THE LANGUAGE OF MURIEL

The model for all of his apartment movies.

Pillow shots. Also function outside of time. Day then night. Grave a mood?

Discontinuous segments. Time seems “broken” while rhythm continues.

Long takes. Move the moment into a sudden zone of continuity.

Then decoupage – “traditional” reaction shots to convey emotional and plot information. But NEVER in a linear way.

Ambient sound.  Noise of the harbor. Hiss.

Use of flat or warm sound to introduce grace notes of weirdness. Not just in performance but in miking.

Sonic cross-cut – dialogue from one scene pasted over another.

A crossing of the line with a musical hit (synchresis) to emphasize a dynamic shift in the scene. From her time to his time. Also, perhaps to create a v-effect.

Emotional discontinuity. She comes back as if nothing happened.

Wide Shot. Stagy tableaux feel. Then things start to move again. Resnais still does this, even though his camera moves much more. Motions toward or past the camera.

Break up the illusionist character of the scene with interjections – even while the sound makes for continuity.

Shots linked by “parallel” movements rather than “continuity”. Drawers opening. Doors opening. 

Emotional segmentations – closer to “affect spaces” than emotions.  A bit like I fidanzati  in that way.

Breath as punctuation.

The sharp voice – a bark -- with the shot of the back of the head – a powerful effect.

Modulation out of fragmentation: He picks up his coat. Looks towards her. Smiles. Indicates the tension is broken. Another “affect space” has opened up. Then they go into the next bit of business.

Resnais also uses sound cuts, hard, butchery cold cuts – like Godard.  From the guitar music to the wind on the cliff.

The energy of decoupage plus ellipsis: The offcenter close-up of Helene’s hand rapping the window. Then the other woman emerging from the darkness of the already open door.

Music hall meets modernism. Bernstein (theatrical melodrama) plus Picasso.

HUH...?

Ever since the coming of sound, filmmakers tried in vain to silence the pictures...

Tubbs: So whats going on?
Crockett: As in?
Tubbs: As in there is undercover and then there is "Which way is up?".
Crockett: What? Do you think I'm in so deep I forgot?
Tubbs: I will never doubt you.

Mann's ingenious solution: make the dialogue nigh incomprehensible in its extreme hieratic quality. You might be thinking that this is some pseudo-realist attempt to tackle the argot of these criminal-police tribes that he loves. You'd be wrong. He's been reading his Chion. When people talk in a Mann film it's about the rhythm, the sound of the words not the meaning. He just wants one word here and there to hit you like a stroke on a canvas. The approach to sound design is expressionist in the extreme -- which forces the TV weaned, -- yes, even them -- to fall back to the images, which ever since he's gone Digital, have become more the looser stuff of 30's poetic realism than the slicky-hard rubber style of the early Mann.

Stylized language is beautiful -- it is also more forceful cause it sneaks past the CPU.  

Take it to the limit one more time, etc.

MUSIQUE ACONCRETE

Rene Auberjonois: He was talking about people who were walking uptown as we were walking downtown. The conversations that we would hear pieces of:

"and she needs a hysterectomy..." 

"his brother-in-law" 

(Altman) said: "That's the key to it. You don't need to hear EVERYTHING people are saying to know the world they're living in."