The Prevention of Audience Perception of Narrative Construction in the films Tarkovsky's Mirrorand Wenders' Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas

Originally submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements of the Animation MA, Royal College of Art.

Joshua Wedlake, 2012http://www.joshwedlake.com

Word Count 9039

Contents

Thesis

1. An Introduction to the Notion of Construction . . . . . 22. Ambiguity and Perception . . . . . . . 53. Questioning Narrative . . . . . . . 104. Approaches to Story . . . . . . . . 115. Stories within Stories . . . . . . . . 156. The Effect of Content and Genre on Construction in Wenders' Films . . 187. The Effect of Form on Construction in Wenders' Films . . . 218. The Effect of Content on the Construction of Tarkovsky's Mirror . . 249. The Effect of Form on the Construction of Tarkovsky's Mirror . . 2710. Experimental Evidence for Postulations . . . . . 3011. Final Remarks . . . . . . . . 33

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . 35

Appendices

A. Structural Analysis of Mirror. . . . . . . 37B. Experiment Phase 1, Part 1 . . . . . . . 49C. Experiment Phase 1, Part 2 . . . . . . . 53D. Experiment Phase 1, Part 2: Normative Narrative Schema Analysis . . 55E. Experiment Phase 2 . . . . . . . . 72F. Introduction to Shot-by-Shot Analyses . . . . . 81G. Roll Charts for Shot-by-Shot Analyses . . . . . 82H. Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Alice in the Cities: Alice's Goodnight Story . . 86I. Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Alice in the Cities: Wuppertal Caf Scene . . 90J. Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Kings of the Road: Character Introductions . . 96K. Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Kings of the Road: The Widower . . . 111L. Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Paris, Texas: Ending Sequence . . . 123

On the DVD

Chronological Re-edit of Tarkovsky's MirrorData and Interface Demos for Experiments

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1. An Introduction to the Notion of Construction

When Hitchcock's Psycho1 was first released, audiences were terrified by it2. Though

Psycho is still held in high regard today, to a contemporary audience the film is nowhere

near as thrilling. This is in part because contemporary cinema-goers are well aware of

how Psycho manipulates their emotions; they are aware of the film's narrative construction

and devices. Except in cases where films deliberately make an audience aware of their

construction for effect3, this awareness tends to detract from their experience, alienating

them from the world of the film, allowing form to distract from content, disrupting their

immersion, and negating the reality of the film. Though to some extent, audiences'

awareness of construction is dependent on their familiarity with screen language, narrative

form, dramatic conventions, editing devices and so on, I believe that techniques exist

which do not rely on this lack of familiarity and enable films to be made which conceal their

construction. By analysing several films which I interpreted as being unconstructed, I hope

to reveal the methods and techniques by which these films use to prevent audiences from

detecting the illusion of reality which they portray.

When I first saw Tarkovsky's Mirror4, I found it to be incredibly captivating and beautiful

throughout, yet after I felt as though I had very little understanding of the events depicted

within it. What surprised me, was that my immersion in Mirror did not seem to have been

at all affected by my inability to gather the gist5 of the narrative: I was unable to summarise

the film in a concise way which maintained any similarity to the experience of watching the

film. I do not believe that my enjoyment of Mirror was entirely down to the immediate

1 Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho. Horror, Mystery, Thriller, 1960.2 How Psycho Changed Cinema. BBC, April 1, 2010, sec. Magazine.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8593508.stm.3 In particular, Verfremdungseffekts: for example, jump cuts in Breathless (Godard, Jean-Luc.

Breathless. Crime, Drama, Romance, 1961.), or the set in Dogville (Trier, Lars von. Dogville. Drama, 2003.)

4 Tarkovsky, Andrey. Mirror (), 1975.5 p.16. Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. Routledge, 1992.

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sensory appeal of its surface structure6, or the collective impression of the heap7 of visuals

built up by the end of the film. On my first viewing of Mirror I was barely able to

comprehend it as a collection of episodes8. I felt that despite not being able to sense the

director's hand organising the elements of the film, Mirror's appeal, and the way it

captivates its audiences, must be reliant on some kind of underlying structure, even if it is

not readily apparent to the viewer. I was fascinated to know why Mirror works the way it

does. In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky tells of the difficulty of editing Mirror9, suggesting that

a vast reordering was required to make the film comprehendable. By contrast, others

have suggested that Tarkovsky deliberately obfuscated what was otherwise a linear plot in

order to avoid the censors10. In my attempt to re-edit Mirror to be chronological11, I was

unable to reveal a conventional narrative structure, and the film only seemed less powerful

and more contrived as a result of my changes.

A few months after seeing Mirror, I watched Wim Wenders' 1976 road movie, Kings of the

Road12. I was taken aback by the level of realism in the narrative. The plot arc never

made itself evident, yet the film was still filled with intrigue, and never felt rambling or lost.

The portrayal of time felt continuous, and the places real. My emotions seemed entirely

due to a shared empathy with the characters, rather than being forced on me by the film's

director. I was never aware of the characters seeming manipulated by a director, or of

them as puppets acting out a story. After watching I confirmed analytically that the film

does indeed contain a full scale narrative, and is not just a focused chain13. The level of

dialogue in the film is a far closer representation of how much of our lives we actually

6 p.15. Branigan.7 p.19. Branigan.8 p.20. Branigan.9 Tarkovsky, A., 1975. Mirror ().10 Tarkovsky is quoted as having said: "Do you know what I'll do [with Mirror]? I'll mix it all up, so that no-

one will understand a bloody thing... I'll move the end to the beginning, and the middle to the end." p.55. Zoya in the mirror: Leo Arnshtam's influence on Andrei Tarkovsky. Rogatchevski, Andrei, in Dunne, N (ed). 2008. Tarkovsky. Black Dog, London.

11 See DVD for film, and Appendix A for editing notes.12 Wenders, Wim. Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit), 1976.13 p.20. Branigan.

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spend in silence, thus suggesting that the unconstructedness might be due to how much of

the narrative information is communicated subtextually.

I felt similarly about Alice in the Cities14, a film which forms part of the same trilogy as

Kings, and feels wonderfully observational. I didn't perceive the film as a heavily designed

drama, but rather a series of truthful observations about a developing relationship.

Wenders gives the viewer time to look for themselves, rather than forcing conclusions on

them. In Paris, Texas15, which Wenders made several years after Kings, on his rise to

fame, I noticed a different unconstructed feel: the mystery of Travis' past was never

pushed out of proportion as I focussed on Travis' relationship with Hunter, and followed

him on his quest to find Jane. When Travis finally finds Jane, a landslide of exposition

relating to their past emerges. Looking closer at the film16 I realised that the majority of the

it is devoid of action, and that the climax is primarily verbal. The film doesn't so much tell

the story itself, as allow the characters to exposit the events which explain the current

situation, creating an incredibly intense and moving story entirely within the audience's

imagination.

A commonality amongst the unconstructed films is that the concept of a strictly unified plot,

which everything in the film points towards, is noticeably absent. Instead the films'

narratives leave options open. Normally if a real-life happening was adapted into a film, it

would be condensed into a plot containing only the most exciting, relevant or unique

action, and in the extreme example of Hollywood, the plot would be further reduced to a

high-concept17. Real life contains many ambiguities, and even when heightened drama

14 Wenders, Wim. Alice in the Cities (Alice in Den Stdten), 1974.15 Wenders, Wim. Paris, Texas. Drama, 1984.16 See Appendix L.17 A high-concept film is one which can easily be described by a succinctly stated premise. Jaws is a

prime example. The narrative structure of Jaws is analysed in Appendix D. Spielberg, Steven. Jaws. Thriller, 1975. See also: Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. University of Texas Press, 1994.

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is occurs, that drama is not the only cause of events. I do not believe that in order to make

films seem unconstructed they must be devoid of plot, but rather that a plot cannot be the

sole cause of drama, and that ambiguities and unfocussed action must be included so that

events in the film do not make the plot obtrusive.

