by this strategy.

In any event, I take this opportunity to carry some of my points further in the malleable
medium of the Internet.

One last note: My comments in Figures on Slavoj Žižek’s critique (pp. 260–264) were
confined to his objections to my discussions of style. Žižek has many other objections to my
orientation, particularly as set forth in a volume I edited with Noël Carroll, Post-Theory. In
the online essay Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything I reply to Žižek’s more wide-ranging points.

Stylistics and Craft Practice: Issues of Intention

When I wrote this chapter, I didn’t have available Paisley Livingston’s excellent new book,
Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Livingston untangles many issues around artistic decision-making, and he does it in ways
more sophisticated than I can. Still, the book supports, I think, my assumptions that stylistics
can appeal to the patterns of craft choices as revealing intentions within a believe-desire,
means-ends framework.

An accessory pleasure of Livingston’s book is his habit of mounting dry asides to some of the
wilder claims of contemporary literary/film theory. His treatment of Foucault is at once
respectful, subtle, and skeptical, pointing out that Foucault’s account of authorship leads to an
infinite regress (p. 67). And in discussing Borges’s story about Pierre Menard, who wrote a
version of Don Quixote identical to Cervantes’ book, Livingston responds to post-structuralist
beliefs that single art works dissolve into a sea of indeterminate textuality with this:

If text and textuality are always already indeterminate and in a condition of perpetual flux
and deferral, how could Cervantes and Menard generate anything that could rightly be
recognized as being “verbally identical”? As the proponents of theories of a sublime and
wholly indeterminate textuality regularly rely on such textual identifications (they are, for
example, quick to complain if they are misquoted), their accounts of textuality are most
charitably understood not as plausible definitions but as exhortations to engage in creative
and transgressive interpretation (125).
Representational Relativism

People who don’t spend time in seminar rooms will probably be surprised to learn that many
academics studying the visual arts believe that there are no universals of pictorial
representation. They believe that the persons, places, and things depicted in images are
presented by means of conventions that vary maximally across cultures. Pictures are
“arbitrary” representations, in that they consist of symbol systems that might have been
radically otherwise.

By assuming the radical arbitrariness of pictures, the theorist can deny that there are any
interesting common features of human nature. Human nature, many believe, is a monstrous
hoax, an ideological construction that affirms “the great family of man” and thus erases the
specificity of social struggles. For most theorists, all meanings are local and “historically
situated,” tied firmly to one culture at one time and place. Once this position is granted, the
theorist can go on to point out how any image is shot through with local social meanings. The
theorist can always ask, right out of the gate, what ideological work the picture is performing.
How, for example, does a picture of a woman exaggerate her sexual appeal to men? (The
classic essay here is John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.)

Chapter 6 of Figures argues that this position is flawed. There’s no reason to believe that
pointing out cross-cultural affinities in any way makes us lose a sense of local differences. A
picture is a representational package, evoking at once very broadly based responses (e.g., the
perceptual process of detecting edges of figures) and quite local ones (e.g., the modes of
dress, the use of color). These responses are in a complex tangle, but it’s wrong to deny that
all these strands exist. If we want full explanations of why images look as they do, we can
usefully invoke as either causes or preconditions the human propensity to make images that
in important respects resemble the world.

But resemble it in what ways? Many theorists came to believe in the ultimate arbitrariness of
images because they thought that the case for the cross-cultural commonality of visual
representation rested upon perspective drawing. If they could show that perspective was
arbitrary and culturally provincial, then there was no other candidate for pan-human picture-
making. This position was given impetus, among French theorists particularly, by the art
historian Pierre Francastel. In La Figure et le lieu (Gallimard, 1967) and other works,
Francastel sought to show the ideological sources of what he called “the perspective cube,”
the principles of spatial organization found in Renaissance pictures. His ideas proved
important for Cahiers du cinéma’s examination of deep-focus in the cinema in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.

General principles of perspective construction—e.g., scaling figures to approximate sizes, or

arranging figures to suggest relative distances, or overlapping planes to indicate depth—
includes design principles common to many (but not all) image-making traditions. And
perspective in the narrower sense of “geometrical” perspective (with vanishing points and
receding orthogonals) is more culturally specific. But at least one principle seems common to
all traditions. An outline drawing of familiar figures, not necessarily arrayed in an overall
spatial whole, is a good candidate for a contingent universal of picture-making.
Fig. 6A.1
Deer hunt from Cavalls cave, near
Valltorta, Spain. From Clottes, World
Rock Art, p. 98. Note sticklike human
figures on left and canonical profile views
of the deer.
Fig. 6A.2
A pride of lions, again in profile, from the
Grotte Chauvet cave. Painted by
Cro-Magnons, they are at least thirty thousand
years old, yet astonishingly realistic by any
standard. From Clottes, World Rock Art, p. 45.

Look at an ancient Egyptian tomb painting, and you will see people (often distorted in their
proportions, but recognizably human), along with birds, beasts, flowers, fish, chariots,
furniture, food, bowls, goblets, and the like—many rendered in striking detail. In Figures, I
allude to Ice Age cave paintings that represent all manner of creatures in immediately
recognizable ways. Since writing that chapter, I have found Jean Clottes’s wonderful World
Rock Art (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002), which amply shows the
universality of outline drawing. Such representations appear in every inhabited region, they
go back very far (perhaps fifty thousand years), and they are remarkably readable to us today.
While the pictures of humans are somewhat stylized (there seems to be a preference for
sticklike figures, often distended), other things are presented as vivid, even “realistic” in a
modern sense (Figs. 6A.1 and 6A.2).

