{ "site": "Shot Reverse Shot", "url": "https://shotreverseshot.com", "description": "Research journal behind axisofaction.com: films, scenes, film-language concepts, contexts and sources, cross-linked, with every quotation verified against the owner's scanned library (Reel).", "generated": "2026-09-26T11:08:05.615Z", "how_to_use": { "types": "film = hub per film; scene = close reading of one scene; concept = a code or convention, mapped to Axis of Action; context = production/reception force; idea = one atomic claim; source = a book or article; person = hub per person.", "citations": "`prefix page` = printed page in a book held in Reel (e.g. `sos 48`). Unpaged scans (sbe, smj, sls) are cited without a page. Web sources carry source.url and date.", "codes": "Concept slugs, hyphenated. The same slugs appear in each concept note's title (lowercased, hyphenated) and in /matrix/.", "axis": "Axis of Action pages this note corresponds to. See axis_crosswalk below for the full map." }, "counts": { "notes": 134, "library_books": 39 }, "notes": [ { "title": "Acting", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/acting/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/acting.md", "summary": "Performance as a symbolic code: who authors it, how the cut and the casting shape it, and why realism is the wrong yardstick.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting" ], "tags": [ "reference", "symbolic-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Acting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/acting/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 133", "um 233", "awf 292", "lam 300" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" } ], "words": 800, "body": "Acting is the code most viewers believe they can already read, and the one the textbooks\nhandle least well. \"Good acting\" usually means \"acting I believed\", and belief moves: the\nperformances one decade calls natural the next calls mannered. Two better questions replace\nit. Whose choices are you watching, the performer's, the director's or the editor's? And\nwhat is the performance doing in the film's design, whether or not it resembles behaviour?\nRead this way, a performance is a set of decisions about face, voice, body, stillness and\ntiming, and the gap between what a line says and what the body does while saying it.\n\n### Whose performance is it\n\nThe library splits on ownership. Giannetti gives the performance to the director outright.\nAfter sorting performers into extras, non-professionals, professionals and stars, he\nconcludes that \"the movie actor is ultimately a tool of the director\", one more language\nsystem the filmmaker speaks. Boggs goes further and gives part of it to the editor: the\nKuleshov experiment shows that a neutral face reads as hunger or grief depending on the shot\nbeside it, so \"the actor's face may not be so beautifully expressive as the visual context\nmakes it appear\". Barsam and Monahan admit that actors change lines, then shrink the\nadmission to \"fertile suggestion making\".\n\nBordwell and Thompson decline the ownership question and ask a different one. A\nperformance \"should be examined according to its function in the film's overall formal\ndesign\", and it can be plotted on two scales, individualised or typed, restrained or\nstylised. Their historical point matters most for this site: realism is not a fixed\nstandard. De Niro's Travis Bickle, the model of 1970s naturalism, now \"seem[s] quite\nstylized\". The difference between the camps is where meaning is made. Giannetti and Boggs\nput it outside the actor, in direction and cutting. Film Art puts it in the whole design and\nrefuses to rank realism above stylisation.\n\n### On the bench\n\nThe wiki's own evidence argues with Giannetti. The most quoted line in\n[[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] is not in the script; De Niro's annotated shooting script\nrewrote Travis's dialogue and the revisions reached Schrader's final draft\n([[De Niro wrote in the margins]]). That is authorship, not suggestion. On a smaller scale,\n[[Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose]]: three girls cackle when the hair falls out\nand one is horrified, because Rachel True decided the character would register the cost.\n[[The Craft — Nancy's turn]] shows a performance and a screenplay disagreeing inside one\nfilm. Balk plays Nancy at a pitch the script cannot contain, and the sympathy the writing\nwithdraws keeps flowing back through the acting.\n\nGiannetti's Hitchcock line, \"casting is characterization\", fits\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]], where the star found the script, hired the\ndirector and won the Oscar. And [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] is Boggs's point made with\nset decoration instead of a cut: Perkins plays Norman as shy, kind and trapped, sympathy\nconsolidates around him, and the stuffed birds above his head say what the performance and\nthe script both withhold.\n\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]] asks who authored a performance before *Taxi Driver* did. The back-room\nscene is improvised according to Scorsese, scripted according to Richard Romanus, and written\nin advance according to De Niro's own papers; all three are describing stages of one process\n([[Mean Streets — the back room]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Where does the performance contradict the line, and which one do you believe?\n- In a close-up, what is doing the work: the face, or the shot placed before it?\n- Where does the performance sit on Film Art's two scales, individual or type, restrained\n or stylised, and does that placement suit the film's design?\n- Who else could have been cast, and what would the film have lost or gained before a\n frame was shot?\n\n### In the books\n\n> An actor's performance consists of visual elements (appearance, gestures, facial expressions) and sound (voice, effects).\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 133`\n\n> Even Charles Chaplin, the most famous movie star of his era, admitted: \"Film acting is unquestionably a director's medium.\" In short, the movie actor is ultimately a tool of the director\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 233`\n\n> Thus, the actor's face may not be so beautifully expressive as the visual context makes it appear.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 292`\n\n> Actors commonly confer with directors about altering or omitting written lines, but this form of improvisation is so limited in scope that we can better understand it as the sort of fertile suggestion making that is intrinsic to collaboration.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 300`" }, { "title": "Audio", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/audio/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/audio.md", "summary": "Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence, and the argument over whether sound serves the image or works against it.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio" ], "tags": [ "reference", "technical-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Audio", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/audio/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/technique-film-editing/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 264", "um 94", "lam 370", "tfe 226" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" }, { "prefix": "tfe", "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing" } ], "words": 833, "body": "Audio is everything a film lets you hear: dialogue, effects, ambience, music and the\nsilence between them. It is the code audiences treat as accompaniment and analysts skip,\nbecause the vocabulary of film (\"viewer\", \"spectator\", \"watching\") assumes the image is the\nfilm and the soundtrack is what plays under it. The position taken here is the reverse. On\nthe four films on this site, sound does the work the image is credited with. The murder in\nPsycho is substantially a sound effect; the levitation in The Craft is a rhythm; the whole\npremise of Alice is a cut you can hear with your eyes closed. The distinction between sound\nthe characters share and sound only the audience hears has its own note, [[Non-diegetic sound]].\n\n### Servant or partner\n\nThe library disagrees about rank. Giannetti, closing two chapters on the image, calls it\n\"the most important source of meaning in the movies\" and files sound among the \"many other\nways of communicating information\". Barsam and Monahan say the opposite in so many words:\n\"Today, sound is not subordinate to image\", and \"A film's sound is potentially as\nexpressive as its images.\" Bordwell and Thompson explain why the argument persists: we\nhave learned to ignore most of what we hear, so \"we're strongly inclined to think of sound\nas simply an accompaniment to the real basis of cinema, the moving images\". Their verdict\nis that sound is \"perhaps the hardest one to study\", not the least important.\n\nReisz and Millar, writing in 1953, had already moved past the ranking question to a\npractical one: what sound does to time. Their reading of the robbery in Odd Man Out shows a\nfast-cut sequence slowed by the steady beat of mill machinery on the track, so the audience\nfeels the men's sense that the job is taking too long. \"Sound can be used to act in\nopposition to the visuals, in quality or tempo\", and in that scene \"the tempo of the sound\nis used as a counterpoint to the visuals, not as a reinforcement\". That is the difference\nbetween the camps. Giannetti's sound illustrates; Reisz's sound argues with the picture.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the shower scene]] is the case for Barsam and Monahan. The knife never enters\nflesh; the shrieking strings do the physiological work the image withholds, and they exist\nonly because the composer ignored an instruction to leave the scene unscored\n([[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]). Screen the two versions back to back.\n\n[[The Craft — light as a feather]] is the case for Reisz. There is no cue. Four girls'\nvoices repeat a rhyme, each cycle a little faster and quieter, and the cutting locks to the\nbeat, so suspense is manufactured out of pulse rather than information\n([[The chant is a metronome, not a spell]]). Sound governs the tempo of the scene, exactly\nas the mill machinery governs Odd Man Out.\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] shows sound and editing as one instrument. Alice Faye's \"You'll\nNever Know\" is the sound of a 1940s promise; the smash cut to Mott the Hoople at full\nvolume is 1974 arriving. Twenty-seven years are explained by the join between two songs\n([[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]]). And [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] ends\non a musical citation of Herrmann's Psycho score, which turns an apparent recovery into a\ndiagnosis ([[Herrmann finished the score and died that night]]).\n\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]] is the partner position at its most literal: there is no score at all,\nonly what the jukebox and car radio are playing, and the cutting follows the records. Johnny\nBoy's entrance cuts to slow motion on the downbeat of \"Jumpin' Jack Flash\"\n([[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]], [[The jukebox is the score]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Play the scene sound-only. What survives? Then image-only. What survives?\n- Does the tempo of the track match the tempo of the cutting, or work against it?\n- What is conspicuously silent, and what would a cue have added or spoiled?\n- When does a sound arrive before its image, and what does the film gain by letting you\n hear a place before you see it?\n\n### In the books\n\n> This makes sound as flexible and wide-ranging as other techniques. Yet sound is perhaps the hardest one to study.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 264`\n\n> we've been concerned with the most important source of meaning in the movies—the visual image. But of course movies exist in time and have many other ways of communicating information.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 94`\n\n> A film's sound is potentially as expressive as its images.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 370`\n\n> In many instances, sound can be used to act in opposition to the visuals, in quality or tempo.\n\n— [[Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing|Reisz & Millar]], `tfe 226`" }, { "title": "The camera as voyeur", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/camera-as-voyeur.md", "summary": "The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork" ], "tags": [ "film-language", "theory" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Camerawork", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/camerawork/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/printed-language/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/" ], "citations": [ "ckc 412", "mas 247", "um 79" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" }, { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 652, "body": "A sub-concept of [[Camerawork]], and the theory-side version of its central claim.\nCamerawork asks where the camera stands; this note asks what kind of watcher that position\nmakes of the audience. The strong form, from\n[[Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)|Mulvey]], is that mainstream cinema\nruns on pleasure in looking, that the looking is gendered male, and that the camera's\nhabitual place is that of a watcher nobody on screen admitted. The weak form is a\nconvention: actors do not look at the lens, so the audience is always overhearing. Most\nfilms earn only the weak one. [[Psycho (1960)]] stages the strong one on purpose.\n\n### Structure or convention\n\nHayward treats voyeurism as a fact about the apparatus. Viewers \"are positioned as voyeurs\"\nthe moment they sit down, the camera \"is also, technically speaking, a 'voyeur'\", and the\nposition is where the pleasure comes from. Mulvey, quoted in *Media & Society*, adds the\ngender: looking is \"split between active/male and passive/female\", and editing and camera\nposition stitch the viewer into the male character's point of view. On this account the\ncamera cannot help being a voyeur.\n\nGiannetti describes the same fact and declines the theory. Actors \"almost never look into\nthe camera\", so \"we are merely allowed to be voyeurs while they studiously ignore our\nexistence\". For him this is a staging convention, and Hitchcock's use of it a casting trick:\nStewart in *Rear Window* is \"literally a voyeur\" and forgiven because he is Jimmy Stewart.\n*Film Art* barely uses the word; its reading of the Psycho opening is formal, a motif of\ninward movement, with no watcher implied.\n\nThe difference is whether the voyeur is in the seat or on the screen. The classroom test is\nsimple. If a film keeps making its audience notice that they are looking, the strong theory\ndescribes something the film built. If not, it adds little.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the opening]] states the thesis before a word of dialogue: a skyline, a window\nchosen from among many, and the camera slipping under the blind. [[Psycho — the parlour scene]]\nthen hands the position to a character. Norman's peephole makes the audience's look into\nhis, and the shower that follows is shot from positions nobody innocent could occupy.\n\n[[Taxi Driver (1976)]] runs the same argument through a windscreen and a rear-view mirror.\n[[Bickle sees through glass]] records that Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and that\nthe film shows only the passengers who feed his watching. The camera shares his aperture and\nleaves it twice, in [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] and [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]],\nboth times to look at the space around him rather than through him.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Does anyone in the film watch someone who does not know it, and does the camera share that look?\n- Who is displayed for looking and who does the looking, and does the film ever swap them?\n- Does the film make you notice that you are watching, and at what moment?\n\n### In the books\n\n> We pay to go to the movies, but once we are sat before the screen we are positioned as voyeurs, as spectating subject watching the goings-on of the people on-screen who are 'unaware' that we are watching them.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 412`\n\n> In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure, which is styled accordingly.\n\n— Mulvey, quoted in [[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]], `mas 247`\n\n> Of course, during the movie itself, actors almost never look into the camera. We are merely allowed to be voyeurs while they studiously ignore our existence.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 79`" }, { "title": "Camerawork", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/camerawork/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/camerawork.md", "summary": "Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork" ], "tags": [ "reference", "technical-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Camerawork", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/camerawork/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/shoot-like-scorsese/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 190", "um 12", "fa 203" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 723, "body": "Camerawork is the set of decisions about where the camera is, what it can see from there,\nand whether it moves: shot size, angle, height, lens, focus, and the stillness or motion of\nthe frame. The taxonomy is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that every\nsetup makes a claim about who is looking, and the audience accepts the claim without being\nasked. Where students go wrong is in reading camerawork as a dictionary, one angle per\nmeaning. The books divide on exactly that. The theory-side extension, the camera as a watcher\nnobody invited, has its own note: [[The camera as voyeur]].\n\n### Vocabulary or context\n\nGiannetti treats the camera as a speaker with a vocabulary. Angle is \"an authorial\ncommentary on the subject matter\", and he says what the words mean: a low angle makes the\nfigure loom and pins the viewer \"to the ground, dominated\"; a high angle makes people \"look\npowerless, trapped\". This is the reading most first-time viewers make, and he describes it\nwithout embarrassment.\n\nBordwell and Thompson refuse the dictionary. Framings \"don't carry absolute or general\nmeanings\", and relying on formulas \"is to forget that meaning and effect always stem from\nthe film's overall form and the immediate context\". Their evidence is *Citizen Kane*, whose\nlowest angles arrive at Kane's worst defeat, where the low camera isolates rather than\nenlarges him.\n\nGiannetti describes the default a film inherits before it has taught you anything; Bordwell\ndescribes what a film can do once it has. Of any angle, ask which is operating.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the opening]] is the standard case for movement. Bordwell and Thompson read the\ncrane over Phoenix and the slide under the blind as the first instance of a motif, \"the\npenetration of an interior\", repeated until the next-to-last shot tracks into Norman's face.\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] tests the two books against each other. The low angles on Norman among the birds read as threat in Giannetti's sense, yet the scene note\nrecords that first-time sympathy consolidates around him, which is Bordwell's point: the\nangle warns while the context reassures.\n\n[[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] is the counter-case to motivated movement. Bordwell and\nThompson say a moving frame should usually depend on movement in the shot. Scorsese's track\naway from Travis to an empty corridor depends on nothing, and he admits that \"you can see the\nhand behind the camera there\". [[The Craft — light as a feather]] shows the quiet version\nof a position making a claim: the camera at floor level, kneeling with the girls.\n\n[[After Hours (1985)]] is the case for camerawork as a budget line. Scorsese drew about 500\nshots in the margins of the script and had forty nights to get them\n([[Five set-ups a day became sixteen]]). The style that results (fast dollies, a jib arm that\nswoops \"as if it were a hawk\", a crane that drops like a set of keys) is Ballhaus's speed made\nvisible. Scorsese wanted \"a dolly, not a zoom, because the dolly you can feel\".\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Whose eye level does the camera adopt, and when does it leave it?\n- When the camera moves, what in the shot motivates the move? If nothing does, who is moving it?\n- Does an extreme angle carry the textbook meaning, or has the film built a local one?\n- What does the camera decline to show from where it stands?\n\n### In the books\n\n> In fact, framings don't carry absolute or general meanings. In some films, angles and distance imply the meanings mentioned earlier, but in other films—probably most films—they don't.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 190`\n\n> The angle from which an object is photographed can often serve as an authorial commentary on the subject matter. If the angle is slight, it can serve as a subtle form of emotional coloration. If the angle is extreme, it can represent the major meaning of an image.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 12`\n\n> The camera's movement inward, the penetration of an interior, is repeated throughout the film, often motivated as a subjective point of view when various characters move deeper and deeper into Norman Bates's mansion.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 203`" }, { "title": "Character", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/character/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/character.md", "summary": "How a film builds a person out of traits, and whether it ever lets that person decide anything.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "story-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 78", "awf 59", "awf 58", "um 517" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 674, "body": "A film character is not a person. It is a small set of traits, chosen because the plot\nwill need each of them, and shown early so the audience can start predicting. That is the\ntextbook account. The interesting question starts where it stops: what a film does when the\ntraits no longer explain the person. Some films let the\ncharacter decide something the traits did not predict. Others change the character by\ndecree, because the ending needs them to be wrong. Students tend to grade characters on\nrealism, as if \"round\" were praise and \"flat\" a fault. The books are clearer than that.\n\n### Function, taxonomy, judgement\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] treats character as machinery. A trait exists\nto cause something later; Jill's marksmanship in *The Man Who Knew Too Much* sits idle for\nan hour and then fires the last shot (`fa 78`). The question to ask of any trait is what it\nis for.\n\nBoggs (*The Art of Watching Films*) sorts instead: flat against round, static\nagainst developing. His caveat matters more than the categories. Round is not better than\nflat; the terms describe what a character is doing in the story, and a flat character\nserves an allegory better than a round one would (`awf 59`). He then files Charles Foster\nKane, tentatively, among the static (`awf 58`).\n\nGiannetti (*Understanding Movies*) quotes Welles on the same character and\nreaches the opposite place. Welles \"refuses to place his protagonist in a tidy moral\ncategory\"; the audience is meant to judge, and the film declines to (`um 517`). The\ndisagreement is not about Kane. Boggs asks which box a character fits. Welles builds the\ncharacter so that the box will not close. A film can assemble a person as a bundle of causes\nand still refuse the audience a verdict on him. That refusal is a design choice, not a\nfailure of characterisation.\n\n### On the bench\n\nMarion Crane is the functional model executed in full: goal, flaw, a moral decision on her\nlast night, every trait doing causal work, and then the film removes her\n([[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]). Norman is built the other way, out of sympathy\nfirst, so that the reveal re-reads every trait [[Psycho — the parlour scene|the parlour scene]]\ngave him.\n\nTravis Bickle is the Welles case. The film stays inside his head and never once agrees\nwith him, and its most quoted scene is a performer supplying the character's own text in a\nroom with nobody else in it ([[Taxi Driver — the mirror]]). Nancy Downs is the counter-case.\nThe Craft needs her to be the reason the coven works and the reason it must be dismantled,\nand it converts her without giving her a decision that would explain the conversion\n([[The Craft — Nancy's turn]]). Her wish was different in kind from the others'\n([[Nancy is the only poor one]]), and the film punishes the difference. Psycho reassigns\nallegiance scene by scene; The Craft reassigns it by fiat.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What does the character's first scene ask you to predict, and does the film ever cash the prediction?\n- Which trait turns out to be causal, and which is decoration?\n- When the character changes, is the change a decision they make or a thing done to them?\n- Does the film give you a verdict on this person, or leave you to make one?\n\n### In the books\n\n> In general, a character is given traits that will play causal roles in the overall story action.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 78`\n\n> Round characters are not inherently superior to flat characters. The terms merely imply how different characters function within the framework of a story.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 59`\n\n> It depends on who's talking about him. The point of the picture is not so much the solution of the problem as its presentation.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 517`" }, { "title": "Chronology", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/chronology/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/chronology.md", "summary": "The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "story-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/narration-fiction-film/" ], "citations": [ "fa 80", "ckc 177", "um 158" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 654, "body": "Chronology is the relation between the order in which things happen in a story and the\norder, duration and frequency in which the film shows them: linear telling, flashback,\nflash-forward, ellipsis, compression, repetition. The mistake is to treat the linear version\nas neutral and everything else as a trick. Every film omits, and most omit almost everything, so\nthe choice of what to skip is the first chronological decision and usually the most\nrevealing. Reordering is rarer and more visible, and the books\ndisagree about what it is for.\n\n### Three uses for a reordered story\n\nBordwell and Thompson describe chronology as work the viewer does. \"As we watch a film, we\nconstruct story time on the basis of what the plot presents.\" The default is omission: we\nassume characters sleep, eat and travel, \"so the periods containing such irrelevant action\ncan be skipped over\". A flashback is \"the most common violation of 1-2-3 order\", and\nreconstructing the sequence \"might be seen as a sort of game\". A reordering is information\nmanagement. The film decides when you learn things.\n\nHayward reads the same device as psychology. Flashbacks \"are a cinematic representation of\nmemory and of history and, ultimately of subjective truth\"; because they usually resolve an\nenigma, \"they are by nature investigative or confessional\". The flashback is not a delivery\nschedule but a mind, and the past it shows is somebody's version.\n\nGiannetti reads it as theme. Flashbacks and flash-forwards let filmmakers \"develop ideas\nthematically rather than chronologically\", and the cinema's freedom with time amounts to\n\"cracking the tyranny of mechanically measured time\". Where Bordwell sees a puzzle and\nHayward a confession, Giannetti sees a liberty.\n\nOf any reordering, ask which of the three it is. A flashback that withholds a fact is\nBordwell's. One that shows how a character remembers is Hayward's. One that sets two times\nagainst each other is Giannetti's, and the site's largest example is that kind.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] holds the biggest ellipsis on this site: a soundstage Monterey, a\ngirl announcing she can sing, and a single cut to Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later. Nothing\nbetween is shown, and nothing needs to be, because\n[[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]] carries the decades in the sound. That is\nBordwell's skipped-over time used for Giannetti's purpose: two eras set side by side so the\ngap says what a montage of years could not.\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] compresses rather than leaps. The search montage folds an evening into 41\nseconds ([Playback ↗](https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-search-montage/)), story time\nexceeding screen time with nothing hidden. Its more radical act is structural:\n[[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] does not reorder events, but it breaks the\nexpectation about when a story is allowed to change hands.\n\n[[Taxi Driver (1976)]] keeps strict linear order and makes the calendar the subject. The hub\nnote describes the structure as a diary, Travis's voice-over dating its own entries, so the\nfilm's chronology is the record of a man losing his.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What is skipped, and what does the skip protect? Name the longest gap and say what showing it would lose.\n- When the film leaps, who bridges the gap: a caption, a cut, a song, or the audience alone?\n- If there is a flashback, whose is it? Does the film treat it as fact, as memory, or as argument?\n\n### In the books\n\n> As we watch a film, we construct story time on the basis of what the plot presents.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 80`\n\n> Flashbacks are a cinematic representation of memory and of history and, ultimately of subjective truth.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 177`\n\n> to develop ideas thematically rather than chronologically, freeing them to explore the subjective nature of time and the human mind\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 158`" }, { "title": "Colour", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/colour/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/colour.md", "summary": "Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "colour" ], "tags": [ "reference", "symbolic-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Colour", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/colour/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/" ], "citations": [ "um 23", "vs 260", "fa 596", "awf 218" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "vs", "title": "Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" }, { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 843, "body": "Colour is the palette a film builds across production design, costume, lighting, stock\nand grading, and the meanings that palette carries: warmth, danger, nostalgia, sickness,\nclass. Black and white is a colour decision too. It is the code students over-read\nfastest: red means danger, blue means cold, and the reading is finished before it has\nstarted. The better question is where a colour's meaning comes from. Sometimes from the\nculture, sometimes from a rule the film sets up in its opening scene, and sometimes, on\nthe evidence of this site, from a laboratory, a censor or a budget, with the meaning\narriving later.\n\n### Instinct or rule\n\nGiannetti treats colour as something the audience absorbs rather than reads. \"Color tends\nto be a subconscious element in film. It's strongly emotional in its appeal, expressive\nand atmospheric rather than intellectual.\" Viewers interpret lines but \"accept color\npassively, permitting it to suggest moods rather than objects. Lines are associated with\nnouns; color with adjectives.\" Bruce Block, writing for people who have to design a film\nrather than describe one, denies that any colour has a mood of its own. \"Each visual\ncomponent can be assigned to an emotion, mood, idea, situation, or character\", and the\nassignment is made in the visual exposition: \"If presented consistently, the audience\nwill learn that a green color communicates danger.\" For Giannetti the meaning is in the\ncolour; for Block it is in the contract the film signs with its audience in its first\nminutes. Block explains why the same red can be romance in one film and warning in\nanother; Giannetti explains why some contracts are easier to sign.\n\nThe books also split on realism. Boggs finds that black and white \"often seems more\ntrue to life, more realistic, than color\". Barsam and Monahan say that \"color films may\nstrike us as more realistic than black-and-white films\". Bordwell and Thompson settle it\nhistorically: black and white \"was then considered more realistic\" in the 1940s, when\ncolour was for fantasy and musicals, and \"such rules of thumb as 'color for realism'\nhave no universal validity; as always, it is a matter of context\".\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is Block's rule and Giannetti's instinct at once. The sunset red\nof the painted sky is a quotation of Menzies and of a studio-era technology for painting\nemotion onto weather, Technicolor as the colour of promised futures. The film spent\n$85,000 of a $1.8 million budget on ninety seconds of it ([[The $85,000 backdrop]]) to\nestablish a palette the smash cut to Socorro then abolishes.\n\n[[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] is the warning against reading meaning first. The neon\nand steam of the night driving came from Michael Chapman pushing night-rated stock in\ndevelopment ([[Chapman pushed the night stock]]). The muted, coppery look of the\nmassacre, routinely praised as a stylistic choice, was a red tint agreed to avoid an X\nrating ([[The red tint over the bloodbath]]). Two lab decisions, one by choice and one\nunder duress, both now read as authorship.\n\n[[The Craft — Nancy's turn]] is colour as class signalling in Block's sense: the trailer's\nsodium and brown, the storm on the beach, the cold blue-white of the new apartment, then\ninstitutional flatness. The palette moves with her, and it is the most legible thing in the\nfilm's design. And [[Psycho (1960)]] reminds you that black and white in 1960 was first a\nbudget decision, shot with a television crew for around $800,000, before it was a palette.\n\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]] puts a debt inside a meaning. Tony's bar is red because red means hell\nin Charlie's theology ([[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]]), and it is red because Scorsese took it\nfrom Michael Powell, who then wrote to say there was too much of it ([[Too much red]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What is the film's base palette, and when does it break? Was the break taught earlier?\n- Which character owns which colour, and does anyone steal it?\n- Does colour shift with the story's temperature, or stay fixed while the story moves?\n- When the colour is unusual, find out whether anyone was allowed to choose it.\n\n### In the books\n\n> Color tends to be a subconscious element in film. It's strongly emotional in its appeal, expressive and atmospheric rather than intellectual.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 23`\n\n> If presented consistently, the audience will learn that a green color communicates danger.\n\n— [[Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media|Block]], `vs 260`\n\n> Such rules of thumb as \"color for realism\" have no universal validity; as always, it is a matter of context, the function of color or black-and-white tonalities within a specific film.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 596`\n\n> The overall effect of black and white can be paradoxical, for somehow it often seems more true to life, more realistic, than color\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 218`" }, { "title": "Conflict", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/conflict/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/conflict.md", "summary": "What stands between a character and what they want, and whether the film treats that as a device or as its subject.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "story-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/" ], "citations": [ "fa 99", "awf 49", "mas 253" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" } ], "words": 745, "body": "Conflict is the convention that makes a story move: somebody wants something and\nsomething is in the way. The mistake is to treat it as a synonym for fighting. A fistfight\nis the smallest conflict a film can stage and usually the least interesting. The question\nis not who is fighting but what the fight is a proxy for, and whether the film knows. The\nbooks offer three sizes of answer, from plot mechanism to a theory of what a film is about.\n\n### Mechanism, psychology, structure\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] keeps it small and mechanical. A classical\nprotagonist has a goal; without a \"blocking element\" nothing would stop them reaching it\nin the first reel; so the plot supplies an opposing character with opposing traits\n(`fa 99`). Conflict here is a component of causality, no more.\n\nBoggs (*The Art of Watching Films*) calls conflict \"the mainspring of practically any film\"\nand sorts it into external and internal (`awf 49`). External conflict is a contest of wills,\nor a character against nature, fate or the system; internal conflict is a division inside\none person. His caveat is that the two rarely separate: a duel grows into a struggle\nbetween the value systems the duellists stand for.\n\n[[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]] makes that caveat the\nwhole theory. Following Kitses on the western, it reads conflict as a table of binary\noppositions in which characters, settings and even colours line up on two sides, and the\nsides \"cohere to provide a central opposition between two different value systems\"\n(`mas 253`). Resolution is a synthesis: protagonist and antagonist take on aspects of each\nother so the opposition can close. The difference from Film Art is one of scale. Bordwell\ndescribes what conflict does to a plot. Media & Society describes what a plot's conflict\nreveals about the culture that made it.\n\n### On the bench\n\nMarion Crane resolves her external conflict before the film kills her. The theft and the\nflight end the night she works out how to repay the money\n([[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]); what remains is internal, and Psycho removes the\nperson carrying it. That is why the murder feels structurally wrong as well as violent.\n\nTravis Bickle is conflict without a worthy opponent. The film builds a man who needs an\nenemy and gives him a woman who will not take his calls ([[Taxi Driver — the phone call]]),\na candidate he cannot reach and three men in a stairwell ([[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]]).\nNone is the opposition his rage is sized for, and the film's authors could not agree on\nwhat the final fight meant ([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]).\n\nThe Craft is the binary case. Every conflict after [[The Craft — light as a feather]] is a\nfight over what that scene proved, and the sides sort by what the girls asked for: three\nwanted something about themselves changed, Nancy wanted out of a trailer\n([[Nancy is the only poor one]]). The ending's synthesis keeps power with the girl born to\nit and punishes the one whose motive was material ([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]).\nLay the oppositions out in a table and the film's values show.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Name the goal and the blocking element. Is the block a person, a system, or something inside the character?\n- If the external conflict were resolved tomorrow, what would still be wrong? That remainder is the internal conflict.\n- List what lines up on each side of the central opposition. Which side does the ending reward?\n- Does the antagonist deserve the protagonist's effort? If not, why has the film mismatched them?\n\n### In the books\n\n> But in the classical narrative there's a blocking element: an opposition that creates conflict. Typically, the protagonist comes up against a character with opposing traits and goals.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 99`\n\n> Conflicts can seldom be isolated completely from other individuals, society as a whole, or the value systems of the individuals involved.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 49`\n\n> These then cohere to provide a central opposition between two different value systems. Analysis of this opposition leads us to a deeper understanding of what the film is essentially concerned with.\n\n— [[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]], `mas 253`" }, { "title": "Continuity", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/continuity/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/continuity.md", "summary": "The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "form conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "form-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Form conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/form-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/editing/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "citations": [ "fa 231", "ckc 135" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 652, "body": "Continuity is the system of conventions that lets a scene built from dozens of shots read as\none continuous space and one stretch of time: the 180° line, the eyeline match, the match on\naction, the establishing shot and its return. The question is not what the rules are, which\ntakes ten minutes, but what kind of thing they are. One set of books treats them as craft, a\nway of telling a story clearly. Another treats them as ideology, a way of making a\nconstructed thing feel like a window. Both describe the same cuts. This site's own name is\nthe system's handshake: shot, reverse shot.\n\n### Craft or ideology\n\nBordwell and Thompson describe continuity as a tool with a purpose. It exists \"because the\ncontinuity style seeks to present a story clearly and forcefully\", and each device is\nexplained by its legibility. The eyeline match works because \"to be looked at,\nan object must be near the looker\". The match on action is the strongest device: carry a\nmovement across a cut and \"we assume that the space and time are continuous\". Even the 180°\nrule is held loosely; they show Ozu crossing the line comfortably in *Early Summer*.\n\nHayward describes the same devices from the other side. Continuity editing is defined by\nwhat it hides: \"in the name of realism – the editing does not draw attention to itself\", and\nits seamlessness stitches the viewer into an omniscient position they never question. Deep\nfocus, which needs less cutting, leaves the spectator \"less manipulated, less stitched into\nthe narrative\", and is therefore \"counter-Hollywood\" as a style. The SAGE Handbook gives the\nmoderate version: continuity was devised partly to streamline production, \"but more\nfundamentally in order to provide audiences with a seamless, intimate and unobstructed\nperspective upon the action\".\n\nThe difference is what the invisibility is for. For Bordwell it serves the story; for\nHayward it serves the illusion, and the illusion serves an order. Neither disputes the\nother's facts. Every time a cut goes unnoticed, ask what it clarified and what it concealed.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] is a shot/reverse-shot conversation whose two halves slowly\nstop matching. Marion sits in soft, rounded compositions near a lamp; Norman moves into low\nangles, hard shadow and the birds. The space stays legible, and the mismatch is carried in\nframing and lighting rather than in any breach of the system. It keeps continuity's\nletter so it can break the spirit without anyone noticing the join.\n\n[[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]] shows the eyeline match used as\ncharacterisation. What Scorsese took from Hitchcock was a\nprocedure, cutting between a man under scrutiny and the shifting attention of the people\ndeciding about him, so the audience feels watched on his behalf. Ordinary grammar, turned\ninto an ordeal. [[Alice — the prologue]] is continuity refused on purpose: a smash cut\nacross 27 years, where the point is that nothing matches.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Where is the line in a conversation scene, and does the film ever cross it? Error or argument?\n- Find an eyeline match. Are looker and object ever shown together, or is the space built from the look alone?\n- Watch a match on action twice. What did the cut let the film skip?\n- When continuity breaks, what does the film gain by being seen?\n\n### In the books\n\n> When working in the continuity style, the filmmaker builds the scene's space around what is called the axis of action, the center line, or the 180° line.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 231`\n\n> Spatial continuity is maintained by strict adherence to the 180-degree rule, temporal continuity by observing the chronology of the narrative.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 135`\n\nThe first is where [Axis of Action ↗](https://axisofaction.com) gets its name." }, { "title": "Editing", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/editing/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/editing.md", "summary": "The join between shots: cinema's only invisible code, until it decides to be seen.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing" ], "tags": [ "reference", "technical-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Editing", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/editing/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/montage/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/sources/technique-film-editing/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/montage/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "/sources/technique-film-editing/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "tfe 185", "fa 496", "um 141" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "tfe", "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing" }, { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 650, "body": "Editing is the selection of shots and the joining of them: cut, dissolve, fade, wipe, and\nthe rhythm those joins build across a scene. It is the one technical code a well-made film\nhides from its audience. Nobody watching a conversation notices the forty cuts in it; the\ncraft that hides them is [[Continuity]]. The interesting question is not what a cut is but\nwhy one is there at all. Three books answer that differently. The extreme case, where the\njoin manufactures the meaning, is [[Montage]].\n\n### Three answers to \"why cut?\"\n\nReisz and Millar, practitioners writing in 1953, give the working editor's rule. \"Every cut\n— this much we can insist on — should make a point. There must be a reason for transferring\nthe spectator's attention from one image to another.\" The corollary is the sharpest thing in\nthe book: \"unless it makes a point a cut is often found to be unsmooth\". A cut is not\ninvisible because it is well matched. It is invisible because it was needed.\n\nBordwell and Thompson decline to legislate. Editing is \"the set of techniques that governs\nthe relations among shots\", and the relations come in four kinds: graphic, rhythmic, spatial,\ntemporal. Asked why Hitchcock cuts the bird attack rather than panning to it, they say only\nthat \"it's a matter of timing and heightened impact\". What a cut does depends on the film\naround it.\n\nGiannetti is the least cautious. \"Editing is an art as well as a craft\", and classical\ncutting is \"editing for dramatic intensity and emotional emphasis rather than for purely\nphysical reasons\". He borrows Truffaut's remark that films in which people lie need more\nshots than films in which people tell the truth, because the cut delivers what the\ncharacters will not.\n\nReisz tells you when a cut is wrong. Bordwell tells you what a cut changed. Giannetti tells\nyou what a cut is for.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the shower scene]] satisfies all three. Each cut makes a point in Reisz's sense,\nsince no single shot could show what the sequence implies;\n[[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]] records that none shows the knife enter flesh.\nIn Bordwell's terms it is rhythmic and spatial editing at the limit; in Giannetti's it is\nnarration by cut, the audience supplying the violence.\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] holds the most economical cut on the site: one splice, 27 years, and a\nwhole aesthetic gone. [[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]] shows that the cut is\naudible before it is visible. [[The Craft — light as a feather]] is the gentler shower:\ncutting locked to the chant, no wide shot to prove the levitation, and the rise assembled\nfrom angles that each hold part of it.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Where does the cutting rate change, and what in the story changes with it?\n- Pick one cut and ask Reisz's question: what point does it make that the previous shot could not?\n- What does the sequence refuse to show in a single shot, and what does the audience supply instead?\n- Does the transition comment (a dissolve, a smash cut, a sound carried over) or merely continue?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Every cut — this much we can insist on — should make a point. There must be a reason for transferring the spectator's attention from one image to another.\n\n— [[Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing|Reisz & Millar]], `tfe 185`\n\n> editing (1) In filmmaking, the task of selecting and joining camera takes. (2) In the finished film, the set of techniques that governs the relations among shots.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 496`\n\n> Classical cutting involves editing for dramatic intensity and emotional emphasis rather than for purely physical reasons.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 141`" }, { "title": "Format", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/format/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/format.md", "summary": "The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "form conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "form-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Form conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/form-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/" ], "citations": [ "fa 181", "fa 46", "um 182", "awf 13" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 649, "body": "Format is the container a film arrives in, decided before any creative choice is made inside\nit: the shape of the frame, the length of the whole, the medium, the screen it is built for.\nStudents treat these as neutral facts. They are not. A ratio\ndecides what a composition can hold, and a running time decides what a structure can afford.\nThe interesting question about both is whether they are constraints the filmmaker works\nwithin or meanings the filmmaker works with. The library divides on this.\n\n### Constraint or meaning\n\nBordwell and Thompson treat format as a history of standards. The Academy ratio of 1.37:1\nwas set \"to allow room for a soundtrack\", widescreen norms arrived in the 1950s, and what\ninterests them is adaptation: \"Every change in technology and exhibition has forced\nfilmmakers to make tough choices.\" Running time gets the same treatment, the eleven-minute\nreel that forced the cuts in *Rope*, and a filmmaker who \"may exploit every moment of the\nfilm's running time\". Format is the field of play.\n\nGiannetti wants the ratio to mean something. Following Bazin, he treats widescreen as a\nrealist argument: it \"tends to de-emphasize depth in favor of breadth\", and a horizontal\npresentation \"could be more democratic\" than the close-up and the edited sequence. The wide\nframe is a position on how much a viewer should be told where to look.\n\nBoggs takes a third line: the format is the work and altering it is damage. Cropping a\nwidescreen film for a square television is \"cinematic mutilation\", because the process\n\"introduced camera movement not intended by the film's creators\". Three positions, three\nquestions: what did the format allow, what did it claim, and what happened to the film when\nthe format changed under it.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] is where format is most visibly a production decision. It was shot fast,\nin black and white, by the television crew from *Alfred Hitchcock Presents*, on a TV-unit\nbudget. Its running time is then made a contract.\n[[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]] records that cinemas could admit nobody after the start, because a structure built on\n[[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] does not survive an audience that wanders in at\nminute fifty. Hitchcock priced the running time into the release.\n\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] has the strangest format afterlife in the wiki.\nA profane New Hollywood feature became *Alice* (CBS, 1976–85), a laugh-tracked sitcom: the\nsame diner in a different container, and the meaning inverted. [[Alice — the prologue]]\nadds a smaller point, a feature that opens by counterfeiting the look of a studio-era\nwomen's picture, so the container is the first thing the film quotes.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What is the aspect ratio, and what sits at the edges of the frame that a narrower ratio would lose?\n- What does the running time permit or forbid? Where would the film break if half an hour shorter?\n- Was the film built for the screen you are watching it on? If not, what has been cropped or letterboxed?\n- Has the story lived in another container, and what changed with the shape?\n\n### In the books\n\n> The ratio of frame width to frame height is called the aspect ratio.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 181`\n\n> Every change in technology and exhibition has forced filmmakers to make tough choices.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 46`\n\n> Widescreen tends to de-emphasize depth in favor of breadth, but Bazin believed that a horizontal presentation of the visual materials could be more democratic\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 182`\n\n> The process frequently introduced camera movement not intended by the film's creators and thereby could alter significantly the visual rhythms of the film.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 13`" }, { "title": "Formula", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/formula/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/formula.md", "summary": "The plot shape a genre's audience arrives already knowing, and the argument over whether repetition is commerce, ritual or both.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "genre conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "genre-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Genre conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/genre-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "lam 80", "sgh 437", "um 354", "ckc 197", "ckc 199", "um 356", "fa 351" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" }, { "prefix": "sgh", "title": "Donald & Renov — The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" }, { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" } ], "words": 744, "body": "A formula is a genre's recurring plot: the beats an audience can hum in advance. The\nwestern's showdown, the romantic comedy's cute meet and big misunderstanding, the\ngangster's rise and fall. Students use the word as an insult, and the books partly agree.\nBut formula is also what makes variation legible: you cannot notice a film refusing a beat\nunless you were expecting it. The disagreement in the library is not whether formula\nexists but what the repetition is for, and there are two answers that do not reduce to\neach other.\n\n### Repetition sells, or repetition means\n\nThe industrial answer is plainest in Barsam and Monahan (*Looking at Movies*). Genres hand\nthe studio \"a blueprint for creating and marketing a type of film that has proven\nsuccessful in the past\", and the principle underneath is \"give people what they want, and\nthey will buy it\" (`lam 80`). Adherence driven purely by economics \"often yields derivative and formulaic results\"\n(`lam 80`). Steve Neale's version, reported in *The SAGE Handbook of\nFilm Studies*, is colder: genres \"offer the industry a means of controlling demand\"\n(`sgh 437`).\n\nThe ritual answer is Giannetti's (*Understanding Movies*). Genre conventions and archetypal\nplots \"encourage viewers to participate ritualistically in the basic beliefs, fears, and\nanxieties of their age\" (`um 354`). Repetition is what myth does. The test is not whether a film repeats but how:\n\"Incompetent artists merely repeat. Serious artists reinterpret\" (`um 354`).\n\nHayward (*Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts*) holds the two together rather than choosing.\nGenres are \"simultaneously conservative and innovative\" because they answer to two sets of\nexpectations, the industry's and the audience's; the industry repeats formulas that work\nand the audience wants familiarity and change at once (`ckc 197`). Her sharper point is\nabout who owns the formula: genres have conventions \"with which the audience is as familiar\nas the director (if not more so)\" (`ckc 199`), which is why a film can fail for following\nthem too closely and become a cult for breaking them. Barsam sees a sales device, Giannetti\na rite, Hayward a negotiation. All three agree that the audience's foreknowledge is the\nmaterial.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] runs a crime-and-flight formula for 47 minutes, complete with a heroine,\na theft and a road, then swaps genres by killing the person carrying the plot\n([[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]). The first formula is a decoy for the second,\nand the audience's foreknowledge is exactly what the film spends\n([[The money dies with Marion]]).