2. Ambiguity and Perception

The birth of film, and its world of triumphant illusions and dreams18, was shortly followed

by the start of Cubism, a movement that Gombrich describes as the most radical attempt

to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man made

construction, a coloured canvas19. Many of the early experiments with film, and the

industry which sprung up shortly after the invention of cinema, were chiefly concerned with

portraying unambiguous narratives. Film grammar developed, and although some

techniques, for example Griffith's use of close-ups, required audiences to familiarise

themselves with the new screen language, much understanding seemed to be innate. In

1920 Unhooking the Hookworm20 was released, a film intended to educate rural people

about healthcare issues. Officials initially thought that nave audiences would struggle to

understand the complexities of [the] 'sophisticated' film techniques21 utilised. In fact, the

reverse turned out to be true, as the film was particularly influential22 on those who had

never seen films before: even at the most basic level it would seem that familiarity with

construction detracts from cinema's effect. The discovery also revealed that an

understanding of film is to some extent innate and applies universally across audiences, to

the extent that if a film-maker follows certain rules, they can be confident that their work

will be unambiguous.

18 p.205. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message. in Wardrip-fruin, Noah. The New Media Reader. Har/Cdr. MIT Press, 2003.

19 p.27. Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion. Princeton University Press, 2000.20 Unhooking the Hookworm. Silent, black and white. International Health Division of the Rockefeller

Foundation, 1920.21 p.8. Burns, James. Unhooking the Hookworm: The Making and Uses of a Public Health Film, 2009.22 p.10. Burns.

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The innate understanding of film is due to the fact that brain's ability to comprehend

narrative is independent from the medium which delivers it23. The cognitive faculties which

process narrative in films are identical to those which make the world around us intelligible.

Thus the problem of device awareness is separate to that of narrative design. If all

devices are left unused by a film, reducing it to a static single shot, it would still be possible

for the film to feel completely constructed if the narrative shown within the frame appeared

obvious or artificial. This suggests that in order to maintain unconstructedness regardless

of the devices used, the brain must be allowed to indulge in the activity of sorting relevant

data to achieve 'Meaning'...when pattern exists24. Data must therefore be provided from

which a pattern can emerge, but is not necessarily immediately apparent. An obvious

narrative is one in which the pattern is already apparent in the data, and the data's

ordering aligns closely with the schema by which the mind usually organises narrative

data.

If we consider filmic devices to known ways of arranging data, then we can define

familiarity to be the efficiency with which the data provided by the filmic device is

remapped into a recognisable pattern. Thus the more an audience practices their faculty

of remapping data from a specific filmic device, the more familiar that device becomes,

both reducing the challenge of comprehending the film, and with each use of the

remapping, making the audience conscious of the rote nature of the remapping's

application. The remapping procedure for each filmic device is developed by intuition, as

for each new filmic device and data-set, the brain attempts different remappings until a

specific remapping occurs which creates patterns for all cases of the device-data-set

pairings in question. The process of developing the remapping is interesting in itself: put

23 Narrative is a fundamental way of organizing data. p.1, Branigan.24 p.14, Branigan.

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simply it is more enjoyable to develop algorithms to solve puzzles for yourself, than to be

shown puzzles which you already know how to solve.

To take this a step further, I would suggest that filmic devices do not necessarily have to

have completely constant remappings to be comprehensible. Filmmakers can prevent the

audience from developing too great a familiarity with each device, and so prevent the

device's application from becoming boring, by constantly subtly redefining what each

device implies, or altering its implementation. In this way the remappings associated with

each device must be re-examined each time they are altered, and so the brain must play

catch up: a director who reuses clichd devices without innovation, thus becomes boring

quickly.

Returning to the analogy of a puzzle, consider the application of a remapping a filmic

device's data-set to be like playing tic-tac-toe. Once the tic-tac-toe player has learnt the

method by which they can consistently win or draw at tic-tac-toe, the game of tic-tac-toe in

itself becomes boring. However, not all puzzles will eventually become boring in the same

way that tic-tac-toe does: while some puzzles can be solved by applying algorithms, there

are many examples of mathematical problems to which no elegant solutions exist.25 I

believe that it is possible for filmic devices to exist which cannot be solved by a consistent

remapping, and thus these filmic devices never become familiar, or, as a result, boring.

Another way of keeping a puzzle interesting, and thus preventing the solution from being

reachable by a trivial application of an algorithm, is to allow the data to become fuzzy. For

example, imagine if the numbers in a sudoku grid were occasionally altered randomly to

prevent the player from ever reaching the final solution. In this way it doesn't matter how

25 For example, many of Hilbert's problems hare remained unsolved for over 100 years. David Hilbert. Mathematische Probleme. Gttinger Nachrichten (1900): pp. 253297.

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familiar the brain is with the puzzle solving method, as the data itself is constantly slipping.

Applying this concept to a narrative: if the data provided by the film is kept ambiguous,

then the rearrangement procedure cannot produce a stable pattern, and so the audience

never feels as if the plot exposed by the narrative has become predictable.

When watching Mirror, one of the ways in which the film becomes captivating, is the

constant cognitive challenge of trying to develop a gist from the events depicted. As shown

in Appendix A, there are so many possible causal or associative connections that the

audience can make, many of which make up independent episodes or unfocussed chains

which overlap with each other, that even if only a small fraction of the data gains Meaning,

there is still as much satisfaction from accomplishing the mental gymnastics as might be

gained from following a more conventional narrative structure. As the fragmentation of

Mirror makes it clear that the primary purpose of the film is not to convey a single unified

narrative, there is no disappointment when the gist of one cannot be achieved; whether an

all-inclusive narrative even exists in Mirror is questionable. The fact that large amounts of

data remains ambiguously connected, keeps the collection of patterns unstable and thus

alive.

Ambiguity in film can have purposes other than simply leaving the audience unable to

predict a narrative's outcome. Jocelyn Cammack discusses the mental slippages which

occur when switching between the two interpretations of unstable images26, or when

watching visual ambiguities in Tati's Playtime27, as follows: The kind of uncertainty, that

sort of fragility... is a parallel experience... for something that is embedded in the

experience of beauty, there is a certain fragility about the moment we experience beauty

which means we quite dont know it, we dont quite understand it, and this state of not

26 eg. The duck-rabbit or the face-vase.27 Tati, Jacques. Play Time. 1973.

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knowing... is a very beautiful state28. The interpretation of a situation which could at any

minute evaporate has a parallel in the fleeting beauty of Romanticism. Interestingly, in

terms of film, Cammack believes that the beauty exists only on the first viewing. When

you see these visual ambiguities in a film again, the ambiguity is solved its not unknown

to you any more and you now understand it... its never quite the same.29 This suggests

that for film to utilise ambiguity effectively, the audience must not be so confused as to

need to see the film a second time. Alternatively there would need to be new ambiguities

which only make themselves apparent on subsequent viewings: I would argue that for a

film as dense as Mirror, that even after several viewings the narrative schema still

develops as yet more information comes to light.

Mainstream film-makers often deliberately try to prevent ambiguities by employing various

dramaturgical devices which audiences have become familiar with, and understand to be

symbolic representations of certain situations, relationships or emotions. The audience

can only interpret this kind of light entertainment film, with its obvious construction, in an

extremely limited way, compared to how they interpret the real world, using paralanguage,

proxemics and kinesics. Fortunately against this trend, many film-makers have come to

appreciate that the unspoken minutiae of human gesture and movement30 have a great

importance; none of these minutiae have fixed interpretations, and as such, using them to

their full extent can help to prevent a film from feeling constructed. Sontag observes that

in teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is

worth looking at 31; if a film encourages an audience to look closer, they will. The

simplicity of explicit representation in film ignores that we have a common unspoken

knowledge to reference. By contrast, with regards to Mirror' we share so many of the

28 p.9. Cammack, Jocelyn. Gravity, Peak Lecture Theatre, February 17, 2011. http://gravity21.org/cammack.pdf.

29 p.9. Cammack.30 Discussing Jarmusch on p.139. Andrew, Geoff. Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-makers in

Recent American Cinema. Prion Books Ltd, 1998.31 p.3. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New Ed. Penguin, 1979.

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protagonist's childhood memories32.

3. Questioning Narrative

Cammack states that film seems to exist in this space somewhere between seeing and

thinking.33. A film requires the audience to watch, see, think and then know34. Wenders

states that seeing is an immersion in the world, and thinking is always a process of

gaining distance from it35, and so when we comprehend a narrative we are being asked to

both see and think at the same time. If we are required to perform too much or too little of

either, then our immersion in the film disintegrates; we can be overwhelmed by imagery,

subsumed by reasoning, or left searching or bored.

