American Cinematographer - August 1993 - 89

Film Aesthetics
by John Bailey, ASC
That cuts

In last week's mail I received

a mailing from
called Film Aesthetics. The en¬
velope sported a logo of a stylized human
figure, arms aloft, waving a piece of motion
picture film as if it were a banner. The name
alongside it had a deep 3-D drop shadow.
Inside were a questionnaire and a letter.
It requested that I list for pur¬
poses of a national survey my choices of the
greatest scenes from ten movies and why I
thought they were great (not in order of
merit, thank God). It said further that my
a

company

name

arcane

already thrown

are

looking at-that subtle dance of mind,

heart and eye which transports us into that
larger-than-life experience we sometimes
call "beauty": a complex, somewhat intui¬
tive state that enables us to understand life

a

are a

bit more. What more could anyone ask of
great scene from a great film?

art or of a

Many powerful images have
been rattling around inside me since I first
encountered cinema at the age of fifteen by

that, in America at least, the director is of¬
ten more "central" as a target for market¬
ing and focus group pot shots than as the

way

creative focus of the film.

scared the hell out of

erable curiosityforthis survey. We have all
made our own fantasy list of the ten great¬
est movies to be

trapped with on a desert
island. But trying to isolate an individual

scene

within

a

favorite film is

a

novel

un¬

dertaking with sizable shoals and reefs.
Struggling to find some way of
centering myself to ground this search, I
decided to meet the company on its own
terms
aesthetics. Philosophers have
been attempting to define aesthetics for
several millennia and I'm certainly not quali¬
fied to pursue the Aristotelian, Kantian or
-

Semiotic dimensions of the issue. But the
humble dictionary proved to be an expedi¬
ent arbiter. The final entry in the Random

House Unabridged proved to be appropri¬
ately concise and elegant - "the study of
the mind and emotions in relation to the
sense

of

beauty."

of the death-dream scene that opens
Bergman's Wild Strawberries, the first

movie I

ever saw

with subtitles. It also

me in a way that
Psycho didn't. Some vital locked chamber
was opened for me during that Saturday

matinee at the old Sunset Theater on West¬
ern Avenue - a passageway parallel to,
but more wonderfully mysterious than the

explore in the daily world.
The problem with this exercise,
I soon realized, is not in finding ten scenes
that embrace a mind-emotion synthesis but
in limiting it to ten, a task about as easy as
my pitching a no-hitter at Dodger Stadium.
So I'm going to start by throwing a few
warm-up pitches from the sidelines.
With strong nods toward the al¬
ready cited Bergman scene in Wild Straw¬
berries, the time-warped Sugar Ray slaugh¬
ter scene in Paging Bull, the suspended
one we

warily ascend the

than aware that I've probably

my five best pitches.
I should clarify at this point is that

I am a child of the French New Wave, and
that includes a deep affection for films that
my generation thought could change the
world. Yes, there was a time when film¬
makers thought they had that power.
Some of us hardheaded ones still

storehouse of the
scenes and films that have
touched our minds and emotions,
and we add a critical awareness
of our own work to that reservoir.
We

was more

Nonetheless, I admit to consid¬

more

like October or Artforum, this is what you

membership roster of the Directors Guild of

intrigued by the insistence on its random
sampling or that only "directors" were be¬
ing polled - because "more than any
other," they said, the director's role is "cen¬
tral" (a new catchword, I suspect, used to
avoid that shop-worn cliche, "auteur"). I
have no argument with this supposition for
reasons that I hope will become apparent
in this piece. However, it does seem to me

in Black Narcissus, I

mound,

had been chosen at random from the

America. I don't know whether I

right to the heart of the
all the
pedantry of "aesthetics" journals

matter, doesn't it? Once you remove

do. So it may come
as no

surprise that

of my
choices harbor
several

abiding political
sympathies of
their time.
The concen¬

tration of French troops,

tanks and tear gas
against FLN partisans, which builds to a de¬
fiant dance of imminent liberation by a
keening Algerian woman, is at the end of
Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, the crown¬
ing achievement of mind-heart cinema. And
a close parallel is the assassination scene
of Yves Montand (an icon of the Sixties' en¬
gaged cinema), which ignites the pursuit of
the bestial killers through the narrow streets
of Costa-Gavras' Z

The poetically evocative draping
of the lanterns that serves as a near-feudal,
sexual leitmotif in Zhang Yimou's decorous
and formal Raise the Red Lantern, and

Jean-Louis

Trintignant's regimented walk
through the starkly lit, fascist ministry build¬
ing in Bertolucci's The Conformist, repre¬
sent another polarity of aesthetic style in
their restrained, heartless and controlled

images of repression.
The blistering pace of the open¬
ing of Truffaut's Jules and Jim, culminat¬
ing with the introduction of Jeanne Moreau,
the Greek bust come to life, is a distillation
of the giddiness of the entire French New

aerial Christ flying through Rome in La Dolce
Vita, the "March of Time" newsreel in Citi¬
zen Kane, and the mad rush through a wind¬

Wave.

swept convent by the demented Sister Ruth

nitroglycerin-laden trucks in Clouzot's

August 1993

American

frenzied

In complete juxtaposition to this
style is the nighttime departure of

Cinematographer

87
American Cinematographer - August 1993

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