\n\n[[Taxi Driver (1976)]] runs a neo-noir formula, the returned veteran, the corrupt city, the\ndoomed rescue, through a character the film refuses to explain; opening-night audiences\ntook the rescue as a payoff the director had built to be recoiled from\n([[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]]). [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] crosses the\nwoman's picture with the road movie and opens by staging the older formula as a soundstage\npastiche ([[Alice — the prologue]]); its ending was argued over as an ending for 1974\n([[The women's picture, 1974]]). The Craft inherits a 1990s teen skeleton, outsider\narrives, is adopted, is corrupted, must renounce, and puts a story about female anger and\nclass inside it. The two do not fit ([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Which beats arrive on schedule, and which are delayed, inverted or refused? What does the refusal say?\n- Whose expectation does a given beat serve: the studio's need to presell, or the audience's need to recognise?\n- Where the film departs from formula, does it reinterpret (Giannetti's test) or only decorate?\n- Which of Giannetti's phases is the film in: primitive, classical, revisionist or parodic (`um 356`)?\n\n### In the books\n\n> give people what they want, and they will buy it.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 80`\n\n> The stylized conventions and archetypal story patterns of genres encourage viewers to participate ritualistically in the basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 354`\n\n> Genres have codes and conventions with which the audience is as familiar as the director (if not more so).\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 199`\n\n> Films are most commonly grouped into genres by virtue of similar plot patterns, similar thematic implications, characteristic filmic techniques, and recognizable iconography.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 351`" }, { "title": "Iconography", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/iconography/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/iconography.md", "summary": "The objects, costumes and spaces a genre reuses until they carry its memory, and what that memory is worth.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "genre conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "genre-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Genre conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/genre-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/sage-handbook-film/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/media-and-society/" ], "citations": [ "fa 332", "ckc 226", "sgh 392" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" }, { "prefix": "sgh", "title": "Donald & Renov — The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies" } ], "words": 731, "body": "Iconography is a genre's visual vocabulary: the six-shooter and the Stetson, the tommy gun\nin the 1920s Ford, the gothic house on the hill, the diner counter. It works by\nrecognition. One image summons a genre's whole history, and a film can then spend that\ninheritance straight, ironically, or at a loss. The lazy reading stops at identification. The books push further, in three directions:\niconography as an economy, as a historical record, and as the place where a genre's\nideology is easiest to see and to attack.\n\n### Economy, record, weak point\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] gives the working definition. A genre's\niconography is its \"recurring symbolic images that carry meaning from film to film\"\n(`fa 332`), furnished by objects, settings, costume and even stars. The value is\nefficiency: because viewers know the conventions, \"the film can communicate information\neconomically\" (`fa 332`). An icon is a shortcut.\n\nHayward (*Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts*) treats the same images as evidence.\nIconography \"stresses both mise-en-scène and genre\" (`ckc 226`); it is historically\nmarked, so the icons of one period will not serve another, and the shift in a genre's look\n\"points to social and sexual changes\" (`ckc 226`). Her best sentence is the caveat: \"If\nthere appears to be no change, that too merits investigation.\" An icon that has not moved\nin forty years is a claim about what a culture would rather not revisit.\n\nClaire Johnston, as reported in *The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies*, makes iconography\nthe soft spot in ideology. Following Barthes, \"myth uses icons, but the icon is its\nweakest point\" (`sgh 392`). The handbook's gloss is that the less realistic the icon the\nbetter, since verisimilitude naturalises an icon while an obvious stereotype points back at\nthe tradition that made it, and can therefore be turned against that tradition. Set beside\nFilm Art, that is a disagreement about value. For Bordwell the icon is good because it is\nfast. For Johnston it is useful because it is obvious, and obviousness is what lets a\nfilm, or a critic, take it apart.\n\n### On the bench\n\nPsycho stacks two icon systems in one composition: the gothic house of the family psyche\nabove the flat modern motel ([[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]]). Inside, the parlour's\ntaxidermy is horror iconography doing narration, predators and prey and a man already\nstuffed ([[Norman among the birds]]).\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is iconography rebuilt in order to be broken: the *Oz* farmyard,\nthe *East of Eden* house, a sky painted in homage to Menzies, a child in gingham with a\nDorothy silhouette, all constructed on a soundstage at 1940s expense\n([[The $85,000 backdrop]]) so that one cut can smash them. Johnston's point exactly: the icons are conspicuously artificial, which is what lets the\nfilm argue with them.\n\nThe Craft assembles occult iconography on screen, candles, chalk, the calling of the\ncorners, a snake, most of it designed by a practising witch around one invented deity\n([[Manon was invented so nobody could call him]]). Taxi Driver's arrives second-hand, from\n*The Searchers* and from *Pickpocket* ([[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]]), and its most\ninsistent icon is a costume: the military jacket tells everyone Travis meets what he never\nsays ([[The returning veteran, 1976]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Which objects, costumes and spaces arrive already loaded? What tradition loaded them?\n- Does the film spend the inheritance straight, or does it make the icon visibly artificial? If the latter, what is it arguing with?\n- Compare the icon to an earlier film in the genre. What has changed, and what has pointedly not?\n- Which icon is doing exposition the dialogue never provides?\n\n### In the books\n\n> A genre's iconography consists of recurring symbolic images that carry meaning from film to film.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 332`\n\n> Iconography is, therefore, historically marked – the icons of one period will not be icons for another – and so it points to the shift over time of the look of a particular genre. It also points to social and sexual changes. If there appears to be no change, that too merits investigation.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 226`\n\n> [M]yth uses icons, but the icon is its weakest point\n\n— [[Donald & Renov — The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies|SAGE Handbook]], `sgh 392`" }, { "title": "Lighting", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/lighting/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/lighting.md", "summary": "Light as language: key, fill and shadow, the moral vocabulary one textbook gives them and the grey scale another reduces them to.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "lighting" ], "tags": [ "reference", "technical-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Lighting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/lighting/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/" ], "citations": [ "fa 132", "um 18", "vs 100", "awf 99" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "vs", "title": "Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 777, "body": "Lighting is the quality, direction, source and colour of the light in a shot: high-key\nevenness or low-key shadow, hard or soft, motivated by a lamp in the frame or added from\nnowhere. It decides what can be seen and what the seeing feels like, and the second job is\nthe one worth teaching. Students read shadow as \"mood\" and stop. Shadow is first a decision\nabout who is allowed to be seen clearly and who is not, and a film makes that decision face\nby face, often inside a single room. The question is not \"is it dark\" but \"who is lit, by\nwhat, and does the source have to be believed\".\n\n### A moral vocabulary or a grey scale\n\nGiannetti gives light an ethics. \"What's photographed in bright light is there for the\nworld to see. But what's photographed in darkness is furtive, scary.\" He sorts keys by\ngenre: comedies and musicals in high key, tragedies in high contrast, and \"mysteries,\nthrillers, and gangster films are generally in low key, with diffused shadows and\natmospheric pools of light\". He knows the vocabulary can be reversed, and his best\nexample is an assault in broad daylight: \"we tend to associate light with safety,\nhigh-key lighting is generally nonthreatening and reassuring. But not always.\"\n\nBruce Block strips the ethics out. Light is tone, tone is brightness, and brightness works\nby contrast and affinity. \"Without tonal contrast, lines don't exist.\" A shadow is not\nfurtive; it is an edge, and the edge is what lets the eye find a shape. Bordwell and\nThompson sit between them: \"the power of a shot is centrally controlled by light quality,\ndirection, source, and color\", and they quote Sternberg's \"drama and adventure of light\"\nas the most important component of mise en scène. Their contribution is the default\nagainst which everything else is measured, the classical three-point set-up of \"key\nlight, fill light, and backlight\".\n\nBoggs records the reaction against that default. \"Today's filmmakers generally strive for\na very natural effect in their lighting\", and he lets Vilmos Zsigmond say why: \"I like to\nhave windows in my shots—windows, or candles or lamps. Those are my true light sources.\"\nThe disagreement is about where meaning lives. Giannetti puts it in the shadow itself,\nBlock in the contrast, Film Art in the convention, and the naturalists in the plausibility\nof the source. Zsigmond's summary covers all four: a cinematographer \"improves on nature\".\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] runs two lighting schemes in one room. Marion sits in soft,\nrounded compositions near a lamp; Norman sits low and angular in hard shadow, under an owl\nwith its wings spread ([[Norman among the birds]]). This is Giannetti's vocabulary applied\nface by face, and it is doing narration the script withholds: sympathy consolidates around\nNorman while the light has already sorted him with the predators.\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is the opposite programme. A painted sky drenched in sunset red,\nfog, a soundstage, a set that declares itself a set. The light is a quotation of a\nstudio-era technology for painting emotion onto weather, and it makes no claim to a\nplausible source. Zsigmond's windows and candles are exactly what it refuses. The film\nspent $85,000 on that refusal ([[The $85,000 backdrop]]). And\n[[Chapman pushed the night stock]] is the reminder that a lighting look can be made in the\nlab: Taxi Driver's smeared neon and unsettled blacks came from over-developing night-rated\nstock, a processing decision as much as a lighting one.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Where is the key light, and is there a source in the frame that could account for it?\n- Who gets soft light and who gets hard, and does the film ever swap them?\n- What lives in the shadow the film maintains, and when is it finally lit?\n- Is the scene lit the way its genre expects, and if not, what is the reversal for?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Yet the power of a shot is centrally controlled by light quality, direction, source, and color.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 132`\n\n> What's photographed in bright light is there for the world to see. But what's photographed in darkness is furtive, scary\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 18`\n\n> Without tonal contrast, lines don't exist.\n\n— [[Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media|Block]], `vs 100`\n\n> I like to have windows in my shots—windows, or candles or lamps. Those are my true light sources.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 99`" }, { "title": "Mise en scène", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/mise-en-scene.md", "summary": "Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise en scène" ], "tags": [ "film-language" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Mise en scène", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/mise-en-scene/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/setting/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/setting/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/" ], "citations": [ "fa 113", "um 48", "ckc 255" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 650, "body": "Mise en scène is the arranged content of the frame: setting, décor, props, costume,\nlighting, and the placement and movement of the people in it. The discipline it names is\nsimple to state and hard to keep: treat everything in a fiction frame as chosen, because it\nwas. The interesting question is where the concept stops. Does it end at what was placed in\nfront of the camera, or include the camera's treatment of it? The books do not agree, and\nthis site's boundary, which keeps mise en scène apart from [[Camerawork]] and [[Setting]],\nis a decision rather than a fact.\n\n### Where the boundary sits\n\nBordwell and Thompson draw the line at the theatre. Mise en scène is \"the director's control\nover what appears in the film frame\", and it covers \"those aspects of film that overlap with\nthe art of the theater: setting, lighting, costume and makeup, and staging and performance\".\nFraming and movement belong to a separate chapter.\n\nGiannetti refuses the separation. His mise en scène has four elements: the staging, the\nsetting and décor, \"the manner in which these materials are framed\", and \"the manner in\nwhich they are photographed\". Then the sentence that marks the disagreement: \"The art of\nmise en scène is indissolubly linked with the art of cinematography.\" A composition is what\nthe camera makes of the arrangement, so the arrangement cannot be read without it.\n\nHayward adds the reason the word matters. The Cahiers critics used it to argue that\nHollywood directors were authors even without the script: \"they had no control over the\nscript but they could stage their shots and so be deemed to have a discernible style\". The\nconcept, for her, is a signature a critic can read.\n\nThe site keeps the narrow definition because it makes better questions, with Giannetti's\nobjection in view: the birds in the parlour mean what they mean partly because of where the\ncamera is when it sees them.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] is the reference case. The taxidermy narrates what the script\nwithholds: an owl mid-strike over Norman, a raven at his shoulder, Marion among soft light\nand rounded forms. [[Norman among the birds]] works the inventory through to the surname\nCrane and the final frozen grin; [[Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)|Durgnat]]\nmodels the maximal reading.\n\n[[The Craft — Nancy's turn]] carries an argument the dialogue never states. Nancy is the\nonly poor girl of the four, and the film says so entirely in production design:\nthe trailer against Sarah's house, sodium and brown against the cold blue-white of the\napartment the insurance buys ([[Nancy is the only poor one]]).\n[[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] is the minimal case: an institutional corridor, a\npayphone, a door, nobody. The set does no work except be empty, and that is the work.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Name three objects in the frame the story does not need. What are they there to say?\n- Where are the people placed relative to each other, and who has the light?\n- What would change if the same arrangement were shot from another position?\n- Is the space real, dressed, or built, and does the film want you to know which?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Film scholars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to signify the director's control over what appears in the film frame.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 113`\n\n> The art of mise en scène is indissolubly linked with the art of cinematography.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 48`\n\n> In more general terms, however, mise-en-scène refers to what is visible in the frame (décor/setting, lighting, costume, the actors) and how the interaction of these elements provides meaning which the spectator interprets.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 255`" }, { "title": "Montage", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/montage/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/montage.md", "summary": "Meaning made between shots, not within them. The editing code at its most assertive.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing" ], "tags": [ "film-language" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Editing", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/editing/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/editing/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/technique-film-editing/", "/sources/narration-fiction-film/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/editing/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/narration-fiction-film/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 226", "um 168", "tfe 23" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "tfe", "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing" } ], "words": 653, "body": "A sub-concept of [[Editing]]. Editing joins shots; montage is the case where the join is the\ncontent, where two shots placed together produce a meaning neither holds alone. The word has\nthree uses: in French, cutting; in Soviet theory, argument by collision; in a Hollywood\ncutting room, the dissolve-linked sequence that gets a character through a decade. This wiki\nuses the second sense, and the interesting question is whether the Soviet claim survives\ncontact with an audience. The library's practitioner says it often does not.\n\n### Collision, construction, or obscurity\n\nGiannetti gives the Eisenstein position at full strength. Editing \"ought to be dialectical\":\nthe relation \"between shot A and shot B is not AB (Kuleshov and Pudovkin), but a\nqualitatively new factor—C (Eisenstein)\". Transitions should jolt. \"For Eisenstein, editing\nproduces harsh collisions, not subtle linkages. A smooth transition, he claimed, was an\nopportunity lost.\"\n\nBordwell and Thompson start lower, with Kuleshov. Their term is **constructive editing**,\nand the Kuleshov effect is defined without reference to ideas: a whole assumed from parts\nnever shown together. Intercut a face with soup and viewers report hunger, so \"the cutting\nactually created the performance\". Eisenstein, in their account, pushed this tool until\nclashes \"would prod the spectator to engage more actively with the film\". Montage is a\nspectrum, not a doctrine.\n\nReisz and Millar, who had cut films, are the sceptics. They describe Eisenstein's\ncontinuities as proceeding \"by a series of collisions, giving an impression of a constantly\nshifting and developing argument\", then test one against a viewer. Their verdict on the\nKornilov sequence in *October* is that the effect \"fails when put on the screen because it\nremains obscure\". Reisz does not say montage fails; he says intellectual montage tends to.\n\nGiannetti reports the theory. Bordwell reduces it to a perceptual mechanism any film can use.\nReisz asks whether a given collision reaches the person in the seat.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the shower scene]] is the strongest evidence on Reisz's side, because there the\ncollision reaches everyone. [[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]] records that no\nshot shows the knife enter flesh, so the stabbing exists only as an inference built between\ncuts: the Kuleshov effect in Bordwell's sense, run at a speed that turns inference into\nassault. The censors saw nudity that was not photographed.\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is the same principle with one cut instead of fifty. Soundstage\nMonterey against real Socorro, Alice Faye against Mott the Hoople: shot A and shot B produce\na C, a life's disappointment, that neither contains.\n[[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]] shows the collision carried in the audio as much\nas the image.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Find a moment where the meaning is in no single shot. What two shots make it, and what is the C?\n- Does the film withhold an establishing view, and what does your mind build to fill it?\n- Is the collision felt, or does it stay on paper? Reisz's test: would a first-time viewer get it?\n\n### In the books\n\n> In general, that term refers to cutting together portions of a space in a way that prompts the spectator to assume a spatial whole that isn't shown onscreen.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] on the Kuleshov effect, `fa 226`\n\n> For Eisenstein, editing produces harsh collisions, not subtle linkages. A smooth transition, he claimed, was an opportunity lost.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 168`\n\n> The effect, which on paper looks ingeniously double-edged, fails when put on the screen because it remains obscure.\n\n— [[Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing|Reisz & Millar]], `tfe 23`\n\nThe Soviet chapter of [[David Bordwell — Narration in the Fiction Film|Narration in the Fiction Film]]\ntreats montage as a mode of narration; its pagination is unchecked, so it is a pointer, not a source." }, { "title": "Non-diegetic sound", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/non-diegetic-sound.md", "summary": "Sound the story world cannot account for. Three textbooks draw the line in three places, and the edge cases are where films work.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio" ], "tags": [ "film-language" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Audio", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/audio/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "citations": [ "fa 285", "fa 291", "um 200", "ckc 111" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 825, "body": "A sub-concept of the [[Audio]] code. Diegetic sound belongs to the story world;\nnon-diegetic sound belongs to the telling. Score is the obvious case, and because no\ncharacter can hear it, it is the one channel on which a film addresses its audience with\nno narrative alibi at all. The definition looks trivial. It is not, because the test you\nuse to draw the line decides the hard cases, and the hard cases (voice-over, a thought\nheard as speech, a score that quotes another film) are where the channel does its most\ninteresting work. The mistake students make is treating \"non-diegetic\" as a label to\napply. Treat it instead as a question the film is asking: who is this sound for?\n\n### Three tests\n\nBordwell and Thompson test by source. Diegetic sound \"has a source in the story\nworld\"; non-diegetic sound \"is represented as coming from a source outside the story\nworld\". The test lets them keep a third category, internal diegetic sound, for a thought\nwe hear but nobody in the scene does: \"Does the sound come from inside the mind of the\ncharacter? That is also diegetic\". Giannetti tests by audibility: \"sounds that the\ncharacters can hear as diegetic, while sounds they can't hear are nondiegetic\". That is\neasier to teach and fails at once on a soliloquy, which only its speaker hears. Hayward\ntests by the screen: non-diegetic sound is \"not being produced within the on-screen\nspace\", and she adds the theorist's reminder that the whole distinction is a convention,\nsince \"even diegetic sound and space are totally illusory and falsely constructed\".\n\nThe difference matters. Giannetti's test has trouble with Travis Bickle's diary\nvoice-over: nobody in the cab hears it, so it reads as a narrator's voice. Under\nBordwell and Thompson it is internal diegetic: the source is the man in the cab. The\nsecond reading is the useful one, because it keeps the film inside Travis's head rather\nthan granting him an outside commentator. Hayward's contribution is the reverse case,\nthe extra-diegetic sound that arrives \"with no logical reason for being there\" and\nreminds the viewer that a film is a made thing.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the shower scene]] is the channel measured. Hitchcock asked for the murder to\nplay unscored; Herrmann wrote the strings anyway and Hitchcock conceded on hearing them\n([[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]). Bordwell and Thompson catch what the\ncue does: \"when a woman screams, we expect to hear a voice but instead hear violins\". The\nnon-diegetic sound takes over a diegetic job, and the violence roughly doubles.\n\n[[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] closes on a quotation of Herrmann's own Psycho score, so\nthe coda that looks like recovery is heard as diagnosis\n([[Herrmann finished the score and died that night]]). This is non-diegetic sound as\ncitation: a channel no character hears, carrying a reference no character could know.\n[[The Craft — light as a feather]] approaches the same question from the other side. There\nis no cue at all; four voices chanting inside the scene do what a score would normally do,\nand the cutting locks to their beat ([[The chant is a metronome, not a spell]]). A\ndiegetic sound performing the non-diegetic function is the best test of whether a student\nunderstands the distinction rather than the label.\n\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]] is the test case from the other side: a film that almost never crosses\nthe line. Its music comes from sources in the story world, a model Scorsese took from *The\nPublic Enemy* ([[The jukebox is the score]]). The exception is his own voice, which speaks\nCharlie's thoughts from outside the fiction ([[Mean Streets — the opening]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Apply all three tests to one sound. Where do they disagree, and which answer does the\n film seem to want?\n- If a character narrates, is the voice inside the story (a diary, a memory) or outside it\n (a commentator)? What would change if it were the other?\n- When music starts, could a character in the scene have started it? When it stops, who\n stopped it?\n- Does the score ever quote something the audience knows and the characters do not?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Alternatively, there is nondiegetic sound, which is represented as coming from a source outside the story world.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 285`\n\n> Does the sound come from inside the mind of the character? That is also diegetic, but rather internal diegetic sound.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 291`\n\n> Critics refer to sounds that the characters can hear as diegetic, while sounds they can't hear are nondiegetic.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 200`\n\n> The term non-diegetic sound refers to sound that clearly is not being produced within the on-screen space (such as voice-over or added music).\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 111`" }, { "title": "Point of view", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/point-of-view/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/point-of-view.md", "summary": "Whose knowledge the narration is limited to, how deep it goes, and how films move it without saying so.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "film-language", "narrative" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/films/after-hours/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "/sources/narration-fiction-film/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 93", "awf 506", "um 400", "awf 395" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 802, "body": "Point of view is the most overloaded term in film analysis. It names a camera position\n(the shot through a character's eyes), a narrative limit (what the audience is allowed to\nknow), and a loyalty (whose side the film puts you on). Students collapse the three. Keep\nthem apart, because a film can hand you one without the others: you can see through a\ncharacter's eyes and know nothing of what they think, or know everything they know and\nstill be positioned to judge them. The interesting films change the arrangement mid-stream\nand do not announce it.\n\n### Three books, three meanings\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] concedes the problem outright. The term is\nambiguous because it can mean range of knowledge or depth of knowledge, and the two are\nset independently: *The Big Sleep* is tightly restricted to Marlowe yet almost never enters\nhis head (`fa 93`). Having said so, the book retreats to the narrowest sense and reserves\nthe term for the optical POV shot.\n\nBoggs (*The Art of Watching Films*) goes the other way. His glossary defines a\npoint-of-view character as the one \"with whom we emotionally or intellectually identify\",\nand lists voice-over, editing and camera position as the tools for producing that\nidentification (`awf 506`). Point of view here is allegiance, and the camera is only one\nof its instruments.\n\nGiannetti (*Understanding Movies*) is blunter. Because every camera move is a new vantage\non the scene, omniscient narration is nearly unavoidable in film; the camera can be a\ndispassionate observer or \"a witty commentator\" on what it shows (`um 400`). The three are\ndescribing layers, not contradicting each other. Bordwell supplies the dials, range and\ndepth. Boggs names the effect those settings produce. Giannetti reminds you that above the\ncharacter there is always a narrating camera with opinions of its own. This wiki uses the\nterm in Boggs's wide sense and describes it with Bordwell's dials.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] is the case for measuring a transfer. For 47 minutes the range is\nrestricted to Marion; then the film kills her and has to re-home the audience\n([[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]). It prepares the move in\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]], where sympathy consolidates around Norman, and confirms it\nwhen the sinking car pauses and the audience catches itself wanting the swamp to finish\nthe job ([[The money dies with Marion]]). Allegiance changes hands in one held shot.\n\n[[Taxi Driver (1976)]] is the case for depth without agreement. The narration stays inside\nTravis for the whole running time, and the city arrives through his windscreen and\nrear-view mirror ([[Bickle sees through glass]]). Boggs names the film as a model for\nvoice-over that conveys personality rather than information (`awf 395`). Giannetti's\ncommentating camera appears twice: the track down an empty corridor in\n[[Taxi Driver — the phone call]], and the rise through the ceiling in\n[[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]]. Both leave his head to look at the space around him.\n\n[[After Hours (1985)]] is the case for point of view as a prank. The narration never leaves\nPaul, and the camera keeps borrowing the grammar of subjectivity for things that cannot see: a\nset of keys falling at his face ([[After Hours — the keys]]), close-ups of light switches that\npromise significance and deliver none ([[Close-ups for no reason]]). Ebert's diagnosis is that an\naudience \"raised on classic film grammar would share his expectation and disappointment\". The\noptical POV shot and the allegiance come apart, and the paranoia lives in the gap.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Range: is there a scene the main character is not in? What does the film know that they do not?\n- Depth: do you get the character's perception, their thoughts, or only their behaviour?\n- Allegiance: whose success are you hoping for, and when did that start?\n- Where does the camera move on its own authority, without a character to motivate it? What is it saying there?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Incidentally, this is one reason why the term point of view is ambiguous. It can refer to range of knowledge (as when a critic speaks of an \"omniscient point of view\") or to depth (as when speaking of \"subjective point of view\").\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 93`\n\n> point-of-view character A film character with whom we emotionally or intellectually identify and through whom we experience the film. Voice-over narration, editing, and camera position may be employed for this effect.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 506`\n\n> Each time the director moves the camera—either within a shot or between shots—we are offered a new point of view from which to evaluate the scene.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 400`" }, { "title": "Printed language", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/printed-language/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/printed-language.md", "summary": "Words the audience reads: titles, captions, signs, credits. Film Art calls them helpers; media studies calls them anchors.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "printed language" ], "tags": [ "reference", "written-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Printed language", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/printed-language/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/technique-film-editing/" ], "links_in": [], "citations": [ "fa 76", "fa 95", "mas 139", "tfe 202" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" }, { "prefix": "tfe", "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing" } ], "words": 793, "body": "Printed language is any text a film asks the audience to read: title cards, credits,\nsuperimposed captions, on-screen signs, letters, newspapers, screens. It carries two\nmeanings at once, what the words say and what their style claims, since a typeface is a\ntone of voice. The position taken here is that printed words are never neutral\ninformation. They are the film's most direct instruction about how to read the image they\nsit on, and the instruction is often a bluff. A caption that stamps a city, a date and\n\"two forty-three p.m.\" over a skyline is not telling you the time. It is telling you what\nkind of film to expect, and then the camera does something else.\n\n### Helper or anchor\n\nThe film textbooks and the media textbooks describe the same words from opposite sides.\nBordwell and Thompson classify. Superimposed titles are non-diegetic: \"They aren't part\nof the story world; the characters couldn't read them.\" Credit sequences are likewise\n\"nondiegetic material, but they can assist our understanding of the story\", and since\nthe 1920s their graphic design has \"often conjured up the story's time and place\". The\nkey verbs are assist and conjure. Printed language helps.\n\nMedia & Society, following Barthes and Fiske, gives the same words a different job.\n\"Captions anchor the image to a particular meaning, narrowing the polysemic\npossibilities.\" An image can mean many things; a line of text under it closes most of\nthem off and \"shows us how to view it\". Here the key verb is limit. Printed language\ncontrols. The difference is one of suspicion. Film Art treats the words as outside the\nstory and on the audience's side. The semiotic tradition treats them as the point where\na preferred reading is enforced, which is why the same caption can be read as courtesy or\nas coercion depending on which book you learned from. Reisz and Millar add the\npractitioner's constraint: an insert of text must be held for the time a spectator needs\nto read it, and holding it shorter \"means withholding part of its information\". Text is\none of the few elements whose duration the audience's reading speed, not the editor's\ntaste, dictates.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho — the opening]] is the anchor read as a bluff. The captions stamp city, date and\nexact time in the manner of a police report, promising that time and place matter. They\ndo not, particularly. What matters is the camera, which behaves like an uninvited watcher\nchoosing a window at random, and the documentary caption is the alibi that lets it in.\nThe printed code claims authority so that the camera can misuse it\n([[The camera as voyeur]]).\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] uses printed language to name a genre before a shot is seen: a\ntitle sequence in the satin-and-script styling of a studio-era women's picture, then a\ncaption placing us in Monterey, California. The typography is the promise the rest of the\nfilm breaks, and the note's own writing lead, to check the exact caption text and title\ntypography against the film, is the right instinct. A student who cannot describe the\nlettering has not yet read the code. And [[In every city there's one man]] shows printed\nlanguage beginning before the film does: the poster line under a shot of De Niro walking\nsold Taxi Driver as a film about loneliness, and audiences read the film through it.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Who is the text addressed to, a character or you? Could anyone in the story read it?\n- What does the typography borrow (news, bureaucracy, romance, nostalgia), and does the\n film honour or betray that borrowing?\n- What does a caption claim to authenticate, and does the film need the claim to be true?\n- How long is the text on screen, and what does the film do while you are reading?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Such titles would be nondiegetic as well. (They aren't part of the story world; the characters couldn't read them.) Today superimposed titles are the most common sorts of nondiegetic inserts\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 76`\n\n> Credit sequences are nondiegetic material, but they can assist our understanding of the story.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 95`\n\n> Captions anchor the image to a particular meaning, narrowing the polysemic possibilities.\n\n— [[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]], `mas 139`\n\n> To hold the shot for a shorter time than this means withholding part of its information; keeping it on the screen longer means boring sections of the audience while they wait for the next shot.\n\n— [[Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing|Reisz & Millar]], `tfe 202`" }, { "title": "Setting", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/setting/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/setting.md", "summary": "Where and when, and the argument over whether a place expresses its people or acts on its own account.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "setting" ], "tags": [ "reference", "symbolic-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Setting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/setting/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/films/after-hours/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 115", "um 304", "awf 86" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 899, "body": "Setting is the time and place of the story world, geography, era, weather, architecture,\nand the assumptions those import before a character speaks. It is distinct from\n[[Mise en scène]]: setting is where we are; mise en scène is what has been arranged in\nfront of the camera once we are there. It is also the code most often mistaken for\nbackground. A student who writes \"the film is set in New York\" has recorded a fact and\nread nothing. The question is what the place is doing: whether it explains the people in\nit, or acts on them, or is only ever seen through them.\n\n### Extension or protagonist\n\nGiannetti and Boggs give setting to the characters. For Giannetti, \"settings are not\nmerely backdrops for the action, but symbolic extensions of the theme and\ncharacterization\". Boggs is more literal. \"The environment in which a person lives may\nprovide the viewer with clues to understanding his or her character\", above all \"the\naspects of their environment over which individuals exercise some control. Houses, for\nexample, may be excellent indicators of character.\" Read the house and you have read the\noccupant.\n\nBordwell and Thompson, quoting Bazin, give setting a life of its own. \"Setting plays a\nmore active role in cinema than it usually does in the theater\", and \"it need not be only\na container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action\". Bazin goes\nfurther: some films \"use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint to\nnature, which is the true leading character\". The difference is one of direction. For\nBoggs the arrow runs from person to place; for Bazin it can run the other way, with the\nplace shaping, threatening or outlasting the people in it. Giannetti adds the question of\nmanufacture. \"The main appeal of studio sets is usually their lack of reality\", while real\nlocations can be shot to look baroque: Eisenstein's Winter Palace interiors \"are never\njust picturesque backgrounds to the action\". Real or built is a separate axis from active\nor expressive.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Nancy is the only poor one]] is Boggs's rule at work. The school uniforms flatten four\nvery different homes into one frame, so production design is the only place the class\ndifference is stated: Sarah's house against Nancy's trailer. Three girls want something\nabout themselves changed; Nancy wants out of a place. The film reads the house and then\npunishes the occupant for it.\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is Giannetti's studio set with the lack of reality as the point.\nMonterey is not a place but a memory of cinema, a set that declares itself a set, and the\nproduction spent $85,000 of a $1.8 million budget to build one day of it\n([[The $85,000 backdrop]]). The artifice is the argument: Alice's childhood was furnished\nby the movies, and the film says so by building her past on a soundstage.\n\n[[Psycho — the opening]] stamps Phoenix, a date and a time over a skyline in the manner\nof a police report, then chooses one window at random. The city is an alibi for the\ncamera, not a character. And [[Bickle sees through glass]] shows a setting that exists\nonly as one man selects it: Taxi Driver's New York arrives through a windscreen and a\nrear-view mirror, and the film shows the fares that feed Travis rather than a\nrepresentative sample. The selection is the characterisation: Boggs's rule, made to feel\nlike Bazin's.\n\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]] is the case for setting as a handful of true details. Most of its\nLittle Italy is Los Angeles with garbage added; the tenement hallways, the skyline and the\nfeast are real New York, and the audience fills in the rest ([[New York was Los Angeles]]).\n\n[[After Hours (1985)]] is setting with a date stamp: SoHo at night in 1984, a few blocks from\nthe Little Italy of *Mean Streets* and a different country, where the uptown visitor is the\nintruder ([[SoHo before the money, 1984]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Real location or built set, and does the film want you to know which?\n- Does the place explain the people, or do things to them they cannot explain?\n- What does the setting let you assume about class, safety and possibility before anyone\n speaks, and does the film later confirm or revoke the assumption?\n- Through whose eyes is the place seen, and what would it look like through anyone else's?\n\n### In the books\n\n> In a film, the setting can come to the forefront; it need not be only a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 115`\n\n> In the best movies and stage productions, settings are not merely backdrops for the action, but symbolic extensions of the theme and characterization.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 304`\n\n> The environment in which a person lives may provide the viewer with clues to understanding his or her character. This is especially true for the aspects of their environment over which individuals exercise some control. Houses, for example, may be excellent indicators of character.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 86`\n\n> The main appeal of studio sets is usually their lack of reality\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 304`" }, { "title": "Spoken language", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/spoken-language/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/spoken-language.md", "summary": "Dialogue, voice-over, accent and idiom: the code the textbooks rank lowest and the sound mix ranks highest.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "spoken language" ], "tags": [ "reference", "written-code" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Code: Spoken language", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/spoken-language/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/" ], "citations": [ "awf 406", "um 225", "fa 272", "lam 379" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" } ], "words": 789, "body": "Spoken language is the verbal layer of a film: dialogue, voice-over, narration, and the\naccent, register and idiom that carry them. It is the code film theory has spent a\ncentury apologising for. The silent era set the terms, the talkies were read as a\nretreat, and the textbooks still teach that the image says what matters and the words\nembroider. That is half true and the wrong half to teach. A line rarely means only what it\nstates; the work is in the gap between utterance and intention, which is also where\n[[Acting]] lives, and in what the manner of speaking gives away before the content does.\n\n### Embroidery or evidence\n\nBoggs states the received view and quotes Nicholas Ray for support: \"Generally, film\ndialogue is simpler than that used on the stage\", poetry belongs in the theatre, and \"the\nwords are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework\". Giannetti agrees\nabout quantity. \"Because the close-up can show the most minute detail, verbal comment is\noften superfluous.\" But he then makes the claim that matters for analysis: \"Spoken\nlanguage is steeped in ideology. It's an instant revealer of class, education, and\ncultural bias.\" For Boggs the words carry little; for Giannetti the words carry the\nspeaker's whole social position whether or not the script intends it.\n\nBordwell and Thompson describe what the industry does rather than what theory says.\n\"Dialogue, as a transmitter of story information, is usually recorded and reproduced for\nmaximum clarity. Important lines should not have to compete with music or background\nnoise.\" The sound mix puts speech on top by convention, which is why muffled dialogue in\nInterstellar was taken by some viewers for a technical fault. So the code the aesthetic\nranks last is the one the practice protects first. Barsam and Monahan split the\ndifference: dialogue is \"one of the principal means of telling a story\", but it is a\nproduct of acting, not a layer of text. Read them together and the question changes from\n\"how much is said\" to \"what does the saying reveal that the sentence does not\".\n\n### On the bench\n\n\"We all go a little mad sometimes\" in [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] is a kindness on\nfirst viewing and a confession on second. The spoken code carries a double meaning the\nfirst-time viewer cannot yet hear, and the taxidermy around Norman says it in another\ncode at the same time. [[Alice — the prologue]] is Giannetti's ideology point run in\nreverse: period-perfect 1940s diction with a profanity inside it that no studio child was\nallowed to say. The register clash is the film's whole method, and the sources disagree\nabout the exact wording.\n\n[[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] is a dialogue scene with one participant: every question is\nanswered by the voice that asked it, the line was not in the script, and it is quoted more\noften than it is watched ([[De Niro wrote in the margins]]). In\n[[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] we never hear Betsy, and Travis's ladder of diminishing\nrequests is the plainest statement in the film of what he wants, delivered to nobody. And\n[[Nancy is the only poor one]] is a warning about the code's limits: the class argument\nin The Craft is carried almost entirely by mise en scène rather than dialogue, which is\nwhy it is easy to miss.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Who talks \"wrong\" for the room they are in, and does the film punish or reward it?\n- Which lines mean something different on a second viewing, and what did the film do to\n keep you from hearing it the first time?\n- Whose voice does the mix protect, and whose is allowed to drown?\n- What does the accent, idiom or register tell you about the speaker that the script\n never states?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Generally, film dialogue is simpler than that used on the stage. Language that is too refined, too elaborate, and too poetic is generally out of place and unnatural in film.\n\n— [[Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films|Boggs]], `awf 406`\n\n> Spoken language is steeped in ideology. It's an instant revealer of class, education, and cultural bias.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 225`\n\n> Dialogue, as a transmitter of story information, is usually recorded and reproduced for maximum clarity. Important lines should not have to compete with music or background noise.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 272`\n\n> Expressing the feelings and motivations of characters, dialogue is one of the principal means of telling a story.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 379`" }, { "title": "Structure", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/structure/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/structure.md", "summary": "The shape of the telling, and whether that shape is a pattern the audience feels or a template the writer follows.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "story-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/after-hours/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/understanding-movies/", "/sources/visual-story/" ], "citations": [ "fa 51", "fa 54", "um 338", "um 342", "fa 584", "vs 251", "vs 246" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" }, { "prefix": "vs", "title": "Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" } ], "words": 814, "body": "Structure is the order and proportion of a story's parts: where it starts, where it turns,\nwhat it plants early and pays off late, how it ends. It is a contract with the audience.\nThey feel its terms without naming them, which is why a broken contract lands harder than\na broken rule. The common error is to treat structure as a template (three acts, a\nmidpoint, a climax at the three-quarter mark) and grade films on compliance. The template\nis real. But it describes the writer's side of the contract; the audience's side, the\npattern of expectation and payoff, is the one you can analyse from your seat.\n\n### Pattern, paradigm, graph\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] starts from the audience. Form is a pattern\nthe artist designs \"so that we can have a structured experience\" (`fa 51`), and the\npattern works by creating expectations and sustaining them over time; once inside it, we\nwant it to develop and conclude (`fa 54`). Structure here is the experience of waiting for the next part.\n\nGiannetti (*Understanding Movies*) describes the writer's template. The classical paradigm\nis Freytag's inverted V: an opening conflict, rising action, a climax where \"the protagonist\nand antagonist clash overtly. One wins, the other loses\", then a resolution and formal\nclosure (`um 338`). He sets out Syd Field's three acts and the eight-sequence variant, and\nthen adds the caveat that matters: applied mechanically, the model \"is merely a formula\"\n(`um 342`). Film Art reports the same rule from outside: first-act climax at a quarter,\nsecond at three-quarters (`fa 584`).\n\nBruce Block (*The Visual Story*) turns the paradigm into a graph. A story begins at zero\nintensity, climbs through the conflict to a hundred at the climax and drops to zero in the\nresolution (`vs 251`), and the picture's visual structure, its contrast of line, colour\nand rhythm, should track that line (`vs 246`). Bordwell says structure is something the\naudience undergoes; Giannetti says it is a shape the writer builds, and warns against\nbuilding it by rote; Block says it is a curve you can draw and then light and cut to. The\ndisagreement is over who owns it.\n\n### On the bench\n\nPsycho signs the classical contract in full and then tears it up. Marion has a goal, a\nflaw and a moral turn, built by the book, and at the midpoint of act two the film murders\nher ([[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]). The shock is only partly\nthe violence; it is the narration breaking its own pattern, Bordwell's account of structure\ndemonstrated by violation. A film shaped like that cannot survive a latecomer\n([[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]]).\n\n[[Alice — the prologue]] is structure as promise. Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s\nHollywood, then a cut that jumps 27 years, so that everything after is an audit of the\ndream the opening staged. Taxi Driver is structured as a diary, dated by its own voice-over,\nand its organising image was the first shot Scorsese thought of and the last he filmed\n([[Taxi Driver — the phone call]]). The Craft has two halves that want different things,\nand the join is visible ([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]). Draw Block's curve for it and you will need two lines.\n\n[[After Hours (1985)]] is one night built as a chain, each rescue turning into the next trap,\nand its ending closes a circle: the film starts at Paul's terminal and ends there\n([[After Hours — back at work]]). It is also a lesson in how endings get chosen. The film had\nfour ([[Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway]]; [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]]),\nand the one that survived was the one that obeyed the rules the other ninety minutes had set.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- Where are the irreversible turns, and do they fall where the template says? If not, what does the displacement do?\n- What did the first two minutes promise, and does the ending answer that promise or a different one?\n- What is planted early and collected late? What is planted and never collected?\n- Draw the intensity curve. Does the film's lighting, cutting and colour follow it, or work against it?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Artists design their works—they give them form—so that we can have a structured experience. For this reason, form is of central importance in film.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 51`\n\n> Here, the protagonist and antagonist clash overtly. One wins, the other loses. After their confrontation, the dramatic intensity subsides in the resolution.\n\n— [[Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies|Giannetti]], `um 338`\n\n> Picture makers must understand story structure or they may never be able to correctly use visual structure.\n\n— [[Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media|Block]], `vs 246`" }, { "title": "The MacGuffin", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/the-macguffin.md", "summary": "Hitchcock's name for the object the characters chase and the film forgets, and the argument over what its emptiness is for.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "MacGuffin" ], "codes": [ "story conventions" ], "tags": [ "film-language", "narrative", "hitchcock" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Story conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/after-hitchcock/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/" ], "citations": [ "lam 34", "fa 406", "ah 94" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" }, { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "ah", "title": "Boyd & Palmer — After Hitchcock" } ], "words": 732, "body": "The MacGuffin is Hitchcock's word for the thing the plot runs on and the film does not\ncare about: the secret plans, the uranium, the money. The characters must want it\ndesperately. The audience only has to believe that they want it. Its emptiness is a\nlicence: a film relieved of caring about its plot object is free to be about something\nelse. The unsettled question is what. The books agree on the definition and disagree,\nusefully, on the purpose.\n\n### One device, three purposes\n\nBarsam and Monahan (*Looking at Movies*) give the plainest definition: an object,\ndocument or secret \"of vital importance to the characters\" that \"turns out to be less\nsignificant to the overall narrative than we might at first expect\" (`lam 34`). Their\nexample is Psycho's $40,000, and their footnote sends the reader to Hitchcock's own account\nin [[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)|Truffaut]]. On this reading the MacGuffin is a motivation\ndevice: it moves the characters, and then the story moves on.\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] shifts the beneficiary to the audience.\nHitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries, and in *North by Northwest* the mystery element\n\"can serve as merely a pretext for intriguing the audience\" (`fa 406`). The object keeps\nus leaning forward while the narration works on suspense and surprise.\n\nAn essay in *After Hitchcock* (Boyd & Palmer, eds) names the real work. In *The 39 Steps*\nand *North by Northwest* the spy conspiracies are \"blocking\" elements the hero must\novercome \"in order to take possession of the woman\"; they generate the MacGuffin, \"the\ndisposable motor that is quickly forgotten by the audience once the plotting, in both\nsenses, comes to an end\" (`ah 94`). The thriller is a\nromance with an alibi. Three answers, then, to what the emptiness buys: character\nmotivation, audience attention, or a courtship. Ask which one a film is spending it on.\n\n### On the bench\n\nPsycho is the demonstration, and an unusually honest one. The money drives the first act,\ngets Marion out of Phoenix and into the motel, then sinks into the swamp wrapped in\nnewspaper, unnoticed by Norman and never mentioned again ([[The money dies with Marion]]).