The question remains as to whether narrative is even the main attraction or purpose of

cinema, or if it is, as Cubitt suggests, it is merely a secondary effect36 which audiences

have come to expect, led on by marketing and industry pressure. Does a narrative have to

be consistent and complete to engross an audience? What is considered a deviation or

distraction, either from the expected arc, or in terms of misinformation which upsets what

has already been established37? In either of these cases, does the extra reasoning

required of the viewer destroy their immersion in the film? The balance of implicit and

explicit dramaturgy also becomes important: if the film is too explicit the viewer can feel

lectured, but conversely, with the majority implicit, they may have to reason so much so as

to be unimmersed. In the 1960s film-makers attempted so completely to consign to the

32 p.65. Turovskaja, Maja. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. Revised ed. Faber and Faber, 1989.33 p.9. Cammack.34 Wenders expresses a similar sentiment in Wenders, Wim. Until the End of the World. Drama, Sci-Fi,

1991.35 p.60. Wenders, Wim. The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations. Translated by Michael Hofmann.

Faber & Faber, 1997.36 It is important to recognize that narrative is neither primary nor necessary to cinema... but only a

potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames. p.38. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. New Ed. MIT Press, 2005.

37 Comprehension slows when explicit propositions constructed earlier must be reactivated... ; or when previous inferences are indirectly disconfirmed... ; or when a perceiver must make novel inferences p.16. Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. Routledge, 1992.

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dustbin the schema of closed romantic realism38. As much as the idea of a closed

narrative is in some way romantic, the mechanisms by which it is constructed are often

classical, and the accidental exposure of these mechanisms can easily reveal the falsity of

the romanticism. In both Wenders'39 and Tarkovsky's work romanticism exists not only in

the narratives; as Dyer states 'Mirror' is a film uniquely held together by the director's

style... rather than by the mechanical demands of narrative40.

Watching a film is always to some extent an exercise in cognitive estrangement, as the

audience must learn to understand the rules of a new world. How different that world is

from our own sets out expectations of what is plausible within it. Anything which falls

outside of these expectations will reduce our immersion in the narrative as we recalibrate

our perception and assumptions about the world of the film; similar to a paradigm shift,

when one conceptual world view is replaced by another41.

4. Approaches to Story

Wenders categorises his films into two groups, A and B42. Kings falls into the A

grouping, which Wenders describes as being highly improvised, having undecided

endings, undesigned narrative arcs and being produced with minimal budgets and low

shooting ratios. In these films experimentation takes place between shots, to decide on

the next beat, rather than once the camera starts rolling where experimentation could only

affect delivery or wording. By contrast, Wenders B grouping, which includes films like

Paris, is characterised by a long preproduction process, formal scripts, developed

storyboards, and high budgets, which despite the films' pre-planned nature at a larger

38 p.268. Cousins, Mark. The Story of Film. Pavilion Books, 2004.39 das die Romantiker zu einer mythischen Landschaft erhoben p.70. Buchka, Peter. Augen Kann Man

Nicht Kaufen: Wim Wenders Und Seine Filme. Hanser, 1983.40 p.29. Dyer, Geoff. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. Canongate Books Ltd, 2012.41 p.10. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second Edition, Enlarged. University of

Chicago Press, 1970.42 Impossible Stories in Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and

Faber, London; Boston.

11

scale, often allow for experimentation at a smaller scale on set.

Paralleling the A-B counterpoint in the production methods of Wenders' films is another

counterpoint in their content. In his essay for Ingmar Bergman43 he describes two

opposing methods of working with film: surface images and psychology. Wenders'

justification of his own processes varies most frequently in his attitude to story44, and his

internal conflicts are expressed by these groupings. The surface group consists of

classically constructed narratives, often partly conceived by others, and produced in a way

which treats the director solely as the metteur-en-scene, left only to explore the narrative

with emphatic and unambiguous images, much in the style of the output of the Hollywood

studio system. The content of films in the other grouping, psychology, more closely

resembles that of films by auteurs, and is frequently based on romanticist, metaphysical,

and personal or dream like poetic images. Wenders refers to Tarkovsky45 as being a major

influence on his film-making, and this undoubtedly comes across in the films in this group.

What is interesting is that the A-B grouping does not always correlate with the classical-

romantic divide. In Kings, Wenders arises at a classical narrative after a highly

improvisational process. Wings of Desire revels in romanticism despite being firmly in the

B group, while Paris, also in the B group, is much closer to the classical end of the

scale. The connection between Wenders' working method and his result is not as

straightforward as we might expect. His approaches and results are nowhere near a

consistent as Tarkovsky, whose films, though regularly highly romanticist in their content,

and at times flowing like streams of consciousness, are very rarely improvised, with the

43 p.84. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London; Boston.

44 The theoretical question most consistently under discussion, and to which Wenders never appears to find an answer with which he is fully satisfied, has been the incompatibility, or conflict, that he perceives to exist between the filmic image and the filmic story. p.1. Graf, A., 2002. The cinema of Wim Wenders: the celluloid highway. Wallflower Press.

45 Andrej Tarkovsky is listed as one of Wenders' Angels in the closing title sequence for Wenders, Wim. Wings of Desire. Fantasy, Drama, Romance, 1988.

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shooting ratio for Mirror around 3:146. Despite Tarkovsky's open praise for the mystery of

art47, and his preference not to pragmatise, he generally spent a great deal of time

preparing his ideas and tended to work with very detailed shooting scripts48. Unlike

Wenders, Tarkovsky does not believe that it is possible to simply take to the streets with a

camera and shoot a film without a script. I doubt it. It will take years49 he says when

lecturing on 'Scenario'.

As a young film-maker Wenders' initial preoccupation was simply to observe, stating that

noticing or revealing things is actually more precious to me than getting over some kind of

message"50, but with his student film Silver City51 he realised that even if the film-maker

didn't intend for there to be a story, the audience would see entirely fanciful connections

between scenes and interpret them as having narrative intentions52, a phenomenon

known as Apophenia, the unmotivated seeing of connections53, often employed

deliberately by fuzzy plotters. Wenders came to realise that in an audience's search for

order, stories are what people require [from film] more than anything else54. Alexander

Graf asks what kind of stories Wenders can tell55 if he can say on one hand, I totally reject

stories56, but also that he does, in fact, try to tell stories, in order to preserve something

46 "7500 meters of Kodak stock were allocated", roughly enough for 3 takes. p.114. Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Indiana University Press, 1994.

47 Thousands of pages written about Bach, Leonardo and Tolstoy, but in the end no one could figure it out. No, thank God, I could not find a touch of truth to touch the essence of their creativity! This proves once again that the miracle is inexplicable. p.14.Tarkovskii, A.A., 1993. (Lektsii Po Kinorezhissure, Lessons on Film Directing).

48 The political situation in the USSR meant that Tarkovsky was often left with much time between films to develop ideas. With regards to his scripts: the director's script, or shooting script, contained dialogue, places of action and descriptive passages; it also included number, length (in metres) and type of shot (...), type of lens to be used, and a description of the soundtrack. Sometimes it included drawings for individual scenes. p.xiv. Tarkovskii, A.A., 1999. Collected screenplays. Faber and Faber, London; New York.

49 p.17. Tarkovskii, A.A., 1993. (Lessons on Film Directing).50 On his first ever experience using a camera. p3. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and

conversations. Faber and Faber, London; Boston.51 Wenders, W., 1968. Silver City.52 p.52. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London;

Boston.53 Klaus Conrad, 1958.54 p.97. Wenders, W., 1997. The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations. Faber & Faber.55 p.6. Graf, A., 2002. The cinema of Wim Wenders: the celluloid highway. Wallflower Press.56 p.59. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London;

Boston.

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he has discovered57.

In Wenders' unplanned films, his 'discoveries' often occur on a geographical journey.

Wenders' use of roadmaps instead of scripts58, results in his images being reliant on the

viewer possessing what Guiliana Bruno refers to as a modern memory59 of similar

places. Deleuze uses Alice and Kings to illustrate how the essence of the cinematic

movement-image lies in extracting [...] from movements the mobility which is their

essence60 which, according to Mulvey, combined with the successive order of film,

merges easily into the order of narrative61, as if to say that it is the constant movement

and continuing journey which gives the sensation of a linearly progressing narrative, even

if there is no constructed plot. In addition Bruno explains the emotional draw of the road

movie: motion produces emotion, and ... correlatively, emotion contains a movement62.

