Abstract
At a climactic point in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, Lina (Joan Fontaine) receives a visit from two police inspectors come to inform her of the death of a friend in circumstances which cannot but increase her fears concerning the probity — the rectitude — of her husband Johnnie (Cary Grant). The scene finds its centre in a painting: the massive portrait of Lina’s father which bears with all its OEdipal weight on the whole action of the film — this woman held under the eye of the father (the name as crushing as the image: General MacLaidlaw), sexuality in place as transgression (‘Lina will never marry, she’s not the marrying sort... Lina has intellect and a fine solid character’, declares the General early on in the film), as radically ‘impossible’ (leaving her father for Johnnie, Lina is henceforth racked by doubt, a suspicion that is irresolvable, for her and the film) — and before which she now positions herself to read the newspaper report of the friend’s death and to gather strength enough to face the scrutiny of the law, the look relayed from portrait to police and to portrait again (Stills 1, 2, 3, 4).
‘It is precise that “events take place” ’ Michael Snow
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Notes
Annette Michelson, ‘Toward Snow’, Artforum (June 1971) p. 32;
Peter Gidal (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976) p. 41.
Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973); first published in French as Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, ‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu’, Screen vol. 17 no. 2 (Summer 1976) pp. 42, 45; ‘The Space of Equinox Flower’ ibid. p. 104.
Cf. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma vol. 1 (Paris: Denoel, 1963) pp. 288, 290.
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Bulletin account of Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son made in 1905 cf. Kemp R. Niver, The First Twenty Years: A Segment of Film History (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) p. 88.
M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie’, in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) p. 110;
P. Francastel, ‘Espace et illusion’, Revue internationale de filmologie 11–5 (1948) p. 66.
R. Arnheim, Film as Art (London: Faber, 1969) p. 20.
G. Ten Doesschate, Perspective: Fundamentals, Controversials, History (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1964) pp. 6–7.
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1966) p. 51.
P. Francastel, Études de sociologie de l’art (Paris: Denoël, 1970) pp. 136–7.
W. M. Ivins, Art and Geometry (New York: Dover, 1964) p. 108; Ten Doesschate, op. cit. p. 157.
C. Metz, ‘Le signifiant imaginaire’, Communications no. 23 (1975) pp. 35–7; translation, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen vol. 16 no. 2 (Summer 1975) pp. 52–4.
E. Lindgren, The Art of the Film (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948) p. 54.
K. Reisz and G. Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (New York and London: Hastings House, 1968) p. 215.
J. P. Richter (ed.), The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci vol. 1 (London: Oxford U.P., 1939) p. 150. The figure is Leonardo’s own, ibid. [Leonardo was much exercised by difficulties in the match between the Albertian perspective system and visual appearances, exploring elsewhere the possibility of an alternative system based on a spherical optics; cf. J. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1967) pp. 207–15.]
E. Reboul, Le Cinéma scolaire et éducateur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1926).
Hollis Frampton, interview with Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, Afterimage no. 4 (Autumn 1972) p. 65.
Quoted by Rosalind Krauss in ‘A View of Modernism’, Artforum (September 1972) p. 50. Krauss comments: ‘Perspective is the visual correlate of causality that one thing follows the next in space according to rule… perspective space carried with it the meaning of narrative: a succession of events leading up to and away from this moment; and within that temporal succession—given as a spatial analogue—was secreted the “meaning” of both that space and those events.’
C. Metz, ‘Histoire/discours’, in J. Kristeva, J.-C. Milner and N. Ruwet (eds), Langue, discours, société (Paris: Seuil, 1975) p. 304; translation, ‘History/Discourse’, Edinburgh ’76 Magazine (1976) p. 23.
It can be noted that much independent film work has been concerned to experience dislocations of screen and frame; Sharits, for example, writes: ‘When a film “loses its loop” it allows us to see a blurred strip of jerking frames; this is quite natural and quite compelling subject material. When this non-framed condition is intentionally induced, a procedure I am currently exploring, it could be thought of as “anti-framing”.’ Paul Sharits, ‘Words per page’, Afterimage no. 4 (Autumn 1972) p. 40. For an attempt by a film-maker to provide a theoretical formulation of such dislocation using the notion of a ‘second screen’ (in fact, the frame on screen in a narrative coherence of ground/background) that independent cinema will destroy (‘in independent cinema, there is no second screen’), see Claudine Eizykman, La jouissance-cinéma (Paris: Bourgois, 1976) esp. pp. 147–51.
B. D. Lewin, ‘Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly vol. XV (1946) pp. 419–34.
C. Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma vol. II (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972) p. 189.
Noël Burch, ‘De Mabuse â M: le travail de Fritz Lang’, in Cinéma Théorie Lectures, special issue of the Revue d’Esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973) p. 229.
See Barry Salt, ‘Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures’, Film Quarterly (Fall 1974) pp. 13–22.
J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma vol. II (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1965) p. 10.
Reisz and Millar, op. cit. p. 216. To emphasize the reality of this smoothness as construction rather than ‘reflection’, it can be noted that the Navajo Indians studied by Worth and Adair, though capable of producing the ‘correct’ continuity (for example, by matching on action), were very far from the ‘rules’ in their films, articulating another system of space as an area of action (in which ‘jumps’ from the standpoint of the vision of the rules became essential continuities); cf. Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1972) p. 174 and stills 22–35, 35–40.
André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. I (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) p. 108.
Which is not, of course, to say that deep focus must necessarily be used in this way; for analysis of ‘a refusal of perspective within depth of field’, see Cl. Bailblé, M. Marie and M.-C. Ropars, Muriel (Paris: Galilée, 1974) pp. 128–36.
André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol. II (Paris: Cerf, 1959) p. 100.
For a detailed analysis of the point-of-view shot, see Edward Branigan, ‘Formal Permutations of the Point-of-View Shot’, Screen vol. 16 no. 3 (Autumn 1975) pp. 54–64.
Noël Burch and Jorge Dana, ‘Propositions’, Afterimage no. 5 (Spring 1974) p. 45.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1970) p. 230;
Edward Branigan, ‘Narration and Subjectivity in Cinema’, mimeographed (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975) p. 24.
Discussed by R. Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, Screen vol. 15 no. 2 (Summer 1974) p. 38; Branigan, ‘Formal Permutations’, p. 57; and M.Nash, ‘Vampyr and the Fantastic’, Screen vol. 17 no. 3 (Autumn 1976) pp. 32–3, 54–60.
Cf. J.-A. Miller, ‘La suture’, Cahiers pour l’analyse no. 1 (1966) pp. 37–49; translation, ‘Suture’, Screen vol. 18 no. 4 (Winter 1977/8) pp. 24–34.
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (New York and London: Oxford U.P., 1974).
Burch and Dana, art. cit. p. 44 (Jakobson: ‘The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.’ ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960) p. 358).
Ibid. p. 51; full details of the transition discussed here can be found on this same page. [Thompson and Bordwell have since returned to the terms of their account of Ozu’s ‘modernism’, taking up points made here; see Kristin Thompson, ‘Notes on the Spatial System of Ozu’s Early Films’, Wide Angle vol. 1 no. 4 (1977) pp. 8–17 (especially pp. 8–9);
David Bordwell, ‘Our Dream Cinema: Western Historiography and the Japanese Film’, Film Reader no. 4 (1979) pp. 45–62 (especially p. 54).]
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© 1981 Stephen Heath
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Heath, S. (1981). Narrative Space. In: Questions of Cinema. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16579-7_2
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