\nLooking at Movies notices the same thing: the killer \"doesn't seem to know it exists\"\n(`lam 34`). Most films pretend the object mattered. Psycho lets you watch the pretence\ndissolve, and the money's other function shows in retrospect: it aimed the audience at the\nwrong genre so that [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] could land on an unguarded\nflank. The theft is plausible only because [[Psycho — the opening]] stripped Marion's\nrespectability in its first minute.\n\nThe Craft has a near relative. Manon, the deity the coven invokes, was invented by the\nfilm's witchcraft consultant so that no teenager could call on anything real\n([[Manon was invented so nobody could call him]]). The characters must believe in it; the\naudience need only believe they do; and it was made empty for a reason Hitchcock never had\nto consider. Taxi Driver is the contrast. Its plot object, the rescue of Iris, is one the\nfilm and its audience care about, and the argument over what it meant has never closed\n([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]).\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What do the characters want that the film stops mentioning? When exactly does it stop?\n- Who benefits from the object: the characters, who need a reason to move, or the audience, who need a reason to watch?\n- If the object were swapped for another, would anything change? If not, it is a MacGuffin.\n\n### In the books\n\n> Hitchcock used the otherwise meaningless term MacGuffin to refer to an object, document, or secret within a story that is of vital importance to the characters, and thus motivates their actions and the conflict, but that turns out to be less significant to the overall narrative than we might at first expect.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 34`\n\n> North by Northwest shows that the mystery element can serve as merely a pretext for intriguing the audience.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 406`\n\n> the disposable motor that is quickly forgotten by the audience once the plotting, in both senses, comes to an end.\n\n— [[Boyd & Palmer — After Hitchcock|After Hitchcock]], `ah 94`" }, { "title": "Themes", "type": "concept", "url": "/concepts/themes/", "raw": "/raw/concepts/themes.md", "summary": "The questions a genre keeps asking across decades, and whether its answers are a ritual the audience performs or a settlement it is sold.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [ "genre conventions" ], "tags": [ "reference", "genre-convention" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Genre conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/genre-conventions/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/values/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "/sources/media-and-society/" ], "citations": [ "fa 332", "lam 81", "ckc 89", "ckc 229", "ckc 198" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" }, { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 752, "body": "A genre's themes are the preoccupations it returns to whatever the individual film: the\nwestern's civilisation against wilderness, horror's body and its repressions, the\ngangster's price of success, melodrama's cost of desire. A film inherits its questions\nand answers them in the accent of its year, which is why theme analysis and context\nanalysis ([[Values]]) are usually the same conversation. The disagreement in the library\nis about what the answering does. One tradition says the audience performs its beliefs\nthrough genre. Another says the genre performs a settlement on the audience's behalf, and\nthe settlement is the ideology.\n\n### Ritual or management\n\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] keeps theme at the level of convention. Some\ngenre conventions \"are more thematic, involving broad meanings that are summoned again and\nagain\": the gangster's rise as \"a hardening into egotism and brutality\", screwball's\nsnobbery against zaniness (`fa 332`). A theme here is a convention like the cute meet, and\nthe job is to name it.\n\nBarsam and Monahan (*Looking at Movies*) give the ritual account. Nearly every western\nshares \"a central conflict between civilization and wilderness\", and the audience goes\n\"not only to celebrate the familiar, but to enforce fundamental beliefs and passively\nperform cultural rituals\" (`lam 81`). The theme is stable; the answer moves with the\nperiod. A western made in wartime \"is likely to express its themes differently than one\nproduced at the height of the Vietnam War\" (`lam 81`).\n\nHayward (*Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts*) reads the same repetition as ideology.\nClassical narrative \"must have closure\", and her example is Psycho: Norman is still\npsychotic, but he has been caught, \"so there is closure\" (`ckc 89`). Genres \"function\nideologically to reproduce the capitalist system\", and their compulsory endings \"provide\nsimple commonsense answers to very complex issues\" (`ckc 229`). Following Robin Wood,\ngenres are not \"safe\" but ideologically inflected (`ckc 198`). The difference from Barsam\nis who is acting. In the ritual account the audience enforces its beliefs by watching; in\nthe ideological account the genre enforces them, and the ending is where it does it.\n\n### On the bench\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] works horror's oldest theme, the past devouring the present, and near\nits close hands the film to a psychiatrist whose lecture a pop-Freud audience could receive\nas authority and a later one receives as glib ([[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]]). Hayward's closure and Barsam's period accent are both visible in that one scene.\n\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] works melodrama's theme, what a woman's desire\nis allowed to cost, at the moment the women's movement made it loud, and its ending was\nargued about as an ending for 1974 rather than for Alice ([[The women's picture, 1974]]).\nKay and Peary's complaint that she is \"trapped as surely as Dorothy\" is a verdict on the\nsettlement, not the story.\n\nTaxi Driver's theme is disputed by its own makers. Schrader says the film is not about\nVietnam; Scorsese says the war is what makes the reflected gutter threatening\n([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]), and the film sustains both\n([[The returning veteran, 1976]]). The Craft raises power, class, race and belonging in its\nfirst hour and answers one of them, and its stated moral and its actual sympathies point\nin opposite directions ([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]). That is Hayward's case in miniature.\n\n### What to look for\n\n- What question would this genre ask no matter which film was asking it? Write it as a question.\n- What answer does this film, in this year, give? What would the same genre have answered twenty years earlier?\n- Does the ending resolve the question or only close the plot? What has been left unsaid so that it can close?\n- Does the film's stated moral match where its sympathies lie in the framing, the music and the performances?\n\n### In the books\n\n> Other genre conventions are more thematic, involving broad meanings that are summoned again and again.\n\n— [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], `fa 332`\n\n> We go to these movies not only to celebrate the familiar, but to enforce fundamental beliefs and passively perform cultural rituals.\n\n— [[Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film|Barsam & Monahan]], `lam 81`\n\n> Genres function ideologically to reproduce the capitalist system.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 229`\n\n> Classic narrative cinema, no matter what genre, must have closure.\n\n— [[Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts|Hayward]], `ckc 89`" }, { "title": "Church and street in Little Italy", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy.md", "summary": "In the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in, the two powers were the wise guys and the priests. Mean Streets is a film about trying to answer to both.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "character", "themes", "setting", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "context", "religion", "catholicism", "italian-american", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/contexts/personal/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/contexts/values/", "/films/taxi-driver/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/" ], "citations": [ "sos 9", "sos 48", "sos 12", "sos 215", "sos 113" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 739, "body": "### The datum\n\nScorsese describes the world of his childhood, around Elizabeth, Mott and Mulberry Streets, as\nhaving two authorities:\n\n> In my neighbourhood, the people in power were the tough guys on the street, and the Church.\n> The organized crime figures would tip their hats to a priest and watch their language, and\n> they would have their cars and pets blessed.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 9`\n\nAnd the respect that went with them: \"not the working people, they were the wise guys, the gang\nleaders, and the priests. And that was what inclined me towards the priesthood, which was a\ntougher profession, I'm afraid!\" (`sos 48`). At fourteen he went to Cathedral College, \"a junior\nseminary on the Upper West Side\", and was expelled after a year because he had fallen in love\n(`sos 12`). [[Mean Streets (1973)]] is what happens when a man who wanted both careers makes a\nfilm about one who has both.\n\n### The film's version\n\nCharlie is the compromise. He collects for his uncle and goes to confession. Scorsese, later:\n\n> In Mean Streets, the main character, Charlie, tries to live a Christian life; he goes to church,\n> does confession, listens to all the philosophy within the edifice of the church. But outside in\n> the street, life is ruled by the gun. So how does one live a good Christian life in a world of\n> this kind?\n\n— `sos 215`\n\nHis earliest statement of the idea was more direct: \"the whole idea was to make a story of a\nmodern saint, a saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Teresa punctures it: \"St.\nFrancis was not a numbers runner.\"\n\n### What the critics saw\n\nEbert, who notes that \"both Scorsese and I had attended Catholic schools\" (Ebert, unpaged),\nmakes it the key to the film:\n\n> Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets is not primarily about punk gangsters at all, but about living in\n> a state of sin. For Catholics raised before Vatican II, it has a resonance that it may lack for\n> other audiences.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged\n\nHe notices that Charlie's guilt is aimed at the wrong target: \"Although he is an apprentice\ngangster involved with men who steal, kill, and sell drugs, Charlie's guilt centers on sex.\nImpurity is the real sin; the other stuff is business\" (Ebert, unpaged). And he spots the liturgy\nhidden in the bar: Charlie has whiskey poured over his crossed fingers, \"a literal reenactment of\nwhat the priest does when an altar boy pours water and wine over his fingers holding a chalice\"\n(Ebert, unpaged). Pauline Kael's review praised the film for showing \"Catholicism as it's actually\npracticed among these people, what it means on the street\"\n([[Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)]]).\n\n### The judgement\n\nScorsese is harder on Charlie than the critics are:\n\n> Charlie uses other people, thinking that he's helping them; but by believing that, he's not only\n> ruining them but ruining himself. When he fights with Johnny against the door in the street, he\n> acts like he's doing it for the others, but it's a matter of his own pride — the first sin in the\n> Bible.\n\n— `sos 48`\n\nThat is the film's theology in one reading: penance performed for an audience of oneself is pride.\nIt is why the voice-over at the start says \"you do it in the streets\" and the film then shows\nwhat that costs ([[Mean Streets — the opening]]).\n\n### Why it belongs on the bench\n\nIt is the clearest [[Personal]] context on the site: a film whose meaning depends on where the\ndirector was born and what he nearly became. It also sets up a motif that runs through the next\nforty years of his work. The gesture is [[The hand in the flame]]; the camera angle is\n[[Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view]]. And it shows the limits of the [[Values]] force:\nEbert's own caveat is that a non-Catholic audience may miss half the film. That is a reception\nclaim a class can test.\n\nThe companion documentary is *Italianamerican* (1974), made the next year, about Scorsese's\nparents at their kitchen table. Scorsese pairs the two (`sos 113`).\n\nFilms noted here that this context touches: [[Mean Streets (1973)]],\n[[Taxi Driver (1976)]]." }, { "title": "Commerce", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/commerce/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/commerce.md", "summary": "The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [], "tags": [ "reference", "context-force" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/oxford-world-cinema/", "/sources/media-and-society/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/oxford-world-cinema/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/" ], "citations": [ "ohwc 43", "mas 375", "mas 415" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "ohwc", "title": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema" }, { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" } ], "words": 218, "body": "### The economic forces on a media product, through both lenses\n\nProduction: budgets,\nfinancing, star bankability, schedules, what a studio thinks will sell. Reception:\nticket prices, marketing, platforms, subscription and ad models — the economics of how\naudiences get access.\n\n### What to ask\n\nWho paid, and what did they believe they were buying? What did money\nforbid, and what did scarcity invent? How was the audience's attention purchased?\n\n### Canonical cases\n\n[[Psycho (1960)]] end to end: Paramount's refusal, Hitchcock's\ndeferred fee, the TV crew and $800k budget — then\n[[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]] on the reception side.\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]]: Ellen Burstyn's post-*Exorcist* bankability\nbuying a first-time-at-a-studio director creative room, and one day of that budget buying\n[[The $85,000 backdrop]].\n\n### Sources\n\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]];\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|Biskind]].\n\n### In the books\n\n> […] from production to publicity to distribution to exhibition, they created a model system–the 'studio system'–which other countries had to imitate in order to compete.\n\n[[Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema|The Oxford History of World Cinema]], Douglas Gomery on Hollywood, `ohwc 43`.\n\n[[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]] carries stardom as an economic instrument at `mas 375` and globalisation at `mas 415`." }, { "title": "Control", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/control/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/control.md", "summary": "The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [], "tags": [ "reference", "context-force" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/sources/media-comms-australia/", "/sources/oxford-world-cinema/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "mca 396" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "mca", "title": "Cunningham & Turner — The Media and Communications in Australia" } ], "words": 253, "body": "### The regulatory and institutional forces on a media product\n\nProduction: censorship\ncodes, studio and editorial power, legal constraint. Reception: classification and\nratings, availability, platform rules, algorithms deciding what is even seen.\n\n### What to ask\n\nWhat could this text not show or say in its time — and what workarounds\ndid the constraint produce? Who classifies it now, and how does that gatekeep its\naudience?\n\n### Canonical cases\n\nThe definitional case is [[The Production Code and Psycho]] — a film\nbuilt by negotiating a dying censorship system, with [[The first flushing toilet]] as its\nsmallest, funniest battle. Fourteen years later,\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] opens with a child swearing inside a perfect\nrecreation of the very studio aesthetic the Code once policed ([[Alice — the prologue]]) —\nthe ratings era measuring its distance from the Code era in one line.\n\n### Sources\n\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]] on the\ncensor correspondence.\n\n### In the books\n\nThe densest source on the shelf is chapter 24 of\n[[Cunningham & Turner — The Media and Communications in Australia|The Media and Communications in Australia]],\nTerry Flew's \"Classification and Regulation\", which opens at `mca 396` on the policy problem\nthat media convergence creates for any classification regime — the Australian institutional\npicture, in the vocabulary the curriculum uses.\n\nFor censorship as film history — the regimes, and what each one produced —\n[[Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema|the Oxford History]] carries\nmore than any other book here." }, { "title": "The Craft turns on its own coven", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven.md", "summary": "The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "themes", "formula", "character", "conflict", "structure" ], "tags": [ "context", "teen-film", "values", "1990s" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/concepts/formula/", "/contexts/values/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/films/the-craft/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/themes/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 475, "body": "### The datum\n\n*The Craft* has two halves that want different things, and the join is visible.\n\n**The first hour** builds four specifically unhappy girls, gives them each a wish, and takes\ntheir friendship seriously. It is the part audiences quote, re-enact and remember\n([[The Craft — light as a feather]]).\n\n**The second hour** converts three of them into antagonists, strips their power, and returns\nSarah — the one with the house, the father and the inherited gift — to a corrected normality.\nBonnie and Rochelle are left with their original problems restored. Nancy is institutionalised.\n\nContemporary reviewers noticed the seam without much sympathy for the first half. Stephen\nHolden's *New York Times* review of 3 May 1996 is reported to praise the opening as a\ncelebration of adolescent nonconformity and to fault the closing stretch as a sermon about\nkarma. That review is paywalled and this wiki has not read it, so the characterisation is\nrecorded here second-hand and should be replaced with the words when someone can get at them.\n\n### Why the seam matters\n\nBecause the film's moral arithmetic does not survive inspection. It treats four wishes as\nequivalent errors when they are not: three are about the self, and Nancy's is about escaping a\ntrailer and a dangerous man ([[Nancy is the only poor one]]). The girl with the least gets\npunished most, and the girl with the most keeps her power on the grounds that she was born\nwith it.\n\nThe racial dimension runs the same way. Rochelle's storyline — added after Rachel True was\ncast, replacing a bulimia plot ([[Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)]]) — is the only one\nin which the wish is a response to someone else's cruelty rather than to a private lack. It is\nalso the one the ending resolves least ([[Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose]]).\n\n### The teen-film pattern underneath\n\nThe shape is a 1990s [[Formula]]: outsider arrives, is adopted by a group, is corrupted by it,\nmust renounce it to be restored. It is the same skeleton as a dozen films of the decade, and\nit is fundamentally conservative — the group is the danger and the correction is a return to\nthe individual. *The Craft* inherits that skeleton and puts a story about female anger and\nclass inside it, and the two do not fit.\n\n### Why it belongs on the bench\n\nIt is a clean teaching case for [[Values]]: a film whose stated moral and whose actual\nsympathies point in opposite directions, where students can be asked which one the *filming*\nsupports. And it is why the reappraisal happened at all — audiences did not reinterpret the\nfilm so much as decide to believe its first half over its second\n([[The Craft got better as it got older]]).\n\nFilms noted here that this context touches: [[The Craft (1996)]]." }, { "title": "Independence, 1973", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/independence-1973/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/independence-1973.md", "summary": "Mean Streets was self-produced by two first-timers, shot non-union with a Corman crew, and sold to Warner Bros., who released it for two weeks. A case study in what independence bought and what it cost.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "format", "formula" ], "tags": [ "context", "commerce", "new-hollywood", "independent", "production" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/" ], "citations": [ "smc 372", "sos 39", "sos 41", "sos 47", "smc 368", "ckc 231", "sos 49" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 507, "body": "### The datum\n\nStefan Sereda's chapter in the Companion calls it \"Mean Streets as Cinema of Independence\", and\nthe facts support the title:\n\n> Mean Streets is therefore self-produced by two first-time producers, and the only film released\n> under the banner, \"A Taplin–Perry–Scorsese Production.\"\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|The Companion]], `smc 372`\n\nThe producer was Jonathan Taplin, twenty-six, until then road manager for Bob Dylan and The Band\n(`sos 39`). His first backer, \"a twenty-three-year-old who had just come into an inheritance\",\npulled out (`sos 39`). What got the money in the end was a letter: Taplin could raise it \"if Roger\nCorman promised in writing to distribute the film\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A\nJourney|Kelly]], unpaged).\n\n### How it was made cheap\n\nCorman's crew from *Boxcar Bertha*; no Teamsters, \"to avoid union costs\" (`smc 372`); twenty-six\nor twenty-seven days; mostly Los Angeles ([[New York was Los Angeles]]). Paul Rapp, Corman's man,\nran the schedule by lighting direction rather than by scene: \"shoot everything that was lit in one\ndirection first, so Mean Streets was all shot backwards, as the master shot would be left until\nlast\" (`sos 41`). Sometimes twenty-four set-ups a day, thirty-six for the pool-hall fight. The\nhandheld camera was an economy too: \"if we'd tracked every one of the shots, we'd still have been\nthere shooting! So the economics dictated the style\" (`sos 47`).\n\nThe budget figure depends on who you ask, from $300,000 to $750,000; see the hub,\n[[Mean Streets (1973)]].\n\n### What it cost\n\nThe film was finished independently and then sold to Warner Bros. What happened next is\nScorsese's:\n\n> But next thing I know, we opened in LA, got nice reviews, did two weeks' business, and that was\n> that. Every other city, the same thing. Warner was our distributor, and The Exorcist was coming\n> in.\n\n— Kelly, unpaged\n\nIndependence bought total control of the film and no control over its release. Sereda notes that\nthis arrangement, made outside a studio and distributed by one, now attracts the sneer\n\"dependies\" (`smc 368`). Susan Hayward credits Scorsese with \"bringing East Coast film production\nto the fore (e.g. Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Productions for Mean Streets, 1973)\" (`ckc 231`).\n\n### What it bought\n\nA career. The film did little business and made its director. Coppola saw it and recommended him to\nEllen Burstyn for *Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore*, a studio film with \"a budget three times that\nof Mean Streets\" (`sos 49`). See [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] and\n[[The women's picture, 1974]].\n\n### Why it belongs on the bench\n\nIt is a clean [[Commerce]] case with every term visible: who paid, what they got, what the\ndistributor decided, and how cost shaped style. Put it next to [[Corman offered to make it Black]]\nfor the alternative financing that was refused, and next to [[The red tint over the bloodbath]] for\nwhat a studio could impose three years later, once Scorsese was inside one.\n\nFilms noted here that this context touches: [[Mean Streets (1973)]]." }, { "title": "The Last Temptation collapse, 1983", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983.md", "summary": "Paramount cancelled Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ with the sets built and the costumes made. After Hours was the film he made to survive it, and nearly everyone involved reads it as that year turned into a comedy.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "themes", "character" ], "tags": [ "context", "personal", "commerce", "production", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/films/after-hours/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/contexts/independence-1973/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/", "/people/martin-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "sos 95", "sos 96", "sos 97", "sos 101", "sos 122", "msk 125" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "msk", "title": "Jaspers & Warnecke — Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 757, "body": "### The datum\n\nBy 1983 Scorsese had wanted to film Nikos Kazantzakis's novel for years. Paramount agreed.\nPre-production ran through most of the year, with locations in Israel:\n\n> It went on and on like this until the budget of the film was about $12 million and the\n> schedule was ninety days. It wasn't going to be a big spectacular or a real epic. It was to\n> be a film about people.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 95`\n\nThen everything went wrong at once. Irwin Winkler asked for \"another ten days' shooting and a\nfurther $2 million. I think that was the final blow, together with the campaign being mounted by\nthe Moral Majority\" (`sos 95`). Winkler's *The Right Stuff* opened and \"took a dive at the\nbox-office\" (`sos 96`). Paramount pulled out. \"By this stage we had the cast, the sets had been\nbuilt and the costumes made (I discovered in 1987 that the shoes were eventually used in King\nDavid)\" (`sos 96`). A last attempt at half the cost ended \"just two days before Christmas\" when\nBarry Diller said, \"We just don't want to make it. It's not worth the trouble\" (`sos 97`).\n\n### What it did to him\n\nScorsese's line, in an oral history decades later: \"It wasn't just the cancellation of a movie,\nit felt like the cancellation of my viability in the movie business\" ([[After Hours oral history\nouttakes (2023)]]). In the library he is calmer about it:\n\n> At this point, instead of acting out my rage, I went inside, tried to take care of myself and\n> figure out what to do. The answer was to make a film — any film we could get our hands on —\n> and immediately.\n\n— `sos 97`\n\nTo Kelly he admits he was \"almost relieved, because the picture was becoming too big\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged).\n\n### How it shows in the film\n\nAmy Robinson, who produced *After Hours*: \"Marty's always saying, in interviews, that trying to\nget Last Temptation made was his own personal After Hours for him—that kind of nightmare. And\ndoing After Hours was getting it out\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\nEbert makes the mapping exact. During *Last Temptation*, \"Executives kept reassuring him that all\nwent well, backers said they had the money, Paramount greenlighted it, agents promised him it was\na 'go,' everything was in place, and then time after time an unexpected development would\nthreaten everything.\" And in the film:\n\n> In After Hours, each new person Paul meets promises that they will take care of him, make him\n> happy, lend him money, give him a place to stay, let him use the phone, trust him with their\n> keys, drive him home—and every offer of mercy turns into an unanticipated danger. The film\n> could be read as an emotional autobiography of that period in Scorsese's life.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged\n\nThat is the [[Personal]] context at its most useful: not a claim that the film is \"about\"\nScorsese, but a structure (promise, reassurance, collapse, repeat) that he lived and then built.\n\n### The commercial lesson\n\nThe other half is [[Commerce]]. Schoonmaker: \"With After Hours we started working in a very\ndisciplined manner, not wasting money or time. Marty realized that the kind of films he makes\ndon't necessarily have a big commercial value, but he wanted to keep making them. Therefore, he\nhad to make them cheaper\" (Kelly, unpaged). It worked, and not everyone liked it: \"When I\nsubsequently went to Hollywood to promote my next film I found, to my surprise, some people\nresented that we had made it for so little\" (`sos 101`).\n\n*Last Temptation* came back. When *After Hours* went to Cannes in 1986, the plan was to announce\nthe film again, \"saying it could be made for $5 million in Egypt\" (`sos 122`). Universal made\nit in 1988.\n\n### Disputes\n\n- **Four days or four weeks.** Scorsese says the film \"was cancelled four days before shooting\n was supposed to begin\" (`sos 96`). To Kelly he says \"four weeks before shooting was to have\n started\", and Ebert repeats four weeks.\n- **The budget.** \"About $12 million\" (`sos 95`); \"$19 or $20 million\", Scorsese in an onstage\n conversation printed by Ebert; 20 million, says Ballhaus (`msk 125`).\n- **The schedule.** \"Ninety days\" (`sos 95`); \"a ninety-nine-day shooting schedule\" (Kelly,\n unpaged).\n\nRelated: [[After Hours (1985)]], [[Martin Scorsese]], [[Independence, 1973]] for the last time\nhe made a film this way." }, { "title": "Personal", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/personal/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/personal.md", "summary": "The individual context: a maker's own history and style; a viewer's own position and memory.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [], "tags": [ "reference", "context-force" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/shoot-like-scorsese/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 223, "body": "### The context that isn't worldly forces but particular people\n\nProduction: a maker's\nbiography, obsessions, and signature — the reason two directors given the same script\nreturn different films. Reception: the individual viewer's experience, identity and\nmovie-memory, which no two audience members share.\n\n### What to ask\n\nWhat of the maker's own life is legible in the text? What does *this*\nviewer bring that changes what the text can mean?\n\n### Canonical cases\n\n[[Martin Scorsese]] is the wiki's standing example: a filmmaker whose\npersonal context — Little Italy, asthma, a childhood spent watching instead of playing —\narrives on screen as movie-memory, most nakedly in [[Alice — the prologue]], a childhood\nimagined *as* the films that furnished it. On the reception side: everyone who knew\nHitchcock as television's droll host brought that persona into [[Psycho (1960)]], exactly\nas he intended.\n\n### Sources\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]];\n[[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)|Truffaut]].\n\n### In the books\n\nThis force has the thinnest coverage on the shelf, which is itself telling: the textbooks\nprefer forces to people. [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]] is the standing\nexample of a maker narrating his own influences, and\n[[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)|Truffaut's Hitchcock]] the same on the other side of the\nAtlantic. Both are self-portraits, so read them as evidence of what a filmmaker wants\nunderstood about himself." }, { "title": "The Production Code and Psycho", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/production-code-and-psycho.md", "summary": "Control context, production lens: Psycho was made by negotiating with a censorship system that was visibly dying.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing" ], "tags": [ "context-control", "production-lens", "censorship", "1960s" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/concepts/montage/", "/films/psycho-1960/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/control/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 191, "body": "### Lens: production. Force: control\n\nBy 1960 the Hays Production Code still governed studio releases but had lost most of its\nteeth. Psycho was built to probe exactly where the line now sat: an opening scene of an\nunmarried couple in a hotel bed ([[Psycho — the opening]]), a flushing toilet shown on\nscreen — see [[The first flushing toilet]] — and a murder scene whose nudity was inferred\nrather than photographed.\n\nThe famous story from [[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]]:\ncensors screening [[Psycho — the shower scene]] disagreed about whether they had seen\nnudity. Hitchcock resubmitted the scene — by most accounts unchanged — and it passed. The\nanecdote is a control-context lesson and a [[Montage]] lesson at once: the cutting made the\ncensors see what wasn't there.\n\n### Why it matters for analysis\n\nPsycho's style is not separable from its censorship\ncontext. The obliqueness that reads today as elegance was, at the time, also compliance —\nand a dare. Within a few years the Code collapsed entirely and was replaced by ratings\n(1968), which changes the control context for reception too.\n\nHub: [[Psycho (1960)]]." }, { "title": "Psychoanalysis in postwar America", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america.md", "summary": "Values context: Psycho's 1960 audience had been primed by a decade of pop-Freud to accept a psychiatrist as the film's final authority.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "spoken-language", "themes", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "context-values", "reception-lens", "1950s", "1960s" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/films/psycho-1960/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/values/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/sources/hall-encoding-decoding/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 207, "body": "### Lens: reception (and production). Force: values\n\nBetween the late 1940s and the early 1960s, psychoanalytic ideas moved from clinics into\nAmerican common sense — magazine Freud, analyst jokes, Oedipus in the water supply.\nHollywood had been trading on it for years (Hitchcock's own *Spellbound*, 1945, with its\nDalí dream sequence, is practically an advertisement for analysis).\n\nPsycho banks on this literacy twice. The material itself — mother fixation, split\npersonality, the gothic house of the family psyche above the flat modern motel — reads as\n*legible* rather than lurid to a pop-Freud audience. And the penultimate scene hands the\nfilm to a psychiatrist whose confident lecture ties everything up; 1960 audiences could\nreceive that as authoritative closure, where later audiences often receive it as glib —\n[[Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)|Durgnat]] reads the scene as partly ironic anyway.\n\n### Why it matters for analysis\n\nThe best example in the Psycho cluster of the reception\nprinciple that the same work transforms as its audience's values shift\n([contexts ↗](https://axisofaction.com/contexts/)). The psychiatrist scene hasn't changed a\nframe since 1960; its reception has inverted. Related theory-side note:\n[[The camera as voyeur]] — 1970s film theory re-reading Hitchcock through the same Freud it\ninherited.\n\nHub: [[Psycho (1960)]]." }, { "title": "The returning veteran, 1976", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/returning-veteran-1976.md", "summary": "Taxi Driver never says the word Vietnam after its first ten minutes. The war is in the jacket, the scar and the insomnia — and the film's authors disagree about whether it is there at all.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "character", "mise-en-scene", "iconography", "themes" ], "tags": [ "context", "vietnam", "new-hollywood", "1970s" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/contexts/values/", "/films/taxi-driver/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/themes/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/" ], "citations": [ "smc 394", "sos 62", "smc 393", "smc 11", "smc 386", "smc 392", "smc 396" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 567, "body": "### The datum\n\nBickle's military service is the first concrete fact the film gives us about him — offered in\nthe cab-depot interview, then never returned to. After that the war is carried entirely by\nobjects and symptoms.\n\n> *Taxi Driver* inscribes Vietnam indirectly, as in the application scene, throughout the\n> film. It is written on the character's body, as revealed in the workout scene by the long,\n> three-inch wide shrapnel scar along the left side of his back. It is foregrounded in the\n> costuming, as Bickle wears one of two \"King Kong Company\" military jackets in almost every\n> scene outside his apartment. The costuming communicates his military service to each person\n> he encounters, as if the character's repressed history returns through his dress.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 394`\n\nThat is a precise observation about [[Mise en scène]] doing the work of exposition: the\njacket tells everyone in the film what Travis never says, and he changes into a longer dark\ngreen one for the assassination attempts.\n\n### The dispute\n\nThe screenwriter says the war is not the subject; the director says it is the engine. See\n[[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]] for both quotations. Scorsese's version:\n\n> It was crucial to Travis Bickle's character that he had experienced life and death around\n> him every second he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened when he\n> comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty gutter becomes more\n> threatening.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 62`\n\nThe Companion notes that most critics acknowledge Bickle is a veteran and almost none make\nanything of it — it lists sixteen of them (`smc 393`).\n\n### The scholarly reading\n\nMichael High's chapter reconciles the two standing positions — that Travis is pathological,\nor that he is an ordinary product of a sick society — by reading him through trauma theory:\n\"an interplay of external stimuli and internal frailty\" (`smc 11`, `smc 386`). On this\naccount the film is not an allegory but an early attempt to represent what being both victim\nand perpetrator of violence does to a person.\n\nAmy Taubin's framing is the one to keep for [[Values]]:\n\n> its success, as Amy Taubin (2000) notes in her book on the film, stems from failure: the\n> defeat of the United States in Vietnam, the collapse of the countercultural movement, and\n> the breakdown of hegemonic masculinity structure not only the historical moment within the\n> film, but also the trials of the character.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 392`\n\nCynthia Fuchs reads the film as Vietnam crossed with film noir, arguing the \"correlation\nbetween the war and this essentially American style underlines the cultural mechanisms that\nmade Vietnam possible, unwinnable, and even inevitable\" (`smc 396`).\n\n### Why it belongs on the bench\n\nBecause it is a clean case of context that is *entirely* inferential. There is no flashback,\nno combat footage, no speech about the war. A student can be shown how to build a historical\nreading out of a jacket, a scar, an insomnia and a date — and then shown that the film's own\nscreenwriter would reject the reading. That is a better lesson than either position alone.\n\nFilms noted here that this context touches: [[Taxi Driver (1976)]]." }, { "title": "Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/selling-psycho.md", "summary": "Commerce context, reception lens: Hitchcock engineered how the film would be watched, not just what it contained.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "format", "structure" ], "tags": [ "context-commerce", "reception-lens", "marketing", "exhibition" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/structure/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 222, "body": "### Lens: reception. Force: commerce (shading into control)\n\nHitchcock's campaign made the *conditions of viewing* part of the text. Cinemas were\nrequired to admit no one after each screening began — \"No one … BUT NO ONE … will be\nadmitted to the theatre after the start of each performance\" — enforced with lobby signage,\nrecorded announcements in Hitchcock's voice, and trailers in which he toured the set\nteasing secrets instead of showing the film. Critics were not given advance screenings;\naudiences were begged not to reveal the ending.\n\nIn 1960 this was a genuine change of behaviour: audiences habitually wandered into films\nmidway and stayed round. The policy protected a structure that could not survive casual\nentry — a first act whose protagonist is already gone by [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] — and simultaneously manufactured queues round the block, which became their\nown advertisement.\n\n### Why it matters for analysis\n\nA clean demonstration that reception context is designed,\nnot given. The same film, entered twenty minutes late, is a different and broken text — and\nHitchcock priced that fact into the release. Production side of the same commercial story —\nthe deferred fee, the TV crew, the $800k budget — is in\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]] and summarised on the hub:\n[[Psycho (1960)]]." }, { "title": "SoHo before the money, 1984", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984.md", "summary": "After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "setting", "lighting" ], "tags": [ "context", "setting", "new-york", "gentrification" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/setting/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/setting/", "/films/after-hours/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/" ], "citations": [ "smc 354", "smc 355", "smc 356", "sos 99" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 499, "body": "### The datum\n\nThe film was shot at night in SoHo and TriBeCa, where Scorsese was then living: \"I was living in\nTriBeCa at the time\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Kelly\ndescribes the attraction:\n\n> Scorsese liked the nighttime quiet and emptiness of pre-gentrified SoHo and TriBeCa. Like the\n> Russian cemetery in Mean Streets, the taxicab sanctuary of Travis Bickle, and the boxing ring\n> roped off from the howling crowd in Raging Bull, SoHo is a place apart, especially \"after\n> hours.\"\n\n— Kelly, unpaged\n\nGriffin Dunne remembers it as a secret: \"Soho then was uncharted territory for people who lived\nabove 14th Street. We knew it, but no one else did\" ([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]).\n\n### The change under way\n\nThe urban-space chapter of [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] puts a\ndate on it:\n\n> SoHo was, by 1985, the epicenter of a new wave of culture-led redevelopment in America's\n> cities. Yet the SoHo of After Hours is still very much a neighborhood \"in transition,\" as the\n> developers would say, and Hackett is marked as decidedly \"other\" from the moment he steps out\n> of his taxi.\n\n— `smc 354`\n\nIts reading of the film turns on who belongs.\nIn *Mean Streets* the streets belong to the men who grew up in them. \"Here, Scorsese reverses that\npolarity; the space of SoHo 'belongs' to characters like Kiki and Gail, and Paul is distinctly\nmarked as an interloper\" (`smc 355`). By the end of the night there are wanted posters with his face on them.\nThe chapter's conclusion: \"In his farcical treatment of one uptown man's misbegotten attempts to\nfind downtown love, Scorsese offers us a poignant study of the social consequences of rapid\ngentrification\" (`smc 356`).\n\n### What it does to the images\n\nThe streets look empty because they were. The Companion: \"The streets of SoHo are eerily quiet\nand dark, with a scarcity of streetlights and seemingly no automobile traffic or ambient light\"\n(`smc 355`). Scorsese adds that the new fast film stock could see more than the eye: \"for some\nscenes we had to take the street lights down because it was so bright\" (`sos 99`). So the\ndarkness is partly real and partly made.\n\nEbert, in 1985, thought New Yorkers would recognise it: \"For New Yorkers, parts of the film will\nno doubt play as a documentary\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged,\nwhere the scan reads \"New Torkers\").\n\n### Why it matters\n\nA [[Setting]] case with a date stamp. The same few blocks are \"just a few blocks west of the\nLittle Italy of Mean Streets, and yet there is no hint of the shared geography that the two films\ninhabit\" (`smc 355`). Twelve years apart, one neighbourhood is home and the next is a foreign\ncountry. Compare [[New York was Los Angeles]], where Scorsese had to fake the city, and\n[[Church and street in Little Italy]]." }, { "title": "Values", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/values/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/values.md", "summary": "The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.", "film": null, "aliases": [], "codes": [], "tags": [ "reference", "context-force" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/hall-encoding-decoding/", "/sources/hall-representation/", "/sources/media-and-society/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/sources/hall-encoding-decoding/", "/sources/hall-representation/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/" ], "citations": [ "hed 9", "hed 10", "hed 11", "hall 15", "hall 223", "mas 69", "mas 159", "mas 177" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "hed", "title": "Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding" }, { "prefix": "hall", "title": "Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices" }, { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" } ], "words": 326, "body": "### The assumptions a media product breathes\n\nProduction: the beliefs of the people and\ninstitutions making it — whose stories matter, what behaviour is normal, who gets to be\ncomplex. Reception: the beliefs audiences bring, which keep changing after the text is\nlocked; the same film transforms as its audience's values do.\n\n### What to ask\n\nWhat did the text's first audience take for granted that we don't — and\nvice versa? Which meanings have inverted with no frame changing?\n\n### Canonical cases\n\n[[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]] — Psycho's psychiatrist scene\nreceived as authority in 1960, as irony since. [[The women's picture, 1974]] — Alice made\nand received inside the women's movement, and argued over by it. Both are the Values force\ndoing its slow work.\n\n### Sources\n\n[[Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)|Mulvey]] — itself a\nvalues-context document; [[Criterion — At Home in the World]].\n\n### In the books\n\n> The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position. When the viewer takes the connoted meaning … full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded …\n\n[[Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding|Hall, \"Encoding/Decoding\"]], `hed 9`. The negotiated position follows at `hed 10`, the oppositional at `hed 11` — three ways the same text can be read, which is the mechanism behind [[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]] and [[The women's picture, 1974]].\n\n> Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.\n\n[[Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices|Hall, Representation]], `hall 15`. The method for reading stereotyping — how difference gets fixed in place — is chapter 4, from about `hall 223`, though that part of the scan is OCR-rough.\n\nFor a classroom-length version of both, [[O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society|Media & Society]] covers mediation and representation at `mas 69`, ideology at `mas 159` and hegemony at `mas 177`." }, { "title": "The women's picture, 1974", "type": "context", "url": "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "raw": "/raw/contexts/womens-picture-1974.md", "summary": "Values context, both lenses: Alice made inside the women's movement, marketed by a studio, and argued over by everyone.", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "formula", "themes" ], "tags": [ "context-values", "reception-lens", "production-lens", "1970s", "feminism" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Contexts framework", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/contexts/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/concepts/themes/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/values/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/sources/hall-encoding-decoding/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/" ], "citations": [ "smc 121" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 452, "body": "### Lens: production and reception. Force: values\n\nBy 1974 the women's movement had reached the mainstream, and Hollywood was conspicuously\nshort of films about women's lives — the classic studio \"women's picture\" had died with\nthe studio system. A cycle of feminist-inflected mainstream films (*Klute*, *Diary of a\nMad Housewife*) was forming; [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] entered it from an\nunusual angle — a bankable star, Ellen Burstyn, using post-*Exorcist* leverage to\ncommission the film she couldn't find, rejecting scripts \"full of stereotypes — the woman\nas victim, the woman as helper\" ([[Criterion — At Home in the World]]; [[Commerce]]).\n\nReception ran hot on exactly the terms the values context predicts: praised as a\nmainstream film that took a woman's economic and emotional life seriously; criticised —\nincluding from feminist positions — for resolving toward a man. The sharpest published\nversion of that attack came from Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, who dismissed it as the work\nof a \"self-admitted macho director\" on a feminist trip and pointedly noted that Warner Bros\nowned a quarter of *Ms. Magazine*, which had praised it\n([[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]], `smc 121`). That detail\nbelongs to [[Commerce]] as much as to values: it asks who owned the platform the acclaim\narrived on. The ending was argued\nabout *as an ending for 1974*, not just for Alice; see [[Themes]] on why melodrama's\nquestions and the era's questions were the same questions. The prologue's exhumed\nwomen's-picture styling ([[Alice — the prologue]]) is the film's own comment on the\ninheritance it was renegotiating.\n\n### Sources\n\n[[Criterion — At Home in the World]];\n[[Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)]];\n[[Ebert — Alice review (1974)]] as a first-audience document.\n\n### The critique, and the suspicion\n\nThe film's feminist reception was not warm across the board. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary's 1975\nassessment called it \"self-admitted macho director Martin Scorsese on his feminist trip\", and\npreferred Douglas Sirk as \"a truly worthy women's director\". They granted the craft of\n[[Alice — the prologue]] — its use of mise-en-scène, cinematography and music to show both\nAlice's determination and her adult entrapment — while arguing that Scorsese fell back on\nHollywood stereotypes everywhere else, and turning the film's own Oz reference against it:\n\n> Our Alice is grown now, with singing career abandoned for man, marriage and child. It's the\n> old story. She is trapped as surely as Dorothy was caught in Oz.\n\nKay and Peary (1975), quoted in\n[[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] at `smc 121`.\n\nThe sharpest move in their piece is not the critique but the follow-the-money question behind\nit: see [[Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent]]." }, { "title": "After Hours (1985)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/after-hours/", "raw": "/raw/films/after-hours.md", "summary": "A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "After Hours" ], "codes": [ "camerawork", "point-of-view", "editing", "structure", "setting", "lighting", "character", "formula" ], "tags": [ "scorsese", "comedy", "independent", "new-york", "night" ], "watched": null, "watching": true, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/setting/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/character/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/", "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/structure/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/" ], "citations": [ "sos 227", "sos 97", "sos 99", "sos 101", "msk 125", "smc 100", "sos 100", "awf 47", "sos 122", "sos 104", "smc 31", "ohwc 764", "hnf 682" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "msk", "title": "Jaspers & Warnecke — Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" }, { "prefix": "ohwc", "title": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema" }, { "prefix": "hnf", "title": "David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film" } ], "words": 1603, "body": "Directed by [[Martin Scorsese]]; written by Joseph Minion; shot by [[Michael Ballhaus]], the\nfirst of their films together; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Howard Shore;\nproduced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne and Robert F. Colesberry for Double Play and The\nGeffen Company; released by Warner Bros. in September 1985; 97 minutes (`sos 227`).\n\nPaul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) trains new staff on the word processors of a midtown office. One\nevening in a diner he gets talking to Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who gives him a number\ndowntown. He calls, takes a cab to SoHo, and watches his only $20 blow out of the window on\nthe way. From there the night will not let him go. Marcy turns strange, then turns up dead.\nThe subway fare has gone up past what he has in his pocket. Everyone who offers help (Kiki\nthe sculptor, Tom the bartender, Julie the waitress, Gail in the ice-cream truck) turns out\nto cost him something, until a neighbourhood mob decides he is the burglar who has been\nworking the street. June, a sculptor in a basement, hides him inside a papier-mâché figure.\nThe real burglars steal it. It falls out of their van at dawn, in front of his office.\n\nScorsese's own description of what he was up to:\n\n> I thought it would be interesting to see if I could go back and do something in a very fast\n> way. All style. An exercise completely in style. And to show that they hadn't killed my\n> spirit.\n\n— [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\n### Why it is in the journal\n\nBecause it is the film where the Scorsese of the 1970s is taken apart and rebuilt cheaply.\nParamount had cancelled *The Last Temptation of Christ* at the end of 1983 with the sets built\n([[The Last Temptation collapse, 1983]]). He needed a film \"any film we could get our hands on\n— and immediately\" (`sos 97`), and this is the one that came through his lawyer's door. It is\nhis first feature without De Niro since *Alice*, his first with Ballhaus and his first with\nHoward Shore, and it is the first time since *Taxi Driver* he tried to make a film in forty\ndays (`sos 99`).\n\nIt also connects backwards. One of its producers, Amy Robinson, was Teresa in\n[[Mean Streets (1973)|Mean Streets]], and she saw the same director come back to life:\n\"He was in the vibrant, creative mood he had been in when we did Mean Streets\" (Kelly,\nunpaged). The steam rises from the SoHo streets \"as they did in Scorsese's Taxi Driver,\nsuggesting that Hades lurks just below the field of vision\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by\nEbert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). And the plot is Hitchcock's innocent man wrongly\naccused, played for laughs ([[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]]).\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[After Hours — the diner]] — a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table, and a\n camera that jumps over her \"as if it were a hawk\". Also where the film's debt to a radio\n monologue starts.\n- [[After Hours — the keys]] — a cab ride in fast motion, a $20 bill out the window, and a\n set of keys falling toward the camera's own lens.\n- [[After Hours — back at work]] — the statue falls out of the van, the office gates open,\n and in the credits his desk is empty.\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\n[[Camerawork]] is the whole method: every shot drawn in the script margins, about 500 of them,\nat sixteen set-ups a day ([[Five set-ups a day became sixteen]]). [[Point of view]] is the\nfilm's comic engine. The camera takes the keys' point of view as they fall\n([[After Hours — the keys]]) and cuts to close-ups of light switches and locks that mean\nnothing ([[Close-ups for no reason]]), so the audience shares Paul's paranoia and learns to\ndistrust its own grammar. [[Editing]] is where the comedy was found. Schoonmaker: \"Being a comedy, of course, it had\nto be cut a certain way. We had to take out stuff we both loved in order to get it to work\"\n(Kelly, unpaged).\n[[Lighting]] is Ballhaus's joke on German Expressionism: shadows on stairwells for a film in\nwhich, Scorsese says, \"nothing of film noir or psychological horror really occurs. It's all in\nhis head\" (Kelly, unpaged). [[Setting]] is SoHo at night before the money arrived\n([[SoHo before the money, 1984]]).\n\n### Conventions\n\n[[Structure]] is one night, one escalating chain. Ebert found a better name than \"Kafkaesque\":\n\"screwball logic\", where what happens to Paul \"is like what happens to Buster Keaton: just one\ndamned thing after another\" (Ebert, unpaged). [[Formula]] is Hitchcock's wrong-man thriller\nrun as a comedy: \"a Satanic version of the classic Hitchcock plot formula, The Innocent Man\nWrongly Accused\" (Ebert, unpaged). [[Character]] is a man with no goal bigger than getting\nuptown. Kelly puts him at the end of a line of Scorsese strivers: \"Paul Hackett (After Hours)\njust wants to get uptown\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\n### Contexts\n\n[[The Last Temptation collapse, 1983]] is the [[Personal]] context, and Scorsese accepted the\nreading: Ebert says \"he was quite willing to describe it as a reflection of his state of mind\nafter everything went wrong\" (Ebert, unpaged). It is also the [[Commerce]] story of a director\nproving he could work cheap. [[SoHo before the money, 1984]] is the neighbourhood as it was,\nat the point it started to change.