Bruno refers to the filmic path as the modern version of the architectural itinerary, with its

own montage of cultural space63. It is easy to see how the links between montage and

architecture explored by Eisenstein64 could be extended to develop the navigation of a

road journey into a narrative.

Wenders disputes the supposed objectivity65 of the cinema, due to the use of story: our

[European directors'] stories were all subjective. He describes the major achievement of

the studio system, which he considers to be unsurpassed by the European film or the

'auteur', to be the collective narrative66. Wenders' narratives are far from collective as

57 p.192. Reitz, E., 1995. Bilder in Bewegung. Essays. Gesprche zum Kino. Rowohlt Tb.58 p.67. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London;

Boston.59 Bruno, G., 2004. Cities, cinema: Image of flows, Flows of images. Atlas of Emotion.60 p.23. Deleuze, G., 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1st ed. Univ Of Minnesota Press.61 p.69. Mulvey, L., 2006. Death 24x a second: stillness and the moving image. Reaktion Books.62 Bruno, G., 2004. Cities, cinema: Image of flows, Flows of images. Atlas of Emotion.63 Bruno, G., 2004. Cities, cinema: Image of flows, Flows of images. Atlas of Emotion.64 Eisenstein, S.M., 1938. Montage and Architecture. Assemblage 10, 110131.65 Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. University of California Press, 1968.66 p.47. Wenders, Wim. The logic of images : essays and conversations . London; Boston: Faber and

Faber, 1991.

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they often rely on his personal experiences, while his characters are occasionally

projections of himself, a practice strongly rejected by directors of mainstream commercial

cinema67. For example, there are parallels between Wenders (but for rock music I'd have

gone crazy...68) and Bruno (...that's why Bruno keeps a jukebox in the back of his truck69)

in Kings, where the scene at border guard's hut, is said to contain within it the whole

dialectic of Wenders' world70. In the Wuppertal caf scene in Alice (analysed in Appendix

I), Wenders is represented by the Dutch boy leaning on the jukebox, which is playing a

song which sums up the narrative drive of the entire film. The use of personal memories

as a method for ensuring a narrative's authenticity is highly prevalent in Mirror, where

scenes might appear unconstructed due to their nature of being based on real events in

Tarkovsky's life71. Like Wenders, Tarkovsky rejects theatrical characters, which he

believes leave films feeling terribly false [and] schematic72. He does however sometimes

allow his characters to become mouthpieces... uttering his thoughts, his writings, his

beliefs and his fears73.

5. Stories within Stories

In Wenders' films, narratives often become quite complex and multi-layered. Characters

provide exposition relating to the overall narrative, in the form of a smaller sub-narratives,

for example, in Paris when Travis tells Hunter about how his father used to describe his

mother, he uses a narrative form (Appendix L, Shots 47-59). In this way, actors, who for

most of the film are portraying characters with realism, now portray characters who are

acting, and as such we lower our expectations of them. Wenders also uses meta-narrative

67 in the early stages of experimenting with storytelling, the beginner chooses a protagonist that in psychological terms is something of a projection of his own point of view... a thinly disguised or idealised version of themselves. p.17. Mackendrick, A., 2006. On Film-making. Faber and Faber.

68 p.17. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London; Boston.

69 p.17. Wenders, W., 1991. The logic of images : essays and conversations. Faber and Faber, London; Boston.

70 Roddick, N., 2008. The Road Goes on Forever. Sight and Sound.71 In Appendix A the parallels between Tarkovsky's life and Alexei's are described.72 p.24. Tarkovskii, A.A., 1993. (Lessons on Film Directing).73 p.xx. Tarkovskii, A.A., 1999. Collected screenplays. Faber and Faber, London; New York.

15

structures to subtly explain the overall narrative in a microcosmic example, which also

contributes back to the main narrative. In Alice, Philip tells Alice a bedtime story in order to

persuade her to go to sleep (Analysed in Appendix H). At first the content of his story

seems to be inconsequential, as if he is merely completing yet another a complicating

action on the way to achieving his goal of reuniting Alice with her mother. As his story

draws to a conclusion it becomes clear that the protagonist in Philip's story represents an

idealised Alice, and that the truck driver is Philip.

In Kings, the audience waits patiently for the first hour of the film to find out who Robert is,

and why he is behaving as he does; the complicating action has in effect begun before the

audience has found their feet. Eventually Robert gives a very brief one line reason for his

behaviour, I left my wife in Genoa, without expanding at all on how this has effected him

emotionally. The throwaway nature of his remark suggests that this fact will be left to fade

into the background, and might ultimately be lost from the audience's push-down stacks

before it acquires any significance in the gist. Just before we lose sight of it, Robert is

visited in his bed by the Widower who, in an incredibly moving monologue (analysed in full

in Appendix K), describes his wife's recent suicide. Not only does his story seem so real

that the thought of it ever having been constructed as a fiction barely crosses the

audience's minds, but it also explains the whole premise of the film, while the way Robert

reacts to it fills in his missing character description. This way Wenders avoids having to

provide character exposition in the default format at the standard introductory point in a

normative narrative. Throughout the Widower's story, we are left to imagine all the details

of his wife's suicide. The double blow comes in a dream-like sequence which follows

unexpectedly, showing a windswept Bruno stumbling around the crash site at night to

emotionally manipulative music, repeating the horror of what we have just imagined.

Though at this point Wenders forces emotions upon us, we are still reeling in shock from

16

the previous narration which was delivered in such a formally restrained way, that our

immersion blinds us to this construction.

Meta-narratives are at their most powerful when they also deliver the outcome of the main

narrative in an implicit way, allowing for freedom in their interpretation, and thus ambiguity

in the film's larger structures. It should be noted that use of a meta-narrative alone is not

enough to hide the construction of a conclusion74. In Paris, the meta-narrative which

Travis delivers in the closing sequence (analysed in full in Appendix L), not only completes

his goal, by reuniting Hunter and Jane, but also provides exposition as to the events which

have caused the equilibrium disruption75 which occurred years before we joined Travis in

media res in the desert. After observing Travis as a peaceful character for the whole film,

his violence exposited in this meta-narrative causes us to completely reassess everything

we have seen of him so far76. It even raises the question as to whether any of his meta-

narrative is metaphorical77. In addition, the lies in his meta-narrative create even more

ambiguity78. When Travis tells of Jane telling him of her dream, he nests a sub-meta-

narrative. Although this seems complicated when dissected structurally, the skill of a great

director lies not in inventing complex structures, but rather in enabling the audience to

follow them lucidly, marvelling at how easily they solved the apparent puzzles; the

audience is fooled into self-praise.

74 An example of this in a constructed film is the summing up of Withnail and I (analysed in Appendix D) which is provided by two meta-narratives. First Danny's speech describes the film's conclusion in view of the zeitgeist (we have failed to paint it black). In this case the meta-narrative only confirms something which has already been revealed. Secondly Withnail's recitation of Hamlet to the wolves reveals that he is, despite our misinformed opinions of him, a very capable actor. By this point the main narrative is already over, so this last minute realisation has a comic effect as it reverses our impression of him.

75 B in symbolized Todorov, p.5, Branigan.76 The method of hiding construction which recurs here is the building up of the gist on an unstable or

incomplete base, leaving the gist open for later rearrangement. A similar example to this is the introduction of Jane into the narrative, long before she is shown. The audience builds up an expectation of her which must be adjusted when she is finally shown.

77 For example, whether Jane really tried to burn Travis alive or not.78 Travis lies to Jane, telling her that he did not visit her before. This confuses Jane, but not the audience,

though it does bring the truthfulness of the rest of his testimony into doubt. See Appendix L, Shot 81.