The conclusion seems inescapable. We see things in the world as having boundaries and
edges. Our visual system, like a PhotoShop edge-enhancer, sharpens the softer gradients
given in early stages of vision. These perceptual processes, which we share with our distant
ancestors, bias us toward rendering the contours we see by means of a mark. “Lines stand for
edges” is a simple, apparently universal maxim of picture-making.

There seem to be other universals too. Within a range, figures retain relative proportions; we
can recognize humans even if they’re wildly stretched. The figures also present strong
geometrical cues (symmetry) as well as real-world referents (so humans have, as a default,
two arms, two legs). Certain objects are rendered in canonical ways; fish are instantly
recognizable, being almost always drawn in profile.

So theorists set the bar too high by focusing the case for representational relativism on
perspective, which seems quite specific to certain cultures. Yet Margaret Hagen has mounted
a very intriguing argument that a range of optical projection systems, including station-point
perspective, can account for a great deal of the world’s art. Her Varieties of Realism:
Geometries of Representational Art (Cambridge University Press, 1986) is curiously ignored,
so far as I can tell, by both art historians and theorists of visual representation, but it offers a
systematic account of similarities and differences among many pictorial systems. It turns out
that there aren’t infinitely many such systems, and Hagen convincingly shows that each one
taps into some relevant information about the visible world.

In any event, the commonalities among representational systems aren’t just perceptual ones.
In Figures, I mention that there are also social regularities across cultures. People face one
another when they speak, and they scan each other’s facial expressions for clues to attitudes.
Clottes’s book calls attention to other common elements, such as scenes of hunting
(Fig. 6A.1) and warfare. Such regularities of social exchange and action are supported, I
believe, by a stock of concepts that arise whenever humans form a society. (We are social
animals.) Concepts of kinship, enmity, sexual jealousy, and the like seem fundamental to any
culture, and though they aren’t given in perception, they are good candidates for cultural
universals—and thus pictorial representation. By the way, such social universals also figure
into narrative construction. Belief/desire psychology and informal means/ends reasoning
seem to be central to a great many stories, and as Patrick Hogan shows in his brilliant book,
The Mind’s Stories, the actions these capacities generate can often be correlated with some
widespread conceptions of human emotional fulfillment.

It’s important to stress the argument for the cross-cultural side of image-making on sheerly
theoretical grounds. Doing so enables us to launch a discussion of what many humanities
academics, particularly those who engage in Cultural Studies, have taken for granted: an
overly broad relativism about representational options. My immediate purposes in Figures,
though, were more specific. First, I wanted to show that a many patterns of cinematic staging
appeal to transcultural regularities of human perception and cognition. Viewers outside Japan
can grasp a great deal of what’s going on in a Mizoguchi scene simply by paying attention.
Additionally, evidence for convergence in techniques of making pictures helps support my
claims about the cross-cultural reach of film craft (pp. 258–260). In this way filmmakers in
different times and places might hit upon some common stylistic tactics, without there being
demonstrable influences.

So we need not explain everything interesting about the way films look and sound by
recourse to local cultural factors. When particular patterns of staging are “rediscovered” by
filmmakers working in very different circumstances, it’s plausible to think that the concrete
and proximate choices filmmakers make owe something to longer-standing traditions.

Misprints, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities

[p. 21] : I claim that Kuleshov completed The Revolutionary after Bauer’s death. That’s an
error. Bauer lived to complete The Revolutionary. After his death Kuleshov completed
The King of Paris (1917). Thanks to Yuri Tsivian for noticing the slip.
[p. 83] : I attribute The Cuckoo (Hototogisu, 1922) to Makino Shozo. It was actually directed
by Ikeda Yoshinobu. Thanks to Alexander Jacoby for pointing this out.

[p. 92] : I discuss a scene from The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952). Oharu
receives a farewell letter from her lover Katsunosuke, who has been executed. Grabbing a
knife, she runs out into a bamboo glade, followed by her mother. Before Oharu can kill
herself, her mother wrestles the knife from her and both collapse sobbing in extreme
long shot.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

I should have mentioned is that this scene carries over a motif from an earlier scene in a
garden, when Oharu fainted at Katsunosuke’s declaration of love. That scene ended with his
carrying her into the inn, and it marks the beginning of their affair (Fig. 1). At the close of the
scene, Mizoguchi’s camera gently tilts down to reframe two small stupas, traditional
Buddhist symbols of earth’s elements and of spiritual enlightenment (Fig. 2).

Fig. 3The stupa motif reappears in the bamboo-glade scene. Trying to wriggle away from her
mother, Oharu crawls toward a pair of stupas in the distance. Evidently she had planned to
kill herself there. So far away is Mizoguchi’s camera position that the stupas are just barely
visible in my frame enlargements on p. 93, but they are definitely there in the original film,
and perhaps they can be seen more clearly in this frame, just to right of center (Fig. 3). In
effect Mizoguchi gives the love of Oharu and Katsunosuke a spiritual validation, in sharp
contrast to the social oppression that divides them.
[p. 94] : I claim that Naruse Mikio arranges five figures in various zones of a shot from
The Whole Family Works (Hataratu ikka, 1939). After seeing the film again in a good print, I
find that he actually includes seven figures in the shot. All of them are dimly visible in my
still on p. 95.