\n\n## Ideas\n\n- [[The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne]]\n- [[Five set-ups a day became sixteen]]\n- [[Close-ups for no reason]]\n- [[The first half hour came from a radio monologue]]\n- [[Tim Burton stepped aside]]\n- [[Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway]]\n- [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]]\n\n## Disputes worth keeping\n\n- **The budget.** $3.5 million when Fox Classics was backing it (`sos 97`). \"About $4 million\"\n once Scorsese signed (Kelly, unpaged), and Ballhaus remembers \"less than $4 million\" (Kelly, unpaged). The\n final cost was $4.5 million, \"including a quarter of my normal salary\" (`sos 101`), after\n Geffen paid for four extra days to reshoot the ending.\n- **How many shots.** Scorsese says his drawings \"worked out at about 500 shots\" (`sos 99`).\n Ballhaus remembers a producer telling Scorsese \"they're 600 shots\" (`msk 125`).\n- **Who drops the keys.** Kelly's narration says \"Marcy must drop her keys to Paul\"; Amy\n Robinson, in the same book, says \"Kiki drops the keys\", and so does Ebert. It is Kiki's\n loft. See [[After Hours — the keys]].\n- **How Marcy dies.** The filmography says she \"has died from an overdose\" (`sos 227`). Kelly\n says \"she kills herself\", Ebert \"a shocking suicide\", Sterritt that she \"has killed herself\"\n (`smc 100`). The film shows the body and leaves the cause to you.\n- **Who found the ending.** Scorsese credits Michael Powell and his own father at a screening,\n then Terry Gilliam and Steven Spielberg (`sos 100`–`sos 101`). Griffin Dunne remembers test\n cards and \"Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg\" ([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]). Boggs says preview audiences chose between\n two endings (`awf 47`). See [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]].\n- **Kafka.** Every critic reaches for him. Scorsese, told about Kafka by Powell: \"I said that\n I'd never read Kafka and didn't know anything about that\" (`sos 100`).\n\n## Where it sits\n\nIt won Scorsese Best Director at Cannes in 1986, a prize he did not collect: \"I didn't go,\namong other reasons because of my fear of flying\" (`sos 122`). The editors of Scorsese on\nScorsese sum up the rest: \"although its commercial success was modest, his career now seemed\nrevived\" (`sos 104`). The Companion calls it \"yet another calling card for a rebuilding\nScorsese, showing studios he could work quickly and within a budget\" (`smc 31`), and the\nOxford history says he \"scaled himself down to fit within the industry's needs\" (`ohwc 764`).\n\nThe critics split, and the split is fun. Ebert in 1985: \"After Hours is a brilliant film, one of\nthe year's best\" (Ebert, unpaged), a film that \"earns its place on the list with his great\nfilms: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull.\" Scorsese, in the foreword to Ebert's own\nbook, says that enthusiasm \"puzzles me a little bit (his pieces on those films are critical\nminority reports)\". David Cook, in a textbook, uses it as a stick to beat a later film:\n*Bringing Out the Dead* \"is an unwatchable variant of After Hours\" (`hnf 682`).\n\n## On Axis of Action\n\nNothing yet. The AoA Scorsese season lists *After Hours* as week 7, upcoming, with the line\n\"One night, one escalating structure — the tightest plot machine he ever built.\" The three\nscene notes here are written to be turned into that page: the keys shot is the obvious\nplayback lesson in [[Point of view]], and the ending is the lesson in [[Structure]].\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]] (pp. 94–104) is the core: the collapse of\n*Last Temptation*, the script, the shoot and the ending, in Scorsese's words.\n[[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]] has the producers, Ballhaus, Dunne,\nArquette and Schoonmaker. [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]] has the 1985\nreview and a Great Movies reconsideration. In [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the\nCompanion]], David Sterritt reads it as a Christian fable (pp. 100–104) and another chapter reads\nit as a film about gentrification (pp. 354–356). On the web: [[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]],\n[[Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023)]] and [[After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)]]." }, { "title": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "raw": "/raw/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore.md", "summary": "Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Alice" ], "codes": [ "colour", "audio", "editing", "acting" ], "tags": [ "scorsese", "new-hollywood", "melodrama", "road-movie" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/format/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/personal/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 319, "body": "Directed by [[Martin Scorsese]]; written by Robert Getchell; shot by Kent L. Wakeford (who\nhad shot [[Mean Streets (1973)|Mean Streets]] the year before) for\nWarner Bros on about $1.8 million. Ellen Burstyn — bankable after *The Exorcist* and sick\nof scripts \"full of stereotypes\" — found the script, judged it written \"for Doris Day and\nRock Hudson\", asked Coppola who was good, screened *Mean Streets*, and hired Scorsese to\nrough it up ([[Criterion — At Home in the World]]). Burstyn won the Oscar for Best\nActress; Diane Ladd and Getchell were nominated. Widowed Alice Hyatt drives from Socorro,\nNew Mexico toward a singing career in Monterey and gets exactly as far as a diner in\nTucson.\n\nThis is the hub note. Everything Alice-related links from here.\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[Alice — the prologue]] — the soundstage childhood; the film's thesis in ninety\n seconds and one cut. **The current writing project.**\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\nThe prologue is the site's standing example of [[Colour]] and [[Setting]] as\nquotation, of [[Lighting]] that confesses its own artifice, and — at the cut — of\n[[Editing]] and [[Audio]] working as one blade: [[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]]. Burstyn's performance anchors [[Acting]].\n\n### Conventions\n\nA woman's-picture [[Formula]] crossed with a road movie; a\n27-year ellipsis as [[Chronology]]; a double character introduction ([[Character]]); and\nthe strangest [[Format]] afterlife in the wiki — the sitcom *Alice* (CBS, 1976–85).\n\n### Contexts\n\n[[The women's picture, 1974]] (Values, reception); Burstyn's star power as\n[[Commerce]]; the post-Code profanity of the prologue as a [[Control]] datum; and\nScorsese's movie-memory as [[Personal]] context throughout.\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Criterion — At Home in the World]] for production history and reception;\n[[Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)]] for the star's account;\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]] for the director's;\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)]] for the era;\n[[Ebert — Alice review (1974)]] for a first-audience datum." }, { "title": "Mean Streets (1973)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/mean-streets/", "raw": "/raw/films/mean-streets.md", "summary": "Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Mean Streets" ], "codes": [ "audio", "colour", "camerawork", "acting", "spoken-language", "setting", "character", "formula" ], "tags": [ "scorsese", "new-hollywood", "gangster", "independent", "little-italy" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Playback: Mean Streets — The Home Movies", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/concepts/colour/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/setting/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/structure/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/values/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/films/after-hours/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/setting/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "sos 48", "sos 47", "sos 9", "sos 39", "smc 372", "sos 41", "smc 107", "smc 379", "ohwc 481", "smc 371", "smc 382", "hnf 615", "sos 113" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "ohwc", "title": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema" }, { "prefix": "hnf", "title": "David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film" } ], "words": 1146, "body": "Directed by [[Martin Scorsese]]; written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin; shot by Kent\nWakeford, who would shoot [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)|Alice]] the following\nyear; edited by Sid Levin; produced by Jonathan Taplin. Premiered at the New York Film\nFestival on 2 October 1973 and released by Warner Bros. Charlie ([[Harvey Keitel]]) collects\ndebts for his uncle Giovanni, who runs the neighbourhood, and is waiting to be given a\nrestaurant. He is also trying to keep his friend Johnny Boy ([[Robert De Niro]]) alive, which\nmeans keeping him paying a loan shark called Michael, which Johnny Boy has no intention of\ndoing. Charlie is sleeping with Johnny Boy's cousin Teresa, which his uncle has forbidden.\nHe has a private theory of penance that involves fire. It ends in a car in the dark.\n\nScorsese's own summary:\n\n> Mean Streets was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we\n> lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a\n> sociological tract.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 48`\n\n### Why it is in the journal\n\nBecause it is where the man in the other two Scorsese films on this site first appears. The\npriest's-eye overheads in [[Taxi Driver (1976)|Taxi Driver]], the hand over the flame, the\nrecords chosen to cut to, De Niro as a man who cannot be managed, Keitel as the one who tries:\nall of it starts here, cheaply, and some of it for no better reason than that there was no\nmoney. \"So the economics dictated the style,\" Scorsese says, \"and the style just happened to\nwork\" (`sos 47`).\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[Mean Streets — the opening]] — a voice in the dark, three wake-ups, and a Ronettes\n record hitting on the downbeat as Charlie's head reaches the pillow.\n- [[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]] — the red room, the slow motion, and Johnny Boy's entrance\n to \"Jumpin' Jack Flash\".\n- [[Mean Streets — the back room]] — Johnny Boy's shaggy-dog story about a poker game, and\n the argument over who wrote it.\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\n[[Audio]] first, because the film is built on records: there is no score, only what the\njukebox and the car radio are playing, a model Scorsese took from *The Public Enemy*\n([[The jukebox is the score]]). [[Colour]] is the red of Tony's bar, which Michael Powell\nlater told Scorsese was too much ([[Too much red]]). [[Camerawork]] is handheld because\ntracks cost time, and slows down whenever the music says so. [[Acting]] and\n[[Spoken language]] come out of ten days of rehearsal in New York, taped and turned into\nscript ([[Mean Streets — the back room]]). [[Setting]] is the film's great deception: most\nof Little Italy is Los Angeles ([[New York was Los Angeles]]).\n\n### Conventions\n\nA gangster [[Formula]] with the careers taken out. Ebert's line is the one to remember: \"The\nGodfather was about careers. Mean Streets was about jobs\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by\nEbert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). [[Character]] runs on a pairing Scorsese would keep\nfor twenty years: the anxious manager and the man who will not be managed. [[Structure]] is\nepisodic, closer to Fellini's *I Vitelloni* than to Warner Bros., until the debt comes due.\n\n### Contexts\n\n[[Church and street in Little Italy]] is the [[Personal]] and [[Values]] context: a\nneighbourhood where the two powers were \"the tough guys on the street, and the Church\"\n(`sos 9`). [[Independence, 1973]] is the [[Commerce]] story: a first-time producer, a\nnon-union Corman crew, a $150,000 offer turned down because it came with a condition\n([[Corman offered to make it Black]]), and a Warner Bros. release that stalled because the\nstudio was putting its weight behind *The Exorcist*.\n\n## Disputes worth keeping\n\nThe sources disagree about almost every number, and the disagreements are more useful than\nany one figure.\n\n- **The budget.** Corman's rejected offer was $150,000 (`sos 39`). Scorsese asked Taplin\n for $300,000, and that is what Paul Rapp budgeted for ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin\n Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Scorsese told Ebert $650,000. Stefan Sereda\n estimates about $500,000 (`smc 372`). Scorsese also says Warner paid $750,000 for the\n finished film (Kelly, unpaged), which may be where the highest figure comes from.\n- **Days in New York.** Rapp proposed four. Scorsese says he \"swindled eight days\"\n (`sos 41`). To Kelly he says five, and elsewhere six; to Ebert, six days and nights with\n an NYU student crew. The total shoot was 26 or 27 days.\n- **Whether Johnny Boy dies.** One critic has Scorsese playing \"the shooter who kills\n Johnny Boy\" (`smc 107`); another says \"it is unclear whether any of them will die\"\n (`smc 379`); Kelly says Charlie and Johnny Boy \"survive, dazed and bloody\". See\n [[Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies]].\n- **Who wrote the back-room scene.** Scorsese says improvised and \"Bob's idea\"; Richard\n Romanus says \"basically it was scripted\"; De Niro's own papers suggest writing done in\n advance. See [[Mean Streets — the back room]].\n\n## Where it sits\n\nThe library's general histories agree on its place. The Oxford history: \"Scorsese\nestablished his critical reputation with Mean Streets\" (`ohwc 481`). Pauline Kael's\nreview, quoted in the Companion, called it \"a true original of our period, a triumph of\npersonal filmmaking\" (`smc 371`). Its descendants are easy to spot: *Reservoir Dogs*\nborrows Johnny Boy's slow-motion entrance to introduce its gangsters (`smc 382`), and\nWong Kar-wai's first feature, *As Tears Go By*, was \"apparently inspired by\" it\n(`hnf 615`). Scorsese made *Italianamerican* the next year, a documentary about his parents\nthat he pairs with this film as its counterpart (`sos 113`). Twelve years later Amy Robinson,\nwho plays Teresa, produced [[After Hours (1985)|After Hours]] and watched him recover the\nsame energy: \"It was the same intense kind of fun\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A\nJourney|Kelly]], unpaged).\n\n## On Axis of Action\n\nThe playback page covers the home-movie title sequence as a lesson in form: Super 8 grain,\nthe projector in shot, a feature handing its credits to a home movie. The notes here stay\noff that ground and go after what it leaves out: the sound, the religion, the rehearsal\nmethod and the money.\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]] (pp. 36–49) is the core: Scorsese's\nown account, chapter by chapter. [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|The\nCompanion]] has four chapters that matter here: Sterritt on religion, Muscio and\nCavaluzzi on music, Tait on De Niro's papers, and Sereda on independence.\n[[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]] has the 1973 review, a later\nGreat Movies reconsideration, and a long conversation about the title sequence.\n[[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]] has the cast and crew in their own\nwords. [[Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)]] is the review that made the film." }, { "title": "Psycho (1960)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/psycho-1960/", "raw": "/raw/films/psycho-1960.md", "summary": "Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Psycho" ], "codes": [ "editing", "audio", "mise en scène", "camerawork" ], "tags": [ "hitchcock", "horror", "thriller" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Playback: shower scene", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-shower-scene/" }, { "label": "Playback: parlour room", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-parlour-room/" }, { "label": "Playback: the search montage", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-search-montage/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 345, "body": "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano from Robert Bloch's novel; shot in\nblack and white by John L. Russell with the television crew from *Alfred Hitchcock Presents*,\nfor around $800,000. Paramount didn't want it, so Hitchcock financed it through his own\nShamley Productions and deferred his fee for ownership — a decision that made him\nextraordinarily rich and is itself a lesson in production context\n([[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]] tells the whole story).\n\nThis is the hub note. Everything Psycho-related links from here.\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[Psycho — the opening]] — crane into the hotel window; the camera as intruder.\n- [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] — mise en scène doing the narration.\n- [[Psycho — the shower scene]] — the most-analysed 3 minutes in cinema.\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\nThe shower scene is the canonical case of [[Montage]] and of\n[[Non-diegetic sound]] — see [[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]] and\n[[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]]. The parlour scene is the canonical case of\n[[Mise en scène]] — see [[Norman among the birds]]. The opening's date-and-time captions\nare a rare, teachable use of printed language\n([codes/printed-language ↗](https://axisofaction.com/codes/printed-language/)).\n\n### Conventions\n\nPsycho breaks the structure conventions on purpose:\n[[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] transfers [[Point of view]] from Marion to Norman\nmid-film. [[The money dies with Marion]] is the cleanest example of [[The MacGuffin]] there is.\n\n### Contexts\n\nMade at the exact pressure point of the collapsing studio censorship system —\n[[The Production Code and Psycho]] — sold through an exhibition gimmick that changed\ncinema-going — [[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]] — and legible to its 1960\naudience through [[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]].\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)]] for production;\n[[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)]] for Hitchcock's own account of directing the audience;\n[[Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)]] for a shot-by-shot reading;\n[[Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)]] for the voyeurism argument via\n[[The camera as voyeur]]." }, { "title": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/taxi-driver/", "raw": "/raw/films/taxi-driver.md", "summary": "A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the strongest example here of point of view doing the work of an argument.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Taxi Driver" ], "codes": [ "point-of-view", "camerawork", "colour", "non-diegetic-sound", "editing" ], "tags": [ "scorsese", "new-hollywood", "neo-noir", "vietnam" ], "watched": "2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z", "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/concepts/colour/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/contexts/values/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/contexts/personal/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "smc 394", "sos 62" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 625, "body": "Directed by [[Martin Scorsese]]; written by Paul Schrader; shot by Michael Chapman; scored\nby Bernard Herrmann; Columbia Pictures, 1976. [[Harvey Keitel]] plays Sport. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an insomniac\nVietnam veteran, takes a night shift driving a cab, fails at a courtship with a campaign\nworker, arms himself, fails to assassinate a presidential candidate, kills three men to\n\"rescue\" a twelve-year-old prostitute, and is written up in the papers as a hero.\n\nThis is the hub note. Everything Taxi Driver–related links from here.\n\n### Why it is in the journal\n\nBecause it is the cleanest demonstration in the wiki of a film that never leaves one\ncharacter's head and never once agrees with him. Almost every other note here can point at\na shot in it.\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] — \"You talkin' to me?\" Improvised by De Niro, shot late, in\n a derelict building, over street noise.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] — the camera tracks away from Travis to an empty\n hallway. Scorsese imagined this shot first and filmed it last.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] — the massacre, the priest's-eye view, the red tint that\n bought an R, and an audience that cheered.\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\nThe film is where [[Point of view]] is best studied on this site: the whole city arrives through\none man's windscreen and rear-view mirror, and the film's judgment of him is carried\nentirely by *how* it shows what he sees ([[Bickle sees through glass]]). [[Camerawork]] is\nborrowed wholesale from Hitchcock's *The Wrong Man* for its paranoia\n([[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]]); [[Colour]] begins in the\nneon-and-steam palette Michael Chapman got by pushing night-rated stock\n([[Chapman pushed the night stock]]) and ends under a tint applied to appease a censor; [[Non-diegetic sound]] is\nHerrmann's last score, finished the night he died\n([[Herrmann finished the score and died that night]]); and [[Editing]] carries the\n[[The camera as voyeur|Camera as voyeur]] logic of the overhead shots\n([[Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view]]).\n\n### Conventions\n\nA neo-noir [[Formula]] — the returned veteran, the corrupt city, the doomed rescue — run\nthrough a [[Character]] the film refuses to explain. [[Structure]] is a diary: Travis's\nvoice-over dates its own entries, and the film's [[Chronology]] is the calendar of a man\nlosing one. [[Iconography]] arrives second-hand, from *The Searchers* and from *Pickpocket*\n([[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]]). The [[Conflict]] never finds an opponent that\ndeserves it.\n\n### Contexts\n\n[[The returning veteran, 1976]] — what the film says about Vietnam by never saying it;\n[[Values]] in the argument over whether Travis is sick or ordinary; [[Control]] in the red\ntint Scorsese agreed to lay over the bloodbath to escape an X ([[The red tint over the\nbloodbath]]); [[Commerce]] in a poster line that sold loneliness\n([[In every city there's one man]]); and [[Personal]] context in a director who described\nthe film as the feeling of walking out of a cinema into daylight.\n\n## Disputes worth keeping\n\nSchrader and Scorsese do not agree about their own film. Schrader says Vietnam is\nincidental — Travis is Sartre's Antoine, existentially lost, and \"it's not meant to be a\nstory about Vietnam\" (`smc 394`). Scorsese says the opposite: the war is the thing that\nmakes the reflected gutter look threatening (`sos 62`). The film supports both readings and\nsettles neither. Note it; don't resolve it.\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]] for the director's own account, chapter by chapter;\n[[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]] for the scholarship, especially Michael\nHigh on trauma; [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] for the first-audience reading and the\nsacramental overheads; [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey]] for the oral\nhistory." }, { "title": "The Craft (1996)", "type": "film", "url": "/films/the-craft/", "raw": "/raw/films/the-craft.md", "summary": "Four girls at a Catholic school in Los Angeles form a coven, get everything they asked for, and discover that the film has a moral. The teen movie the 1990s kept trying to make about female anger.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "The Craft" ], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene", "editing", "audio", "character", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "teen-film", "occult-horror", "1990s", "new-line" ], "watched": "2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z", "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/values/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/contexts/control/", "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 653, "body": "Directed by Andrew Fleming; written by Peter Filardi and Fleming; Columbia Pictures, 1996.\nMade for about US$15 million, it took US$55.6 million worldwide — a surprise hit on mixed\nreviews. Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney) arrives at a Los Angeles Catholic school and completes\nthe coven that Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie Harper (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle\nZimmerman (Rachel True) have been failing to make work. They invoke a deity called Manon,\neach gets what she wanted, and the second half takes it all back.\n\nEighty-five actresses auditioned, among them Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson and Alicia\nSilverstone. Rachel True and Fairuza Balk were cast first.\n\nThis is the hub note. Everything Craft-related links from here.\n\n### Why it is in the journal\n\nBecause it is the wiki's first film with **no book behind it**, and because its two halves\nargue with each other. The first hour is about power arriving; the second is about a film\nlosing its nerve and punishing three of the four girls for wanting it\n([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]).\n\n## Scenes\n\n- [[The Craft — light as a feather]] — the sleepover levitation. Suspense built from a chant,\n a rhythm and four faces, with no effect in the shot at all.\n- [[The Craft — Nancy's turn]] — the invocation, the trailer, and Fairuza Balk taking the\n film off its leash.\n\n## What it demonstrates\n\n### Codes\n\n[[Mise en scène]] carries the whole class argument — the uniforms that flatten four very\ndifferent homes into one frame, Nancy's trailer against Sarah's house\n([[Nancy is the only poor one]]). [[Editing]] and [[Audio]] do the levitation entirely\nbetween them ([[The chant is a metronome, not a spell]]). [[Iconography]] is a genre\ninheritance being assembled on screen: candles, chalk, the calling of the corners, a snake —\nmuch of it designed by a practising witch ([[Manon was invented so nobody could call him]]).\n[[Acting]] is where the film's reputation actually lives, and one performance in particular.\n\n### Conventions\n\nA [[Formula]] the 1990s used repeatedly — outsider arrives, is adopted, is corrupted, must\nrenounce — laid over an occult-horror frame. [[Character]] is where it is strongest and\nweakest at once: four distinct girls, three of whom the ending needs to be wrong.\n[[Themes]] of power, class, race and belonging are all raised in the first hour and only one\nof them gets an answer.\n\n### Contexts\n\n[[Values]] in a film that hands a Black character a racism storyline written *after* she was\ncast ([[Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose]]); [[Commerce]] in a modestly budgeted\nhit that outlived its reviews ([[The Craft got better as it got older]]); and [[Control]] —\nof a different kind from the ratings board — in a studio taking advice from a Dianic priestess\nabout how to depict a living religion.\n\n## A note on sources\n\nEvery other film here is built on books from the Reel shelf. The shelf has **nothing** on\n*The Craft* — the nine hits for \"the craft\" across sixty-odd books are all citations of\n*The Craft of the Screenwriter*. So this film is sourced from reviews and interviews instead,\nwhich are listed separately on the [sources page](/sources/) and cited by URL and date rather than by page. It\nis a weaker evidentiary base than the rest of the wiki and should be read as such.\n\n## Sources for this film\n\n[[Ebert — The Craft review (1996)]] for the contemporary verdict;\n[[Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)]] for the casting and the rewrite;\n[[Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft]] for the ritual design;\n[[The history of \"light as a feather, stiff as a board\"]] for the game.\n\nStephen Holden reviewed it for the *New York Times* on the day of release, praising the first\nhalf and faulting the second. That review sits behind a paywall this wiki could not read, so\nit is recorded here as a lead rather than quoted." }, { "title": "The $85,000 backdrop", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/85000-backdrop.md", "summary": "The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "setting", "colour", "iconography", "lighting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "numbers", "production-story" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/setting/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 190, "body": "The soundstage set for [[Alice — the prologue]] — painted sky, farmyard, wooden house — cost\nabout **$85,000**, against a total budget of roughly $1.8 million, and was used for one day of\nshooting. Warner Bros wanted the sequence gone; Scorsese kept it\n([[Criterion — At Home in the World]]).\n\nFive per cent of a budget is a striking enough number. The comparison the literature actually\nmakes is sharper:\n\n> This opening scene cost $85,000, two and a half times the entire budget for *Who's That\n> Knocking*.\n\n[[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly, Martin Scorsese: A Journey]] (`smj`).\n\nThat is the fact worth teaching. On his first studio picture, Scorsese spent two and a half\ndebut features on ninety seconds of homage that carries no plot. As a [[Commerce]] datum it\ncuts both ways: evidence of New Hollywood indulgence, and evidence of a studio funding an\nargument ([[Iconography]] rebuilt in order to be interrogated).\n\nTeaching pair: [[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]] — Psycho's disproportionate spend\nof *time*; Alice's disproportionate spend of *money*. In both, the excess marks the scene the\nfilm considers its thesis." }, { "title": "Bickle sees through glass", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass.md", "summary": "The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "point-of-view", "the-camera-as-voyeur", "mise-en-scene", "setting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/setting/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/" ], "citations": [ "smc 397" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 245, "body": "The cab is a viewing apparatus. Travis watches the street through a windscreen and watches\nhis passengers in a rear-view mirror, and both are screens.\n\n> Bickle's job flirts with social relationships and allows for a rearview-mirror voyeurism\n> that aligns with his compulsive viewing of television and pornography. Through his rearview\n> mirror, he possesses the passengers, their power or sexual prowess (notably, the film only\n> focuses on passengers of his who have these two qualities, ignoring the others).\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 397`\n\nThe parenthesis is the sharpest observation there and the easiest to miss: the film does not\nshow us a representative sample of fares. It shows the ones that feed him. The selection is\nthe characterisation.\n\nThe corollary, from Julian Rice, is the film's arc in one sentence: it \"is about a man who\nbegins as a viewer of life, through the 'screen' of his cab window, who then goes through the\nlooking glass to become an 'actor' in a personal fantasy\" (`smc 397`). The looking glass is\nliteral — see [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]].\n\nA case for [[Point of view]] and [[The camera as voyeur]]. The obvious comparison is\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] and Norman's peephole: both films hand the audience a\ncharacter's aperture and then make the audience uncomfortable about having used it. See also\n[[Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)|Mulvey]], published the year\n*Taxi Driver* was shot." }, { "title": "Bresson's hands, Travis's guns", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns.md", "summary": "The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing", "camerawork", "acting", "montage", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "influence" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/concepts/editing/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/iconography/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/" ], "citations": [ "sos 66", "sos 53", "sos 60" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 269, "body": "> Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson's *Pickpocket*. I admire his films greatly,\n> but I find them difficult to watch. In *Pickpocket* there's a wonderful sequence of the\n> pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement in and out, and it's the\n> same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his guns.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 66`\n\nTwo things filed here.\n\n**The formal debt.** Bresson cuts hands to objects and objects to hands, without faces, until\nthe activity becomes ritual and the man disappears into it. The gun sequences in\n[[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] do the same thing: the sleeve rig, the drawer, the loading. See\n[[Editing]].\n\n**The attribution.** Schrader wrote his thesis on Bresson (*Transcendental Style in Film*,\n`sos 53`). Scorsese, by his own admission, admires Bresson without enjoying him. So the film\ncarries a major influence that arrived through the screenplay rather than the direction —\na useful correction to auteurist reflex, and worth holding next to the fact that the film's\nmost famous line came from the actor\n([[De Niro wrote in the margins]]). *Taxi Driver* has at least three authors and they\ndisagree ([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]).\n\nScorsese's other named sources for the film are Hitchcock's *The Wrong Man*\n([[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]]), Francesco Rosi's *Salvatore Giuliano*\nfor how to do black-and-white in colour, Jack Hazan's *A Bigger Splash* for head-on framing,\nFord's *The Searchers* for the hero, and Irving Lerner's *Murder by Contract* (1958) for the\ninside of a killer's head (`sos 60`, `sos 66`)." }, { "title": "The chant is a metronome, not a spell", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome.md", "summary": "Light as a feather works because four people lifting together carry 15 kg each. The rhyme's real function is to synchronise them.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "editing", "non-diegetic-sound" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "ritual" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 200, "body": "Four people lifting an 80 kg body take 12–20 kg each — easily within finger strength. The\nlift fails when participants pull at slightly different moments, and succeeds when they pull\ntogether ([[The history of \"light as a feather, stiff as a board\"]]).\n\nSo the chant is a timing device. Its supernatural claim is false and its practical function is\nreal: it gets four people onto the same beat. Samuel Pepys recorded the game in the 1660s and\nthe witnesses were already testing it for fraud by repeating it on a heavier man.\n\n**Why this belongs in a film wiki.** The scene in [[The Craft — light as a feather]] does the\nsame thing to the audience that the chant does to the girls. The cutting is locked to the\nrhythm, the repetitions accelerate, and suspense is manufactured out of pulse rather than\ninformation. It is a rare case where the ritual depicted and the technique depicting it run on\nidentical machinery.\n\nAn [[Audio]] case. Compare [[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]] — suspense from a\ncomposer's cue laid over the image, versus suspense from a rhythm the characters are producing\nthemselves. Both are [[Non-diegetic sound]] questions from opposite directions." }, { "title": "Chapman pushed the night stock", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock.md", "summary": "Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "colour", "lighting", "camerawork" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/history-narrative-film/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/films/taxi-driver/" ], "citations": [ "hnf 694" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "hnf", "title": "David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film" } ], "words": 180, "body": "> For *Taxi Driver* (Martin Scorsese, 1976), director of photography Michael Chapman\n> \"pushed\" the night-rated Technicolor stock in development to capture the neon-lit night\n> worlds so crucial to the movie's style and themes.\n\n— [[David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film]], `hnf 694`\n\nPushing means deliberately under-exposing and then over-developing to recover the image: it\nbuys sensitivity and costs grain and colour fidelity. The steam, the smeared neon, the\nblacks that never quite settle — those are a laboratory decision as much as a lighting one.\n\nCook files Chapman with a cohort: Nestor Almendros pushing for *Days of Heaven*, Vilmos\nZsigmond *flashing* the negative on *McCabe & Mrs. Miller* to fade it toward Andrew Wyeth\n(`hnf 694`). Worth remembering that the whole New Hollywood \"look\" is substantially a set of\nprocessing tricks that let cameras go where they previously could not.\n\nA case for [[Colour]] and [[Lighting]]. Set it against\n[[The red tint over the bloodbath]]: one colour decision made in the lab by choice, one made\nin the lab under duress, in the same film." }, { "title": "Close-ups for no reason", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason.md", "summary": "After Hours cuts to big close-ups of light switches, keys and locks that turn out to mean nothing. It is Hitchcock's grammar used as a prank on an audience that has learned to read it.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "editing", "point-of-view" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "hitchcock", "film-grammar" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/" ], "citations": [ "sos 101" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 343, "body": "> Griffin goes into a room, and it cuts to a big close-up of a light switch on the wall, just a\n> light switch, and the lights go on, but nothing else really happens. It's like a\n> psychological twist each time, a joke.\n\n— Scorsese, in [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\nHe did it on purpose and often: \"There was constant cutting to extreme close-ups for no\nreason, just to build up paranoia and anxiety—total anxiety\" (Kelly, unpaged). He calls the\nwhole film \"a parody of film noir and also a parody of a thriller. The angles themselves are\nparodies—the angles, the cuts, and the Fritz Lang–type shots, the Hitchcock parodies\" (Kelly,\nunpaged).\n\nEbert explains why it works, and it is a good paragraph on film grammar:\n\n> If the close-up is a device to underline the importance of a moment to a character, Scorsese\n> used that knowledge to exploit unmotivated close-ups; Paul thought something critical had\n> happened, but much of the time it had not.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged\n\n\"In an unconscious way,\" he goes on, \"an audience raised on classic film grammar would share his\nexpectation and disappointment. Pure filmmaking\" (Ebert, unpaged).\n\nThat is the lesson. A close-up is a promise, and the audience keeps it for the director. Break\nthe promise often enough and the audience starts to feel what Paul feels, a man in a world that\nkeeps signalling importance and never paying off. Scorsese's own model is Hitchcock: \"After\nHours is to some extent a parody of Hitchcock's style\" (`sos 101`), and he names one borrowed\nshot, a hand holding the invitation over the ground below, which \"refers back to the moment in\nMamie where she's holding the gun\" (`sos 101`; the scan's OCR reads *Marnie* as \"Mamie\").\n\nA case for [[Editing]] and [[Camerawork]]. Compare [[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be\nparanoid]], where the same director took Hitchcock's guilt seriously, and\n[[After Hours — the keys]], the loudest of the empty close-ups." }, { "title": "Corman offered to make it Black", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black.md", "summary": "Roger Corman would fund Mean Streets for $150,000 if every character were Black. Scorsese nearly said yes, then couldn't see them in church.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "formula", "character" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production-story", "commerce", "blaxploitation" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/concepts/formula/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/commerce/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/films/mean-streets/" ], "citations": [ "sos 39" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 269, "body": "After *Boxcar Bertha*, Scorsese took the script to Roger Corman, who was then making money on\nBlack-cast action films:\n\n> So Roger said to me, 'If you want to make Mean Streets, and if you're willing to swing a\n> little' — I'll never forget that phrase - 'and make them all black, I'll give you $150,000\n> and you can shoot it all with a non-Union crew in New York.'\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 39`\n\nKelly says Scorsese \"was so anxious, he actually considered this\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). He turned it down for a\nreason that is really a claim about the film:\n\n> But I soon realized that I just couldn't see those black guys in church, or at confession. It\n> just wouldn't work. The plot wasn't really anything, it was the characters that mattered, so\n> I stuck to my guns.\n\n— `sos 39`\n\n**Why keep it.** Because it shows what a [[Formula]] is from the financier's side. To Corman the\nstory was a crime plot, and any milieu could be swapped in: the blaxploitation cycle was the\nmilieu that was selling. To Scorsese the plot \"wasn't really anything\"; the film was a specific\ncommunity's relationship to a specific church. The offer and the refusal are two theories of\nwhat a genre film is.\n\nIt also cost him: the offer was New York, non-union and ready to go. Refusing it meant\nLos Angeles, another backer and a smaller share of real Little Italy on screen\n([[New York was Los Angeles]]). See [[Independence, 1973]] and [[Commerce]]." }, { "title": "The Craft got better as it got older", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older.md", "summary": "Mixed reviews, a surprise hit, then three decades of reappraisal that inverted which half of the film people take seriously.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "format", "formula" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "reception", "commerce" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/contexts/values/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/concepts/format/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/sources/ebert-craft-review/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 214, "body": "The numbers first. Made for about US$15 million, opened to US$6.7 million and finished on\nUS$55.6 million worldwide — a hit on reviews that were, at best, split. It holds a Saturn\nnomination for Balk and an MTV Movie Award for best fight.\n\n[[Ebert — The Craft review (1996)]] gave it two stars and located the failure precisely:\n\n> The movie's failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and\n> special effects.\n\n**What changed.** Nothing in the film. The reappraisal is a reweighting: the first hour —\nfriendship, power, four girls who are each specifically unhappy — is now the part that gets\ntaken seriously, and the moralising second half is read as the studio flinching. Nancy, the\n1996 cautionary example, is now routinely the sympathetic centre\n([[The Craft — Nancy's turn]]).\n\n**Why keep this as a note.** It is the clearest case here of a text staying still while its\n[[Values]] context moves, and a caution about treating any single review — including a good\none — as the meaning of a film. Compare [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]], where the gap opened\nin the opposite direction: the director's intended reading lost to the audience's on opening\nnight, and never recovered it.\n\nSee [[Commerce]] and [[Format]]." }, { "title": "De Niro wrote in the margins", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins.md", "summary": "De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting", "spoken-language" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "authorship" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/concepts/acting/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/" ], "citations": [ "smc 316", "smc 307", "sos 60" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 225, "body": "> De Niro's shooting script reveals his extensive contributions to the screenplay and various\n> scenes, especially regarding Travis Bickle's dialogue and his interactions with particular\n> actors. These revisions made their way into Schrader's final script version. In fact, De\n> Niro's improvisation resulted in one of the most famous lines in any film where Travis\n> stands in front of the mirror and asks, \"Are you talking to me?\" This scene is one about\n> which the audience, critics, and Scorsese himself in interviews all agree about De Niro's\n> authorship.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 316`\n\nThe Companion treats De Niro's process as a form of authorship in its own right — the\nperformer as soloist interpreting a score, with the notes from *Mean Streets* and\n*Taxi Driver* as documentary evidence of the arrangement being changed (`smc 307`).\n\nRelated, and in the same register: the coffee-shop scene between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd\nwas improvised for about twelve minutes, transcribed, then shot; it runs about three minutes\nin the finished film ([[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 60`).\n\nA case for [[Acting]]. See [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] for the scene itself, and\n[[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]] for the influence that arrived through the writer instead.\nThe useful generalisation: on this film, ask *which* author before attributing anything." }, { "title": "The first flushing toilet", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/first-flushing-toilet.md", "summary": "Psycho is generally credited with the first toilet flushed on screen in a mainstream American film — and the flush is a plot point.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "censorship" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 133, "body": "[[Psycho (1960)]] is generally credited as the first mainstream American film to show a\ntoilet flushing on screen — a genuine taboo under the Production Code's regime of\npropriety ([[The Production Code and Psycho]]). Screenwriter Joseph Stefano wanted it in\ndeliberately, as a marker that this film would show what others wouldn't\n([[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]]).\n\nThe elegant part: it isn't a dare for its own sake. Marion flushes the torn-up note of her\n[[The MacGuffin|MacGuffin]] arithmetic — and the scrap that *doesn't* flush is what later\nlets Lila prove Marion was in the room. The transgression does plot work: propriety\nbroken in exactly the place the plot needs a trace to survive.\n\nA neat micro-example of how control contexts shape texts right down to the props." }, { "title": "The first half hour came from a radio monologue", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue.md", "summary": "The diner, the bagel paperweights, the $20 out the cab window: Joe Frank had broadcast them in a radio piece called Lies. The screenwriter admitted it decades later, and the settlement was about $30,000.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure", "spoken-language" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "authorship", "plagiarism", "screenplay" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/" ], "citations": [ "sos 97" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 320, "body": "Joe Frank made late-night radio: long first-person monologues, part fiction, part confession,\nread over music. One of them, \"Lies\", aired in the early 1980s. In 1985 someone rang him and\nasked if he had seen *After Hours*. His widow, Michal Story, tells what happened next:\n\n> He went to see it and was struck that a lot of the details from the beginning were taken\n> verbatim: the plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights, the money blowing out of\n> the window of the cab, and the girl who tells a story of having been raped. Joe threatened to\n> file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled for about $30,000.\n\n— Michal Story, in [[After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)]]\n\nThe screenwriter, Joseph Minion, does not deny it: \"details from it unfortunately wound up in\nthe first section of the script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable\" (same\nsource). Minion's script was called *Lies* when it reached Scorsese (Kelly, unpaged), later\n*A Night in SoHo* (`sos 97`).\n\nThe library tells the other half of the story without knowing it. Scorsese's first reaction to\nthe script was to the opening: \"I started reading it and really liked the first two or three\npages. I liked the dialogue\" (`sos 97`). Minion's teacher at Columbia, Dušan Makavejev, \"had\ngiven it an A!\" (`sos 97`). None of the books mentions Frank.\n\nFrank himself drew a line. On a forum in 2007, as quoted on the\n[Joe Frank Wiki](https://jfwiki.org/index.php?title=Lies), he said the opening was his \"word\nfor word\", but that \"the remainder of the film was the work of the writer.\"\n\nWhy it belongs here: the credit on a film is a legal fact, not a description of who made what.\nCompare the dispute over [[Mean Streets — the back room]], where the argument is between\nimprovisation and writing, and [[De Niro wrote in the margins]]. See [[After Hours — the diner]]." }, { "title": "Five set-ups a day became sixteen", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen.md", "summary": "Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "lighting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production", "ballhaus", "budget" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/films/mean-streets/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/films/after-hours/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/" ], "citations": [ "sos 99", "msk 125", "sos 107", "sos 47" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "msk", "title": "Jaspers & Warnecke — Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 329, "body": "> I had laid out all the shots in advance on paper, with little drawings on the margins of the\n> script. But it worked out at about 500 shots, which was impossible. The way I had been\n> shooting before this, we managed to do five set-ups a day and this script required an\n> average of sixteen a day! But Michael thought he could do it.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 99`\n\nMichael is [[Michael Ballhaus]], who had shot fourteen films for Fassbinder and brought\nFassbinder's speed with him. He ran his own crew and operated the camera himself, and the crew\ncame from NABET, the smaller New York union, \"instead of the I A, because it was an\nindependent film\" (`sos 99`). Fast film stock did the rest: \"for some scenes we had to take the\nstreet lights down because it was so bright\" (`sos 99`).\n\nBallhaus's memory of the numbers is bigger. A producer, he says, told Scorsese: \"I've seen the\nshot list and they're 600 shots. How do you think you'll manage? We have 40 nights\" (`msk 125`).\n\nScorsese's verdict on the shoot: \"On the first day of shooting I realized happily that I had no\ntime to sit down or wait in my trailer. If I was sitting down, there was something wrong! It was\nlike a rebirth by the end of that film\" (`sos 99`). The drawings were what made it possible:\n\"So you have to have a blueprint, and the drawings I do are that plan\" (`sos 99`).\n\nA case for [[Camerawork]] and for the [[Commerce]] context: the style of *After Hours* is\nwhat a fixed budget and a fixed number of nights produced. The next year Scorsese hired Ballhaus\nagain for *The Color of Money*, for the same reason: \"If I could get Ballhaus, I knew I could do\nit again\" (`sos 107`). Compare [[Mean Streets (1973)|Mean Streets]], where \"the economics\ndictated the style\" too (`sos 47`)." }, { "title": "The hand in the flame", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/hand-in-the-flame.md", "summary": "Charlie holds his fingers over a flame three times in Mean Streets: a votive candle, a match, a kitchen grill. It is his private theology, and it recurs in Taxi Driver.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene", "acting", "iconography", "character" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "religion", "motif", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/" ], "citations": [ "smc 377", "smc 380", "smc 378", "smc 98" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 299, "body": "The film's theory of sin is a burn:\n\n> It's all bullshit except the pain, right? The pain of Hell. The burn from a lighted match\n> increased a million times. Infinite. And you don't fuck around with the infinite. There's no\n> way you do that.\n\n— Charlie's voice-over, as transcribed in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the\nCompanion]], `smc 377`\n\nSo he tests himself. Ebert calls it \"the most famous shot in the film\": after refusing the\npriest's \"Ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers\", Charlie \"holds his hand in the flame of a votive\ncandle before the altar, testing himself against the fires of hell\"\n([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). He does it again with a match\nin Tony's bar, and a third time at the grill in his uncle's kitchen, where it \"causes him to\nsweat and grimace in pain\" (`smc 380`).\n\nStefan Sereda notices the ambiguity: \"the film is ambiguous as to whether Charlie plays this game\nto make manifest his spiritual pain or to flirt with temptation\" (`smc 378`). David Sterritt hears\nJoyce in it: the line about the match sounds \"like the priest who terrorizes Stephen Dedalus\"\nin *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (`smc 98`).\n\n**It comes back.** In [[Taxi Driver (1976)|Taxi Driver]], Travis holds his fist over a gas\nflame. Ebert makes the link in the same breath as the overheads: see\n[[Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view]]. Same director, same gesture, a different man:\nCharlie is testing whether he can bear hell; Travis is testing whether he can bear anything.\n\nA case for [[Mise en scène]] and [[Iconography]]: a prop (a candle) and a gesture (the hand)\nturned into a motif by repetition. See [[Church and street in Little Italy]]." }, { "title": "Herrmann scored the shower against orders", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/herrmann-against-orders.md", "summary": "Hitchcock asked for the murder to play unscored. Herrmann wrote the strings anyway, and Hitchcock conceded on the spot.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "non-diegetic-sound" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production-story" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 134, "body": "Hitchcock's instruction was that [[Psycho — the shower scene]] should play with no music —\nwater, screams, knife. Bernard Herrmann wrote the shrieking string cue anyway and played\nthe scene for him both ways; Hitchcock immediately agreed the scored version was right,\nreportedly waving off his own earlier instruction as an \"improper suggestion.\" The story\ncomes from Herrmann's own telling, retold in\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]] — self-serving, perhaps,\nbut nobody disputes the outcome.\n\nTwo lessons filed under [[Non-diegetic sound]]: the scene's violence is substantially a\n*sound* effect (screen the two versions back to back), and authorship is negotiated —\nthe most famous directorial choice in Hitchcock's most famous scene was the composer's.\n\nHerrmann scored the whole film for strings alone: his \"black-and-white sound\" for a\nblack-and-white film." }, { "title": "Herrmann finished the score and died that night", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score.md", "summary": "Bernard Herrmann took some persuading to score a film with a title he disliked. He completed it on Christmas Eve 1975 and died the same night.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "non-diegetic-sound" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production-story" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "sos 62", "sos 63", "smc 4" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 254, "body": "Scorsese wanted the composer of [[Psycho (1960)]] and had to work for him. Herrmann's\nrefusal collapsed in stages, and Scorsese remembers each one:\n\n> He said it was impossible, he was very busy, and then asked what it was called. I told him\n> and he said, \"Oh, no, that's not my kind of picture title. No, no, no.\" I said, \"Well,\n> maybe we can meet and talk about it.\" He said, \"No, I can't. What's it about?\" So I\n> described it and he said, \"No, no, no. I can't. Who's in it?\" So I told him and he said,\n> \"No, no, no. Well, I suppose we could have a quick talk.\"\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 62`\n\nHe finished the score on Christmas Eve 1975 in Los Angeles and died that night\n([[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63`). It was his last work. Scorsese's verdict: \"there\nwas no one who could come near him.\"\n\nTwo consequences worth carrying into [[Non-diegetic sound]]. The saxophone theme that plays\nunder the night driving is the last thing Herrmann wrote — a jazz-lounge lyricism at odds\nwith everything on screen, and the film's only source of tenderness. And the closing\ncitation of his own *Psycho* score turns the coda into a diagnosis rather than a recovery\n([[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 4`) — see\n[[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]].\n\nCompare [[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]: the same composer, sixteen years\nearlier, having to be talked *into* being right." }, { "title": "In every city there's one man", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man.md", "summary": "Columbia sold Taxi Driver on loneliness, not violence. Scorsese expected audiences to reject the film outright.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "format", "iconography", "printed-language" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "marketing", "reception" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/printed-language/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/" ], "citations": [ "sos 63" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 218, "body": "> I never realized what that image on the poster did for the film — a shot of De Niro walking\n> down the street with the line, \"In every city there's one man.