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6. The Effect of Content and Genre on Construction in Wenders' Films

Buchka believes that Alice collects all of the motives and themes of the New German

Cinema (NDF): unease about personal fantasy, the inability of people to communicate, the

senseless one sidedness of the media, the torn relationship between man and woman, the

search for home and the deep links between dreams, writing and travel.7980 Many of these

concerns relate specifically to the political and historical context of the film, and not to my

world, yet with I still find the film immersive. For each film there is an ideal viewer:

someone who can share the most empathy with the protagonists. At the point at which the

viewer cannot empathise at all, the film is reduced to a game of chess, a fascination of

logical reasoning, a pure functional construct leaving only core humanistic themes to

conceal the construction.

Buchka describes the three most important elements of Wenders' film as: a genre like

basis (fiction), an exact view of a real place where the action unfolds (documentation), and

connection to the individual81. The second two of these elements are also found in

Tarkovsky's Mirror. Though Tarkovsky often uses but distorts familiar genres82, it would be

hard to define a base genre for Mirror. Wenders plays a game of adaptation to

circumnavigate our expectations. We might expect Alice to go down the same road as

Lolita83, and for Kings to follow Easy Rider84 but instead Wenders carves an entirely new

path, adapting the genre to a specifically European sensibility. We are not on a narrative

arc we have travelled down before. Wenders (and NDF in general) doesn't reject America

79 p.58. Buchka.80 Similar to Thomas Elsaesser's view that NDF is about a world of false images and real emotions, public

failures and private fantasies quoted in the author's essay on NDF, unpublished p.353. Cousins.81 eine genrehafte Ausgangssituation (Fiktion), der genaue Blick auf den konkreten Ort der Handlung

(Dokumentation) und schliesslich die forcierte Verbindung zur eigenen Person p.43. Buchka.82 p.xvii. Christie, Ian. Introduction. in Turovskaja.83 Kubrick, Stanley. Lolita. Drama, Romance, 1962.84 Hopper, Dennis. Easy Rider. Crime, Drama, 1969.

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completely85, as his films contain innumerable references to Ray and John Ford86, but in

adapting their film language, Wenders creates a whole new kind of sensitivity which

doesn't exist in the presence of the very visible construction of the American films.

Perhaps the attraction Wenders' films have is created by imbuing desire. Wenders

believes that Easy Rider is political because it is beautiful... the images the film gives of

the country..., the music you hear in the film..., because Peter Fonda moves in a beautiful

way87. Emerging from the nave sentimentality of Heimat film, the dreamers of the NDF

wanted to be free to get on the road, to have sex with whomever they desired, to play

loud music, as their occupiers once did88. Cousins believes that Wenders quotes earlier

films by Leo McCarey as if to say to the audience, 'remember what it was like to feel'89,

the images of happiness are unable to instil emotions themselves, but rather to remind

audiences of memories of happiness, or prior filmic representations thereof, an indirect

device which avoids telling the audience how to feel. Wenders takes the themes of the

French New Wave after Godard, [the filmmakers] themselves, their erotic imagination,

their fragility and alienation90, but employs them with vastly suppressed and unflamboyant

emotions.

In a sense both Mirror and Kings share the subject matter of coming to terms with facticity;

in Mirror a mother raises a family in Soviet Russia without her husband present; in Kings

the post-war boom in existentialism, a reaction against the technology of warfare, catches

two men in their own pasts thereby stopping them from progressing. I am my history91

85 The ideal is to make films as beautiful as America's, but to move the content to other areas pp.2-7. Tony Rayns. Forms of Address. Sight and Sound, Winter 1974-5.

86 p.10. Graf, Alexander. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. Wallflower Press, 2002., see also Appendix K, Shot 69 regarding the Mitchum poster foreshadowing Bruno's homecoming.

87 Quoted on p.9. Graf.88 p.353. Cousins.89 p.355. Cousins.90 p.271. Cousins.91 00:50:36. Ich bin meine Geschichte! Wenders. 1976.

19

cries Robert. In Satre, the for-itself is, so to speak, perpetually striving to escape from the

prison of facticity without ever being able to do so92. In Kings, there are three cataclysmic

moments which pull the viewer out of the humdrum of the protagonists' daily rote, each

fulfilling one of Branigan's conditions for narrative93: Robert's Kamikazee attempt

(condition 1), the widower's story, and admission (condition 3) Didn't she understand?

There is only life. Death doesn't exist.94 followed soon after by the incredibly haunting and

surreal shot of Bruno inspecting the wreckage of her suicide car, an indirect, but strong

reminder of Robert's earlier attempt, and finally, Bruno's taunting in the bunker (condition

5) you're like a corpse, have you no desire?95. The low intensity between these moments

of tension, and the implicit fulfilment of conditions 296,4 and 697, especially with regard to

only obliquely informing us of the characters' goals, and the partial omission of condition 7

helps to make the events in Kings feel less expected, without making their extremity

unwarranted.

Throughout Kings Wenders never makes the characters' inner thoughts explicit, and the

use of expositional dialogue is limited and often cryptic98. This uncertainty brings a feeling

of restlessness, and a vision of life as a road movie through homelessness pervades the

film, as Bruno and Robert are permanently engaged in a departure for the unknown99.

The core theme of life as a search for home100 runs through Alice as well. The dream

space of Mirror relates to Kings through the no-man's land around the East-West border 92 p.66. Cox, Gary. Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.93 1. introduction of characters and settings, 2. explanation of a state of affairs, 3. an initiating event, 4.

emotional response or statement of a goal by the protagonist, 5. complicating actions, 6. outcome, 7. reactions to the outcome. p.14. Branigan. See Appendix D for application of this to normative narratives.

94 01:02:11. Wenders. 1976.95 02:31:19. Wenders. 1976.96 The narrative begins when Todorov's subtraction (-A in Branigan) to the equilibrium has already

occurred: Robert left his wife before the start.97 Todorov's addition, the return to (+)A in Branigan's symbols, is never shown, we just see the intention

for it in Robert's note: "Everything must change. So long, R." 02:38:10. Wenders. 1976.98 For example Do you know what 'loon' means?, in this context the answer being a water bird, but the

meaning crazy person is also implied. 00:35:26. Wenders. 1976.99 p.9. Klaus Schuster, Peter. Angles. in Wenders, Wim. Pictures from the Surface of the Earth. First ed.

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag Gmbh, 2003.100 According to Buchka, all of life is a search for home: alles Leben ist der Versuch in p.38. Buchka.

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and the image of Robert's wife's house which he tears up101, and in Alice through the

imagined past of Alice's grandmother's house in Wuppertal102. Tarkovsky's scenes in

Mirror like Ozu's intermediate spaces, are detached from the literal story of his

imagination103, whereas the detached space in Wenders' films is seen mostly in

photographs or at a distance, except perhaps in the border guard's hut where the climax of

Kings takes place. What is left untold by the implied mystical nature of these imagined

places104 leaves the audience to imagine, rather than be told.

7. The Effect of Form on Construction in Wenders' Films

Buchka explains how Wenders' transition from critic to director has led him to make films

which are centred on his own observations105. In watching his films the audience is

effectively following his gaze, looking with him as he shows rather than tells. It is

inevitable that much of what he looks at is the work of other film-makers, and so frequent

citations are present. Fortunately rather than the weak imitations or repetition we see in

the work of many film-makers106, Wenders' citations often register with the audience

subconsciously, and his collective film grammar makes the film fluid and familiar, hiding

that the construction of the fiction is the act of an individual writer. In cases where

references rely on outside knowledge, for example when in Kings, Bruno is frequently

seen reading from The Wild Palms107, they are never obstructive if the audience does not

recognise them. Sometimes Wenders' references appear as if they should be obvious in

retrospect, for example, the lyrics of the diegetic song If I Could Read Her Mind108 clearly

describe male relationship issues, but the notion that this is of immediate relevance to

101 Just before Robert ends his journey in the lake, he rips up the image zerreit er das Bild von dem Haus p.75. Buchka.

102 der Eindruck eines Niemandslandes p.61. Buchka.103 p.306. Cousins.104 This idea could be expanded to include the lot in Travis' photograph in Wenders, Wim. Paris, Texas.

Drama, 1984.105 p.7. Buchka.106 For example the frequent use of Godard scenes in Bertolucci, Bernardo. The Dreamers. Drama,

Romance, 2003.107 A tragic love-road-story which ends with the accidental death of the woman during a botched abortion.

Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms, 1939.

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Robert is not clear until later in the film.

In The Story of Film, Cousins describes the NDF as a cinema of unease109. Alice has a

strong sense of the unknown as the exposition we receive in response to Winter's

questioning is often incorrect and inconsistent, crucially though not because the narrative

itself is flawed, but instead due to the fallibility of Alice's own memory. The audience

accepts this type of unpredictability in a way in which they might not if the confusion was

purely structural. Added to this is Winter's temperamentality, and as with the moodiness in

Kings, we are at the protagonists' whim, much as we are when following Tarkovsky's

Stalker around the zone110. Wenders notes that with Stalker ,Tarkovksy takes cinema to

an utterly new terrain where every step could be your last111. Unexpectedness helps to

dissolve the narrative arc, as well as encouraging audiences to pay attention to avoid

missing information without which the rest of the film could be rendered incomprehensible.

Just as Tarkovsky avoids using reaction shots, due to his belief that Eisensteinian montage

prevents the audience from letting their feelings be influenced by their own reaction to

what they see112, Wenders' cinematographer Robby Mller avoids the close-up, which he

describes as akin to using one word too often [so] it loses its meaning113 referring instead

to his preference for improvisation and genuine reactions on set. Mller describes

storyboards as stupid114 preferring to allow for spontaneity. When Muller films a scene he

often uses only a master shot so the actors can freely react between each other115. The

108 Improved Sound Limited. If I Could Read Her Mind. Rathbone Hotel. Long Hair Records, 1976. An analysis of the shot in which this occurs is available in Appendix J, Shot 86-88. The shot in which it becomes relevant again is featured in Appendix K, Shot 2.

109 p.353. Cousins.110 In Tarkovsky, Andrey. Stalker. Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, 1980.111 p.42. Wenders, Wim. The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations. Faber and Faber, 1997. as quoted

p.138. Dyer.112 p.118. Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter Blair.

New ed. University of Texas Press, 1989.113 Mller, Robby. Interview with director of photography Robby Mller, 2002 on Jarmusch, Jim. Down by

Law. Criterion, 2002.114 Mller.115 Mller.

22

inability of the crew and cast to predict what will happen next with regards to framing,

lighting, acting and so on imbues itself in the finished film. Wenders is comfortable using

montage and Hollywood film language (America as the country where vision was set

free116), however Tarkovsky rejects the principles of montage cinema as they do not allow

... the audience to bring personal experience to bear on what is in front of them117. Where

Wenders aimed to preserve a discovery in his stories, Tarkovsky tried to access the

emotional nature of memory118, but, acutely aware of the problems of visible construction

in films, he cautions against trying to reconstruct ruins119.

Wenders' use of standard Hollywood continuity editing is apparent in Paris, where our

familiarity of it does not cause an awareness of construction, but instead its use becomes

totally transparent, as it is rarely employed for dramatic effect. The contrast between the

clarity of the continuity edit, and the incomplete narrative is resolved when the

conventional narrative structure is fulfilled after the final act's exposition120. Prior to this it

was not possible for the audience to fully assemble the narrative pattern, keeping them in

limbo. Pertinent information was kept fresh in their push-down stacks by showing them

recurring unexplained motifs121,or by giving data relevance which enabled it to be attached

to a catalogue122.

116 Wenders, W., 1984. Der Amerikanische Traum.117 p.118. Tarkovsky, A., 1989. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, New ed. University of Texas

Press.118 Terminology used in Tarkovsky, A., 1989. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, New ed.

University of Texas Press.119 p.xix. Tarkovskii, A.A., 1999. Collected screenplays. Faber and Faber, London; New York.120 Analysed in Appendix L.121 This is the case with Travis' photograph, which later comes to symbolise what is at stake: a possible

future living together with Jane and Hunter in Paris.122 An example of a catalogue in Paris is the collection of fragments which relate to Travis' past: The land

links to the story of Travis' parents, which hints at mental illness in the family. The land is visually similar to shots of Travis' time wandering in the desert. When extra information is added to the fragments in this catalogue, a narrative appears.

23

8. The Effect of Content on the Construction of Tarkovsky's Mirror

Tarkovsky's original intention with Mirror was to depict his mother as the lyrical hero of

literature and poetry, exploring the importance of childhood memories... [and] the need to

rework them into a reconstruction of the past informed by art123. Originally he hoped to

make a questionnaire film124, which would show his mother as he remembered her125.

The film revolves around exposition, but in Tarkovsky's original documentary-like proposal,

even he as the director would not have been sure of the answers to the questions he

planned to ask of the film's heroine, the viewer, and [the film-maker(s)]126. Where

Wenders' questioners are the protagonists, in Mirror the protagonist is the questioned. Its

interesting to compare the enquiring nature of Mirror to Marker's Sunless127 where a

persistently intimate and questioning tone prevails128. Wenders frequently stops short of

achieving narrative closure129, as his omission of Branigan's seventh stage130, prevents his

films from feeling constructed, from heading towards a catharsis, an inevitable death or

marriage131 ending. Similarly, 'Mirror' remains inconclusive: there are no answers to the

questions posed132.

A comparison of Mirror to its literary script, A White, White Day133, reveals the script to be

vastly easier to schematise, and largely devoid of ambiguity with regard to relationships

between characters and chronological context. However, like my structural breakdown of

Mirror134, it lacks the metaphysical presence the film has, which emerges from the blurring

123 p.251. Tarkovskii, Andrei Arsenevich. Collected screenplays. London; New York: Faber and Faber, 1999.

124 p.61. Turovskaja.125 p.253. Tarkovskii. 1999.126 p.261. Tarkovskii. 1999.127 Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil. Documentary, 1983.128 p.4. Kear, Jon. Sunless. Non Basic Stock Line, 1998.129 Ultimately the audience never finds out whether Bruno and Robert's decision to part ways allowed them

to move on, or if Alice and her mother are reunited, or whether Travis ever goes back to Jane. The characters have stories which will continue away from the watchful eyes of the audience.

130 p.14. Branigan.131 p.71. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books, 2006.132 p.68. Turovskaja..133 In Tarkovskii, Andrei Arsenevich. Collected screenplays. London; New York: Faber and Faber, 1999.134 Appendix A.

24

of details by the oneric choreography. Tarkovsky's opinion that children understand my

pictures very well135, suggests that he never intended Mirror to be understood in the

narrative sense which Branigan defines. When following a narrative certain information...

is elaborately processed and assigned to a hierarchy in working memory according to

relative importance while much else is discarded136. When viewing Mirror, clearly the

audience does not interpret it in the narrative mode where everything except gist-related

structure would be lost, but instead the film is remembered using the associative imagery

of poetry or dreams which results in an understanding so complete that you yourself

become part of the dramaturgy137. Tarkovsky de-emphasizes narrative by declining to

accentuate character motivations to the point where drama would develop. His characters

who do have goals, and more often just hopes, don't seem as if they will accomplish them

within the scope of the film; Alexei lacks motivation to apologise to his mother in the post-

war scenes, while Maria realises that her marriage with her husband is over.

Within Mirror characters frequently recur who have no plot-orientated reason to exist in the

world of the film. For example, Klanya, is shown wandering round the Dacha in several

scenes, yet she barely interacts with the other characters. Tarkovsky's reasoning for

including her is straightforward: the Dacha is her home. By contrast, some characters who

do have an involvement in the narrative are neither named nor given any background. A

strange woman appears from nowhere in Alexei's apartment and tries to tie Ignat to his

cultural heritage by asking him to read from Pushkin. Later she appears again in a

seemingly unrelated role, asking the doctor about Alexei's guilt. Tarkovsky seems to treat

her character definition as being totally irrelevant to her actions.

Similarly to Sunless, weaved scenes journey through the labyrinth of time and memory138, 135 p.xxii. Christie, Ian. Introduction. in Turovskaja.136 p.15. Branigan.137 p.69. Fanu, Mark Le. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. 1st ed. BFI Publishing, 1987.138 p.3. Kear,

25

in both cases they are partly fictional, but entirely believable. The feeling of navigating a

maze also appears in Wenders' film through the dialectic between sedentarism and

nomadism139; a constant search ensues. In Sunless, through the blending of

documentary form and ideological critique with poetic reverie and fiction140 a commentary

of memories is developed, while for Tarkovsky all art, in the end, is based on memory141.