\" And we had thought that\n> audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant and no one would want\n> to see it!\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63`\n\nA [[Commerce]] datum with two edges. The campaign sold the film's *affect* — isolation — and\nburied its content, which is the standard move for a difficult picture. And it worked on\npeople who recognised themselves in it, which is not entirely a happy outcome for a film\nabout a man whose loneliness turns into a shooting.\n\nScorsese has the anecdote that goes with it: a film student in Peking who followed him around\nfor three weeks asking what to do about loneliness, and kept coming back when the answers did\nnot help (`sos 63`). \"People related to the film very strongly in terms of loneliness.\"\n\nKeep it beside [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] and the audience that cheered. The film's two\nbest-documented reception facts point in opposite directions: it was received as an anthem of\nloneliness and as a revenge crowd-pleaser, and neither is what it was built to be." }, { "title": "The jukebox is the score", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score.md", "summary": "Mean Streets has no composed score. Every note of music comes from a jukebox, a car radio or a window, and most of it is ten years older than the film.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "non-diegetic-sound", "editing", "format" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "music", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/" ], "citations": [ "sos 45", "smc 275", "smc 274", "smc 278", "smc 265" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 368, "body": "The model was a 1931 gangster film:\n\n> I was influenced by the way William Wellman kept popular tunes playing in the background, no\n> score but source music. And that blend of different kinds of music became the soundtrack of\n> Mean Streets and later Raging Bull.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 45`\n\nGiuliana Muscio puts it technically: \"most of the time the music is diegetic; that is, it comes\nfrom a visible or implicit source – the jukebox or the car radio\" (`smc 275`). It is also old.\nThese men are listening to \"the music the characters prefer: therefore, instead of listening to\nthe hits of 1973, they enjoy Johnny Ace or the Ronettes\" (`smc 274`). The soundtrack is their\nadolescence, playing in their twenties.\n\nScorsese's reason is structural rather than decorative. In the neighbourhood, \"suddenly a piece\nwould come on and we'd stay with it for two or three minutes. Life would stop, so I wanted the\nfilm to stop and go with the music\" (`sos 45`). That is how [[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]] can\ncut on a downbeat: the song is not commenting on the scene, it is setting its tempo.\n\n**Why it matters.** 1973 is the year compilation soundtracks arrived: *American Graffiti* came\nout the same year, after *Easy Rider* (1969) and *A Clockwork Orange* (1971) (`smc 278`). But\n*Graffiti* uses its records as period wallpaper, and Scorsese uses his as memory and rhythm.\nKent Jones, who saw the film at thirteen: \"I had never heard music used in that way\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], afterword, unpaged). Pauline Kael,\nmore briefly: \"The music is the electricity in the air of this movie\"\n([[Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)]]).\n\n**What it cost.** The Stones' \"Jumpin' Jack Flash\" and \"Tell Me\" took $30,000 (`smc 265`).\nOther rights holders surfaced later: \"people came out of the woodwork years later and Warner\nBrothers would have to pay them\" (`sos 45`).\n\nA case for [[Audio]] and for the diegetic line in [[Non-diegetic sound]], which this film\nbarely crosses. Compare [[Herrmann finished the score and died that night]]: three years later,\nScorsese hired the composer of *Psycho* and did the opposite." }, { "title": "Killing the protagonist at minute 47", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/killing-the-protagonist.md", "summary": "Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure", "character", "point-of-view", "formula", "chronology", "conflict", "format", "the-macguffin" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "narrative", "structure" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 176, "body": "[[Psycho (1960)]] constructs Marion as a full classical protagonist — goal, flaw, moral\narc, even a decision to redeem herself (she works out how to repay the money the night she\ndies) — and then kills her roughly 47 minutes in, at [[Psycho — the shower scene]]. The\nstar of the film (Janet Leigh, the biggest name in the cast, marketed as the lead) is gone\nwith half the film left.\n\nStructurally this weaponises the audience's training. Every convention says the protagonist\nis safe; the shock of the scene is only partly the violence — it's the narration breaking\nits contract. The film then has to re-home the audience, and does: [[Point of view]]\ntransfers to Norman, prepared by [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] and confirmed by\n[[The money dies with Marion|the swamp pause]].\n\nThis is why [[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]] existed: the structure is\nunsurvivable for latecomers who arrive after Marion is dead and wait for Janet Leigh to\nappear.\n\nA story-conventions case\n([story conventions ↗](https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/)) as the canonical\n*violation* that proves the rule." }, { "title": "Manon was invented so nobody could call him", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/manon-was-invented.md", "summary": "The Craft's deity is fake by design. The witchcraft consultant refused to put a real one in a film teenagers would copy.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "iconography", "the-macguffin" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production-story", "ethics" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/contexts/control/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 242, "body": "Pat Devin, the Dianic priestess hired to design the film's rituals, invented Manon rather than\nuse an existing deity. Her reason, as reported, was that she\n\"didn't want hordes of teenagers running down to the beach or out to the woods invoking\nanybody real\" ([[Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft]]).\n\nEverything around Manon is otherwise built from real practice — the initiation, the calling of\nthe corners, the elemental assignments (Sarah Earth, Rochelle Water, Bonnie Fire, Nancy Air,\nthough the art department swapped Nancy and Sarah). The authenticity is the point, and the one\ndeliberate falsehood sits at the centre of it.\n\n**Why keep this.** It is a consultant designing against her own film's likely effect on its\naudience — an anticipated-reception decision made at the [[Iconography]] level, before\nrelease, by someone with no stake in the box office. That is unusual enough to be worth a note.\n\nIt also complicates any reading of the film as simply exploitative of Wicca. The practitioners\nsurveyed twenty-five years on split on the result: Christopher Penczak spent years\n\"explaining to people that the magick in the movie was not really what any of us did as\nWitches\", while Lilith Dorsey recorded that \"for Black witches like myself it was one of the\nfirst times we saw a witch that looked like us.\"\n\nCompare [[The Production Code and Psycho]] — constraint imposed from outside — against this,\nwhich is constraint volunteered from inside. See [[Control]]." }, { "title": "Michael Powell wrote the ending", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending.md", "summary": "The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "ending", "powell", "influence" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/people/michael-powell/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/structure/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/" ], "citations": [ "sos 100", "sos 101" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 314, "body": "The first cut of *After Hours* ended with Paul still inside the statue, driven off in the\nburglars' van. Scorsese screened it for two men he trusted:\n\n> After a screening which Michael Powell and my father attended, they both got very angry that\n> I had just ended the film with Paul being driven off by Cheech and Chong. Michael said,\n> 'That's outrageous, you can't do it, we want to know what happens to him.'\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 100`\n\n\"Then he said something about Paul falling out of the truck and winding up back at work and he\nmentioned Kafka. I said that I'd never read Kafka and didn't know anything about that\"\n(`sos 100`). They showed the film around. Terry Gilliam and Steven Spielberg \"agreed on one\nthing — that he should fall out of the truck!\" (`sos 101`). Then: \"Through a process of\nelimination we found ourselves with him winding up back at work. So we ended up with what\nMichael had originally suggested\" (`sos 101`).\n\nPowell was not a passing guest. Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor: \"Between The King of Comedy and\nAfter Hours, my life changed. I married Michael Powell in 1984\" (Kelly, unpaged). Dunne\nremembers him on set \"no matter how late, this elderly man in a butterscotch plaid suit and\nbright red tie\", who called him \"Boy\" ([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]).\n\nTwo things make this a good story. The man who complained ten years earlier that\n*Mean Streets* had too much red ([[Too much red]]) ended up writing the ending of a Scorsese\nfilm. And the ending critics call the most Kafkaesque thing in it came from someone who had\nread Kafka, passed to someone who had not. When a critic says a film is \"Kafkaesque\", ask whose\nidea the Kafka was.\n\nSee [[After Hours — back at work]] and [[Michael Powell]]." }, { "title": "The money dies with Marion", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/money-dies-with-marion.md", "summary": "The $40,000 sinks into the swamp wrapped in newspaper, and no surviving character ever learns it was there.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "the-macguffin", "structure", "formula", "point-of-view" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "narrative" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/psycho-1960/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/concepts/point-of-view/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 130, "body": "The $40,000 that drives the entire first act of [[Psycho (1960)]] goes into the swamp\ninside a folded newspaper on the seat of Marion's car — unnoticed by Norman, never\nrecovered, never mentioned again. The audience watches the film's ostensible subject sink.\n\nThis is [[The MacGuffin]] demonstrated with unusual honesty: most films at least pretend\ntheir MacGuffin mattered. Psycho lets you *see* the pretence dissolve — the money existed\nto move Marion to the motel and to aim the audience at the wrong genre (crime-and-flight\nthriller), so that [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]] lands on an unguarded flank.\n\nDetail worth teaching: Hitchcock holds the sinking car's pause just long enough for the\naudience to catch itself siding with Norman — the [[Point of view]] transfer, measurable\nin one shot." }, { "title": "Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent.md", "summary": "Alice's warmest feminist review ran in a magazine part-owned by the studio that made it — reception and commerce in one fact.", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "themes" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "reception", "commerce" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/contexts/values/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/" ], "citations": [ "smc 121" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 222, "body": "Reviewing [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] in 1975, Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary\nnoted that the film's positive reception in *Ms. Magazine* deserved an asterisk: **Warner\nBrothers, the studio that made the film, held a 25 per cent ownership stake in the magazine**\n([[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 121`).\n\nThey stop short of alleging anything, and so should we. What the fact does is expose the seam\nwhere two context forces meet. A review is a [[Values]] document — evidence of what an\naudience, in this case an explicitly feminist one, made of a film. But the venue carrying that\nreview is a [[Commerce]] object, with owners. Reception does not happen in a clean room.\n\nIt is the best single teaching example on this wiki for the reception lens, because it needs\nno theory to land: ask a class whether the review is worth less, and the argument runs itself.\nThe honest answer is that ownership is a reason to check, not a verdict — the same discipline\nthis wiki applies to [[Criterion — At Home in the World|a release essay]] or to\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|a gossip-driven history]].\n\nPairs with [[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]]: there, commerce shaped the\nconditions of viewing; here, it shadows the conditions of reviewing." }, { "title": "Nancy is the only poor one", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one.md", "summary": "Three of the four girls want something about themselves changed. Nancy wants out of a trailer. The film punishes her hardest.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene", "character", "setting", "conflict", "spoken-language" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "class", "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/character/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 203, "body": "The school uniforms flatten four very different homes into one frame, which makes the\nproduction design the only place the class difference is stated.\n\n- **Sarah** — a house, a father who worries about her, a history of depression treated as a\n medical fact.\n- **Bonnie** — burn scars; a comfortable home; her wish is cosmetic.\n- **Rochelle** — racial harassment at school; her wish is to be left alone.\n- **Nancy** — a trailer, a mother, and the mother's boyfriend, who is a standing threat.\n\nThree of the four ask the coven to change something about *themselves*. Nancy asks to escape a\nmaterial situation, and she is the only one whose wish requires somebody to die.\n\n**The consequence.** The film's second half treats all four wishes as equivalent moral errors\nand reserves its harshest ending for Nancy — the one whose motive was material rather than\nvain. That is the structural weakness in [[The Craft turns on its own coven]], and it is\ncarried almost entirely by [[Mise en scène]] rather than dialogue, which is why it is easy to\nwatch the film twice and not notice the argument it is making.\n\nA case for [[Character]]. See [[The Craft — Nancy's turn]]." }, { "title": "New York was Los Angeles", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles.md", "summary": "The definitive Little Italy film was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with garbage added to the streets. What couldn't be faked were the hallways.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "setting", "continuity", "mise-en-scene" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production-story", "locations" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/continuity/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/setting/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/" ], "citations": [ "sos 41" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 349, "body": "The money meant Los Angeles. Paul Rapp, who budgeted the film, told Scorsese that to shoot it\nfor $300,000 \"you're going to have to shoot it in Los Angeles\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Scorsese's own summary:\n\n> I did ten days of rehearsals in New York; shot all the interiors in Los Angeles, as well as\n> most of the exterior stuff including the final car crash; then we did hallways and the beach\n> in New York to get the authentic look.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 41`\n\nCharlie's apartment was a set in an office building on Hollywood Boulevard; the bar was in \"the\nChicano section - a very rough area\" (`sos 41`). To make LA look like Mulberry Street, \"we had\nto put garbage in the street\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\n**What couldn't be faked.** The tenement hallways. \"The halls in LA weren't the same. I\ncouldn't fake them\" (Kelly, unpaged). The seams are everywhere once you know: when Johnny Boy\nfires off the roof, \"the roof is New York because you see the Empire State Building, but the\nwindow is Los Angeles\" (Kelly, unpaged). The final car crash was shot in downtown LA at night,\nand the script was changed to send the characters to \"Brooklyn\" so that the unfamiliar streets\nwould make sense.\n\n**How many days in New York?** Nobody agrees. Rapp offered four; Scorsese says he \"swindled\neight days\" (`sos 41`); elsewhere he says five, and six (Kelly), and six \"with a student crew of\nNYU\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).\n\n**Why it matters.** Ebert's 1973 review said: \"The whole movie feels like life in New York.\"\nHe later corrected himself: most of it was shot \"in disguised Los Angeles locations\" (Ebert,\nunpaged). A film can be authentic without being actual. For [[Setting]], the lesson is that an\naudience reads a handful of true details, like a hallway, a skyline, or a feast in real\nLittle Italy, and fills in everything else. It is the same principle as [[Continuity]] editing,\napplied to place." }, { "title": "Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies.md", "summary": "A gunman played by Scorsese empties a pistol into the car. Critics have him killing Johnny Boy, sparing him, or leaving it open. The film doesn't say.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure", "character", "conflict", "chronology" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "ending", "dispute" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/structure/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/" ], "citations": [ "sos 221", "smc 107", "smc 301", "smc 379", "sos 9", "smc 144" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 358, "body": "Michael sends a gunman after the car. The gunman is played by Scorsese, credited as \"Shorty,\nMichael's hired killer\" (`sos 221`). The car crashes; Johnny Boy staggers off holding his neck;\nTeresa is hurt in the wreck; Charlie kneels in the street, bleeding. The film cuts away to the\nothers, watching television, washing their hands, and never comes back to tell us who lives.\n\nThe critics in the library disagree:\n\n- **Dies.** David Sterritt has Scorsese playing \"the shooter who kills Johnny Boy\" (`smc 107`).\n Anthony Cavaluzzi says Michael leaves \"Johnny the victim of a gunshot\" (`smc 301`).\n- **Survives.** Mary Pat Kelly: \"Johnny Boy and Charlie survive, dazed and bloody\"\n ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged).\n- **Open.** Stefan Sereda: \"it is unclear whether any of them will die from bullet wounds or\n the ensuing crash\" (`smc 379`).\n\nSereda has the film right. The ending is built so that death doesn't matter; what matters is\nthat Charlie's plan has failed. He tried to save Johnny Boy as penance, putting off every\nconfrontation, in Scorsese's words, \"until everything explodes. It's the worst thing you can\ndo\" (Kelly, unpaged). The kneeling\nis the image, not the body count.\n\n**Where it came from.** A real night. Scorsese and his friend Joey were in the back of a wise\nguy's red convertible at three in the morning; the wise guy flashed a gun at another driver,\nwho caught up with them a few blocks later and opened fire. \"The teenage kid was hit in the eye,\nthough he lived. It could very easily have been us\" (`sos 9`).\n\n**How it was made.** It was shot first. \"The first day in LA, the first night? The end of the\npicture\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). Robert Casillo\nnotices a detail: the gunman \"kisses his pistol just before shooting his victim, as if it were a\ncrucifix\" (`smc 144`). The director, as the agent of the film's judgement, performing a\nsacrament.\n\nA case for [[Structure]]. Compare [[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]: three years\nlater, another Scorsese ending the people who made it describe differently." }, { "title": "Norman among the birds", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/norman-among-the-birds.md", "summary": "The parlour's taxidermy is the film's thesis statement in set decoration: predators, prey, and a man already stuffed.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene", "lighting", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 146, "body": "In [[Psycho — the parlour scene]], Norman sits beneath a spread-winged owl, a raven at his\nshoulder, framed low and angular in hard shadow; Marion sits among soft light and rounded\nforms. He explains that taxidermy is his hobby — \"I hate the look of beasts when they're\nstuffed,\" except birds, which are \"passive to begin with.\"\n\nEvery layer of [[Mise en scène]] is doing narration the script withholds on first viewing:\nthe owl mid-strike over Norman's head (the mother, about to descend); birds as watchers\n(eyes that never blink — see [[The camera as voyeur]]); Marion — surname *Crane*, from\n*Phoenix* — as the next bird to be stuffed and preserved. Even the final frozen grin of\nthe film pays this off.\n\n[[Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)|Durgnat]] works this scene harder than any other\ncritic; use him for the full inventory." }, { "title": "Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view.md", "summary": "Scorsese's flat overhead inserts come from watching a priest lay out the implements of the Mass on an altar — not from any film.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "mise-en-scene" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "scorsese", "authorship" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/contexts/personal/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 280, "body": "> There are other links between *Mean Streets* and *Taxi Driver* that may go unnoticed. One\n> is the \"priest's-eye-view\" often used in overhead shots, which Scorsese has said are\n> intended to reflect the priest looking down at the implements of the Mass on the altar. We\n> see, through Travis's eyes, the top of a taxi dispatcher's desk, candy on a movie counter,\n> guns on a bed, and finally, with the camera apparently seeing through the ceiling, an\n> overhead shot of the massacre in the red-light building. This is, if you will, the final\n> sacrifice of the Mass.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] (this scan carries no page numbers)\n\nEbert makes the same point elsewhere in the same book: the overheads \"mirror the\npriest's-eye-view of the altar\", and Travis holds his fist over a gas flame exactly as\nCharlie holds his hand in the votive candle in *Mean Streets*.\n\nWhy this is worth a note rather than a footnote. Most accounts of the overhead shot in\n[[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] reach for \"godlike\", \"detached\" or \"clinical\". The\nliturgical reading is both more specific and better evidenced — it comes from the director —\nand it changes the object: an altar view is not detached, it is *attentive*, and what it\nattends to is a set of objects arranged for a rite. Guns on a bed. Candy on a counter.\nBodies on a floor.\n\nA [[Camerawork]] case. It is also the clearest single instance of [[Personal]] context\nin the wiki: a formal habit that runs across a director's whole filmography and traces to\nhis childhood rather than to his cinephilia. Compare [[Martin Scorsese]]." }, { "title": "Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway.md", "summary": "One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure", "chronology" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "ending", "production" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/concepts/structure/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/structure/", "/films/after-hours/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/" ], "citations": [ "sos 100" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 314, "body": "Scorsese started shooting without an ending. The one in Minion's script, Paul going out to buy\nice cream for June, felt thin: \"I felt something was missing there and we needed an ending that\nhad magic\" (`sos 100`). Minion's answer had magic:\n\n> So Minion came up with June in the basement suddenly growing in size while people were banging\n> on the door shouting, 'We'll kill him, we'll go get him.' We weren't going to use trick\n> photography\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 100`\n\nInstead, \"He just disappears off the bottom of the frame — you don't see any Tin Drum stuff —\nand then you cut to him born naked, curled up on the cobblestones in the middle of 57th Street\"\n(`sos 100`). Griffin Dunne, who would have played it, puts the birth somewhere else: \"she gives\nbirth to me on the West Side Highway, and I roll out covered in placenta, naked\" ([[Dunne on\nAfter Hours (2024)]]). Ebert, quoting IMDb, also says the West Side Highway (Ebert, unpaged).\n\nThen they told the man with the money. Scorsese: \"when David Geffen read this ending, he said,\n'Marty, come on!'\" (`sos 100`). Dunne's version is ruder: \"He takes a beat, and goes, 'Have you\nlost your fucking minds?' And, uh, I guess we had\" ([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]).\n\nGeffen's objection was a good note, and Scorsese admits it: \"David felt we had to find a natural\nsolution that flowed from the style of the rest of the picture\" (`sos 100`). Everything else in\nthe film is improbable but possible. A birth from a sculptor is neither. It would have broken\nthe rules the film had kept for ninety minutes.\n\nA case for [[Structure]]: an ending has to belong to the same world as the film. See\n[[After Hours — back at work]] and [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]]." }, { "title": "The red tint over the bloodbath", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath.md", "summary": "The muted colour of Taxi Driver's massacre is regularly praised as a stylistic choice. It was the price of an R rating.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "colour" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "censorship", "production-story" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/concepts/colour/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/colour/", "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/ideas/chapman-pushed-the-night-stock/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "sos 68" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 165, "body": "> But to avoid an 'X' rating for its American release, which would have reduced its\n> box-office earning potential, Scorsese had to agree to putting a red tint over the final\n> bloodbath.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 68`\n\nAn X in 1976 meant most newspapers would not carry the advertising and many chains would not\nbook the film. The tint was commercial survival, not palette.\n\nWhy keep this note: the desaturated look of the killing in [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] is\nnow routinely described as expressive — deliberately drained, hellish, dreamlike. It became\nexpressive. It began as a settlement with a ratings board. This is the cleanest case in the\nwiki of [[Control]] producing something later read as authorship, and it belongs beside\n[[The Production Code and Psycho]], where the constraint pushed Hitchcock toward the cut\nrather than the filter.\n\nA [[Colour]] case. The general principle: when a film's colour is unusual, find out\nwhether anyone was allowed to choose it." }, { "title": "Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong.md", "summary": "When the hair falls out, three girls cackle and one is horrified. Rachel True made that choice, and later explained why.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "authorship", "representation" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/contexts/values/", "/concepts/acting/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/the-craft/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 220, "body": "The retaliation spell against Laura Lizzie is written as a triumph. Three of the four play it\nthat way. Rachel True did not:\n\n> Everybody else was gleeful and cackling when their wish came true.\n\n> Rochelle had that moment because she's Black, unlike the other three witches, where she\n> thought, \"Oh, shit. I have really, physically hurt someone and I'm a little freaked out.\"\n\n— [[Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)]]\n\nTwo things filed here.\n\n**Authorship.** This is a performer overruling the scene's written register — the same\ncategory as [[De Niro wrote in the margins]], on a much smaller scale and with none of the\ncredit. The choice is visible on screen and it is the only moment in the film where a\ncharacter registers the cost of a spell at the time of casting it.\n\n**How the part was built.** True has said Rochelle was originally written as bulimic; the\nracism storyline arrived only after she was cast — \"then they hired me and switched [my story]\nto being about racism.\" So the film's one Black character had her interior life reassigned to\nher race at the casting stage, which is a [[Values]] question about production process rather\nthan about screen content.\n\nA case for [[Acting]]. See [[The Craft (1996)]] and [[The Craft — Nancy's turn]]." }, { "title": "Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree.md", "summary": "Ritual suicide or tabloid item? The writer and the director give incompatible accounts of the same scene, and the film supports both.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "themes", "structure", "conflict", "the-macguffin" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "authorship", "dispute" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/concepts/themes/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/concepts/themes/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "sos 63", "sos 66", "smc 394", "sos 62" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 252, "body": "Scorsese, on what he wanted from the massacre:\n\n> Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai 'death with honour' — that's why De Niro attempts suicide —\n> and he felt that if he'd directed the scene, there would have been tons of blood all over\n> the walls, a more surrealistic effect. What I wanted was a *Daily News* situation, the sort\n> you read about every day.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63`–`sos 66`\n\nThe disagreement runs deeper than the staging. Schrader denies the film is about Vietnam at\nall:\n\n> I didn't really make him a Vietnam vet. . . . It's assumed he has some kind of searing\n> memory and that he's had some familiarity with weapons, but it's not meant to be a story\n> about Vietnam and Vietnam is never discussed.\n\n— Schrader (1990), quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 394`\n\nScorsese's account is the opposite: the war is exactly what makes the reflected gutter look\nthreatening, and he ties it to an uncle who ran two blocks when a car backfired (`sos 62`).\nFor Schrader, Travis is Sartre's Antoine — existential, not traumatised\n([[The returning veteran, 1976]]).\n\n**Do not resolve this.** It is the most useful thing about the film for teaching\n[[Themes]]: two of its three authors describe a different film, the third (De Niro) rewrote\nthe dialogue ([[De Niro wrote in the margins]]), and the finished object sustains every\nreading. Intention is evidence, not verdict." }, { "title": "The shower scene is built from 78 setups", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/shower-scene-setups.md", "summary": "Commonly cited: about 78 camera setups and 52 cuts in roughly 3 minutes — and the knife never enters flesh on screen.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing", "montage", "continuity" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "numbers" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/concepts/montage/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/montage/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 128, "body": "The commonly cited figures for [[Psycho — the shower scene]]: around **78 camera setups**\nand **52 cuts** across roughly **3 minutes** of screen time, storyboarded by Saul Bass and\nshot over about a week of the schedule — an enormous spend of resources for a film made on\na TV-unit budget. Numbers vary slightly between accounts; treat as order-of-magnitude\ncorrect rather than exact\n([[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]]).\n\nThe analytical payoff isn't the trivia, it's the ratio: dozens of shots, and not one shows\nthe knife penetrating the body. All the violence is manufactured between shots —\n[[Montage]] doing what a single explicit shot never could, and doing it so effectively the\ncensors saw nudity that wasn't photographed ([[The Production Code and Psycho]])." }, { "title": "The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne.md", "summary": "To get the point of view of a set of falling keys, the crew dropped a camera platform four storeys on climbing rope and stopped it just above the star's head. The footage was out of focus.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "point-of-view" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production", "stunt", "ballhaus" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 276, "body": "Scorsese wanted the key drop in [[After Hours — the keys]] shot from the keys' point of view.\nIn 1984 that meant something had to fall. Amy Robinson, producer, tells it:\n\n> So our crew designed this Rube Goldberg contraption, like a platform with a hole in it. The\n> camera was attached to it. And then they had the platform tied up there on the fourth floor\n> of the building with mountain-climbing rope. They dropped this entire platform down four\n> stories of the building and it stopped just above Griffin's head.\n\n— Robinson, in [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\nGriffin Dunne was the star and also her co-producer. Then the rushes came back: \"the whole\nthing was out of focus. And Marty, of course, said, 'Well, we've got to do it again!' And this\nwas really the only fight we had\" (Kelly, unpaged). She refused: \"it's lucky Griffin's not\ndead. We can't do it again.\" Scorsese won: \"you never just say no to Marty\". They reshot it\n\"with a crane, and it was very simple, which was the way we should have done it in the first\nplace\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\nEbert credits the fix to the cameraman: \"Ballhaus came up with a terrifyingly fast crane move\"\n([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged), and he makes the point that\nmatters: \"In pre-digital days, that really had to happen.\"\n\nA case for [[Camerawork]]: the literal solution (drop a camera) failed and the illusion (move\na crane very fast) worked. What the audience reads as the keys' [[Point of view]] is a machine\npretending to fall. See [[Michael Ballhaus]]." }, { "title": "Tim Burton stepped aside", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside.md", "summary": "Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "lighting", "setting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "production", "what-if" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 325, "body": "Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne optioned Joseph Minion's script and went looking for a director.\nThey found one through a short film:\n\n> Well, he directed a tiny little line-drawing cartoon called 'Vincent,' which you may have\n> seen. Griffin and I saw it and were really impressed with it.\n\n— Amy Robinson, in [[Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023)]]\n\nThey met Tim Burton at Disney, where he was working with the animators, and he showed them his\nnotebooks. \"We felt that he would create a world, but we never got far enough,\" Robinson says.\n\"Partially because we couldn't raise the money with him. Secondly, because Marty had been sent\nthe script first, it turned out that 'Last Temptation' had fallen apart, so he was interested.\"\nBurton, she says, \"was very gracious about it\" (same source).\n\nDunne, asked by the BFI in 2024 what Burton's film would have been: \"It would have had a\ndarker visual look. Everything would have been different. God knows what I would have been\nwearing, or the other people. I think we would have looked like we were already dead and that\nAfter Hours was taking place somewhere in the underworld\"\n([BFI interview](https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/griffin-dunne-after-hours-martin-scorsese),\nBrogan Morris, 20 March 2024). Critics have been reading Scorsese's version as a trip to the\nunderworld since 1985 ([[After Hours — the keys]]); Burton's would have said so in the\ncostumes.\n\nTwo things to take from it. First, the order is disputed: Robinson says Scorsese had been sent\nthe script first, so Burton was the second choice who nearly became the first. Second, the\nbooks in the library do not mention Burton at all. This is a story that only surfaced in\ninterviews decades later, when Burton was famous enough to make it interesting.\n\nThe what-if is a good exercise in [[Setting]] and [[Lighting]]: Burton's SoHo would have been\ndesigned, where Scorsese's was found. See [[The Last Temptation collapse, 1983]] for why\nScorsese was free." }, { "title": "Too much red", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/too-much-red/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/too-much-red.md", "summary": "In 1975 Michael Powell wrote to Scorsese to say Mean Streets used too much red. Scorsese had got the red from Michael Powell.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "colour", "lighting" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "influence", "scorsese", "powell" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/concepts/colour/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/colour/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/" ], "citations": [ "sos 80", "smc 46" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 255, "body": "> Back in 1975, he'd written to me after first seeing Mean Streets to say that he liked it, but\n> I used too much red - this from the man who had red all over his own films, which was where\n> I'd got it from in the first place!\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 80`\n\nThe \"he\" is Michael Powell, director of *The Red Shoes* and *Black Narcissus*, whom Scorsese\nwould help rescue from obscurity and whose editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, later married. So the\nmost famous colour decision in the film, the red of [[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]], is a\nquotation, and its source thought it was overdone.\n\nEbert reads the red as \"the color of sex, blood, and guilt\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by\nEbert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). Both things are true: a colour can carry a meaning in the\nfilm and a debt outside it. A student who knows only the first is reading the image; one who\nknows the second is reading the filmmaker.\n\nThere is also a Powell nod at the start of the film: the projector in the title sequence\nrecalls *Peeping Tom* (`smc 46`). See [[Mean Streets — the opening]].\n\nPowell kept giving notes. Ten years later he fixed the ending of *After Hours*\n([[Michael Powell wrote the ending]]). See [[Michael Powell]].\n\nA case for [[Colour]]. Compare [[The red tint over the bloodbath]], where Scorsese's red three\nyears later was a price paid to a ratings board, not a debt to a master." }, { "title": "The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera.md", "summary": "Scorsese names one Hitchcock film as the source of Taxi Driver's camera moves — and it is the documentary-flat one, not the famous ones.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "point-of-view", "continuity" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "influence" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/continuity/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/people/martin-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "sos 60" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 247, "body": "> We looked at Hitchcock's *The Wrong Man* for the moves when Henry Fonda goes into the\n> insurance office and the shifting points of view of the people behind the counter. That was\n> the kind of paranoia that I wanted to employ.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 60`\n\nElsewhere he puts it more strongly: *The Wrong Man* \"has more to do with the camera movements\nin *Taxi Driver* than any other picture I can think of. It's such a heavy influence because\nof the sense of guilt and paranoia\"\n([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).\n\nThe specific borrowing is not a shot but a *procedure*: cutting between a man under scrutiny\nand the shifting attention of people deciding about him, so the audience feels watched on his\nbehalf. It is why the cab-depot interview and the campaign-office scenes in *Taxi Driver*\nplay as ordeals rather than as exposition.\n\nNotice which Hitchcock this is. Not *Vertigo*, not *Psycho (1960)*, not *Rear Window* —\n*The Wrong Man* (1956), the flat, semi-documentary, overtly Catholic one about an innocent\nman wrongly accused. Scorsese took the guilt, not the suspense. A case for [[Camerawork]]\nand [[Point of view]]; compare [[The camera as voyeur|Camera as voyeur]]. Nine years later\nScorsese ran the same formula as a comedy: Ebert calls [[After Hours (1985)|After Hours]] \"a\nSatanic version of the classic Hitchcock plot formula, The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused\"\n([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). See [[Close-ups for no reason]]." }, { "title": "You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople", "type": "idea", "url": "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "raw": "/raw/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople.md", "summary": "Two songs across one cut: 1943 crooning smashed into 1974 glam — the whole backstory of a life told in an audio transition.", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "editing", "non-diegetic-sound", "chronology", "montage" ], "tags": [ "atomic", "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/chronology/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/montage/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 144, "body": "The hinge of [[Alice — the prologue]] is sonic. Inside the soundstage past: \"You'll Never\nKnow\" in the Alice Faye manner — strings, croon, the promissory sound of the 1940s\nwomen's picture. Then the smash cut to Socorro, and Mott the Hoople's \"All the Way from\nMemphis\" detonates over the present — electric, male, loud, 1974.\n\nNothing needs to be explained about the intervening 27 years because the two songs\nexplain it: the culture that made the promise is gone, replaced by one that doesn't sing\nto women like Alice at all. It's the cleanest demonstration in the wiki that [[Audio]]\nand [[Editing]] can operate as a single code — the cut is *audible* — and a model case of\n[[Chronology]]'s rule that what a film omits is where its meaning concentrates.\n\nLittle test for students: play the transition sound-only. The entire premise survives." }, { "title": "Harvey Keitel", "type": "person", "url": "/people/harvey-keitel/", "raw": "/raw/people/harvey-keitel.md", "summary": "The actor in each of Scorsese's first three films on this site: Charlie in Mean Streets, Ben in Alice, Sport in Taxi Driver. Scorsese's stand-in before De Niro was.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Keitel" ], "codes": [ "acting" ], "tags": [ "actor", "scorsese", "new-hollywood" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/concepts/acting/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/" ], "citations": [ "sos 221", "sos 222", "sos 23", "sos 42", "smc 124" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 382, "body": "Harvey Keitel is the one thread through Scorsese's 1970s films on the site, and he plays three\nentirely different men. (He is not in [[After Hours (1985)]]; that film belongs to Griffin Dunne.)\n\n| Film | Role | Credit |\n|---|---|---|\n| [[Mean Streets (1973)]] | Charlie, the would-be saint | `sos 221` |\n| [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] | Ben, the charming married man who turns violent | `sos 222` |\n| [[Taxi Driver (1976)]] | Sport, the pimp Travis kills | `sos 222` |\n\nBefore any of these he was J.R. in *Who's That Knocking at My Door?* (1967), Scorsese's first\nfeature, and Charlie is the same character a few years on (`sos 23`).\n\n### Why Scorsese cast him\n\n> When I cast Harvey Keitel in my first feature, I found him to be very much like me, even though\n> he's a Polish Jew from Brooklyn.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 42`\n\nKeitel's own version: \"Perhaps I got the part of Charlie because Marty sensed that I came from a\nsimilar background\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). He was\nnearly not Charlie at all. Jon Voight was approached first, and Keitel was confirmed the night\nVoight dropped out; the shots of him walking through the San Gennaro feast were filmed the same\nday (Kelly, unpaged).\n\n### What he does\n\nIn *Mean Streets* he is the straight man to De Niro, and Pauline Kael saw that the straight man\nmade the film: \"Keitel makes De Niro's triumph possible; Johnny Boy can bounce off Charlie's\nanxious, furious admiration\" ([[Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)]]). It is a generous\nperformance in the technical sense: most of his work is reaction. See\n[[Mean Streets — the back room]].\n\nIn *Alice* he is the film's one moment of real danger, and the Companion reads him as a revision\nof the western: Ben, \"with his cowboy hat, boots, and scorpion bolo\", is the cowboy as threat\n(`smc 124`). In *Taxi Driver* he is the man Travis shoots first ([[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]]).\n\nA useful exercise for [[Acting]]: watch the three in order and list what stays the same. The\nanswer is less than you'd expect, which is the point.\n\nRelated: [[Robert De Niro]], [[Martin Scorsese]]." }, { "title": "Martin Scorsese", "type": "person", "url": "/people/martin-scorsese/", "raw": "/raw/people/martin-scorsese.md", "summary": "The wiki's first person hub: the filmmaker as walking film archive — personal context made visible.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Scorsese" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "director", "new-hollywood" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/films/after-hours/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/contexts/personal/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/" ], "links_in": [], "citations": [ "sos 48" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 621, "body": "b. 1942, New York. Asthmatic kid in Little Italy who watched instead of played; NYU;\n*Mean Streets* (1973); then, improbably, a Warner Bros women's picture —\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] — because Ellen Burstyn screened *Mean Streets*\nand hired him. Asked what he knew about women, he reportedly answered: \"Nothing. But I'd\nlike to learn\" ([[Criterion — At Home in the World]]). His own version of how the job\ncame to him is more barbed:\n\n> In Hollywood they liked *Mean Streets* a lot, but on the strength of it they thought I could\n> only direct actors, not actresses!\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 48`.\n\nThis is the hub note for Scorsese material. Everything Scorsese-related links from here.\n\n## Films noted\n\nIn release order. The full filmography, with what has been watched, is on\n[the Scorsese watch](/watching/).\n\n- [[Mean Streets (1973)]] — the opening, Tony's bar, the back room. His first film in his own\n voice, and the start of everything the next two inherit.\n- [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] — and its centrepiece,\n [[Alice — the prologue]].\n- [[Taxi Driver (1976)]] — the mirror, the phone call, the shoot-out. His first acknowledged\n masterpiece, and the most heavily annotated film on the site.\n- [[After Hours (1985)]] — the diner, the keys, and the ending Michael Powell gave him. The\n film he made in forty nights after Paramount cancelled *The Last Temptation of Christ*\n ([[The Last Temptation collapse, 1983]]).\n\nThe people who carry across: [[Harvey Keitel]] is in the three 1970s films; [[Robert De Niro]] in\ntwo. Kent Wakeford shot both *Mean Streets* and *Alice*. Amy Robinson, Teresa in *Mean Streets*,\nproduced *After Hours*, which was the first of his films shot by [[Michael Ballhaus]]. And\n[[Michael Powell]] kept giving him notes.\n\n## Why he matters to the wiki\n\nScorsese is the standing case for the [[Personal]] context force: a director whose\nmovie-memory is the visible material of his style. The prologue of Alice is the thesis\nexhibit — childhood rendered *as* the films that furnished it\n([[The $85,000 backdrop]]) — but the habit runs everywhere: genre knowledge deployed as\nfeeling, camera moves quoted like scripture. He operated inside the brief New Hollywood\nwindow when studios funded that sensibility ([[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|Biskind]]; [[Commerce]]).\n\nThe other half of the personal context is the altar. The flat overhead inserts that run from\n*Mean Streets* through *Taxi Driver* are, by his own account, a priest laying out the\nimplements of the Mass ([[Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view]]) — a formal signature\nthat traces to the church rather than to the cinema. When reading a Scorsese shot, it is\nworth asking which of the two he is quoting.\n\nHis influences are unusually well documented because he names them constantly: Hitchcock's\n*The Wrong Man* for paranoid camera ([[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]]),\nBresson by way of Schrader ([[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]]), Ford's *The Searchers*,\nRosi's *Salvatore Giuliano*, Menzies for painted skies ([[The $85,000 backdrop]]). The\nattributions are a research asset and a trap — see\n[[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]] for what happens when the authors of one\nfilm describe three different films.\n\n## Sources for this person\n\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]] — his own account, film by film.\n[[Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)]] — the collaboration from the star's side.\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)]] — the era, gossip included.\n[[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]] — the scholarship, chapter by chapter.\n[[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] — a critic who followed him for four decades.\n[[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey]] — oral history from the collaborators." }, { "title": "Michael Ballhaus", "type": "person", "url": "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "raw": "/raw/people/michael-ballhaus.md", "summary": "Fassbinder's cameraman, who came to New York and taught Scorsese to shoot sixteen set-ups a day. After Hours was their first film together; Goodfellas and The Departed came later.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Ballhaus" ], "codes": [ "camerawork", "lighting" ], "tags": [ "cinematographer", "scorsese", "fassbinder" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/lighting/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/" ], "citations": [ "hnf 470", "sos 115", "sos 99", "msk 125", "sos 107" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "hnf", "title": "David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "msk", "title": "Jaspers & Warnecke — Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 412, "body": "Michael Ballhaus (1935–2017) shot fourteen films for Rainer Werner Fassbinder before he came\nto America (`hnf 470`; `sos 115`). He brought one thing Scorsese badly needed in 1984: speed.\n\nThe editors of Scorsese on Scorsese give the background:\n\n> At the age of twenty, in 1955, Ballhaus had observed the shooting of Max Ophuls's last film,\n> Lola Montes; and it was his ability to mount complex camera movements rapidly — a feature of\n> Ophuls's style - which immediately impressed Scorsese.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 115`\n\nScorsese's version is warmer and less reliable: \"Michael is a gentleman. He smiles on the set,\nhe is very pleasant and he's Max Ophuls's nephew. He also moves quickly\" (`sos 99`). Ballhaus\nhimself says only that his parents knew Ophüls (`msk 125`). Treat \"nephew\" as a Scorsese\npromotion.\n\n### The films with Scorsese\n\n[[After Hours (1985)]] first, then *The Color of Money*, *The Last Temptation of Christ*, the *New York Stories* segment *Life Lessons*,\n*Goodfellas*, *The Age of Innocence*, *Gangs of New York* and *The Departed*. Scorsese hired him\nfor the second one for a practical reason: \"If I could get Ballhaus, I knew I could do it again\"\n(`sos 107`).\n\nHe had wanted the job for years. \"When I first saw Martin Scorsese, he was in Berlin talking\nabout film preservation and how to prevent colors from fading. I was sitting there, and I said to\nmyself, 'One day I'm going to shoot a movie with this director'\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin\nScorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged).\n\n### What he did on After Hours\n\nHe ran his own crew and operated the camera himself (`sos 99`), which is how a shot list of 500\nor 600 set-ups fitted into forty nights ([[Five set-ups a day became sixteen]]). He found the\ncrane move that replaced the dropped camera in [[The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne]], and\nthe jib-arm swoop in [[After Hours — the diner]]. Scorsese describes the lighting as \"a takeoff\non German Expressionism—the shadow of the walls in the staircase, a shadow against the wall\"\n(Kelly, unpaged): Fassbinder's cameraman quoting Weimar for a comedy.\n\n### Disputes\n\n- **Arrival in America.** The sos editors say he first came in 1982 to shoot *Baby, It's You*\n for John Sayles (`sos 115`, where the scan reads \"198Z\"). Cook says he relocated in 1980\n (`hnf 470`).\n- **Ophüls.** Nephew (Scorsese, `sos 99`) or family friend (Ballhaus, `msk 125`).\n\nRelated: [[Martin Scorsese]], [[Camerawork]], [[Lighting]]." }, { "title": "Michael Powell", "type": "person", "url": "/people/michael-powell/", "raw": "/raw/people/michael-powell.md", "summary": "The director of The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, rescued from obscurity by Scorsese, married to his editor, and a standing note-giver on his films: too much red, the wrong gloves, and the ending of After Hours.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Powell" ], "codes": [ "colour" ], "tags": [ "director", "british", "scorsese", "influence" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/concepts/colour/" ], "links_in": [ "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/people/martin-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "sos 20", "sos 77", "sos 80", "smc 46" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 318, "body": "Michael Powell (1905–1990) made *Black Narcissus*, *The Red Shoes* and *The Tales of Hoffmann*\nwith Emeric Pressburger, then wrecked his career with *Peeping Tom* (1960). Scorsese discovered\n*Peeping Tom* as a student, met Powell in 1975, and in 1978 put up $5,000 to re-release it \"on\ncondition that the poster and print said 'Martin Scorsese presents . . .'\" (`sos 20`).\n\nWhat he saw in it is the thing that ties Powell to this site's interest in [[Point of view]]:\n\n> It's as if the process of film-making becomes an accessory to the crime and makes us all feel\n> guilty.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 20`\n\n### The notes he gave\n\nPowell's real role in Scorsese's films is as the one person who told him when something was\nwrong, and was usually right.\n\n- **Mean Streets.** A letter in 1975: he liked it, but \"I used too much red\"\n ([[Too much red]]). Scorsese had got the red from Powell.\n- **Raging Bull.** Shown the script, he objected to Jake La Motta reciting Shakespeare: \"You\n can't have him doing that, whether he did it in reality or not, for this film it's just wrong\"\n (`sos 77`). Shown 8mm tests, he said, \"There's something wrong: the gloves shouldn't be red\"\n (`sos 80`). *Raging Bull* was shot in black and white.\n- **After Hours.** He hated the first ending and proposed the one in the film\n ([[Michael Powell wrote the ending]]).\n\nBy then he was family. Thelma Schoonmaker: \"I married Michael Powell in 1984\" ([[Mary Pat\nKelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Griffin Dunne remembers him on the *After\nHours* set at all hours in \"a butterscotch plaid suit and bright red tie\" ([[Dunne on After\nHours (2024)]]).\n\nHis influence also shows on screen: the projector in the *Mean Streets* titles recalls *Peeping\nTom* (`smc 46`; see [[Mean Streets — the opening]]).\n\nRelated: [[Martin Scorsese]], [[Colour]]." }, { "title": "Robert De Niro", "type": "person", "url": "/people/robert-de-niro/", "raw": "/raw/people/robert-de-niro.md", "summary": "Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The actor whose rewrites and rehearsal-room inventions are all over both films, often more than the credits admit.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "De Niro" ], "codes": [ "acting" ], "tags": [ "actor", "scorsese", "new-hollywood", "authorship" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/concepts/acting/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/mean-streets/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "sos 221", "sos 222", "sos 41", "sos 42", "smc 309", "smc 312", "sos 48", "sos 49" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 286, "body": "| Film | Role | Credit |\n|---|---|---|\n| [[Mean Streets (1973)]] | Johnny Boy | `sos 221` |\n| [[Taxi Driver (1976)]] | Travis Bickle | `sos 222` |\n\n### How he got there\n\nBrian De Palma introduced him to Scorsese at a Christmas dinner given by Jay Cocks and Verna\nBloom (`sos 41`, `sos 42`). They had grown up blocks apart in Little Italy without meeting: De\nNiro's crowd was on Broome Street, Scorsese's on Prince (`sos 42`).\n\nHe did not choose Johnny Boy:\n\n> He offered me four parts—not Charlie, that was Harvey's part, but four others. I didn't know\n> which one to do.\n\n— [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\n\"One day Harvey said, 'I can see you doing Johnny Boy.' I hadn't thought of playing him at all\"\n(Kelly, unpaged).