Whereas Sunless looks at the extremes of survival, and features deliberate blows such

as the terror of seeing the Hornet142, the removal of the fantastical or anything that could

distract143, leaves Mirror nostalgic, but also in some way timeless. In a similar way,

Wenders' cinematographer Mller avoids the beautiful144 where it could distract.

Tarkovsky's use of the same actors to play multiple roles in Mirror 145might create mental

slippages possessing a similar beauty to those discussed by Cammack in terms of the

unstable image. In Tarkovsky's proposal for Mirror, Confession146, he planned to question

his real mother by proxy of an actor impersonating a psychologist; in Mirror, Maria is

questioned repeatedly by the doctor, Lisa and then Nadezhda. Mirror contains a catalogue

of expositions regarding Maria's life, which the audience compares and confuses with

those relating to Natalia, as ambiguities and parallels start to blend together. This works in

a surprisingly similar way to my concept of the meta-character of the Protagonist in Pulp

Fiction147 (detailed in Appendix D).

139 die Dialektik von Sehaftigkeit und Nomadentum p.68 Buchka.140 p.2. Kear.141 p.253. Mirror in Tarkovskii. 1999.142 p.740. Mavor, Carol. Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Markers Sans Soleil. Art

History 30, no. 5 (November 12, 2007): 738756.143 The screenplay for A White, White Day features references to technology which are subsequently pared

down in 'Mirror': What do you think about space travel? and napalm... radioactive dust, both p.303 Tarkovskii. 1999.

144 Mller.145 Margarita Terekhova plays Maria and Natalia, while Ignat Daniltsev plays Alexei and Ignat. The subtlest

of differences allow identification, for example, Maria smokes while Natalia doesn't.146 Tarkovskii, A.A., 1999. Collected screenplays. Faber and Faber, London; New York.147 Tarantino, Quentin. Pulp Fiction. Crime, Thriller, 1994.

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9. The Effect of Form on the Construction of Tarkovsky's Mirror

The basis for Tarkovsky's theory of cinema is that what the film camera records is time148.

Film allows time to flow in any direction149, and, as Tarkovsky demonstrates with 'Mirror',

possibly his ultimate experiment in manipulating time, at any speed150. Rather than

drawing attention to spectacle and masking the passing of time as intensified continuity151

does, Tarkovsky's long takes leave time for the viewer to meditate and think things

through: what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time, whether for time wasted,

time lost, or time that is yet to be gained152.

Tarkovsky believed that if you increase shot length then at first people will become bored,

but past boredom the shot will gain more interest, until finally it gathers a special intensity

of attention153. However Tarkovsky seems to use this intensity on every shot, very rarely

including short takes. Rather than concealing cuts it could potentially leave the audience

holding their breath. Bla Tarr's last film, The Turin Horse154, contains many shots where

characters leave the frame one by one until it is empty, with the effect that the audience

then anticipates either a cut or the return of a focal point. There are the similarities

between the way Tarkovsky selects which moments to include in his films, and Jarmusch'

tendency to de-dramatise, both directors managing to focus our attention on those

seemingly dead moments155. Often in Mirror we are left to feel long moments of

atmospheric sound without speech, and at other times scenes with overlapped bilingual

dialogue156 remind us that reality does not consist of uninterrupted dialogue. In Wenders'

films, gaps often occur between lines of speech and when overlaps occur they do so with

148 p.xx. Christie, Ian. Introduction. in Turovskaja.149 p.68. Turovskaja.150 In 'Mirror' Tarkovsky frequently overcranks the camera.151 Bordwell, David. Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film. Film Quarterly 55,

no. 3 (March 1, 2002): 1628.152 p.15. Dyer.153 Tarkovskii. 1999.154 Tarr, Bla, and gnes Hranitzky. The Turin Horse. 2011.155 p.139. Andrew.156 Spanish tenants in Alexei's apartment.

27

momentary collisions, not with the full flow simultaneity of an Altman film157.

One way in which Tarkovsky avoids cutting is through careful choreography. Through

sketching storyboards for the travelling doctor sequence in Mirror I became aware of the

ceaseless reorganisation of the elements within each shot. Actors walk in front of each

other as they take focus, move in and out of light and shadow, and occasionally we even

catch their eyes staring straight down the barrel of the lens, drawing us into158 Tarkovsky's

memory, and encountering the questioning gaze of the Ego-Ideal159. All of this helps to

direct the human eye, which constantly seeks out movement, contrast in light, and faces.

Tarkovsky uses the wipe of a character sweeping across the frame as other directors

might use a cut. The effect of this sort of focus refresh is clearly demonstrated by the eye

tracking experiments160. Like Wenders' cinematographer Mller, who insists on lighting

wide shots with immense attention to detail otherwise you see it's film and it breaks the

mystery, the dream161, Tarkovsky studied lighting intensely162. Tarkovsky rarely resorts to

close ups, due to his belief that wider shots allow the audience to form their own thoughts.

Though this avoidance certainly hides the film's construction, I would argue that it gives

the film-maker no less control over the audience's thoughts.163

Despite Tarkovsky's insistence that he does not wish to force ideas upon the audience, he

still uses devices which manipulate emotions: in Mirror, the line is crossed in alarming 157 For example, Altman, Robert. Nashville. Drama, Music, 1975.158 In contrast to the view presented in Roland Barthes. Right in the Eyes, 1977. which dictates that it is

forbidden for an actor to look straight into the camera, breaking the fourth wall in this case actually increases our immersion in Tarkovsky's personal memories.

159 Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, p.80. Zizek, Slavoj, and Critchley, Simon. How to Read Lacan. 1st ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

160 As can be seen from the DIEM project's studies, as characters wipe the frame, they tend to sweep gaze locations with them, either to the edge of the frame, or to a new focal point which emerges from behind the moving object. The DIEM Project. There Will Be Blood with Gaze Locations of 11 Viewers, 2011. https://vimeo.com/19788132. http://thediemproject.wordpress.com/.

161 Mller162 Chiaramonte, Giovanni, and Tarkovsky, Andrey. Instant Light Tarkovsky Polaroids. First ed. Thames &

Hudson Ltd, 2004.163 A good example of director who demonstrates how emotional manipulation is still possible even in fixed

camera, wide angle, flat lit shots is Roy Andersson. Despite his pared down approach, like subliminal propaganda he still manages, to convey very strong messages, crucially without feeling forced.

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situations164. Although he claims to reject the principle of intellectual montage, he creates

a sound-image juxtaposition when a poem about immortality is read over archive footage

of soldiers in Lake Sivash. The combination has clear ironic overtones. He indicates a

cut-away to concurrent events by allowing Asafyev to break the fourth wall, and

juxtaposing the scene of the boys' rifle training with images of suffering soldiers, seen with

our post WWII benefit of hindsight. Just as Tarkovsky creates relationships between two

different characters by using the same actor, he also creates relationships between

different times by reorganising them, a traversal bringing them into a dialectic relationship

with each other 165. Cuts from scenes of Alexei and Maria to those of Ignat and Natalia

emphatically suggest this. Though reordering time is clearly useful to make implicit

references, the fragmentation of time alone does not necessarily help to decrease

audience perception of construction. Pulp Fiction (Analysed in Appendix D), is an example

of how a film can be chronologically reconfigured, yet still feel highly constructed.

Bazin stated that photography... embalms time preserving a moment, so that cinema

becomes objectivity in time166. Tarkovsky's use of the long take is distinct from

neorealism and can be described as mystical realism167. In this new cinematic language

he is able to ignore continuity, to advantage his associative editing. He doesn't alert the

audiences to time changes168, as he often runs themes or ideas across scenes which are

set in different time-frames169 whose context can often only be immediately ascertained by

164 When Maria tells the children about the fire in the barn, as they jump out of their seats to run to the window, and a cut across the line emphasizes the shock. A similar cut across the line occurs when Nadhezda fails to recognise Alexei and Maria, in doing so alienating them.

165 p.7. Kear.166 p.14-15. The Ontology of the Photographic Image in Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh

Gray. University of California Press, 1968.167 Beasley-Murray, Jon. Whatever Happened to Neorealism? Bazin, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky's Long Take

in Gilles Deleuze, Philosophe Du Cinma / Gilles Deleuze, Philosopher of Cinema. Ed. D. N. Rodowick. Iris, no. 23 (Spring 1997).