\n\n### The authorship question\n\nDe Niro keeps turning up as a writer. His papers at the Harry Ransom Center show him rewriting\nJohnny Boy's lines, annotating motivation, and asking Scorsese for \"more of me, one scene, added\"\n(`smc 309`). On *Mean Streets* that produced the back-room scene, whose authorship is still\nargued over ([[Mean Streets — the back room]]). On *Taxi Driver* it produced \"You talkin' to me?\"\n([[De Niro wrote in the margins]], [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]]). Colin Tait's conclusion about\nthe method is the one to hold onto: it \"embodies writing rather than improvisation\" (`smc 312`).\n\n### After Mean Streets\n\n\"Robert De Niro was now a hot property\" (`sos 48`). Coppola saw the film and cast him in *The\nGodfather Part II* (`sos 49`).\n\nA case for [[Acting]] and for the site's recurring question about who authors a film. Related:\n[[Harvey Keitel]], [[Martin Scorsese]]." }, { "title": "After Hours — back at work", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work.md", "summary": "A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "structure", "chronology", "camerawork", "character", "themes" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "ending", "structure", "powell" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/structure/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/" ], "citations": [ "smc 101", "sos 100", "sos 101", "sos 111", "smc 103", "awf 47" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 1128, "body": "### Observation\n\nPaul has been sealed inside a papier-mâché figure to hide him from the mob. Two burglars take\nhim for a sculpture and load him into their van. They drive uptown. At dawn the back door of the van flies\nopen and the figure tumbles out onto the street. It cracks. Paul climbs\nout, covered in plaster dust, and looks up at the iron gates of the building where he works.\nHe walks in, sits down at his desk, and the working day starts around him.\n\nOver the end credits the camera moves around the office as the staff arrive. When it passes\nhis desk again, it is empty.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nSterritt's account in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] catches\nboth the providence and the joke:\n\n> When he finally makes it back to his office in the last scene, providentially deposited by\n> the thieves' van exactly where he is ordained to be, he is greeted by name by the computer\n> network that serves as the godlike spirit of the place.\n\n— `smc 101`\n\nAnd the last shot: the credits unspool \"over a slow panning shot around the office as others\narrive and take their places at their workspaces as Paul has done – but when the camera returns\nto Paul's appointed desk, he is nowhere to be seen\" (`smc 101`). Ebert noticed the same thing:\n\"close examination of the very final credit footage shows that he has disappeared from his\ndesk\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).\n\n### How it got there\n\nThis ending is the fourth one the film had, and it was shot last. Scorsese signed \"on the\nunderstanding that we would come up with a good ending\" (`sos 100`).\n\n1. **Minion's script**: \"Paul going out to buy an ice cream for June down in the basement, and\n that was it\" (`sos 100`).\n2. **The womb**: June grows, Paul disappears inside her, and he is born again on a New York\n street. David Geffen, who was paying, stopped it ([[Paul was nearly born on the West Side\n Highway]]).\n3. **The first cut**: Paul still in the statue, driven off by the burglars. Scorsese's father\n and Michael Powell were angry. \"Michael said, 'That's outrageous, you can't do it, we want\n to know what happens to him'\" (`sos 100`).\n4. **This one**: Powell's idea, reshot over \"the extra four days\" that Geffen paid for\n (`sos 101`). See [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]].\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Structure\n\nThe ending makes the film a circle: it opens at the terminal and closes there. That is what\nPowell saw. Griffin Dunne: \"he just thought of the most simple, elegant, satisfying ending that\nwas right in front of us all, you know, the circularity. Back at work, it's perfect\"\n([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]). A circle can mean two opposite things, and the next\nheading is the argument.\n\n#### Themes: saved or damned?\n\nScorsese says saved. \"That's why in After Hours it was best not to end with Paul stuck in the\ntruck; the wonderful thing is that he survives\" (`sos 111`). He puts it in the terms of his own\nlife at the time:\n\n> I do think the endings of After Hours and The Color of Money maybe have a little more hope in\n> them than my earlier pictures. Once you make a decision at a certain point in your life that\n> you're going to live, when you realize you've got to go on, then that glimmer of hope will\n> show in your work.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 111`\n\nKelly's version is the same, in one word of Scorsese's: \"'We need a resurrection,' Scorsese\nsaid\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). The plaster breaks\nlike a tomb and the man inside walks out at dawn.\n\nSterritt sees the other side. Back at the terminal, \"Pitched back into the tedium of processing\nother people's words – the incessant monotony that drove him to his hopeless, fruitless quest\nfor adventure and romance – he seems less like a redeemed soul than a damned one\" (`smc 103`).\nThe empty desk in the credits is the film refusing to settle it.\n\n#### Chronology\n\nThe night is continuous and the ending is a cut to morning. Everything in the film has been\n\"possible — in that order, highly improbable — but all possible\", Scorsese says, \"and I\ndirected each one realistically so the bottom line was always that it could happen\"\n(`sos 100`). That is why the womb ending had to go: it was the one impossible event, and\nSterritt agrees it \"does not precisely comport with the story preceding it, which presents no\nimpossible events alongside its many improbable ones\" (`smc 101`). The van door opening at\nexactly the right gate is improbable. It is not impossible. The film stays inside its rules by\na hair.\n\n#### Character\n\nPaul does not choose any of this. Kelly: \"Only when he gives up trying to impose reason on\nirrationality can he be saved\" (Kelly, unpaged). He is carried home as an object, which is the\nlogical end for a man who has spent the night being handled by everyone he met.\n\n### Audience\n\nBoggs uses this film in *The Art of Watching Films* as the textbook case of an ending changed\nfor an audience. His account is that the first version, with Paul \"carted away toward an\nunknown, but surely ugly future\", tested badly, and that \"audiences expressed a clear\npreference for the happier ending\" (`awf 47`). Dunne, the star and co-producer, gave him the\nprinciple: \"If the last five minutes are disturbing, it has an overriding effect on the first\nninety\" (`awf 47`). Scorsese's own account never mentions a preview; his is a story about\nfriends. Both can be true.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] — another Scorsese ending that looks like a rescue and may\n be a sentence, and another one the people who made it cannot agree on\n ([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]).\n- [[Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies]] — Mean Streets ends in a car in the dark with its\n fate unsettled. After Hours ends in daylight with its meaning unsettled.\n- [[After Hours — the diner]] — the other end of the circle.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Freeze the credits on the empty desk. Is it a mistake, a joke, or the film's last word?\n Ebert and Sterritt both noticed it; neither calls it an accident.\n- Put Scorsese's \"glimmer of hope\" next to Sterritt's \"damned one\" and decide which the last\n shot supports. Then decide whether it matters that the ending was chosen by committee." }, { "title": "After Hours — the diner", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/after-hours-the-diner.md", "summary": "A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "character", "spoken-language", "structure", "acting" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "opening", "authorship", "plagiarism" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/" ], "citations": [ "sos 97" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 984, "body": "### Observation\n\nThe film opens in an office. Paul Hackett is teaching a new hire the word-processing system,\nand the new hire makes it clear this job is not what he plans to do with his life. Paul\nlistens with the face of a man who once said the same thing.\n\nThat night he eats alone in a coffee shop with a copy of Henry Miller's *Tropic of Cancer*.\nA young woman at the next table, Marcy, recognises the book and quotes it at him. They talk.\nShe is staying with a friend downtown who makes plaster paperweights shaped like bagels with\ncream cheese, and she leaves him the number. At home, bored, he calls it.\n\nEverything the night will use is laid out here: the job he wants to get away from, the woman,\nthe sculptor, the address, and his own politeness.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nKelly's summary is the plain version: Paul is \"a nondescript computer programmer who meets a\nstrange but beautiful girl, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), in a midtown Manhattan coffee shop. She\ngives him her phone number. He calls\" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]],\nunpaged). Ebert's 1985 review adds the loneliness: \"a Midtown Manhattan word-processing\nspecialist who hates his job and his lonely private life\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by\nEbert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).\n\nThe camera is the thing to watch, and [[Michael Ballhaus]] explains the move he is proudest\nof:\n\n> In the beginning, in the coffee shop, the camera jumps over Rosanna Arquette to Griffin as if\n> it were a hawk grabbing this guy. These moments look easy on-screen, but it's not so easy to\n> figure out how to execute them.\n\n— Ballhaus, in [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\nHe did it with \"a thirteen-foot arm\" that \"moves up and down fast\", and he did it on a budget:\n\"We knew we had to do the film for less than $4 million\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Camerawork\n\nThe hawk move tells you who the prey is before the story does. Marcy is the one talking, and\nthe camera ignores her to swoop on Paul. It is also the first appearance of the film's method:\nScorsese wanted dollies rather than zooms \"because the dolly you can feel. The audience can\nfeel itself propelled into action. We used a lot of that in After Hours—dollies instead of\nzooms\" (Kelly, unpaged). A zoom looks at Paul. A dolly goes at him.\n\n#### Character\n\nPaul is built from absences: no friends shown, a job he tolerates, an apartment he sits in.\nKelly's one-line version of his ambition is exact: he \"just wants to get uptown\" (Kelly,\nunpaged). In the diner he wants something smaller, a conversation, and the film takes it as\na provocation.\n\n#### Spoken language\n\nThe dialogue is what sold Scorsese. His first reaction to Minion's script: \"I liked the\ndialogue and almost everything up to the ice-cream truck character\" (`sos 97`). To Kelly he\nput it more warmly: \"The first sixty-five pages were fascinating and the dialogue was very\nfunny, and I realized what I could do with it\" (Kelly, unpaged). Hold on to that. The pages\nhe liked first are the pages with a debt attached.\n\n#### Acting\n\nScorsese wanted Dunne played like a vaudeville straight man: \"Griffin, I wanted his timing to\nbe like Jack Benny's—those pauses\" (Kelly, unpaged). The comedy of the diner is in the pauses\nwhere Paul decides whether to take the next step, and takes it.\n\n### Production context: whose opening is it?\n\nThe diner, the paperweights, the cab ride and the story Marcy tells later all appear in \"Lies\",\na monologue the radio artist Joe Frank broadcast in the early 1980s (the dates vary by\nsource: 1981 on WBAI, 1982 or 1984 on NPR). Minion's working title was *Lies*\n(Kelly, unpaged). Decades later Minion said so himself:\n\n> I had at one point definitely heard the Joe Frank short story \"Lies\" that he read on\n> late-night radio, and details from it unfortunately wound up in the first section of the\n> script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable.\n\n— Joseph Minion, in [[After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)]]\n\nFrank's widow, Michal Story, lists what he recognised: \"the plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese\npaperweights, the money blowing out of the window of the cab, and the girl who tells a story\nof having been raped\". Frank \"threatened to file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled for\nabout $30,000\" (same source). Frank was generous about the rest: \"the remainder of the film\nwas the work of the writer\", he wrote in 2007, as quoted on the\n[Joe Frank Wiki](https://jfwiki.org/index.php?title=Lies). See\n[[The first half hour came from a radio monologue]].\n\n### Audience\n\nA 1985 audience saw a young man's lucky night beginning. The film is betting that you have\nbeen Paul, or been the woman at the next table, and that you know how thin the line is between\na pick-up and an ordeal.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[After Hours — back at work]] — the ending returns him to the same office, which is the\n whole joke of the structure.\n- [[Mean Streets — the opening]] — another opening that lays out a man's problem before the\n plot arrives, and another film where the credit for what we hear is complicated.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] — Paul calls a woman from a lonely room and the call goes\n better than Travis's. That is the last thing that goes better.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Watch the hawk move twice: once for the story, once only for where the camera starts and\n stops. Whose side is it on?\n- Ask whether the \"Lies\" settlement changes how you credit the opening. Minion wrote the\n script; Frank wrote some of its first scenes; Scorsese chose them." }, { "title": "After Hours — the keys", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/after-hours-the-keys.md", "summary": "A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "point-of-view", "camerawork", "editing", "setting", "iconography" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "point-of-view", "stunt", "ballhaus" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/" ], "citations": [ "smc 354", "smc 355" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 836, "body": "### Observation\n\nPaul gets into a cab uptown and gives an address in SoHo. The driver takes off as if the car\nwere in a cartoon: the picture speeds up, the cab darts between lanes, stops dead, lurches off\nagain, and the $20 bill in Paul's hand flies out of the open window. He arrives downtown with\nnothing for the fare.\n\nThe street is empty. He rings the bell at the loft, and a woman leans out of a high window\nand throws down her keys. The camera goes with them. For a second or two we are the keys,\nfalling four storeys straight at Paul's upturned face. Then he is inside.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nThe urban-space chapter of [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] has\ntimed the ride and named the driver:\n\n> The ride itself is compressed into 1 minute and 17 seconds of screen time, serving as an\n> ellipsis between the city that Paul knows and the city he doesn't. The anonymous taxi driver\n> serves in the role of Charon, ferrying Paul between one world and the next.\n\n— `smc 354`\n\nThe money is the first coin of the plot: the cab darts \"in fast motion and starting and\nstopping so suddenly that Paul's $20 bill – the only money he has on him for the night – flies\nout of the cab window\" (`smc 354`).\n\nThe keys are the shot everyone remembers. Amy Robinson, who produced the film:\n\n> There was a shot that Marty designed, the famous key-drop shot. Kiki drops the keys out the\n> window before Paul comes upstairs for the first time.\n\n— Robinson, in [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\n\"He wanted it from the point of view of the keys,\" she adds (Kelly, unpaged). How they got it\nis its own story ([[The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne]]).\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Point of view\n\nThis is a point-of-view shot with no one behind it. Keys do not see. The camera borrows the\ngrammar of the subjective shot and gives it to an object, which turns the grammar into a joke\nand a threat at once. Kelly reads it as a warning: \"they become a threatening missile, hurtling\ndown from above toward Paul's upturned face. They are a warning: He enters this world at his\nown risk\" (Kelly, unpaged). Ebert reads the whole film's close-ups the same way: shots that\npromise importance and do not deliver it ([[Close-ups for no reason]]). The keys are the loudest\nof them.\n\n#### Camerawork and editing\n\nTwo kinds of movement, both artificial. The cab uses undercranking, the oldest comedy trick in\ncinema, so Scorsese is announcing a genre. The Companion notices the break with his usual\nstyle: he presents the ride \"in a decidedly comedic and fantastic manner, eschewing his\ntypically hyperreal style and foreshadowing the overarching surreality that infuses the rest of\nthe film\" (`smc 354`). The key drop is the opposite: a real object moving at real speed toward a\nreal face, and you can feel that it happened.\n\n#### Setting\n\nThe keys come out of the window because this is SoHo in 1984:\nconverted factory lofts, few intercoms, artists living above the street. Kelly makes the same\npoint in brackets: \"(no intercoms in SoHo)\" (Kelly, unpaged). The address, 28 Howard Street,\nis \"just a few blocks west of the Little Italy of Mean Streets, and yet there is no hint of the\nshared geography that the two films inhabit\" (`smc 355`). See [[SoHo before the money, 1984]].\n\n#### Iconography\n\nKeys, money, locks, buzzers. The film is built from small urban objects that stand between a\nperson and a door. Kelly: Scorsese \"again uses objects—the keys, the twenty-dollar bill—as\nsymbols of emotional states\" (Kelly, unpaged).\n\n### Audience\n\nThe shot is built to make you flinch, and that is the lesson: a camera position can\nproduce a physical reaction before any meaning arrives, and a comedy can use the reflexes of a\nthriller.\n\n### A small dispute\n\nKelly's narration says \"Marcy must drop her keys to Paul\". Robinson, in the same book, and Ebert\nboth say it is Kiki. It is Kiki's loft, and it is Kiki at the window.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] — another Scorsese camera move nobody in the story asked\n for, which he admits shows \"the hand behind the camera\".\n- [[Bickle sees through glass]] — the other Scorsese New York seen from a cab, where the city\n arrives through a windscreen instead of being driven through in fast motion.\n- [[Psycho — the opening]] — the camera finds a window and goes in. Here the window throws\n something out.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Time the cab ride yourself against the Companion's 1 minute 17 seconds, and count how many\n shots are undercranked.\n- Find the other point-of-view shots given to objects in the film. How many are there before\n Marcy dies, and how many after?" }, { "title": "Alice — the prologue", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/alice-prologue.md", "summary": "Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "setting", "colour", "lighting", "audio", "editing", "spoken-language", "chronology", "character", "continuity", "format", "formula", "iconography", "montage", "printed-language", "structure" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "writing-project" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/contexts/personal/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/printed-language/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/structure/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [ "smc 122", "smc 26", "smc 121" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 875, "body": "### Observation\n\nBefore the story proper, a title sequence in the satin-and-script styling of a studio-era\nwomen's picture, then a soundstage: a farmyard against a painted sky drenched in sunset red,\nfog, a wooden house. A caption places us in Monterey, California. Young Alice — gingham,\nringlets, a Dorothy silhouette — walks the lane while Alice Faye's \"You'll Never Know\" plays,\nand announces she can sing better. Smash cut: Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later, a crane\nshot of a shabby house, and Mott the Hoople's \"All the Way from Memphis\" at full volume. The\ndream is over before the film begins.\n\nThe visual references are specific and identified. The farmyard recalls *The Wizard of Oz*;\nthe wooden house recalls *East of Eden*; and the sky is a deliberate homage to a named\ncinematographer's work:\n\n> [Scorsese] pays homage to the lighting style created by veteran cameraman William Cameron\n> Menzies for the spectacular skies in *Duel in the Sun* and *Gone with the Wind*.\n\n[[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly, Martin Scorsese: A Journey]] (`smj`),\nalso quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] at `smc 122`.\n\n### What Scorsese says he was doing\n\nNot inference — his own account, twice over. His interest in the film was partly to\n\"comment on old movies\", and of this scene specifically:\n\n> Trying to make Alice look like a women's movie and yet turn it upside down.\n\nScorsese, quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]],\n`smc 122`. The scene is also the one the literature keeps returning to:\n\n> The sequence most commented on and most admired is the opening, with its deliberately\n> artificial Classical Hollywood studio look.\n\n[[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 26`.\n\n### Connotation, code by code\n\n- **[[Setting]] / [[Mise en scène]].** The Monterey of the prologue is not a place but a\n *memory of cinema* — a set that declares itself a set. Alice's childhood is furnished by\n the movies she watched; the film says so by building her past on a soundstage. What that\n cost is its own datum: [[The $85,000 backdrop]].\n- **[[Colour]] and [[Lighting]].** The red sky is not generic nostalgia but a quotation of\n Menzies, and therefore of a specific studio-era technology for painting emotion onto\n weather. Technicolor as the colour of promised futures.\n- **[[Audio]].** Alice Faye is the sound of the promise; the glam stomp that obliterates it\n is the sound of 1974 actually arriving: [[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]].\n- **[[Spoken language]].** The profanity inside period diction is the pastiche's built-in\n bomb. The *Companion* gives the line as \"I can sing better… You wait and see, and if anyone\n doesn't like it they can blow it out their ass\" (`smc 122`); the Criterion essay gives a\n different fragment, \"I swear to Christ I can\". **Check the exact wording against the film\n before quoting it** — the sources disagree, which usually means the speech is longer than\n either quotes.\n- **[[Editing]] / [[Chronology]].** The largest ellipsis on this wiki: 27 years in one splice.\n\n### Audience\n\nThe prologue rigs the whole film, and its first readers said so. Ebert called the reversal\nbetween the first two scenes:\n\n> A parody of the Hollywood dream world that little girls were expected to carry around in\n> their intellectual baggage a generation ago.\n\nEbert, quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]] at\n`smc 122`; see also [[Ebert — Alice review (1974)]].\n\nNot everyone read the homage as critique. Kay and Peary's 1975 feminist assessment granted\nthe craft of the opening while arguing the film repeats Hollywood's stereotypes elsewhere,\nand turned the Oz reference against it — Alice, they wrote, is \"trapped as surely as Dorothy\nwas caught in Oz\" (`smc 121`). That argument, and the striking reason they distrusted the\nfilm's warm reception, is set out in [[The women's picture, 1974]].\n\n### Production context\n\nWarner Bros wanted the sequence cut; Scorsese fought and kept it\n([[Criterion — At Home in the World]]). He had the job at all because of how the studio read\n*Mean Streets* — see [[Martin Scorsese]] for his own sour joke about it. Defending an\nexpensive, plotless homage on a first studio picture was a declaration of [[Personal]]\ncontext: the movie-memory *is* the movie.\n\n### Compare\n\n[[Psycho — the opening]] — the other prologue on this wiki that compromises its audience\nbefore the story starts: Hitchcock does it by making us trespassers, Scorsese by making us\nnostalgists, and both films then spend their runtime collecting on the debt.\n\n### Writing leads\n\nThe pastiche is affectionate *and* prosecutorial at once, and the argument about which wins\nis already in the literature: Kay and Peary say the film's problem \"is not its Hollywood\nconventions\" but \"the lack of deliberate artifice\" elsewhere (`smc 26`) — which is a way of\nsaying the prologue is the most honest thing in the picture. Christine Geraghty, writing in\n*Movie*, reads the style as expressing social tension in the manner of classical melodrama\n(`smc 26`). Both are worth arguing with.\n\nStill to check against the film: the exact caption text, the title typography, and the line\nabove." }, { "title": "The Craft — light as a feather", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather.md", "summary": "Four girls, a chant, and a body that rises. The best sequence in the film contains no special effect at all — only rhythm, faces and a cut.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "editing", "mise-en-scene", "camerawork", "continuity", "conflict", "non-diegetic-sound" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "ritual", "suspense" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/concepts/audio/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/concepts/continuity/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 831, "body": "### Observation\n\nA sleepover. Four girls kneel around a fifth lying on the floor. Two fingers each under the\nbody. The chant begins — *light as a feather, stiff as a board* — flat, repetitive, gathering\nspeed. The body rises. It keeps rising, past the point where fingers could still be under it,\nand the girls' faces change from concentration to delight to something closer to fear.\n\nThere is no creature, no glow, no transformation. The scene's entire effect is a chant, four\nfaces and the decision about when to cut.\n\n### What the chant is actually doing\n\nThe game is roughly 330 years old. Samuel Pepys recorded it in the 1660s, second-hand from a\nMr Brisband who saw four girls in Bordeaux lift a boy on one finger each, then repeat it on\nthe cook to prove it was not a trick ([[The history of \"light as a feather, stiff as a board\"]]).\n\nThe physics are unremarkable. Four people lifting an 80 kg body carry 12–20 kg each, well\nwithin finger strength. What makes it feel impossible is **timing**: lift asynchronously and\nit fails, lift together and it is easy. So the chant is not an incantation. It is a\nmetronome. Its job is to get four people to pull on the same beat\n([[The chant is a metronome, not a spell]]).\n\nThat is worth holding onto, because it is exactly what the *scene* is doing to the audience.\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Audio\n\nThe chant is the engine. It arrives as a children's rhyme — sing-song, faintly bored — and\nthe film lets repetition do the work that a score would normally do. Each cycle is a little\nfaster and a little quieter, so the sequence tightens without anything on the soundtrack\nannouncing that it is tightening. By the fourth or fifth repetition the words have stopped\nmeaning anything and become pure pulse.\n\nThis is the cleanest case in the wiki of [[Audio]] generating suspense through *rhythm*\nrather than through content or scoring. Compare\n[[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]: there, the terror is a composer's cue laid\nover the image. Here it is four girls' voices, diegetic, and no cue at all.\n\n#### Editing\n\nThe cutting rate is locked to the chant. Faces, hands, the body, faces — a rotation timed to\nthe beat, so that the [[Editing]] and the [[Audio]] are the same instrument. The deciding\nchoice is what the film declines to show: there is no wide, uninterrupted shot proving the\nlevitation. The rise is assembled out of angles that each contain part of it, which is both\nthe practical solution and the reason it works. The audience completes the effect, exactly as\nthe four girls complete the lift.\n\n#### Camerawork and mise en scène\n\nLow, close, at floor level — the camera kneels with them. The room is a bedroom: carpet,\ncandles, ordinary domestic objects doing ritual duty. Nothing in the frame is supernatural.\nThe [[Mise en scène]] insists this is a sleepover, which is why the moment it stops being one\nlands.\n\n#### What it establishes about the coven\n\nBefore this, the four are a friendship. Here they discover the thing works, together, and the\nfilm has its founding event. Every subsequent [[Conflict]] in the picture is a fight over\nwhat this scene proved.\n\n### Audience\n\nThis is the scene that survived the film. It is the sequence people re-enact, and the reason\nthe phrase is now attached to the movie rather than to the folk game that carried it for\nthree centuries. Set that against [[Ebert — The Craft review (1996)]], which faults the\npicture for tilting \"too far in the direction of horror and special effects\" — the scene\neveryone actually remembers has no effect in it.\n\n### Production context\n\nThe rituals in the film were designed with a practising Dianic priestess, Pat Devin, who\nproposed a real initiation structure and invented a fake deity so that audiences could not\ncopy it ([[Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft]]). The levitation is the one\nsequence that needed no such invention, because the game already existed in every sleepover\nin the country.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Psycho — the shower scene]] — the other scene in the wiki where the horror is\n manufactured almost entirely in the cutting room, and where the sound is doing more than\n the image.\n- [[The Craft — Nancy's turn]] — the same coven, forty minutes later, once the film has\n decided somebody has to be punished.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Time the chant cycles off the disc and check whether the cutting rate actually accelerates\n or only seems to. This is a measurable claim and I have asserted it from memory.\n- The scene has no score. Confirm — and if so, note it, because the rest of the film is\n heavily scored.\n- Find whether Fleming has said anything about how the rise was rigged. A wire? A board? The\n answer changes the [[Continuity]] reading." }, { "title": "The Craft — Nancy's turn", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/craft-nancys-turn.md", "summary": "Fairuza Balk gets everything she asked for and the film changes its mind about her. The best performance in it, in service of the argument it loses.", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting", "character", "mise-en-scene", "colour", "conflict" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "performance", "class" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "/concepts/acting/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/concepts/colour/", "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/ideas/nancy-is-the-only-poor-one/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 921, "body": "### Observation\n\nNancy invokes Manon alone, on the beach, in a storm. She goes home to the trailer, where her\nmother's boyfriend is on the couch. He dies of a heart attack. The insurance pays out, and the\nnext time we see her she is in a clean apartment with a view.\n\nFrom here the performance escalates and the film's sympathy withdraws. Balk plays the rest of\nthe picture at a pitch nobody else is attempting — the flattened vowels, the stare, the\nsudden stillness inside the mania — and the script's job becomes containing her.\n\n### The turn is a class story before it is a horror story\n\nEvery reading of the film that treats Nancy as simply corrupted skips what the\n[[Mise en scène]] establishes in her first scene at home. She is the only one of the four who\nis poor. Sarah has a house and a father who worries. Bonnie's problem is her scars, Rochelle's\nis the racism she is subjected to at school — both live in comfortable homes. Nancy lives in a\ntrailer with her mother and a man who is a threat.\n\nSo what Nancy asks for is not the same order of request as the others. Bonnie wants her skin,\nRochelle wants to be left alone, Sarah wants a boy to like her. Nancy wants *out*\n([[Nancy is the only poor one]]). The film grants it, and then treats her wanting it as the\noriginal sin.\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Acting\n\nThe film's reputation rests here. Balk is doing something none of the other three are: she\nplays Nancy as someone whose ordinary register is already too loud for the room, so the\nescalation has nowhere to go except into stillness. The most frightening choices in the\nperformance are the quiet ones.\n\nEbert, unimpressed by almost everything else, noticed:\n\n> All four are convincing performers, Balk relishes her character's loathsome behavior, and\n> Rachel True has the sunniest smile since Doris Day.\n\n— [[Ebert — The Craft review (1996)]]\n\nNote the verb. *Relishes.* Even a two-star review recorded that the performance was operating\nabove the material. See [[Acting]].\n\n#### Character\n\nNancy is the film's engine and its designated problem, which is a structural contradiction\nrather than a character arc. The screenplay needs her to be the reason the coven works and\nthe reason it must be dismantled, so the second half converts a person into a threat without\ngiving her a decision that would justify the conversion. The mechanism is external — Manon,\nthe power, the invocation — so nothing she *chooses* explains what she becomes.\n\nCompare [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]: Psycho reassigns audience allegiance\ndeliberately and prepares it scene by scene. *The Craft* reassigns it by fiat, and the\nperformance keeps pulling the other way ([[The Craft turns on its own coven]]).\n\n#### Colour and mise en scène\n\nThe palette moves with her: the trailer's sodium and brown, the storm on the beach, then the\ncold blue-white of the new apartment, and finally the institutional flatness of where she ends\nup. [[Colour]] here is doing straightforward class signalling, and it is the most legible\nthing in the film's design.\n\n#### Where the fourth girl goes\n\nRochelle's arc runs alongside and gets even less resolution. Rachel True has said the racism\nstoryline was written only after she was cast — the character had originally been bulimic\n([[Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)]]) — and that she played the retaliation spell\ndifferently from the other three on purpose ([[Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose]]).\nBoth facts matter to how the ending treats her.\n\n### Audience\n\nThe reappraisal has largely been a reappraisal *of Nancy*: the character read in 1996 as the\ncautionary example is now routinely read as the film's centre and its most sympathetic figure\n([[The Craft got better as it got older]]). The film did not change. What changed is which\nhalf of it audiences take seriously.\n\n### Production context\n\nThe invocation Nancy performs was designed by the film's witchcraft consultant, who invented\nthe deity precisely so it could not be copied\n([[Manon was invented so nobody could call him]]). She also argued the coven needed a real\ninitiation earlier in the film, on the grounds that you cannot threaten someone with death for\nleaving a group they never joined ([[Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft]]) — a\ndramaturgical objection from a religious adviser, and a sharper one than most of the reviews\nmanaged.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[The Craft — light as a feather]] — the coven before the film decided it was a problem.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] — another performance that outgrew its script and became the\n thing the film is remembered for.\n- [[Alice — the prologue]] — the other note here about a film arguing with its own genre\n about what a woman is allowed to want.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Check the runtime split. My claim is that sympathy withdraws at the invocation; find the\n actual minute and see whether the film marks it or slides.\n- Rewatch for whether Nancy is ever given a line that states her class position outright, or\n whether it is entirely production design. If the latter, that is a strong\n [[Mise en scène]] example worth its own note.\n- The ending — the institution, the last shot. Read it against the original closing scene the\n consultant says was cut, in which Sarah reads to children in a forest clearing. Two very\n different films." }, { "title": "Mean Streets — the back room", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/mean-streets-back-room.md", "summary": "Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting", "spoken-language", "character", "structure", "camerawork", "conflict" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "improvisation", "authorship", "de-niro" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/concepts/acting/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/robert-de-niro/" ], "citations": [ "sos 43", "smc 309", "smc 312", "smc 311", "sos 42", "sos 48", "sos 49" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 1013, "body": "### Observation\n\nA storeroom behind Tony's bar. Two men, a table, a bare light. Charlie has cornered Johnny Boy\nabout the money he owes Michael, and he is patient, then pleading, then angry. Johnny Boy\nanswers with a story: a card game, a raid, a fight, a man called Joey Clams, another called\nJoey Scala, and a debt he was going to settle until something happened. The story gets longer\nas it goes and makes less sense. Charlie keeps trying to steer it back to the money. Johnny Boy\nkeeps not arriving. Somewhere in the middle both of them start laughing.\n\nIt is a two-hander with almost no camera movement, and it is the scene people remember\nDe Niro for.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nEbert's description is exact: \"Charlie is earnest, frightened, telling Johnny he has to pay the\nmoney. Johnny launches on a rambling, improvised cock-and-bull story about a poker game, a\npolice raid, a fight—finally even losing the thread himself\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by\nEbert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).\n\nScorsese's account is the one most people repeat:\n\n> In the scene in the back room between De Niro and Keitel after they meet in the bar, I\n> thought it would be fun to improvise and show more of the characters. We realized that we\n> liked Abbott and Costello a great deal, their language routines with inverted word-meanings\n> done with wonderful timing.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 43`\n\n\"The scene was Bob's idea,\" he adds, and when he shot it \"it was about fifteen minutes long,\nhilarious and clarified everything totally\" (`sos 43`). It had to be cut down.\n\n### Who wrote it\n\nThis is the most interesting dispute in the film's history, because every witness was in the\nroom and none of them agree.\n\n**Improvised.** Scorsese, above. He also calls it \"the long improvisation\" in Kelly (unpaged),\nand says he \"kept adding scenes\" as they came out of rehearsal.\n\n**Scripted.** Richard Romanus, who plays Michael, was there too:\n\n> I was there for the rehearsal that led to Bobby and Harvey's scene—the \"Joey Clams, Joey\n> Scala\" scene. They would run a part of it and say, \"Oh, that's good.\" Somebody was there\n> writing it down. When Bobby did the scene, I think he was throwing some lines, mixing it up a\n> little bit, but basically it was scripted.\n\n— [[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged\n\n**Written by the actor.** Colin Tait went to De Niro's papers at the Harry Ransom Center and\nfound the character notes, the rewrites and a note to Scorsese asking for \"more of me, one\nscene, added\" (`smc 309`). His conclusion: \"This preparation by De Niro embodies writing rather\nthan improvisation\" (`smc 312`). The archive, he says, points \"to De Niro as the scene's\nauthor\" (`smc 311`).\n\n**Structured improvisation.** De Niro's own account splits the difference. \"We would find a\nstructure for the improvisations and figure out how to pace it. It's not just freewheeling, it\nhas to have a structure. Then we'd tape what we'd do\" (Kelly, unpaged). That matches\nScorsese's general description of the method: \"Much of the improvisation in the film was taped\nat rehearsal and then scripted from those tapes\" (`sos 43`).\n\nSo all four are true, of different moments in the same process. The words were found by two\nactors in a room, taped, typed up by someone else, shaped by the director, and played back on\nthe day with some of it thrown away. \"Improvised\" names the first stage and \"scripted\" the\nthird, and the film is the fourth. The useful lesson for [[Acting]] is that the binary is\nwrong.\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Spoken language\n\nAbbott and Costello are the right model. The comedy is in the gap between what is being said and\nwhat is being avoided: every sentence Johnny Boy speaks is about the money, and none of them is\nan answer. Scorsese's line on why this was the hard part: \"the hardest thing for two actors to\ndo is just sit down and talk\" (`sos 42`). Fights you can get in two or three takes. Talk you\nhave to earn.\n\n#### Character\n\nScorsese reads the scene as a map of the whole relationship: \"We see the shifting of trust, how\nJohnny trusts Charlie but, God, he's got his problems; and Charlie trusts Johnny, but he's\nusing him\" (`sos 43`). That last clause is the film's judgement on Charlie, delivered in the\nmiddle of its funniest scene. Charlie thinks he is saving Johnny Boy as penance; he is also\nusing him to feel good about himself. See [[Church and street in Little Italy]].\n\n#### Camerawork\n\nAlmost nothing. For a film that tracks and slows and swings, the back room is shot plainly,\nbecause the performers are the event. It is the same choice Scorsese makes in the\n[[Taxi Driver — the mirror|Taxi Driver mirror scene]]: when De Niro is building a character\nout loud, hold still.\n\n### Audience\n\nThe scene is the reason De Niro became, in the editors' phrase, \"a hot property\" after the\nfilm (`sos 48`). Francis Coppola saw the film and, as a result, cast him in *The\nGodfather Part II* (`sos 49`).\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[De Niro wrote in the margins]] — three years later, the same actor's annotated script\n reshapes Travis Bickle, and the most famous line in *Taxi Driver* is his.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] — the other De Niro monologue to an audience that is not really\n there.\n- [[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]] — another film where the people who made\n it describe different films.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Watch for the moment the story loses its thread. Is it Johnny Boy losing it, or De Niro?\n Ebert thought you could not tell, and that is the point.\n- Put the scene next to the pool-hall \"mook\" fight. One is talk that avoids a fight; the other\n is a fight that breaks out over a word nobody can define." }, { "title": "Mean Streets — the opening", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/mean-streets-opening.md", "summary": "A voice in the dark, a man who cannot stay asleep, and a Ronettes record that lands on the downbeat as his head hits the pillow. The film's argument and its method before the first title.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "audio", "spoken-language", "editing", "non-diegetic-sound", "format", "character" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "music", "voice-over" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Playback: Mean Streets — The Home Movies", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/ideas/youll-never-know-mott-the-hoople/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/" ], "citations": [ "sos 48", "sos 45", "smc 97", "smc 276", "smc 375", "smc 297", "smc 46", "smc 377" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 961, "body": "### Observation\n\nBlack screen, and a voice: \"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the\nstreets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.\" Charlie sits up in bed in\nthe dark, goes to the mirror, comes back, lies down. He does it again. On the third return his\nhead drops toward the pillow in slow motion, and the drum figure that opens \"Be My Baby\"\narrives with it, one cut per beat. The camera finds an 8mm projector; the beam turns on the\naudience; the credits play over home movies of christenings, the San Gennaro feast and the\nfour friends on the street.\n\nThree minutes, and the film has told you who is guilty, what he thinks will save him, and how\nthe whole thing will be put together.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nThe voice is not Keitel's. It is Scorsese's, and he says so plainly:\n\n> My voice is intercut with Harvey's throughout the film, and for me that was a way of trying\n> to come to terms with myself, trying to redeem myself.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 48`\n\nAnd the record was chosen before a frame was shot:\n\n> In our neighbourhood you'd hear rock'n'roll playing in the little bars in the back of the\n> tenement buildings at three in the morning, so that was 'Be My Baby', when Harvey's head\n> hits the pillow. For me, the whole movie was 'Jumping Jack Flash' and 'Be My Baby'.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]], `sos 45`\n\nTo Ebert he added that the cut to the beat \"is all worked out in the script. That was all\nworked out, drawn in pictures\" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]],\nunpaged). This is not a lucky edit. It is the one thing in the film that was fixed from the\nstart.\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Spoken language\n\nThe opening line is a theology in four sentences, and the film spends two hours testing it.\nIt rejects the confessional (\"the rest is bullshit\") in favour of works: penance done in the\nstreet and at home. That is the whole of Charlie's plan for Johnny Boy, and it will fail.\nPutting the director's voice in the character's head, rather than Keitel's, makes the claim\nconfessional in a second sense. See [[Church and street in Little Italy]].\n\n#### Audio and editing\n\nDavid Sterritt calls these lines enough to \"remove any doubts about the deeply personal nature\nof Scorsese's first major film\" (`smc 97`). Giuliana Muscio describes the cut precisely: the\nsong is \"matched with a jump cut of sorts on the three beats of the beginning of the song, as\nwe see a sleepless Charlie's head falling on the pillow in darkness\" (`smc 276`). The three\nwake-ups are jump cuts too, which Stefan Sereda takes as a statement of allegiance: they mark\nthe film as \"informed by French New Wave filmmaking rather than classical Hollywood continuity\"\n(`smc 375`).\n\nThe record is the first sound after the voice, and it is a record from 1963, not 1973. The\nfilm's music is the music these men grew up on, which is why it sounds like memory rather than\nperiod dressing ([[The jukebox is the score]]).\n\n#### Format\n\nHere the scene hands over to the home movies, and to [Axis of Action's playback page](https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/), which\ncovers the title sequence as a lesson in form. One detail worth adding from Scorsese himself:\n\"the whole picture's a home movie, you see\" (Ebert, unpaged). Some of the footage is his\nbrother's, from his nephew's christening, and the reel is labelled \"Scorsese baptism\"\n(`smc 297`). The projector shot also nods to Michael Powell's *Peeping Tom* (`smc 46`),\nwhich will matter again in [[Too much red]].\n\n#### Character\n\nA man who cannot sleep, who checks his own face in the mirror, and whose inner voice belongs to\nsomeone else. Compare Travis Bickle's opening insomnia in [[Taxi Driver (1976)|Taxi Driver]]:\n\"I can't sleep nights\" is his reason for driving a cab. The two films start in the same bed.\n\n### Audience\n\nA 1973 audience would have heard \"Be My Baby\" as an oldie, ten years gone. The effect is\nnostalgia with an edge: the song promises a romance the film is about to deny. Kent Jones, who\nsaw the film at thirteen, describes the moment exactly: Charlie \"falls back on his pillow, at\nwhich point the action shifts to slow motion over a twice-repeated echoing drum figure, and we\ncut to closer and closer views of his head as he falls, synced to the beat\"\n([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], afterword, unpaged).\n\n### A small dispute\n\nThe sources cannot agree on the gauge of the home movies: 8mm (Scorsese, to Ebert), Super 8\n(`smc 276`), or a 16mm projector (`smc 375`). Scorsese bought the camera in Italy in 1970 and\nshould know. Trust him.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Alice — the prologue]] — the next year, Scorsese opens again with a counterfeit memory and\n a song, then smashes it with a cut.\n- [[You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople]] — the same editor's instinct, used as a blade\n rather than a caress.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]] — the other Scorsese moment where the camera does something\n the story didn't ask for, and he admits you can see his hand.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Count the cuts against the drum pattern. Is it three cuts on three beats, or two with a\n hold? The sources describe it both ways.\n- Listen for where Scorsese's voice gives way to Keitel's later in the film. Sereda places the\n switch in the church scene (`smc 377`)." }, { "title": "Mean Streets — Tony's bar", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar.md", "summary": "Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "colour", "lighting", "camerawork", "audio", "setting", "character", "iconography", "editing" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "music", "slow-motion" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/colour/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/sources/kael-mean-streets/" ], "citations": [ "sos 45", "smc 276", "smc 265", "smc 378", "smc 299", "sos 41", "smc 382" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 1007, "body": "### Observation\n\nTwo entrances into the same bar.\n\nThe first is Charlie's. The camera follows him in from behind, and the room is red: red light\non the walls, the faces, the smoke. The picture slows, and the sound slows with it. He moves\nthrough the bar greeting people, climbs up onto the stage with the stripper, and for a moment\nhe is the only thing in the room that is in focus with himself.\n\nThe second is Johnny Boy's. Charlie is at the bar with his drink; the drum on \"Jumpin' Jack\nFlash\" drops; the film cuts to slow motion at that exact frame; and Johnny Boy comes through\nthe door with a girl on each arm, hat tilted, grinning, in no hurry at all. The camera tracks\nin on Charlie watching him, then tracks back ahead of Johnny as he comes on.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nThe library's editors call the first one \"the celebrated opening tracking shot, when Charlie\nenters an infernal red-hued bar\", achieved with \"slow-motion cinematography and slowed-down\nsound\" (`sos 45`). The second was planned to the frame. Scorsese told Richard Schickel:\n\n> The moment of the downbeat, I knew that Keitel would be taking his drink and it would be slow\n> motion. Exactly what speed I wasn't quite sure of at the time – I think we went with\n> ninety-six frames per second\n\n— Scorsese, quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]], `smc 276`\n\nNinety-six frames a second is four times normal speed, so the entrance plays at a quarter of\nreal time. That is an extreme choice for a first-time studio release, and it is one the\nStones paid for: the rights to \"Jumpin' Jack Flash\" and \"Tell Me\" cost $30,000 (`smc 265`).\nHe could not afford \"The Last Time\".\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Colour and lighting\n\nEbert's reading is the one that stuck:\n\n> The real world is shot in ordinary colors, but then Charlie descends into the bar run by his\n> friend Tony and it is always bathed in red, the color of sex, blood, and guilt.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged\n\n\"Descends\" is the right verb. The bar is the film's hell, and Charlie's theology says hell is\nfire ([[The hand in the flame]]). Stefan Sereda pushes the reading somewhere more political:\nthe bar is \"a Hellish synecdoche for capitalism\", and while Charlie and Tony argue about\nreligion, \"a mob hit takes place in the bathroom\" (`smc 378`). The red came, Scorsese says,\nfrom Michael Powell, who wrote to him in 1975 to complain there was too much of it\n([[Too much red]]).\n\n#### Camerawork\n\nGiuliana Muscio notices the angle: these are \"tracking shots taken from the back of\ncharacters – instead of more conventional framing showing them from the front – following\ntheir movement in, and their control of, space\" (`smc 276`). The camera trails Charlie as\nthough it were one of the crew. It does not do that for Johnny Boy. It backs away in front of\nhim, which is how you film someone who has taken the room.\n\nThe slow motion does two different jobs. On Charlie it is interior: the red, the smoke and the\nslowed sound are the inside of his head. On Johnny Boy it is Charlie's point of view on his\nfriend, as Anthony Cavaluzzi notes: the jump to slow motion \"at the precise juncture of the\ndownbeat\" lets the track into Charlie and the track back from Johnny \"compliment the voice-over\nnarration\" (`smc 299`). Johnny Boy arrives the way Charlie sees him: glamorous, doomed and\nentirely unbothered.\n\n#### Audio\n\nThe bar has a jukebox, and the film has no score; everything the audience hears is what\nsomeone in the room could be hearing ([[The jukebox is the score]]). That is why the downbeat\ncan do the editing. The song is not commenting on the scene. The scene is happening to the\nsong.\n\n#### Setting\n\nThe bar was in Los Angeles, in what Scorsese calls \"the Chicano section - a very rough area,\nwhere the everyday violence was far worse than anything we showed in the film\" (`sos 41`).\nThe red helps hide that it is not Mulberry Street ([[New York was Los Angeles]]).\n\n#### Character\n\nTwo ways of occupying a room. Charlie works it: greetings, handshakes, the manager's circuit.\nJohnny Boy owns it without trying. Ebert's summary of Johnny is \"almost as a holy fool: a\nsmiling jokester with no sense of time or money and a streak of self-destruction\" (Ebert,\nunpaged). The first time we see him, earlier, he blows up a corner mailbox. \"Why? No\nreason.\"\n\n### Audience\n\nPauline Kael caught the room's effect in her 1973 review: the film \"has its own hallucinatory\nlook; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of\nlurid\" ([[Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)]]). The entrance has had a long afterlife.\n*Reservoir Dogs* adapts it to introduce its gangsters (`smc 382`), and the slow-motion,\nback-lit arrival to a needle-drop has been a crime-film convention ever since. That makes it\nan [[Iconography]] case as much as a camera one: a way of walking into a room that now means\n\"this man is dangerous\" in any film that borrows it.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Mean Streets — the opening]] — the other place the film cuts on a downbeat.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]] — three years later, the same director uses red as a\n settlement with a censor rather than a choice ([[The red tint over the bloodbath]]).\n- [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] — another room whose lighting tells you what the people in it\n are before they speak.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Time the Johnny Boy entrance and check the 96fps figure against the running time of the shot.\n Scorsese himself was not sure.\n- Find the shot where the red is broken by white light, if there is one, and ask what gets it." }, { "title": "Psycho — the opening", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/psycho-opening.md", "summary": "A crane over Phoenix, captions stamping time and place, then in through a half-open window. The audience enters as a trespasser.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "printed-language", "setting", "the-camera-as-voyeur", "point-of-view", "the-macguffin" ], "tags": [ "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/ideas/money-dies-with-marion/", "/films/psycho-1960/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/printed-language/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 192, "body": "### Observation\n\nAn aerial pan across the Phoenix skyline. Superimposed titles print the\ncity, the date, and the exact time — *two forty-three p.m.* — before the camera drifts to\none building, one window, blinds drawn almost shut, and slips inside to find Marion and Sam\nin a lunchtime hotel room.\n\n### Connotation\n\nThe captions are the printed-language code doing something sly\n([codes/printed-language ↗](https://axisofaction.com/codes/printed-language/)): the false\nprecision of a police report or documentary, promising that time and place matter — they\ndon't, particularly — while the camera behaves like the thing that actually matters: an\nuninvited watcher choosing a window at random. The film's first camera movement is an act\nof voyeurism; the audience's position is compromised before a word of dialogue. This is the\nseed of [[The camera as voyeur]], which flowers at Norman's peephole.\n\n### Audience\n\n1960 viewers were also being shown a woman in her underwear, mid-affair, at\nlunchtime — a censor-baiting opening discussed in [[The Production Code and Psycho]].\nRespectability is stripped in the first minute so that the theft — and\n[[The money dies with Marion|the MacGuffin that comes with it]] — feels plausible.\n\nHub: [[Psycho (1960)]]." }, { "title": "Psycho — the parlour scene", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene.md", "summary": "Norman and Marion eat sandwiches while the mise en scène quietly explains the entire film.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "mise-en-scene", "camerawork", "lighting", "spoken-language", "character", "point-of-view", "acting", "continuity", "the-camera-as-voyeur" ], "tags": [ "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Watch it on Playback", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-parlour-room/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 219, "body": "### Observation\n\nMarion eats; Norman talks. The room is filled with stuffed birds — an owl\nwith wings spread above Norman's head, a raven at his shoulder. Marion is framed in soft,\nrounded compositions near a lamp; Norman increasingly in low angles among hard shadows and\nsharp diagonals. The conversation turns on \"private traps\": *\"We all go a little mad\nsometimes. Haven't you?\"*\n\n### Connotation\n\nThis is [[Mise en scène]] as narration — see [[Norman among the birds]].\nThe set decoration states what the script withholds: predator and prey, watcher and watched,\na man already stuffed and mounted by his own past. The spoken code carries a double meaning\nthe first-time viewer can't yet hear\n([codes/spoken-language ↗](https://axisofaction.com/codes/spoken-language/)).\n\n### Audience\n\nOn first viewing, sympathy consolidates around Norman — shy, kind, trapped —\nwhich is exactly the allegiance the film needs before [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]].\nThe scene also quietly redistributes [[Point of view]]: it is the hinge where the film begins\nto hand the narration from Marion to Norman.\n\n### Reading\n\n[[Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)|Durgnat]] spends longer on this scene\nthan on the shower, and he's right to: the murder is technique, but the parlour is meaning.\nNorman's peephole moments later is the film's thesis about looking — see\n[[The camera as voyeur]]." }, { "title": "Psycho — the shower scene", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/psycho-shower-scene.md", "summary": "Three minutes, dozens of cuts, no knife ever shown entering flesh. Violence assembled entirely in the audience's head.", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing", "audio", "camerawork", "montage", "non-diegetic-sound" ], "tags": [ "close-reading" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [ { "label": "Watch it on Playback", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-shower-scene/" } ], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 275, "body": "### Observation\n\nMarion, having decided to return the money, showers. A figure enters behind\nthe translucent curtain. The curtain is torn back; what follows is a rapid alternation of\nextreme close-ups — knife arm, face, torso, water, drain — cut so fast the eye can't settle.\nThe sequence ends on two dissolves: drain to dead eye, then the slow pull-back across the\nbathroom. See [[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]] for the numbers.\n\n### Connotation\n\nThe frenzy of [[Montage]] *is* the violence. Because no shot shows the knife\nentering the body, the stabbing exists only as an inference the viewer constructs between\ncuts — the Kuleshov principle weaponised. The shrieking string glissandi\n([[Non-diegetic sound]]; [[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]) do the physiological\nwork the image withholds.\n\n### Audience\n\nHitchcock to Truffaut: transferring the menace \"from the screen into the mind\nof the audience\" was the whole method — \"I was directing the viewers. You might say I was\nplaying them, like an organ\" ([[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)|Truffaut]]). The scene also\ndetonates the film's structure: see [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]].\n\n### Production context\n\nThe scene took roughly a week of the schedule, used a body double\nfor many setups, chocolate syrup for blood, and a casaba melon for the knife's sound\n([[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]]). The censors' confusion\nover whether nudity was visible — [[The Production Code and Psycho]] — is proof of how much\nthe montage makes viewers see things that are not on screen.\n\nCompare the parlour scene, where meaning is loaded into a single held space instead:\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]]." }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the mirror", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror.md", "summary": "\"You talkin' to me?\" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "acting", "spoken-language", "camerawork", "point-of-view", "character" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "improvisation" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/concepts/format/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "smc 316", "sos 66", "smc 397", "smc 400" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" }, { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 1010, "body": "### Observation\n\nTravis, alone in his room, draws on a mirror. He plays both halves of a confrontation that\nhas no other participant: the challenge, the imagined reply, the draw. The sleeve gun rig\nsnaps the pistol into his hand. The lines run in a loop — *you talkin' to me? you talkin' to\nme? Well I'm the only one here* — and the loop is the point. There is no second person in\nthe room, and the scene knows it before Travis does.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nThe line is De Niro's. This is the rare production claim on which everyone concerned\nagrees:\n\n> In fact, De Niro's improvisation resulted in one of the most famous lines in any film\n> where Travis stands in front of the mirror and asks, \"Are you talking to me?\" This scene\n> is one about which the audience, critics, and Scorsese himself in interviews all agree\n> about De Niro's authorship.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 316`\n\nScorsese's own account gives the scene a source and a shooting circumstance, and both\nmatter:\n\n> Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson's *Pickpocket*. I admire his films\n> greatly, but I find them difficult to watch. In *Pickpocket* there's a wonderful sequence\n> of the pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement in and out, and\n> it's the same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his guns. I felt he should\n> talk to himself while doing this, and it was one of the last things we shot, in a disused\n> building in one of the roughest and noisiest areas of New York. I didn't want it to be\n> like other mirror sequences we'd seen, so while Bob kept saying, \"Are you talking to me?\"\n> I just kept telling him, \"Say it again.\" I was on the floor wearing headphones and I could\n> hear a lot of street noise, so I thought we wouldn't get anything, but the track came out\n> just fine.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 66`\n\nThree things worth separating out of that. The **hands** are borrowed from Bresson\n([[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]]). The **talking** was the director's instruction, not\nthe script's. The **repetition** was manufactured on the floor by a director saying *say it\nagain* — which is why the scene sounds like a man rehearsing rather than a man performing.\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Acting\n\nNowhere else on the site does a performance author its own text so plainly. De Niro's\ncontribution to Travis was not confined to the day: his shooting script carries extensive\nrevisions to Bickle's dialogue that reached Schrader's final draft (`smc 316`,\n[[De Niro wrote in the margins]]). What the mirror adds is a performer given a physical\ntask — the draw, the rig, the hands — and told to keep going until speech falls out of it.\n\n#### Spoken language\n\nA dialogue scene with one participant. The grammar is interrogative and the addressee is\nabsent, so every question is answered by the same voice that asked it. Ebert reads the whole\nfilm as a sequence of failed attempts to connect and files this one at the end of the list:\n\n> He is so lonely that when he asks, \"Who you talkin' to?\" he is addressing himself in a\n> mirror.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] (this scan carries no page numbers)\n\nNote that Ebert quotes the line as \"Who you talkin' to?\" and the Companion quotes it as \"Are\nyou talking to me?\" Neither is quite the delivered line, which shifts across the take. The\nscene is quoted more often than it is watched.\n\n#### Camerawork and point of view\n\nThe mirror is the film's whole method in one prop. For most of the running time we are\nbehind Travis's eyes — the windscreen, the rear-view mirror, the slow pans across a street\nhe has already decided about ([[Bickle sees through glass]]). Here the apparatus turns\naround and he is finally on the other side of his own gaze. One critic's formulation is\nworth keeping:\n\n> the film \"is about a man who begins as a viewer of life, through the 'screen' of his cab\n> window, who then goes through the looking glass to become an 'actor' in a personal\n> fantasy\"\n\n— Julian Rice (1976), quoted in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 397`\n\nThe psychoanalytic reading takes the mirror at its word and finds it wanting: the wholeness\nTravis assembles there is \"transitory, limited\" (`smc 400`). The scene stages a self and the\nfilm spends its remaining hour disassembling it.\n\n### Audience\n\nThis is the scene that escaped the film. It is quoted by people who have not seen *Taxi\nDriver* and generally quoted as bravado — which inverts it, since in context it is a man\nfailing to find anyone to say it to. Worth holding next to Scorsese's alarm at the shoot-out\naudience ([[Taxi Driver — the shoot-out]]): both are cases of an audience taking the\nconfident reading of a scene built to undercut confidence.\n\n### Production context\n\nLate in the schedule, in a derelict building, with street noise the director expected to\nruin the take. The scene that became the film's signature was shot under conditions nobody\nwould choose, from a line nobody wrote.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Alice — the prologue]] — the other Scorsese scene in the wiki where a performance is\n built against its own script.\n- [[Psycho — the parlour scene]] — two people talking; here, one person talking twice.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Track the line's afterlife as [[Format]] — the quotation has a life independent of the\n film, which is a measurable thing.\n- The Bresson debt is Schrader's, not Scorsese's, by Scorsese's own account. Worth a note on\n whose influence is whose ([[Bresson's hands, Travis's guns]]).\n- Get the actual delivered dialogue off the disc and set it against both published\n quotations above." }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the phone call", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call.md", "summary": "Travis begs Betsy down a payphone and the camera walks away from him, into an empty corridor. Scorsese thought of this shot first and filmed it last.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "camerawork", "point-of-view", "structure", "mise-en-scene", "conflict", "spoken-language", "the-camera-as-voyeur" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/structure/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [ "sos 54", "smc 385", "sos 63", "sos 60", "smc 82" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 896, "body": "### Observation\n\nAfter the date that ended in a porn theatre, Travis stands at a payphone in a corridor,\nworking through a ladder of diminishing requests — dinner, coffee, a phone call, anything.\nWe never hear Betsy. Partway through, the camera gives up on him: it tracks slowly right,\noff the man, along the corridor, and holds on a stretch of empty hallway and a door until he\nfinishes and walks out of frame.\n\nNothing motivates the move. No one enters. The camera simply declines to watch.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nScorsese has been asked about this shot for fifty years and gives the same answer:\n\n> There's a shot in *Taxi Driver* where Travis Bickle is talking on the phone to Betsy and\n> the camera tracks away from him down the long hallway and there's nobody there. That was\n> the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was the last I filmed. I like it because I\n> sensed that it added to the loneliness of the whole thing, but I guess you can see the\n> hand behind the camera there.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 54`\n\nThe admission at the end is worth as much as the shot. *You can see the hand behind the\ncamera* — the director naming the one moment where his film stops pretending to be\ntransparent.\n\nThe scholarly reading takes the move as a diagnosis rather than a courtesy:\n\n> As Bickle proposes dinner, coffee, a phone call, anything, the camera slowly tracks away\n> from him to an empty hallway. Down the long hallway lies nothing and no one, a world\n> bereft of others. This scene demonstrates a schism in his consciousness, a separation\n> between his stated desire for attachment and his unconscious desire for isolation.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 385`\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Camerawork\n\nAn unmotivated lateral track — the single most discussed camera move in the film, and the\nopposite of the film's usual grammar. Everywhere else the camera is welded to Travis's\nattention ([[Bickle sees through glass]]); here it detaches, and the detachment is legible\nas tact, as embarrassment, or as verdict depending on how you read him. All three readings\nsurvive the shot, which is why it works.\n\nCompare the received wisdom that the camera moves *toward* what matters. This one moves away\nand finds the subject anyway: the emptiness down the corridor is a more accurate portrait of\nTravis than his face would have been.\n\n#### Point of view\n\nThe film's [[Point of view]] contract breaks here and only here. For the rest of the running\ntime the audience is inside a consciousness; for eight seconds it is beside one, looking at\nthe space that consciousness cannot fill. This is the structural argument of the film made\nas a single physical gesture — and made without a line of dialogue, since the dialogue\ncontinues off-screen while we look at a wall.\n\n#### Mise en scène\n\nAn institutional corridor: painted brick, a payphone, a door at the end, nobody. The set\ndoes no work except be empty, which is the work.\n\n#### Structure\n\nScorsese conceived this shot before the film existed and shot it last. That makes it both\nthe seed and the last thing planted — the image the whole production was arranged around,\ncompleted only once everything it explains had already been filmed. Useful when teaching\nthat a film's organising idea is not necessarily its first scene.\n\n### Audience\n\nThe film's marketing sold exactly this: the loneliness, not the violence.\n\n> I never realized what that image on the poster did for the film — a shot of De Niro\n> walking down the street with the line, \"In every city there's one man.\" And we had thought\n> that audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant and no one would\n> want to see it!\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63` ([[In every city there's one man]])\n\n### Production context\n\nThe last shot filmed on a picture that had lost four days to rain and had been shot largely\nas documentary from inside a moving car (`sos 60`). After weeks of grabbing what the street\nwould give them, the crew ended on the one shot that had been designed before anything else.\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] — the other scene of Travis addressing someone who is not\n there. In the mirror he supplies the other voice; on the phone the other voice exists and\n still cannot reach him.\n- [[Psycho — the opening]] — another camera that moves on its own authority to make a claim\n about the person it is watching.\n- [[Alice — the prologue]] — a camera move (the crane onto Socorro) used as an argument\n rather than as coverage.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Time the shot off the disc. The published descriptions do not agree on how long the camera\n holds on the empty corridor.\n- The Alka-Seltzer close-up is the film's other overt authorial intrusion, and it is a\n double allusion — to Godard and to Carol Reed (`smc 385`, `smc 82`). Worth its own note.\n- Set this against the \"hand behind the camera\" admission: which other Scorsese shots does\n he describe as visible authorship?" }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the shoot-out", "type": "scene", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "raw": "/raw/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout.md", "summary": "Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "aliases": [], "codes": [ "editing", "colour", "camerawork", "audio", "point-of-view", "non-diegetic-sound", "conflict", "formula", "the-camera-as-voyeur" ], "tags": [ "close-reading", "scorsese", "violence" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/contexts/control/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/contexts/values/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/" ], "citations": [ "sos 63", "sos 66", "sos 68", "smc 4" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" }, { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 1173, "body": "### Observation\n\nTravis goes to the building where Iris works and kills the men who run her: the pimp on the\nstreet, the mafioso on the stairs, the bouncer in the room. He is shot through the neck and\nhand. The killing is close, clumsy and slow, more struggle than marksmanship. He puts a\nbloodied finger to his temple and mimes firing at the arriving police. Then the camera lifts\noff the floor, rises through the ceiling that ought to stop it, and drifts back out along the\ncorridor, over the stairs, out of the building, looking straight down.\n\n### What the sources say it is\n\nScorsese's stated intention for the violence is specific — and specifically not heroic:\n\n> I wanted the violence at the end to be as if Travis had to keep killing all these people\n> in order to stop them once and for all. Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai 'death with\n> honour' — that's why De Niro attempts suicide — and he felt that if he'd directed the\n> scene, there would have been tons of blood all over the walls, a more surrealistic effect.\n> What I wanted was a *Daily News* situation, the sort you read about every day: 'Three men\n> killed by lone man who saves young girl from them'.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63`–`sos 66`\n\nThat is a director aiming at tabloid banality and a screenwriter aiming at ritual — and the\nfinished scene is legible as either ([[Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending]]).\n\n### Connotation code by code\n\n#### Camerawork — the priest's-eye view\n\nThe overhead retreat is the film's most-discussed shot, and Ebert traces it to a specific,\nverifiable source in Scorsese's biography rather than to film history:\n\n> One is the \"priest's-eye-view\" often used in overhead shots, which Scorsese has said are\n> intended to reflect the priest looking down at the implements of the Mass on the altar. We\n> see, through Travis's eyes, the top of a taxi dispatcher's desk, candy on a movie counter,\n> guns on a bed, and finally, with the camera apparently seeing through the ceiling, an\n> overhead shot of the massacre in the red-light building. This is, if you will, the final\n> sacrifice of the Mass.\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] (this scan carries no page numbers)\n\nThat reframes a shot usually described as \"detached\" or \"godlike\" into something narrower\nand stranger: liturgical bookkeeping. The film has been laying objects out on flat surfaces\nand looking down at them all along ([[Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view]]); the bodies\nare the last set of implements.\n\nScorsese, characteristically, is less reverent about the crane that carried it:\n\n> we were preparing for that crane shot at the end that pulls back, which is still too long —\n> I just, it's one of those things — I had a crane, I wanted to use it, you know\n\n— [[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert]] (unpaged)\n\nBoth things are true. The shot means what Ebert says it means and it exists partly because\nthere was a crane on the truck.\n\n#### Colour\n\nThe bloodbath as released is not the bloodbath as shot. To keep the film out of the X\nbracket in the United States, Scorsese agreed to desaturate the sequence with a red tint:\n\n> But to avoid an 'X' rating for its American release, which would have reduced its\n> box-office earning potential, Scorsese had to agree to putting a red tint over the final\n> bloodbath.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 68`\n\nNo better example exists here of [[Control]] leaving a visible mark that later gets read as\nstyle. The muted, coppery look of the massacre is routinely praised as an artistic choice.\nIt was a censorship settlement ([[The red tint over the bloodbath]]). Both facts belong in\nany account of the scene, in that order.\n\n#### Non-diegetic sound\n\nThe coda — Travis back in the cab, apparently recovered — closes on a musical citation:\n\n> Scorsese ends *Taxi Driver* with a reference to Bernard Herrmann's score for *Psycho* to\n> imply that Travis is more sociopath than hero.\n\n— [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese]], `smc 4`\n\nThe film's last argument is made in the orchestra, by the composer of [[Psycho (1960)]],\nin what turned out to be his final work ([[Herrmann finished the score and died that night]]).\nSee [[Non-diegetic sound]].\n\n#### Point of view\n\nThe rise through the ceiling is the second and last time the film leaves Travis's head — the\nfirst being [[Taxi Driver — the phone call]]. Both departures are the film's own voice, and\nboth say the same thing: *look at the space around this man*. That the film reserves its only\ntwo authorial intrusions for a corridor and a stairwell full of bodies is not an accident.\n\n### Audience\n\nThe scene did not land as designed, and the director says so plainly:\n\n> I saw *Taxi Driver* once in a theatre, on the opening night, I think, and everyone was\n> yelling and screaming at the shoot-out. When I made it, I didn't intend to have the\n> audience react with that feeling, 'Yes, do it! Let's go out and kill.' The idea was to\n> create a violent catharsis, so that they'd find themselves saying, 'Yes, kill'; and then\n> afterwards realize, 'My God, no' — like some strange Californian therapy session. That was\n> the instinct I went with, but it's scary to hear what happens with the audience.\n\n— [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)]], `sos 63`\n\nA two-stage design — approve, then recoil — that stalled at stage one. The best single case\nin the wiki of an intended reading and an actual reading pulling apart in the room, and a\nuseful corrective to any account of [[Values]] that assumes a film controls its own meaning.\nScorsese had watched the same thing happen to *The Wild Bunch* and built the scene anyway\n(`sos 63`).\n\n### Production context\n\nAn R rating bought with a colour filter; a crane the director now thinks he over-used; a\n1.9-million-dollar picture that took the Palme d'Or at Cannes the same year (`sos 68`).\n\n### Compare\n\n- [[Psycho — the shower scene]] — the other scene in the wiki where violence is cut to\n control what the audience is allowed to see, and where Herrmann's strings do the work.\n- [[Taxi Driver — the mirror]] — the rehearsal for this.\n- [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47|Killing the protagonist]] — Travis survives, which is arguably the more disturbing choice.\n\n### Writing leads\n\n- Find a pre-tint frame if one is published. The comparison would make the [[Control]] case\n visible rather than asserted.\n- The coda: real, or Travis's dying fantasy? Ebert links the question to *The King of\n Comedy*'s ending (unpaged). Worth a note that holds both readings open.\n- Count the overhead shots across the film and check Ebert's list against the disc." }, { "title": "After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes/", "raw": "/raw/sources/after-hours-oral-history-outtakes.md", "summary": "Outtakes from Jake Malooley's Air Mail oral history, including the screenwriter admitting he borrowed from Joe Frank's radio piece Lies, and the settlement figure.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "After Hours oral history" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "oral-history", "web", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://expandingdan.substack.com/p/martin-scorsese-after-hours-oral-history", "publication": "Expanding Dan (Substack), outtakes from Air Mail", "date": "2023" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/first-half-hour-radio-monologue/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 227, "body": "Material cut from Jake Malooley's oral history of [[After Hours (1985)]], published by *Air\nMail* on 12 August 2023, and posted as a \"takeover edition\" of the Substack newsletter *Expanding\nDan*. The *Air Mail* piece itself is paywalled; this site has read only the outtakes and *Air\nMail*'s free preview.\n\n### Good for\n\nThe Joe Frank story, told by the people involved rather than by bloggers\n([[The first half hour came from a radio monologue]]).\n\n### What they say\n\nJoseph Minion, screenwriter: \"I had at one point definitely heard the Joe Frank short story\n'Lies' that he read on late-night radio, and details from it unfortunately wound up in the first\nsection of the script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable.\" He also names his\nmodels: \"I had seen Carol Reed's Odd Man Out as well as David Mamet's play Edmond, both of which\ntook place in a single night\".\n\nMichal Story, Joe Frank's widow: \"Joe threatened to file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled\nfor about $30,000.\"\n\nMartin Scorsese on the *Last Temptation* cancellation: \"It wasn't just the cancellation of a\nmovie, it felt like the cancellation of my viability in the movie business.\"\n\nCheech Marin on the night shoot: \"I started to feel like a bit of a vampire. Sleeping all day and\nliving at night totally turned everything upside down\"." }, { "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/art-of-watching-films/", "raw": "/raw/sources/art-of-watching-films.md", "summary": "Boggs and Petrie's classroom text: plain analytical questions, a working glossary, and the flat/round and static/dynamic character pairs.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "The Art of Watching Films" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "awf", "passages": 3592 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/conflict/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/" ], "citations": [ "awf 506", "awf 56", "awf 99", "awf 406", "awf 13" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "awf", "title": "Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films" } ], "words": 152, "body": "Boggs & Petrie, *The Art of Watching Films* (9th edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nThe teacher's book. It is less ambitious than Giannetti and less rigorous than Bordwell, and that is exactly its use: every chapter ends in questions a student can put to a film, and the glossary entries are short enough to quote whole. Its definition of a point-of-view character as the one \"with whom we emotionally or intellectually identify\" (`awf 506`) is the wide sense of the term this site uses, and its flat/round, static/dynamic pairings (`awf 56`) give [[Character]] a vocabulary Bordwell does not bother with.\n\nAlso the source for Vilmos Zsigmond on motivated light, \"windows, or candles or lamps\" (`awf 99`), for dialogue being \"simpler than that used on the stage\" (`awf 406`), and for the phrase \"cinematic mutilation\" about pan-and-scan (`awf 13`).\n\nCited across [[Acting]], [[Spoken language]], [[Lighting]], [[Setting]], [[Colour]], [[Format]], [[Point of view]], [[Character]] and [[Conflict]]." }, { "title": "Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "raw": "/raw/sources/biskind-easy-riders.md", "summary": "The New Hollywood chronicle: how the directors briefly took over the studios, told through interviews and gossip.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Biskind" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "industry-history", "new-hollywood" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/concepts/formula/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/commerce/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/sources/oxford-world-cinema/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 121, "body": "Peter Biskind, *Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation\nSaved Hollywood* (Simon & Schuster, 1998).\n[Book overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Riders,_Raging_Bulls)\n\n### Good for\n\nThe industrial context around [[Martin Scorsese]] and\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]]: the collapse of the studio system, the brief\nwindow when a *Mean Streets* screening could get a director a Warner Bros picture, the\neconomics and egos of 1967–80. The wiki's standing source for [[Commerce]] and\n[[Formula]] (genre revisionism) in the New Hollywood years.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nFamously gossip-driven — vivid, sourced to interviews, and disputed\nby several of its subjects. Use it for the shape of the era and the texture of the deals;\nverify any specific anecdote before quoting it as fact." }, { "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "raw": "/raw/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art.md", "summary": "The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Film Art" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "textbook", "reference" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "fa", "passages": 5585 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/themes/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/printed-language/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/concepts/themes/", "/sources/media-and-society/", "/sources/narration-fiction-film/", "/sources/understanding-movies/" ], "citations": [ "fa 231", "fa 112", "fa 115", "fa 124", "fa 132", "fa 149", "fa 177", "fa 181", "fa 217", "fa 226", "fa 230", "fa 252", "fa 88", "fa 264", "fa 267", "fa 285", "fa 62", "fa 72", "fa 328", "fa 303", "fa 402" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "fa", "title": "Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art" } ], "words": 508, "body": "David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith, *Film Art: An Introduction* (12th edn,\nMcGraw-Hill, 2020).\n[Book overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_Art:_An_Introduction) ·\n[davidbordwell.net ↗](https://www.davidbordwell.net/)\n\n### Good for\n\nClean, neutral definitions with worked examples. When a note on this wiki needs an\nuncontroversial definition of a code or convention, it defaults to *Film Art* and links out\nfrom there. The scan in the library is complete and its pagination is hand-checked, so page\ncitations below can be trusted.\n\nIt is also, quietly, the source of the companion site's name. Chapter 6.8 is titled \"Spatial\nContinuity: The 180° System\", and the text there introduces the centre line around which a\nscene's space is built — \"the axis of action\" (`fa 231`). [Axis of Action ↗](https://axisofaction.com)\ntakes its name from that page.\n\n### Where each code and convention is defined\n\nThe wiki's reference pages map onto the book like this. Cite as `fa `.\n\n| Concept | *Film Art* | Page |\n|---|---|---|\n| [[Mise en scène]] | ch. 4.1 What Is Mise-en-Scene? | `fa 112` |\n| [[Setting]] | ch. 4.2 Setting | `fa 115` |\n| [[Lighting]] | ch. 4.4 Lighting | `fa 124` |\n| [[Acting]] | ch. 4.5–4.6 Staging; The Film Actor's Toolkit | `fa 132` |\n| [[Colour]] | ch. 4.8 Guiding Our Attention in Black and White and Color | `fa 149` |\n| [[Camerawork]] | ch. 5 Cinematography (framing at 5.5) | `fa 177` |\n| [[Format]] | ch. 5.6–5.7 Frame Dimensions and Shape | `fa 181` |\n| [[Editing]] | ch. 6.1 What Is Editing? | `fa 217` |\n| [[Chronology]] | ch. 6.6 Temporal Relations; 6.14 Order, Frequency, Duration | `fa 226` |\n| [[Continuity]] | ch. 6.7 Continuity Editing | `fa 230` |\n| [[Montage]] | ch. 6.15–6.16 Alternatives to Continuity; Discontinuity | `fa 252` |\n| [[Point of view]] | ch. 3.2–3.3 Range and Depth of Story Information | `fa 88` |\n| [[Audio]] | ch. 7 Sound in the Cinema | `fa 264` |\n| [[Spoken language]] | ch. 7.3 What Do We Hear? | `fa 267` |\n| [[Non-diegetic sound]] | ch. 7.8 Diegetic Versus Nondiegetic Sound | `fa 285` |\n| [[Structure]] | ch. 2.4 Principles of Film Form; ch. 3 Narrative Form | `fa 62` |\n| [[Character]], [[Conflict]] | ch. 3 Narrative Form | `fa 72` |\n| [[Iconography]], [[Formula]], [[Themes]] | ch. 9 Film Genres | `fa 328` |\n\nTwo chapters have no wiki counterpart yet and are worth mining: ch. 8, on style as the\npatterned use of technique across a whole film (`fa 303`), and ch. 11, five sample analyses\nthat model the method end to end (`fa 402`).\n\n### Handle with care\n\nDeliberately formalist. Codes and conventions are its home ground, and it is excellent there.\nFor contexts — industry, censorship, reception, politics — it is thin by design, so go to the\ndedicated context notes and their sources instead. Its examples also skew to a canon that\nthe book itself has helped fix in place; the definitions travel further than the examples do." }, { "title": "Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "raw": "/raw/sources/burstyn-lessons.md", "summary": "Ellen Burstyn's memoir: the Alice collaboration from the side of the star who commissioned it.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Burstyn" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "memoir" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/concepts/acting/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 120, "body": "Ellen Burstyn, *Lessons in Becoming Myself* (Riverhead, 2006).\n[Book overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Burstyn)\n\n### Good for\n\nThe power dynamics behind [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] told\nfrom the inside: a star fresh off *The Exorcist* using her leverage to develop a film\nabout a woman's actual life, hiring [[Martin Scorsese]] off a *Mean Streets* screening,\nand shaping the script and improvisations that won her the Oscar. Primary-source ballast\nfor [[Commerce]] (star power as financing), [[Acting]], and\n[[The women's picture, 1974]].\n\n### Handle with care\n\nA memoir written three decades on, with a spiritual-autobiography\nframe; generous to collaborators. Use for perspective and texture, and pin dates and\nfigures to [[Criterion — At Home in the World]] or trade records where it matters." }, { "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/cinema-key-concepts/", "raw": "/raw/sources/cinema-key-concepts.md", "summary": "Hayward's dictionary of film theory: the shelf's voice for the ideological reading of every convention.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "ckc", "passages": 2366 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/themes/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/continuity/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/themes/" ], "citations": [ "ckc 135", "ckc 229", "ckc 412", "ckc 177" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "ckc", "title": "Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts" } ], "words": 145, "body": "Susan Hayward, *Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts* (5th edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nThe theory book. Where the introductions describe how a convention works, Hayward asks whose interests it serves. Continuity editing is invisible \"in the name of realism\" (`ckc 135`); \"genres function ideologically to reproduce the capitalist system\" (`ckc 229`); the cinema spectator \"is also, technically speaking, a 'voyeur'\" (`ckc 412`); flashbacks are \"a cinematic representation of memory and of history and, ultimately of subjective truth\" (`ckc 177`). Every entry is a position, sourced to the critical literature.\n\nUse her to put the ideological reading beside the craft reading in any concept note, and to find the name of the theorist behind an idea. Do not use her as the only voice; the entries argue rather than survey.\n\nCited across [[Continuity]], [[Mise en scène]], [[Chronology]], [[Non-diegetic sound]], [[The camera as voyeur]], [[Formula]], [[Iconography]] and [[Themes]]." }, { "title": "Criterion — At Home in the World", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "raw": "/raw/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world.md", "summary": "The Criterion release essay on Alice: production history, the prologue fight, and the film's place in 1974.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Criterion Alice essay" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "essay", "production-history" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/values/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 140, "body": "\"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore: At Home in the World\" — the essay accompanying the\nCriterion Collection edition of the film.\n[Read the essay ↗](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/9219-alice-doesn-t-live-here-anymore-at-home-in-the-world)\n\n### Good for\n\nThe consolidated production history behind\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]]: Burstyn sourcing the script (\"written for\nDoris Day and Rock Hudson\", needing to be \"roughed up\"), Coppola's referral, the *Mean\nStreets* screening, Scorsese's \"Nothing. But I'd like to learn\", Warner Bros' attempt to\ncut the prologue, and the $85,000 set ([[The $85,000 backdrop]]). Also situates the film\namong the feminist-inflected mainstream cycle ([[The women's picture, 1974]]).\n\n### Handle with care\n\nA release essay serves the edition it accompanies — celebratory by\ngenre. Its facts check out against the standard accounts, but for contested points prefer\n[[Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)|Burstyn]] or\n[[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]] as testimony." }, { "title": "Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/devin-craft-consultant/", "raw": "/raw/sources/devin-craft-consultant.md", "summary": "The Dianic priestess hired to make the rituals plausible — who invented a fake goddess so that teenagers could not invoke a real one.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Pat Devin" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "production", "web", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://www.slashfilm.com/679174/the-real-life-witch-who-heavily-influenced-the-craft/", "publication": "SlashFilm; The Wild Hunt", "date": "2021" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/manon-was-invented/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 327, "body": "Pat Devin, a Dianic priestess of the Covenant of the Goddess, was hired as the witchcraft\nconsultant on [[The Craft (1996)]] after an occult shop owner connected her to a Sony\npublicist. She read the script and met director Andrew Fleming and producer Ginny Nugent.\n\n### Good for\n\nA rare, documented case of a subculture being consulted about its own screen representation —\nand of a consultant designing *against* the film's likely effect on its audience.\n\n### What she contributed\n\n- **The invocation and the calling of the corners.** Devin proposed that the girls perform a\n real initiation and each call a quarter for an element. Her assignment was Sarah as Earth,\n Rochelle as Water, Bonnie as Fire, Nancy as Air. The art department reversed Nancy and\n Sarah.\n- **Manon is a fake.** She invented the deity rather than use a real one, because she\n \"didn't want hordes of teenagers running down to the beach or out to the woods invoking\n anybody real\" ([[Manon was invented so nobody could call him]]).\n- **A structural note.** She argued that if the coven was going to threaten Sarah with death\n for leaving, the film needed an initiation in which the girls actually bound themselves to\n each other first — a dramaturgical fix, not a religious one.\n\nShe regretted losing the original script's closing scene, in which Sarah reads to children in\na forest clearing.\n\n### Use with care\n\nDevin's account is her own, given in interviews years later, and the two secondary sources\nhere (SlashFilm and *The Wild Hunt*) both report it rather than quote a primary document. The\npractitioners *The Wild Hunt* surveyed at twenty-five years disagreed about the result:\nChristopher Penczak, \"I spent many years after explaining to people that the magick in the\nmovie was not really what any of us did as Witches\"; Lilith Dorsey, \"For Black witches like\nmyself it was one of the first times we saw a witch that looked like us.\"" }, { "title": "Dunne on After Hours (2024)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours/", "raw": "/raw/sources/dunne-lwlies-after-hours.md", "summary": "Griffin Dunne, star and co-producer, on the ending they nearly shot, Geffen's reaction, Michael Powell's fix, and SoHo as 'uncharted territory'.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Griffin Dunne interview" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "interview", "web", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://lwlies.com/interviews/griffin-dunne-after-hours", "publication": "Little White Lies", "date": "2024-03-20T00:00:00.000Z" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/" ], "citations": [ "sos 100", "sos 101" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "sos", "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)" } ], "words": 249, "body": "Griffin Dunne interviewed by Leigh Singer for *Little White Lies*, 20 March 2024, for the 4K\nre-release of [[After Hours (1985)]]. Dunne played Paul Hackett and produced the film with Amy\nRobinson.\n\n### Good for\n\nThe ending, from inside the room. The library has Scorsese's account (`sos 100`–`sos 101`);\nthis is the star's, and it differs in useful ways: test-audience cards rather than a family\nscreening, De Palma rather than Gilliam.\n\n### What he says\n\nOn the first cut:\n\n> It used to end with me still in the [papier-mâché] cast in the car Cheech and Chong drove\n> away, but pretty much all the [test audience] cards said, 'What happened to him?' There was\n> no release.\n\nOn the womb ending and the man paying for it: \"I called up David Geffen, who financed the film,\nhe'd been very anxious to know, and I tell him… He takes a beat, and goes, 'Have you lost your\nfucking minds?' And, uh, I guess we had.\"\n\nOn Powell: \"he just thought of the most simple, elegant, satisfying ending that was right in\nfront of us all, you know, the circularity. Back at work, it's perfect.\"\n\nOn the neighbourhood: \"Soho then was uncharted territory for people who lived above 14th\nStreet. We knew it, but no one else did.\"\n\nBrackets are the magazine's. Used in [[After Hours — back at work]],\n[[Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway]], [[Michael Powell wrote the ending]] and\n[[SoHo before the money, 1984]]." }, { "title": "Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look/", "raw": "/raw/sources/durgnat-long-hard-look.md", "summary": "A shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene reading of the whole film. The model for what a maximal close reading looks like.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Durgnat" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "close-reading", "hitchcock" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/ideas/killing-the-protagonist/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/norman-among-the-birds/", "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 115, "body": "Raymond Durgnat, *A Long Hard Look at Psycho* (BFI Publishing, 2002; reissued in the BFI\nSilver series). A whole book that simply walks the film from first shot to last.\n[Publisher page ↗](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/long-hard-look-at-psycho-9781838719784/)\n\n### Good for\n\nDemonstrating method. Durgnat treats every scene — not just the famous ones —\nas worth the full apparatus, which is why this wiki leans on him for\n[[Psycho — the parlour scene]] and for tracking the narration transfer in\n[[Point of view]] and [[Killing the protagonist at minute 47]]. Also the best corrective to\nshower-scene tunnel vision.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nDigressive by design; he entertains readings rather than settling\nthem. Quote him as \"a reading\", not \"the reading\"." }, { "title": "Ebert — Alice review (1974)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/ebert-alice-review/", "raw": "/raw/sources/ebert-alice-review.md", "summary": "A first-run review: what a sympathetic 1974-75 critic saw before the film had a reputation.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Ebert on Alice" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "review", "primary-reception" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/contexts/values/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 128, "body": "Roger Ebert, review of *Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore*, Chicago Sun-Times, on the\nfilm's first release.\n[Read the review ↗](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore-1974)\n\n### Good for\n\nReception evidence. Reviews written before consensus forms are primary\ndocuments for the [[Values]] force: they record what a first audience noticed, praised\nand didn't yet see. For [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] and\n[[The women's picture, 1974]], Ebert is the wiki's control sample of immediate mainstream\nreception — read against later feminist critique and the film's canonisation via\n[[Martin Scorsese]]'s subsequent career.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nOne critic, one city, one deadline — a data point, not a verdict.\nThe useful move is comparative: what does this review *not* mention that every modern\naccount leads with (the [[Alice — the prologue]] pastiche, for instance)?" }, { "title": "Ebert — The Craft review (1996)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/ebert-craft-review/", "raw": "/raw/sources/ebert-craft-review.md", "summary": "Two stars. Ebert liked the four actresses and thought the film wasted them on special effects and revenge.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Ebert on The Craft" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "review", "web", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-craft-1996", "publication": "Chicago Sun-Times", "date": "1996-05-03T00:00:00.000Z" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/craft-got-better-as-it-got-older/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 252, "body": "Roger Ebert, *Chicago Sun-Times*, 3 May 1996. **Two stars out of four.**\n\n### Good for\n\nA first-audience reading from a critic who was not the film's target market and said so.\nUseful precisely because it is unimpressed: it records what the film looked like in 1996,\nbefore the cult reappraisal decided it was a classic.\n\n### What he actually says\n\nOn the performances — the part of his verdict that has aged best:\n\n> All four are convincing performers, Balk relishes her character's loathsome behavior, and\n> Rachel True has the sunniest smile since Doris Day.\n\nOn where it goes wrong:\n\n> The movie's failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and\n> special effects.\n\nAnd the objection he raises against the whole genre, which is the most quotable thing in the\nreview:\n\n> What I have always wondered about supernatural characters in movies is why their horizons\n> are so limited […] they limit their amazing powers to getting even.\n\nHe also files the film as \"the underside of the coin from *Clueless*\" — a useful 1996\ncoordinate for [[The Craft (1996)]], since both are Los Angeles high-school films released\nwithin a year of each other.\n\n### Use with care\n\nEbert is reviewing the film he was shown, not the film it became. Set his verdict against the\nreappraisal ([[The Craft got better as it got older]]) rather than treating either as the\nfinal word — the gap between them is the interesting object." }, { "title": "Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/hall-encoding-decoding/", "raw": "/raw/sources/hall-encoding-decoding.md", "summary": "Eleven pages that gave audience study its vocabulary: encoding, decoding, and the three reading positions.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Encoding/Decoding" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "essay", "reel", "reception", "cultural-studies" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "hed", "passages": 48 }, "links_out": [ "/contexts/values/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/values/" ], "citations": [ "hed 1", "hed 11", "hed 9", "hed 6" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "hed", "title": "Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding" } ], "words": 287, "body": "Stuart Hall, \"Encoding/Decoding\" (1980), in *Culture, Media, Language*. The complete essay is in\nthe library — eleven pages, `hed 1`–`hed 11`.\n\n### Good for\n\nThe single most useful reception-side text on the shelf, and short enough to set as reading.\nHall's argument is that a media text is *encoded* by producers within one set of codes and\n*decoded* by audiences within another, and that the two need not match. Meaning is not\ntransmitted; it is produced twice.\n\nThe famous part is the three decoding positions, set out at `hed 9`–`hed 11`:\n\n- **dominant-hegemonic** — the viewer reads within the code the text was built in, and takes\n the preferred meaning\n- **negotiated** — the viewer grants the broad frame but bargains with it from their own position\n- **oppositional** — the viewer understands the preferred meaning perfectly well and reads\n against it\n\nThat is the theoretical spine under [[Values]]'s reception lens. It explains why the same film\ntransforms as its audience changes without a frame of it altering — the mechanism behind\n[[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]] and [[The women's picture, 1974]]. Hall also works the\ndenotation/connotation distinction at `hed 6`, arguing that ideology enters at the connotative\nlevel, which is precisely where this wiki's close readings operate.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nWritten for a 1970s Birmingham cultural-studies seminar, and it shows: dense, allusive, and\naddressed to debates about television news rather than about film. Its page offset is\nunverified in the library, though at eleven pages that is easy to check by eye. The three\npositions are also routinely flattened in teaching into a tidy trio of audience \"types\"; Hall's\npoint is subtler — they are positions a single viewer moves between, not boxes people live in." }, { "title": "Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/hall-representation/", "raw": "/raw/sources/hall-representation.md", "summary": "The constructionist account of representation, and the chapter on stereotyping that most of the wiki's Values work rests on.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "reception", "cultural-studies", "representation" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "hall", "passages": 2089 }, "links_out": [ "/contexts/values/", "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/values/", "/sources/media-and-society/" ], "citations": [ "hall 15", "hall 223" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "hall", "title": "Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices" } ], "words": 304, "body": "Stuart Hall (ed.), *Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices* (Open\nUniversity / SAGE). Hall writes chapters 1 and 4; the rest are by Hamilton, Lidchi, Nixon and\nGledhill.\n\n### Good for\n\nChapter 1, \"The Work of Representation\" (from about `hall 15`), is the clearest statement of\nthe constructionist position: meaning is not in the object, nor purely in the head of the\nviewer, but produced through shared codes. Hall sets it against the reflective and intentional\naccounts, which is exactly the distinction a student needs before they can say anything useful\nabout [[Values]] or about connotation.\n\nChapter 4, \"The Spectacle of the 'Other'\" (from about `hall 223`), is the one this wiki leans\non hardest. It is a working method for reading how difference gets represented — stereotyping\nas a signifying practice, the reduction of people to a few essentialised traits, and the split\nbetween what a representation shows and what it fixes in place. That chapter is the natural\nsource for context notes about race, gender and othering, and it pairs directly with\n[[Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)|Mulvey]]: both argue that looking is\norganised by power, Mulvey through psychoanalysis and Hall through discourse.\n\n### Handle with care\n\n**The scan is rough.** There is no clean table of contents in the library copy, and the\nrunning heads OCR'd badly — the recorded \"parts\" are largely noise (\"FIGURE 4.20\", \"IHI WORK\n01\"). The page anchors above were located by searching the text and spot-checked, but treat\nthem as approximate and confirm against the printed page before quoting. Page numbering\nitself is only auto-checked.\n\nBeyond the scan: this is an Open University coursebook, built for structured study with\nactivities and readings interleaved. That makes it excellent for teaching and slightly\nmaddening for reference — the argument is spread across exercises rather than concentrated." }, { "title": "Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/kael-mean-streets/", "raw": "/raw/sources/kael-mean-streets.md", "summary": "Pauline Kael's New Yorker review, the one that made the film: 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.'", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Kael on Mean Streets" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "review", "web", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/mean-streets-pauline-kael/", "publication": "The New Yorker, via Scraps from the Loft", "date": "1973-10-08T00:00:00.000Z" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/films/mean-streets/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/" ], "citations": [ "smc 371" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 349, "body": "Pauline Kael, *The New Yorker*, 8 October 1973. Reprinted on Scraps from the Loft; *The New\nYorker*'s own archive blocks this site's fetcher. The Reel library has the review only\nsecond-hand, quoted in the Companion (`smc 371`) and by Ebert.\n\n### Good for\n\nProof of what the film looked like to the most influential American critic in the week it\nopened. It is the review usually credited with launching Scorsese, and it is still one of the\nbest descriptions of the film: it notices the music, the look, the Catholicism and the\ntwo-man structure in one go.\n\n### What she actually says\n\nThe opening sentence, and the most quoted:\n\n> Martin Scorsese's *Mean Streets* is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal\n> filmmaking.\n\nOn Charlie, in a sentence Ebert later quoted:\n\n> The clearest fact about Charlie (Harvey Keitel), junior member of a Mafia family—and, in a\n> non-literal sense, the autobiographical central figure—is that whatever he does in his life,\n> he's a sinner.\n\nOn the look: \"It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars,\nwith lighting and color just this side of lurid.\" See [[Mean Streets — Tony's bar]].\n\nOn the sound: \"The music is the electricity in the air of this movie; the music is like an engine\nthat the characters move to.\" See [[The jukebox is the score]].\n\nOn the religion: \"The whole world of the movie—Catholicism as it's actually practiced among these\npeople, what it means on the street—is in Charlie's mingy-minded face.\" See\n[[Church and street in Little Italy]].\n\nOn the two leads: \"Keitel makes De Niro's triumph possible; Johnny Boy can bounce off Charlie's\nanxious, furious admiration.\" See [[Harvey Keitel]].\n\n### Use with care\n\nEvery quotation above was checked word for word against the reprint in September 2026. The BFI's\nprogramme notes say Kael called it the best American movie of the year, but they report it rather\nthan quote it; this site does not repeat it as her words until the sentence is found.\n\nFilms this source covers: [[Mean Streets (1973)]]." }, { "title": "The history of \"light as a feather, stiff as a board\"", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/light-as-a-feather-history/", "raw": "/raw/sources/light-as-a-feather-history.md", "summary": "Samuel Pepys recorded the levitation game in the 1660s. The physics are dull and the ritual is not.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Light as a feather (game)" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "reference", "web", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board", "publication": "Wikipedia", "date": "accessed September 2026" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "/films/the-craft/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/chant-is-a-metronome/", "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 253, "body": "Background for [[The Craft — light as a feather]].\n\n### The oldest account\n\nSamuel Pepys (1633–1703) recorded the game second-hand, from a Mr Brisband who had seen it\nperformed in Bordeaux: four young girls lifted a boy from the ground using one finger each,\nraising him as high as they could reach. To rule out a trick they repeated it on the cook —\n\"a very lusty fellow\" — and it worked.\n\nSo the sleepover game in the film is roughly 330 years old, and was already being\n*tested for fraud* in the seventeenth century.\n\n### Why it works\n\nFour people lifting an 80 kg body take 12–20 kg each, which is well within finger strength.\nThe illusion of effortlessness comes from three things: synchronised timing (asynchronous\nlifting fails, which is why the chant matters), people underestimating what fingers can do,\nand memory exaggerating a brief lift into a long float.\n\n### Why that is the interesting part\n\nThe chant is not a spell, it is a metronome — its function is to synchronise four people so\nthey lift together. A ritual whose supernatural claim is false and whose practical mechanism\nis real is a very good object for thinking about what [[The Craft (1996)]] is doing with\n[[Audio]] and [[Editing]] in that scene, and about ritual generally as a\n[[Mise en scène]] problem.\n\n### Use with care\n\nA tertiary source. Good enough for the Pepys anecdote and the arithmetic; not a substitute\nfor a folklore history if this note ever grows up." }, { "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/looking-at-movies/", "raw": "/raw/sources/looking-at-movies.md", "summary": "Barsam and Monahan: the most current of the introductions, strong on sound, genre as industry, and the MacGuffin.