168 For example, following her conversation with the Travelling Doctor, Maria stares at the camera, then after a cut-away to a different location, she walks back into frame. There is nothing to indicate whether this is an ellipsis or even a scene break.

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cues in their colour palette170. The rests in Mirror are not the discontinuities in diegetic

time, but rather the thematic boundaries. Tarkovsky subverts the point-of-view shot when

he uses a long gaze, often into a mirror, to indicate that the next reverse shot will show a

dream or vision171. Free roaming cameras are often used to shows memories of a

particular time, as the viewer is carried along with an out-of-body floating sensation,

unable to interact with the scene, only to observe it, and never from the most convenient

view. Though the camera move indicates a specific mode of viewing, it isn't used in itself

to suggest emotions172, as it develops no specific allegiance to any one theme, by contrast,

for example, to the complementary pair of ped and tilt moves in Wenders' Paris (see

Appendix L, shots 65 & 67).

10. Experimental Evidence for Postulations

One of the most basic components of film construction is the cut. According to Anderson

cuts become acceptable only when the general patterns of light in the two shots are

sufficiently different. The complete change of image across a cut is akin to the visual data

lost across a saccade, thus, we accept a disrupted flow quite naturally173 as human

169 For example, after Alexei, who is lying on his deathbed, throws a bird up in the air, the cut on the camera's motion would normally suggest a continuity edit, yet time jumps back from the 1970s to around 1929. There is very little indication of the geography of the 1970s scene, so the audience automatically sites it near the geography of the next shot. After the pan across the 1929 scene reaches Maria, it is revealed she is with her husband, so initially the audience can only date the scene as pre-1935. Only when they discuss Maria's pregnancy does it becomes obvious that the scene is set in 1929, and that Alexei, on his deathbed, is looking back to his conception, and seeing his mother cry about her son, who in this scene, is yet to be born.

170 For example, an exterior shot in 1935 is indicated by the green buckwheat and the red sky.171 For example, Alexei dreams of the redhead as he waits for his mother at Nadezhda's house; the dream

is indicated by his long stare into the mirror, then the image of a burning hand. Another example demonstrates a variation on this device: Maria lies in the grass with her husband. She holds a stare away from the camera, so that rather than her gaze we see the back of her head. In the dream which follows she sees herself as an old women, still looking after her children, who haven't grown up. As she leads her children up to the Dacha she realises that it is in ruins.

172 An extreme example of an emotion being linked to a specific camera move can be found in Barry Lyndon, where ominous backwards tracking shots show a character's gaze as they look past the limits of the camera frame, while walking towards the camera which stays ahead of them. The character's face is visible, and so our mirror neurons cause us to react to their emotional expressions, yet we cannot see who or what they are approaching. The shot is used several times to warn of an upcoming duel, or an imminent death. Once its meaning has been established, it is immediately foreboding. See Kubrick, Stanley. Barry Lyndon. Adventure, Drama, Romance, War, 1975.

173 p.19. Joseph D. Anderson, Barbara Fisher Anderson, and David Bordwell. Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations. SIU Press, 2007.

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perceptual systems are already segmenting ongoing activity into discrete events174. A

jump cut is disruptive as it results in a certain kind of irrelevant motion... beta motion175

which is usually unwanted by the narrative. Continuity editing techniques are successful

in perceptually smoothing over full-field visual discontinuities176, but not necessarily

audible discontinuities177. It is also obvious that as scene boundaries require a break in

action178, a cut may follow after an action is complete. In this case the absence of a cut

can become more noticeable than its presence as audiences become aware that the limits

of their gaze are the edges of the frame and the end of the shot.

I was interested to know how an audience's perception of time differs between an edited

scene, and the same action shown in long shot. I carried out an experiment which is

covered in detail in Appendix A. In most cases, an edited version of events is usually

shorter than the same events in long shot as dead time and inconsequential action is

removed in the editing process. However, Wenders often reverses this in his slow-paced

films, by cutting out the action, and leaving in the dead time. Sometimes he doesn't even

use ellipses, but simply cuts away to a parallel scene of dead time, then later returns to the

first scene after a change in it has occurred. Not only does he show less action, but he

also lets it take longer. In my experiment I found that audiences did not generally perceive

a great difference in the running time of an edited video of an action, compared with an

equal length long shot video of the same events. There was a more significant difference

between the running time estimated for the first video seen, and that for the second:

participants generally found the second video in the series shorter though I cannot explain

why.

174 p.439. Bacci, Francesca, and David Melcher. Art and the Senses. Oxford University Press, 2011.175 p.19. Anderson. 2007.176 p.443. Bacci, Francesca, and David Melcher. Art and the Senses. Oxford University Press, 2011.177 a break in visual flow is usually less noticeable than a break in the stream of sound... we blink

frequently, usually without awareness, but ... we have no parallel anatomical structure for our ears. p.80. Anderson, Joseph. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. SIU Press, 1998.

178 p.443. Bacci.

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In the second phase of the experiment, which is detailed in appendix E, viewers were

tested on their perception of cuts which were not well hidden. Very few viewers estimated

more cuts than were present, and most estimated correctly or slightly fewer. Even given

that the editing of the test videos in this phase of the experiment was deliberately jarring, I

was surprised how well participants remembered the cuts. I had assumed that at least a

few poor matches might slip by unnoticed. The results suggest that the glitches in Kings

(for example see Appendix J, Shot 70), and possibly even the mirrored shots in Paris (for

example see Appendix L, shot 80) might disturb audiences. The participants' ability to

recall several details from each video was also tested. In general this was dependant on

how prominently the details were framed in specific shots, rather than being dependant on

whether the video was an edited version or a long shot. I am not sure if this effect would

continue over the length of a whole film composed of long shots, or if audiences would

become less observant when cuts don't occur regularly.

I also tested how well audiences were able to recall timings of specific events in popular

mainstream films. I was interested to know how well normative narrative structures could

be recalled. Several case studies and the results for this phase of the experiment are

shown in Appendices C and D. It would be interesting to find out how heavily related the

ability to remember a narrative is to the level of immersion in that narrative which the

viewer experienced while perceiving it. The general trend seems to be that viewers were

more able to remember timings when the narrative structure was linearly chronologically

ordered, had acts of roughly even lengths, and the events were in some way related to the

act structure.

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11. Final Remarks

The problem of audience awareness of construction can be divided into two main issues.

Firstly, due to the film's content being unrealistic in some way, whether it is too simple or

too contrived. Secondly, due to a viewer-and-device-dependent familiarity with the forms

used to express the content.

Narratives are clearly an essential way in which we understand the world around us,

however, from my investigation into Mirror, it becomes clear that film can be intriguing

despite an incomplete narrative structure. The closest Mirror comes to an overall

narrative, is the causal link which implies that due to Maria's divorce and Alexei's

subsequent upbringing, Alexei has divorced from Natalia, and is now unable to

communicate with his mother. In Wenders' films a variety of complex but fluidly organised

structures often hide the fact that the film is based on a very simple premise. While

Tarkovsky develops his own screen language, Wenders applies a Hollywood tradition so

indifferently that it becomes transparent. All four of the films analysed here focus on

relationships as opposed to action, and I believe that this bias more accurately reflects

viewers' lives, and thus the films' content is a closer representation of reality.

At a basic level I believe that stories become engaging when they tell us about life itself,

and I propose that we are interested in the fate of others to help us learn about how to

react in different situations; we follow stories to derive if-then logic structures from them,

which we can apply to our daily lives. I believe that when a film's construction is not

visible, the film is perceived as an illusion of reality, and so instead of being valuable for

entertainments sake alone, it is valuable as a cognitively expansive experience.

When a film feels constructed, it means that we are aware of a pattern which we already

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know about - be it an oft-quoted narrative which we have heard many times before, or an

intrusive filmic device which prevents us from viewing the underlying content of the film as

reality. Making a film could be viewed as the act of constructing of abstract event

scenarios (which together are part of a plot), and the placement of these events in time

and space in such a way that there are no inconsistencies. To look at the process in

another way which I feel is more representative of how films which appear unconstructed

are put together: making a film is the act of selecting segments of a character's time, which

contains both plot-relevant events, and events which show that the characters have a life

of their own.

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