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "lam", "passages": 2918 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/themes/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/concepts/themes/" ], "citations": [ "lam 370", "lam 80", "lam 34" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "lam", "title": "Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film" } ], "words": 127, "body": "Barsam & Monahan, *Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film* (3rd edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nThe most recent general introduction in the library, and it shows in the sound chapter: \"Today, sound is not subordinate to image\" (`lam 370`) is a position the older books do not take. Its genre chapter is the one that treats formula as a business model first, \"a blueprint for creating and marketing a type of film that has proven successful in the past\" (`lam 80`), and its MacGuffin definition is the clearest in the library and uses *Psycho*'s forty thousand dollars as the example (`lam 34`).\n\nGood for a second opinion on [[Audio]], [[Formula]], [[Themes]] and [[The MacGuffin]]; slightly less distinctive on the visual codes, where it mostly agrees with Bordwell." }, { "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/media-and-society/", "raw": "/raw/sources/media-and-society.md", "summary": "The Australian media studies textbook. The closest thing on the shelf to the wiki's own framework, in a VCE-shaped vocabulary.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Media & Society" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "textbook", "australian", "reference" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "mas", "passages": 4826 }, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/contexts/values/", "/concepts/iconography/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/themes/", "/concepts/structure/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/sources/hall-representation/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/conflict/", "/concepts/printed-language/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/values/" ], "citations": [ "mas 211", "mas 69", "mas 159", "mas 177", "mas 195", "mas 235", "mas 375", "mas 415", "mas 89", "mas 123", "mas 225" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "mas", "title": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society" } ], "words": 396, "body": "O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey, *Media & Society* (6th edn, Oxford University Press Australia\n& New Zealand).\n\n### Good for\n\nThe one book on the shelf written for this curriculum. It is an Australian textbook in an\nAustralian vocabulary, and chapter 14 is called, almost exactly, what this site is about:\n\"Genres, Codes and Conventions\" (`mas 211`). Where [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]]\ngives the formalist definition of a code, *Media & Society* gives the media-studies one, with\nthe audience and the institution already in the frame. For anything student-facing, this is\nusually the better citation.\n\nIt is also the strongest source on the shelf for the context forces, which *Film Art* leaves\nthin by design:\n\n| For | Chapter | Page |\n|---|---|---|\n| [[Values]] — representation | ch. 5 Mediation and Representation | `mas 69` |\n| [[Values]] — ideology | ch. 11 Discourse and Ideology | `mas 159` |\n| [[Values]] — hegemony | ch. 12 Dominant Ideology and Hegemony | `mas 177` |\n| [[Values]] — resistance | ch. 13 Culture Jamming and Counter-Hegemony | `mas 195` |\n| [[Iconography]], [[Formula]], [[Themes]] | ch. 14 Genres, Codes and Conventions | `mas 211` |\n| [[Structure]] | ch. 16 Narrative Structure and Binary Oppositions | `mas 235` |\n| [[Commerce]] — stardom | ch. 23 Stars and Celebrities | `mas 375` |\n| [[Commerce]] — globalisation | ch. 25 Globalisation | `mas 415` |\n| Audiences | ch. 6 Texts, Meanings, and Audiences | `mas 89` |\n| Semiotics | ch. 8 Semiology | `mas 123` |\n\nChapter 15 is a full worked reading of *American Beauty* (`mas 225`) — a model of the method\nat student length, and a useful comparison piece for the close readings here.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nThe chapter map above was **derived from running heads, not from a table of contents**, so\nchapters 4, 10 and 20 are missing from it and the page numbers are chapter *starts* as the\nOCR found them. Good enough to navigate by; check before citing precisely.\n\nAs a textbook it is also synoptic rather than deep — it will tell you what hegemony is and\ngive you a paragraph of Gramsci, where [[Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices|Hall]]\nwill give you the argument. Use it to frame and to teach; go to the primary texts to think." }, { "title": "Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure/", "raw": "/raw/sources/mulvey-visual-pleasure.md", "summary": "The essay that named the male gaze. Sixteen pages that reorganised film theory.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Mulvey" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "essay", "theory" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/contexts/psychoanalysis-postwar-america/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/contexts/values/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/sources/hall-representation/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 135, "body": "Laura Mulvey, \"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema\", *Screen* 16.3 (1975), pp. 6–18.\n[DOI ↗](https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6) ·\n[Essay overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Pleasure_and_Narrative_Cinema)\n\n### Good for\n\nThe scopophilia argument behind [[The camera as voyeur]]: narrative cinema\npositions its spectator as an empowered, hidden watcher, with the look gendered male and\nthe woman positioned as spectacle (\"to-be-looked-at-ness\"). Hitchcock is one of her two\ncentral exhibits, which makes the essay a natural companion to [[Psycho (1960)]] even\nthough her named cases are *Vertigo*, *Rear Window* and *Marnie*.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nA polemic and a product of its moment — 1970s *Screen* theory,\npsychoanalytic scaffolding and all (see [[Psychoanalysis in postwar America]] for the\nlonger arc of that inheritance). Mulvey herself revisited and complicated the argument in\n\"Afterthoughts\" (1981). Teach it as an argument that changed the field, not as settled\nmechanism." }, { "title": "David Bordwell — Narration in the Fiction Film", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/narration-fiction-film/", "raw": "/raw/sources/narration-fiction-film.md", "summary": "Bordwell's theory of narration. Only the Soviet montage chapter is in the library — read the shelf mark before citing.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Narration in the Fiction Film" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "nff", "passages": 106 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/chronology/", "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/point-of-view/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/montage/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 287, "body": "David Bordwell, *Narration in the Fiction Film* (1985) — the book where Bordwell sets out\nnarration as an activity the viewer performs, and sorts films into historical modes that\neach cue that activity differently.\n\n### What is actually in the library\n\n**A fragment, not the book.** The scan holds roughly one chapter — the Soviet material,\npages 241–273, entered as three unnamed PDF pieces. The theoretical apparatus the book is\nfamous for, including the plot/story distinction the wiki uses in [[Chronology]] and the\naccount of the classical, art-cinema and parametric modes, sits in chapters that are **not\nhere**. Its page offset is also unverified, so treat `nff` citations as provisional and check\na running head before quoting.\n\nIf you need Bordwell's definitions rather than his Soviet chapter, use\n[[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]], which is complete and hand-checked.\n\n### Good for\n\nWhat it does hold is worth having. The Soviet chapter argues that montage is not a cutting\ntechnique but a *mode of narration* — a whole system for organising what the viewer knows and\nwhen, in which crosscutting builds an omniscient, collective point of view rather than an\nindividual one. That is a stronger claim than the one [[Montage]] currently makes, and it is\nthe natural next step for that note: Eisenstein's grammar treated as narration rather than as\nediting. It also bears on [[Point of view]], since the argument turns on whose knowledge a\nfilm is organised around.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nBeyond the fragment problem: this is Bordwell at his most systematic and least casual, written\nfor film-studies graduates rather than for a classroom. The prose assumes the vocabulary that\nthe missing chapters supply. Worth completing the scan before leaning on it." }, { "title": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/oxford-world-cinema/", "raw": "/raw/sources/oxford-world-cinema.md", "summary": "The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "The Oxford History of World Cinema" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "history", "reference" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "ohwc", "passages": 4692 }, "links_out": [ "/contexts/commerce/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/control/" ], "citations": [ "ohwc 43" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "ohwc", "title": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema" } ], "words": 333, "body": "Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), *The Oxford History of World Cinema* (Oxford University Press) —\na commissioned history in which each section is written by a specialist.\n\n### Good for\n\nContext, at the scale the wiki's context notes need. It is organised by period and then by\nindustry and movement, so it answers the questions [[Commerce]] asks — who paid, under what\nsystem, selling to whom — with actual history rather than generalities. Douglas Gomery's\naccount of the studio system opens at `ohwc 43`; the silent era opens the book.\n\nIts real advantage over a single-author history is the \"world cinema\" of the title: the\nnational and regional chapters are written by people who work on those cinemas, so it is the\nright source when a note needs something outside Hollywood. It is also the natural home for\nthe movement material the wiki has not built yet — expressionism, Soviet montage, neorealism,\nthe New Waves — each of which currently has a Reel concept but no page here.\n\n### Handle with care\n\n**The scan's page numbers are 23 higher than the printed book's.** The roman-numeral front\nmatter was numbered along with everything else. The book's own index proves it: *Sunset\nBoulevard* is indexed at 55, 258 and 603 and sits on scan pages 78, 281 and 626. Citations\nhere use the printed page, so they match a copy on the shelf; `tools/reel.py` applies the\ncorrection automatically. (An earlier version of this note called the numbering verified\nafter checking only that content sat on the scan pages it was expected on. That test cannot\ncatch a constant offset. Corrected 26 September 2026.)\n\nThe bigger caution is the form. A multi-author history has no single argument, and the\nsections vary in how much they assume. It is a reference work — go in with a question, not\nfor a read-through. For a single continuous argument about how film history fits together,\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|Biskind]] is livelier on one decade and much less\nreliable." }, { "title": "Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/rachel-true-avclub/", "raw": "/raw/sources/rachel-true-avclub.md", "summary": "The A.V. Club interview in which True describes the character being rewritten around race, and why she played the hair spell differently from everyone else.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Rachel True interview" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "interview", "web", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://www.avclub.com/the-craft-s-rachel-true-on-rochelle-s-evolution-and-the-1845459663", "publication": "The A.V. Club", "date": "2021" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/the-craft/", "/contexts/values/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/craft-turns-on-its-coven/", "/films/the-craft/", "/ideas/rochelle-plays-it-wrong/", "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 268, "body": "Rachel True, interviewed by *The A.V. Club*, 2021, on playing Rochelle Zimmerman in\n[[The Craft (1996)]].\n\n### Good for\n\nAn actor's account of a character being rewritten around her casting — one of the clearest\nproduction-history cases in the wiki of [[Values]] entering a film through who gets hired.\n\n### What she actually says\n\nThe racism storyline was not in the script she auditioned with:\n\n> The character was also originally bulimic, by the way, and my first audition was an \"I threw\n> up today\" kind of monologue. Then they hired me and switched [my story] to being about racism.\n\nOn playing the spell that makes Laura Lizzie's hair fall out — the moment her performance\ndeparts from the other three:\n\n> Everybody else was gleeful and cackling when their wish came true.\n\n> Rochelle had that moment because she's Black, unlike the other three witches, where she\n> thought, \"Oh, shit. I have really, physically hurt someone and I'm a little freaked out.\"\n\nOn what the part meant:\n\n> Sometimes I think that even my costars don't understand what that role at that time\n> represented for Black women and girls.\n\nShe was also older than the role and hiding it: \"I was lying about my age so hardcore, it was\nlike I was leading a double life.\"\n\n### Use with care\n\nThis is testimony given twenty-five years after the fact, by someone with a stake in how the\nfilm is remembered — and it is corroborated by what is on screen, which is the test that\nmatters. See [[Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose]]." }, { "title": "Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/", "raw": "/raw/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho.md", "summary": "The production history. Where nearly every behind-the-scenes claim about Psycho should be checked.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Rebello" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "production-history", "hitchcock" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/commerce/", "/contexts/control/", "/contexts/production-code-and-psycho/", "/contexts/selling-psycho/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/ideas/first-flushing-toilet/", "/ideas/herrmann-against-orders/", "/ideas/shower-scene-setups/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 135, "body": "Stephen Rebello, *Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho* (Dembner Books, 1990; reissued\nby Soft Skull/Open Road). Built from interviews with surviving cast and crew and studio\nrecords. Basis of the 2012 film *Hitchcock*.\n[Book overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_and_the_Making_of_Psycho)\n\n### Good for\n\nProduction context, exhaustively: Paramount's refusal, the Shamley/TV-crew\neconomics, the censor correspondence, the shooting of the shower scene day by day, the\nmarketing plan. The strongest single source behind:\n\n- [[The shower scene is built from 78 setups]]\n- [[Herrmann scored the shower against orders]]\n- [[The first flushing toilet]]\n- [[The Production Code and Psycho]]\n- [[Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy]]\n\n### Handle with care\n\nAnecdotes collected decades after the fact; some numbers (setups,\ncuts, days) circulate in slightly different versions. Where a figure matters, this wiki\nflags it as \"commonly cited\" rather than gospel." }, { "title": "Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023/", "raw": "/raw/sources/robinson-dunne-rogerebert-2023.md", "summary": "The producers of After Hours on the director they had before Scorsese: a Disney animator called Tim Burton.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Amy Robinson interview" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "article", "interview", "web", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": { "url": "https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/insanely-fun-griffin-dunne-amy-robinson-on-after-hours", "publication": "RogerEbert.com", "date": "2023-07-17T00:00:00.000Z" }, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/" ], "links_in": [ "/films/after-hours/", "/ideas/tim-burton-stepped-aside/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 156, "body": "Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne interviewed by Collin Souter for RogerEbert.com, 17 July 2023,\naround the Criterion release of [[After Hours (1985)]]. Robinson played Teresa in\n[[Mean Streets (1973)|Mean Streets]] and co-produced *After Hours*.\n\n### Good for\n\nThe Tim Burton story, which is not in any book in the library ([[Tim Burton stepped aside]]),\nand the casting of John Heard.\n\n### What they say\n\nRobinson on Burton: \"we felt that he would create a world, but we never got far enough.\nPartially because we couldn't raise the money with him. Secondly, because Marty had been sent\nthe script first, it turned out that 'Last Temptation' had fallen apart, so he was interested.\"\n\nDunne on John Heard, who plays Tom the bartender: \"We suggested him to Marty for this role. And\nJohn had kind of a wild reputation. (Marty) expressed his concern, and John said, 'I'm going to\nbe on my best, best behavior,' and he was.\"" }, { "title": "Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/scorsese-by-ebert/", "raw": "/raw/sources/scorsese-by-ebert.md", "summary": "Roger Ebert", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Scorsese by Ebert" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "sbe", "passages": 1369 }, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/values/", "/sources/ebert-alice-review/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/ideas/overhead-shots-priests-eye-view/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 147, "body": "Roger Ebert, *Scorsese by Ebert* — four decades of Ebert's reviews and interviews on a single\ndirector, collected with later commentary.\n\n### Good for\n\nReception evidence across time from one consistent observer, which is rare and analytically\nuseful: you can watch a critical consensus form. His first-run review of\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] reads it as a portrait of an American woman rather\nthan as a Scorsese picture — a useful control on how the film looked before its director\nbecame canonical ([[Values]]).\n\nThe collection is the natural companion to [[Ebert — Alice review (1974)]]: the single review\ngives you the moment, this gives you the revision.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nJournalism, not scholarship — deadline judgements, and Ebert's warmth toward Scorsese grows\nover the decades. That drift is itself the data; just don't mistake the later commentary for\nwhat he thought at the time." }, { "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "raw": "/raw/sources/scorsese-companion.md", "summary": "Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)", "film": null, "aliases": [ "A Companion to Martin Scorsese" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "smc", "passages": 2447 }, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/contexts/commerce/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/independence-1973/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/contexts/womens-picture-1974/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bickle-sees-through-glass/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/hand-in-the-flame/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/ideas/ms-magazine-twenty-five-per-cent/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/scorsese-journey/" ], "citations": [ "smc 117", "smc 124", "smc 121", "smc 122" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "smc", "title": "Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese" } ], "words": 242, "body": "Aaron Baker (ed.), *A Companion to Martin Scorsese* — the academic collection, one chapter\nper problem rather than one per film.\n\n### Good for\n\nThe critical argument *about* Scorsese rather than the making of the films. Its chapter on\n[[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] (`smc 117`–`smc 124`) is the best single account of\nhow the film was received as a feminist object and attacked as one: it quotes Karyn Kay and\nGerald Peary dismissing it as the work of a \"self-admitted macho director\" on a feminist trip,\nand notes that Warner Bros held a quarter of *Ms. Magazine*, which had praised it\n(`smc 121`) — a reception-side [[Commerce]] fact worth more than most production trivia.\n\n`smc 122` is where the prologue's visual debts are pinned down: the red sky as homage to\nWilliam Cameron Menzies' skies for *Duel in the Sun* and *Gone with the Wind*, and the girl's\nboast quoted in full. It also carries Burstyn calling the shoot the most creative experience\nshe had had with a director. See [[Alice — the prologue]] and [[The women's picture, 1974]].\n\n### Handle with care\n\nA multi-author collection: chapters vary in method and quality, and several are reading the\nfilms through a theoretical frame rather than describing them. It cites secondary sources\nheavily — the Menzies attribution, for instance, comes via Kelly — so for production facts go\nto [[Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)|Scorsese on Scorsese]] first and use this for the argument." }, { "title": "Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/scorsese-journey/", "raw": "/raw/sources/scorsese-journey.md", "summary": "Mary Pat Kelly (Hachette Books, 1991)", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Martin Scorsese: A Journey" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "smj", "passages": 1600 }, "links_out": [ "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/contexts/soho-before-the-money-1984/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/85000-backdrop/", "/ideas/close-ups-for-no-reason/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/ideas/nobody-agrees-whether-johnny-boy-dies/", "/ideas/the-keys-nearly-killed-griffin-dunne/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/robert-de-niro/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 165, "body": "Mary Pat Kelly, *Martin Scorsese: A Journey* (1991) — a career biography built on long access\nand interviews with Scorsese, his family and his collaborators.\n\n### Good for\n\nTexture and testimony, film by film, from someone who was allowed in the room. Its reading of\nthe [[Alice — the prologue]] is the most quoted one in the literature: the prologue as the\npoint where, for both Alice and Scorsese, imagination and movie images merge — red sky, fog,\nthe *Wizard of Oz* farmyard, the *East of Eden* house. Later writing on the film, including\n[[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]], cites Kelly for these\nattributions rather than arriving at them independently.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nAuthorised and affectionate, written with the subject's cooperation. Excellent on what people\nremember and why it mattered to them; weaker as a check on dates, budgets and who decided\nwhat. Cross-check against [[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|Biskind]] for the\nindustrial version of the same events." }, { "title": "Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/", "raw": "/raw/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese.md", "summary": "The director's own account, film by film, assembled from interviews. Intention straight from the source — with the usual caveats.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Scorsese on Scorsese" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "interview", "scorsese" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "sos", "passages": 1012 }, "links_out": [ "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "/contexts/personal/", "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "/sources/biskind-easy-riders/", "/sources/burstyn-lessons/" ], "links_in": [ "/contexts/church-and-street-little-italy/", "/contexts/last-temptation-collapse-1983/", "/contexts/personal/", "/contexts/returning-veteran-1976/", "/films/after-hours/", "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "/films/mean-streets/", "/films/taxi-driver/", "/ideas/bressons-hands-travis-guns/", "/ideas/corman-offered-to-make-it-black/", "/ideas/de-niro-wrote-in-the-margins/", "/ideas/five-set-ups-a-day-became-sixteen/", "/ideas/herrmann-taxi-driver-last-score/", "/ideas/in-every-city-theres-one-man/", "/ideas/jukebox-is-the-score/", "/ideas/michael-powell-wrote-the-ending/", "/ideas/new-york-was-los-angeles/", "/ideas/paul-born-on-west-side-highway/", "/ideas/red-tint-over-the-bloodbath/", "/ideas/schrader-scorsese-disagree/", "/ideas/too-much-red/", "/ideas/wrong-man-paranoid-camera/", "/people/harvey-keitel/", "/people/martin-scorsese/", "/people/michael-ballhaus/", "/people/michael-powell/", "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "/sources/criterion-at-home-in-the-world/", "/sources/scorsese-companion/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 269, "body": "*Scorsese on Scorsese*, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie (Faber & Faber, 1989;\nrevised editions since). Scorsese narrating his own filmography, from the Little Italy\nshorts onward, in the Faber \"directors on themselves\" series.\n[Publisher page ↗](https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571220021-scorsese-on-scorsese/)\n\n### Good for\n\nIntention and film-memory: what he thought he was quoting, what the studio\nfought him on, how [[Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)]] fit between\n[[Mean Streets (1973)|Mean Streets]] and [[Taxi Driver (1976)|Taxi Driver]]. The Mean Streets\npages (pp. 36–49) are the densest account of that film anywhere in the library. Feeds [[Martin Scorsese]], [[Alice — the prologue]] and the\n[[Personal]] context note — no filmmaker documents his own influences more willingly.\n\n### Handle with care\n\n**Which edition.** The scan in Reel is not the 1989 first edition. It is a later revised\nedition that runs to *Casino* and *Kundun*, with a filmography that credits every song in *Mean\nStreets*. Its text for the 1970s chapters matches the first edition as far as can be checked;\npage numbers may not.\n\n**Pagination.** Two printed pages are missing from the scan between pp. 84 and 86. Up to p. 83\nthe scan runs two pages ahead of the printed book; from p. 87 it matches. Checked against\nrunning heads in September 2026. `tools/reel.py` and `tools/verify-citations.py` correct for\nit; the library's own caution note on this book gives different offsets and is wrong.\n\nLike [[Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)|Truffaut]], it's a self-portrait:\ninterviews compiled with the subject's cooperation, decades of retelling smoothing the\nanecdotes. Cross-check production claims against\n[[Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)|Biskind]] and\n[[Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006)|Burstyn]]." }, { "title": "Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Scorsese", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/shoot-like-scorsese/", "raw": "/raw/sources/shoot-like-scorsese.md", "summary": "Christopher Kenworthy (Michael Wiese Productions)", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Shoot Like Scorsese" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "scorsese", "practical", "craft" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "sls", "passages": 289 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/camerawork/", "/contexts/personal/" ], "links_in": [], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 142, "body": "Christopher Kenworthy, *Shoot Like Scorsese* — a practical shot-by-shot manual: named camera\nmoves, diagrammed, with instructions for reproducing them.\n\n### Good for\n\nTurning [[Camerawork]] from description into something a student can actually execute. Where\nthe critical books say a shot is expressive, this says where to put the camera and when to\nmove it. Useful in class as the bridge between analysis and production, and as a check on\nvague writing: if a move can be diagrammed, it can be named precisely.\n\n### Handle with care\n\nThe premise — that a director's style reduces to a repertoire of moves — is exactly what the\n[[Personal]] context note argues against. Style is what a filmmaker does with movie-memory,\nnot a list of setups. Use it for craft vocabulary; don't let it stand in for an account of\nwhy Scorsese frames as he does." }, { "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/technique-film-editing/", "raw": "/raw/sources/technique-film-editing.md", "summary": "Reisz and Millar, 1953: an editor's book, still the sharpest thing in the library on why a cut is there at all.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "The Technique of Film Editing" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel", "editing" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "tfe", "passages": 2029 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/editing/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/printed-language/" ], "citations": [ "tfe 185", "tfe 189", "tfe 226", "tfe 202", "tfe 23" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "tfe", "title": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing" } ], "words": 137, "body": "Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar, *The Technique of Film Editing* (2nd edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nA practitioner's manual from 1953 that reads as if written yesterday. Its rule is the one this site's [[Editing]] note is built on: \"Every cut — this much we can insist on — should make a point\" (`tfe 185`), with the corollary that \"unless it makes a point a cut is often found to be unsmooth\" (`tfe 189`). That reframes invisibility as a consequence of necessity rather than of matching, which no later textbook puts as well.\n\nAlso the source for sound used \"in opposition to the visuals\" (`tfe 226`), for the timing of intertitles (`tfe 202`), and for a sceptical account of Eisenstein's intellectual montage in practice (`tfe 23`).\n\nReach for it whenever an editing question is really a \"why\" question." }, { "title": "Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966)", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/truffaut-hitchcock/", "raw": "/raw/sources/truffaut-hitchcock.md", "summary": "The book-length interview. Hitchcock's own theory of directing the audience, in his own words.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Truffaut" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "interview", "hitchcock" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": null, "links_out": [ "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/concepts/montage/", "/sources/rebello-making-of-psycho/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/the-macguffin/", "/contexts/personal/", "/films/psycho-1960/", "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "/sources/scorsese-on-scorsese/" ], "citations": [], "books_cited": [], "words": 137, "body": "François Truffaut, *Hitchcock* (Simon & Schuster, 1966; revised 1983), from roughly fifty\nhours of interviews conducted in 1962 with Helen Scott interpreting.\n[Book overview ↗](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchcock/Truffaut) · The 2015 documentary\n*Hitchcock/Truffaut* uses the original audio tapes.\n\n### Good for\n\nIntention — the only major source where Hitchcock explains Psycho's design\nhimself: the \"playing the audience like an organ\" line used in\n[[Psycho — the shower scene]]; the fun-picture framing (\"the film was made with quite a\nsense of amusement\"); the MacGuffin doctrine quoted in [[The MacGuffin]]; the \"pure film\"\nargument that underwrites [[Montage]].\n\n### Handle with care\n\nIt's a performance. Hitchcock is constructing his own legend for a\nflattering interviewer, and technique is systematically foregrounded over collaborators\n(Stefano, Herrmann and Saul Bass barely register). Cross-check production claims against\n[[Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)|Rebello]]." }, { "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/understanding-movies/", "raw": "/raw/sources/understanding-movies.md", "summary": "Giannetti's survey: opinionated, quotable, and the library's best source for what a technique feels like rather than what it is called.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "Understanding Movies" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "um", "passages": 2695 }, "links_out": [ "/sources/bordwell-thompson-film-art/", "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/formula/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/acting/", "/concepts/audio/", "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/", "/concepts/camerawork/", "/concepts/character/", "/concepts/chronology/", "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/editing/", "/concepts/format/", "/concepts/formula/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/mise-en-scene/", "/concepts/montage/", "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/", "/concepts/point-of-view/", "/concepts/setting/", "/concepts/spoken-language/", "/concepts/structure/" ], "citations": [ "um 23", "um 17", "um 277", "um 354", "um 517", "um 168" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "um", "title": "Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies" } ], "words": 154, "body": "Louis Giannetti, *Understanding Movies* (14th edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nThe most quotable general text on the shelf. Where [[Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art|Film Art]] classifies, Giannetti judges, and the judgements are what make him useful: colour is \"strongly emotional in its appeal\" and audiences \"accept it passively\" (`um 23`); low-key lighting belongs to \"mysteries, thrillers, and gangster films\" (`um 17`); \"casting is characterization\" (`um 277`); \"incompetent artists merely repeat. Serious artists reinterpret\" (`um 354`). He also carries the Welles quotation on Kane's moral ambiguity (`um 517`) and the cleanest short statement of Eisenstein's dialectical montage (`um 168`).\n\nReach for him when a concept note needs a second voice that will commit to a position. Do not reach for him for definitions; the vocabulary is looser than Bordwell's and occasionally idiosyncratic (his \"classical cutting\" is not everyone's).\n\nCited across [[Acting]], [[Audio]], [[Colour]], [[Lighting]], [[Setting]], [[Camerawork]], [[Editing]], [[Montage]], [[Point of view]], [[Character]], [[Structure]] and [[Formula]]." }, { "title": "Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media", "type": "source", "url": "/sources/visual-story/", "raw": "/raw/sources/visual-story.md", "summary": "Bruce Block's practitioner's grammar of the image: contrast and affinity, the visual components, and story structure drawn as a graph.", "film": null, "aliases": [ "The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" ], "codes": [], "tags": [ "book", "reel" ], "watched": null, "watching": false, "axis": [], "source": null, "reel": { "prefix": "vs", "passages": 1390 }, "links_out": [ "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/structure/", "/concepts/colour/" ], "links_in": [ "/concepts/colour/", "/concepts/lighting/", "/concepts/structure/" ], "citations": [ "vs 260", "vs 100", "vs 246" ], "books_cited": [ { "prefix": "vs", "title": "Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" } ], "words": 155, "body": "Bruce Block, *The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media* (3rd edn).\n\n### Good for\n\nA working designer's book rather than a scholar's. Block's method is to name the visual components (space, line, shape, tone, colour, movement, rhythm) and then argue that all of them work through contrast and affinity. His colour chapter is the one that says colour meaning is learned inside a film rather than given by nature: \"If presented consistently, the audience will learn that a green color scheme means danger\" (`vs 260`). His tonal-contrast line, \"Without tonal contrast, lines don't exist\" (`vs 100`), is the shortest correct thing anyone has written about [[Lighting]].\n\nThe story-structure chapter draws intensity as a curve and insists \"picture makers must understand story structure or they may never be able to correctly use visual structure\" (`vs 246`), which links [[Structure]] back to the technical codes.\n\nCited across [[Colour]], [[Lighting]] and [[Structure]]." } ], "library": [ { "title": "Boyd & Palmer — After Hitchcock", "url": "/sources/after-hitchcock/", "prefix": "ah", "passages": 1179, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Kelly Gordon Brine — The Art of Cinematic Storytelling", "url": "/sources/cinematic-storytelling/", "prefix": "acs", "passages": 1617, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Marilyn Fabe — Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique", "url": "/sources/closely-watched-films/", "prefix": "cwf", "passages": 889, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "R. Barton Palmer — Joel and Ethan Coen", "url": "/sources/coen-brothers/", "prefix": "coen", "passages": 861, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Staiger & Hake — Convergence Media History", "url": "/sources/convergence-media-history/", "prefix": "cmh", "passages": 785, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Pavlik & McIntosh — Converging Media", "url": "/sources/converging-media/", "prefix": "cvm", "passages": 3599, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Edgar & Sedgwick — Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts", "url": "/sources/cultural-theory-key-concepts/", "prefix": "ctk", "passages": 1336, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Justus Nieland — David Lynch", "url": "/sources/david-lynch/", "prefix": "dl", "passages": 698, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Guy Westwell — A Dictionary of Film Studies", "url": "/sources/dictionary-film-studies/", "prefix": "dfs", "passages": 6181, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Doughty & Shaw — Film: The Essential Study Guide", "url": "/sources/essential-study-guide/", "prefix": "esg", "passages": 854, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Gray, Sandvoss & Harrington — Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World", "url": "/sources/fandom-identities/", "prefix": "fan", "passages": 2170, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "William H. Phillips — Film: An Introduction", "url": "/sources/film-an-introduction/", "prefix": "fai", "passages": 3872, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Pramaggiore & Wallis — Film: A Critical Introduction", "url": "/sources/film-critical-introduction/", "prefix": "fci", "passages": 4095, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Amy Villarejo — Film Studies: The Basics", "url": "/sources/film-studies-basics/", "prefix": "fsb", "passages": 470, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Ed Sikov — Film Studies: An Introduction", "url": "/sources/film-studies-sikov/", "prefix": "sik", "passages": 1142, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film", "url": "/sources/history-narrative-film/", "prefix": "hnf", "passages": 3565, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Nicholas Mirzoeff — How to See the World", "url": "/sources/how-to-see-the-world/", "prefix": "htsw", "passages": 973, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Jill Nelmes — Introduction to Film Studies", "url": "/sources/intro-film-studies/", "prefix": "ifs", "passages": 3676, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "danah boyd — It's Complicated", "url": "/sources/its-complicated/", "prefix": "itc", "passages": 1452, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Christopher Kenworthy — Master Shots", "url": "/sources/master-shots-1/", "prefix": "ms1", "passages": 584, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Christopher Kenworthy — Master Shots Vol 3: The Director's Vision", "url": "/sources/master-shots-3/", "prefix": "ms3", "passages": 751, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Cunningham & Turner — The Media and Communications in Australia", "url": "/sources/media-comms-australia/", "prefix": "mca", "passages": 2065, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Hoban, Humphris & Booth — Media Reframed", "url": "/sources/media-reframed/", "prefix": "mr", "passages": 4558, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Couldry & Hepp — The Mediated Construction of Reality", "url": "/sources/mediated-construction/", "prefix": "mcr", "passages": 1249, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Donald & Renov — The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies", "url": "/sources/sage-handbook-film/", "prefix": "sgh", "passages": 2484, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Jaspers & Warnecke — Martin Scorsese", "url": "/sources/scorsese-kinemathek/", "prefix": "msk", "passages": 2001, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Spielberg", "url": "/sources/shoot-like-spielberg/", "prefix": "slsp", "passages": 304, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Tarantino", "url": "/sources/shoot-like-tarantino/", "prefix": "slt", "passages": 319, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Dixon & Foster — A Short History of Film", "url": "/sources/short-history-film/", "prefix": "shf", "passages": 1394, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Mark Cousins — The Story of Film", "url": "/sources/story-of-film-book/", "prefix": "sof", "passages": 2587, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Mark Cousins — The Story of Looking", "url": "/sources/story-of-looking/", "prefix": "sol", "passages": 1823, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Abrams, Bell & Udris — Studying Film", "url": "/sources/studying-film/", "prefix": "stf", "passages": 1972, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Henry Jenkins — Textual Poachers", "url": "/sources/textual-poachers/", "prefix": "tp", "passages": 929, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "David Morley — Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies", "url": "/sources/tv-audiences-cultural-studies/", "prefix": "tacs", "passages": 1152, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Roger Silverstone — Television and Everyday Life", "url": "/sources/tv-everyday-life/", "prefix": "tel", "passages": 755, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Per Persson — Understanding Cinema", "url": "/sources/understanding-cinema/", "prefix": "uc", "passages": 1061, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Mark Duffett — Understanding Fandom", "url": "/sources/understanding-fandom/", "prefix": "ufd", "passages": 1829, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Donna Kornhaber — Wes Anderson", "url": "/sources/wes-anderson-kornhaber/", "prefix": "wak", "passages": 565, "strongest_on": [] }, { "title": "Sophie Monks Kaufman — Wes Anderson", "url": "/sources/wes-anderson-lwl/", "prefix": "wal", "passages": 356, "strongest_on": [] } ], "axis_crosswalk": { "snapshot": "2026-09-26", "playback_total": 131, "shared": [ { "axis": { "slug": "mean-streets-the-home-movies", "film": "Mean Streets", "scene": "The Home Movies", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/" }, "note": { "title": "Mean Streets (1973)", "url": "/films/mean-streets/", "type": "film" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "psycho-shower-scene", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Shower Scene", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-shower-scene/" }, "note": { "title": "Psycho (1960)", "url": "/films/psycho-1960/", "type": "film" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "psycho-parlour-room", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Parlour Room", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-parlour-room/" }, "note": { "title": "Psycho (1960)", "url": "/films/psycho-1960/", "type": "film" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "psycho-search-montage", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "The Search", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-search-montage/" }, "note": { "title": "Psycho (1960)", "url": "/films/psycho-1960/", "type": "film" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "mean-streets-the-home-movies", "film": "Mean Streets", "scene": "The Home Movies", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/" }, "note": { "title": "Mean Streets — the opening", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-opening/", "type": "scene" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "psycho-parlour-room", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Parlour Room", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-parlour-room/" }, "note": { "title": "Psycho — the parlour scene", "url": "/scenes/psycho-parlour-scene/", "type": "scene" } }, { "axis": { "slug": "psycho-shower-scene", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Shower Scene", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-shower-scene/" }, "note": { "title": "Psycho — the shower scene", "url": "/scenes/psycho-shower-scene/", "type": "scene" } } ], "candidates": [ { "title": "After Hours — back at work", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-back-at-work/", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "summary": "A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.", "codes": [ "structure", "chronology", "camerawork", "character", "themes" ] }, { "title": "After Hours — the diner", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-the-diner/", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "summary": "A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.", "codes": [ "camerawork", "character", "spoken-language", "structure", "acting" ] }, { "title": "After Hours — the keys", "url": "/scenes/after-hours-the-keys/", "film": "After Hours (1985)", "summary": "A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.", "codes": [ "point-of-view", "camerawork", "editing", "setting", "iconography" ] }, { "title": "Alice — the prologue", "url": "/scenes/alice-prologue/", "film": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "summary": "Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.", "codes": [ "setting", "colour", "lighting", "audio", "editing", "spoken-language", "chronology", "character", "continuity", "format", "formula", "iconography", "montage", "printed-language", "structure" ] }, { "title": "The Craft — light as a feather", "url": "/scenes/craft-light-as-a-feather/", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "summary": "Four girls, a chant, and a body that rises. The best sequence in the film contains no special effect at all — only rhythm, faces and a cut.", "codes": [ "audio", "editing", "mise-en-scene", "camerawork", "continuity", "conflict", "non-diegetic-sound" ] }, { "title": "The Craft — Nancy's turn", "url": "/scenes/craft-nancys-turn/", "film": "The Craft (1996)", "summary": "Fairuza Balk gets everything she asked for and the film changes its mind about her. The best performance in it, in service of the argument it loses.", "codes": [ "acting", "character", "mise-en-scene", "colour", "conflict" ] }, { "title": "Mean Streets — the back room", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-back-room/", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "summary": "Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.", "codes": [ "acting", "spoken-language", "character", "structure", "camerawork", "conflict" ] }, { "title": "Mean Streets — Tony's bar", "url": "/scenes/mean-streets-tonys-bar/", "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "summary": "Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.", "codes": [ "colour", "lighting", "camerawork", "audio", "setting", "character", "iconography", "editing" ] }, { "title": "Psycho — the opening", "url": "/scenes/psycho-opening/", "film": "Psycho (1960)", "summary": "A crane over Phoenix, captions stamping time and place, then in through a half-open window. The audience enters as a trespasser.", "codes": [ "camerawork", "printed-language", "setting", "the-camera-as-voyeur", "point-of-view", "the-macguffin" ] }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the mirror", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-mirror/", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "summary": "\"You talkin' to me?\" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.", "codes": [ "acting", "spoken-language", "camerawork", "point-of-view", "character" ] }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the phone call", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-phone-call/", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "summary": "Travis begs Betsy down a payphone and the camera walks away from him, into an empty corridor. Scorsese thought of this shot first and filmed it last.", "codes": [ "camerawork", "point-of-view", "structure", "mise-en-scene", "conflict", "spoken-language", "the-camera-as-voyeur" ] }, { "title": "Taxi Driver — the shoot-out", "url": "/scenes/taxi-driver-shootout/", "film": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "summary": "Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.", "codes": [ "editing", "colour", "camerawork", "audio", "point-of-view", "non-diegetic-sound", "conflict", "formula", "the-camera-as-voyeur" ] } ], "same_films": [ { "film": "Mean Streets (1973)", "url": "/films/mean-streets/", "axis": [ { "slug": "mean-streets-the-home-movies", "film": "Mean Streets", "scene": "The Home Movies", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/mean-streets-the-home-movies/" } ] }, { "film": "Psycho (1960)", "url": "/films/psycho-1960/", "axis": [ { "slug": "psycho-parlour-room", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Parlour Room", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-parlour-room/" }, { "slug": "psycho-shower-scene", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "Shower Scene", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-shower-scene/" }, { "slug": "psycho-search-montage", "film": "Psycho", "scene": "The Search", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/playback/psycho-search-montage/" } ] } ], "codes": [ { "name": "Camerawork", "slug": "camerawork", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/camerawork/", "scenes": 68, "srs": [ { "title": "The camera as voyeur", "url": "/concepts/camera-as-voyeur/" }, { "title": "Camerawork", "url": "/concepts/camerawork/" } ] }, { "name": "Editing", "slug": "editing", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/editing/", "scenes": 47, "srs": [ { "title": "Editing", "url": "/concepts/editing/" }, { "title": "Montage", "url": "/concepts/montage/" } ] }, { "name": "Audio", "slug": "audio", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/audio/", "scenes": 43, "srs": [ { "title": "Audio", "url": "/concepts/audio/" }, { "title": "Non-diegetic sound", "url": "/concepts/non-diegetic-sound/" } ] }, { "name": "Lighting", "slug": "lighting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/lighting/", "scenes": 18, "srs": [ { "title": "Lighting", "url": "/concepts/lighting/" } ] }, { "name": "Setting", "slug": "setting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/setting/", "scenes": 31, "srs": [ { "title": "Setting", "url": "/concepts/setting/" } ] }, { "name": "Mise en scène", "slug": "mise-en-scene", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/mise-en-scene/", "scenes": 41, "srs": [ { "title": "Mise en scène", "url": "/concepts/mise-en-scene/" } ] }, { "name": "Acting", "slug": "acting", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/acting/", "scenes": 35, "srs": [ { "title": "Acting", "url": "/concepts/acting/" } ] }, { "name": "Colour", "slug": "colour", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/colour/", "scenes": 26, "srs": [ { "title": "Colour", "url": "/concepts/colour/" } ] }, { "name": "Story conventions", "slug": "story-conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/story-conventions/", "scenes": 65, "srs": [ { "title": "Character", "url": "/concepts/character/" }, { "title": "Chronology", "url": "/concepts/chronology/" }, { "title": "Conflict", "url": "/concepts/conflict/" }, { "title": "Point of view", "url": "/concepts/point-of-view/" }, { "title": "Structure", "url": "/concepts/structure/" }, { "title": "The MacGuffin", "url": "/concepts/the-macguffin/" } ] }, { "name": "Form conventions", "slug": "form-conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/form-conventions/", "scenes": 23, "srs": [ { "title": "Continuity", "url": "/concepts/continuity/" }, { "title": "Format", "url": "/concepts/format/" } ] }, { "name": "Genre conventions", "slug": "genre-conventions", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/genre-conventions/", "scenes": 30, "srs": [ { "title": "Formula", "url": "/concepts/formula/" }, { "title": "Iconography", "url": "/concepts/iconography/" }, { "title": "Themes", "url": "/concepts/themes/" } ] }, { "name": "Printed language", "slug": "printed-language", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/printed-language/", "scenes": 16, "srs": [ { "title": "Printed language", "url": "/concepts/printed-language/" } ] }, { "name": "Spoken language", "slug": "spoken-language", "url": "https://axisofaction.com/codes/spoken-language/", "scenes": 23, "srs": [ { "title": "Spoken language", "url": "/concepts/spoken-language/" } ] } ] }, "watches": { "scorsese": { "title": "The Scorsese watch", "person": "Martin Scorsese", "intro": "Every fiction feature Martin Scorsese has directed, in release order, and how far through them the journal has got. A film goes green when it has a watched date, amber while it's being watched, and grey until then. Films with a note but no date are waiting for a date. The dark ones between were seen along the way and haven't been written up yet.", "source": "Filmography checked against Wikipedia's Martin Scorsese filmography, 26 September 2026.", "films": [ { "year": 1967, "title": "Who's That Knocking at My Door", "hook": "Keitel as J.R., the character who becomes Charlie.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1972, "title": "Boxcar Bertha", "hook": "The Corman picture. Cassavetes called it a piece of shit and told him to make something personal.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1973, "title": "Mean Streets", "note": "Mean Streets (1973)", "url": "/films/mean-streets/", "summary": "Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.", "status": "noted", "date": null }, { "year": 1974, "title": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", "note": "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)", "url": "/films/alice-doesnt-live-here-anymore/", "summary": "Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.", "status": "noted", "date": null }, { "year": 1976, "title": "Taxi Driver", "note": "Taxi Driver (1976)", "url": "/films/taxi-driver/", "summary": "A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the strongest example here of point of view doing the work of an argument.", "status": "watched", "date": "2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z" }, { "year": 1977, "title": "New York, New York", "hook": "A studio musical built from taped improvisations: the Mean Streets method on a Hollywood budget.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "seen", "date": null }, { "year": 1980, "title": "Raging Bull", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "seen", "date": null }, { "year": 1982, "title": "The King of Comedy", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "seen", "date": null }, { "year": 1985, "title": "After Hours", "note": "After Hours (1985)", "url": "/films/after-hours/", "summary": "A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.", "status": "watching", "date": null }, { "year": 1986, "title": "The Color of Money", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1988, "title": "The Last Temptation of Christ", "hook": "Charlie's question from Mean Streets, asked of Christ.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1990, "title": "Goodfellas", "hook": "Mean Streets with the career put back in.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1991, "title": "Cape Fear", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1993, "title": "The Age of Innocence", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1995, "title": "Casino", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1997, "title": "Kundun", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1999, "title": "Bringing Out the Dead", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2002, "title": "Gangs of New York", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2004, "title": "The Aviator", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2006, "title": "The Departed", "hook": "On Axis of Action twice: the interview and the chase.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2010, "title": "Shutter Island", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2011, "title": "Hugo", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2013, "title": "The Wolf of Wall Street", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2016, "title": "Silence", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2019, "title": "The Irishman", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2023, "title": "Killers of the Flower Moon", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": null, "title": "What Happens at Night", "upcoming": "In post-production", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "upcoming", "date": null } ], "documentaries": [ { "year": 1974, "title": "Italianamerican", "hook": "Scorsese's parents at their kitchen table. He pairs it with Mean Streets.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1978, "title": "The Last Waltz", "hook": "Jonathan Taplin, who produced Mean Streets, brought him the job.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1995, "title": "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 1999, "title": "My Voyage to Italy", "hook": "Where he talks about I Vitelloni, the model for Mean Streets' structure.", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2005, "title": "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2008, "title": "Shine a Light", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2011, "title": "George Harrison: Living in the Material World", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2019, "title": "Rolling Thunder Revue", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2022, "title": "Personality Crisis: One Night Only", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null }, { "year": 2024, "title": "Beatles '64", "url": null, "summary": null, "status": "to-come", "date": null } ], "key": "scorsese", "counts": { "total": 26, "seen": 6, "watching": 1 }, "now": [ { "year": 1985, "title": "After Hours", "note": "After Hours (1985)", "url": "/films/after-hours/", "summary": "A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.", "status": "watching", "date": null } ] } } }