Acephalous

Just because I was the last to know doesn't mean it didn't blow my mind

So there I am, a professional nerd watching World War Z with an executive chef, and I giggle when Brad Pitt decides that at the end of the world, the place he needs to be is Cardiff, Wales. Because of course it is. When the world’s ending and the best option isn’t available, you seek out Torchwood.

“What sort of book nonsense are you laughing about now,” my roommate asked.

“Too arcane to explain,” I replied, and that was that.

So Pitt stumbled up and passed out on the gates of the World Health Organization’s Cardiff outpost, which is fine, as the entire world ain’t out to please me meta-textually.

Or so I thought, before Pitt opened his eyes and the camera flipped to his first-person perspective as he awoke from his short coma:

I made a noise like my mind had been blown because it had. Because that’s Peter Capaldi.

The new Doctor.

In Cardiff.

At the end of the world.

So apparently the best option was available, except he’s not playing the Doctor. He’s credited as … “W.H.O. Doctor.”

For the record, principle photography on World War Z began in early 2011, more than a year and a half before Matt Smith announced he’d be leaving Doctor Who, which means the only way all this could’ve been thrown together would be if someone had a …

I never realized England was a Jewish grandmother

Because it’s about time for another Doctor Who post, here’s England reminding Matt Smith that he’s going to be miserable when she’s gone and we all die alone. The caption to the above photograph, for example, reads “[a]fter his lunch Matt wandered around, ending up sitting on someone’s front step,” which is essentially a Yiddish insult. (My grandmother never actually said “you should wander around and end up sitting on some stranger’s stoop,” but I can easily imagine her doing so.) The Jewish futility doesn’t end there:

Matt seemed to blend into the crowd as he spent a relaxed day on his own, as passers by seemed oblivious to who he was. ["You relax like a nobody" or "You and nine men don't make a minyan."]

Matt didn’t seem bothered by the fact that he was spending the day by himself, wanting to work on his own. ["As you work so will you die."]

Reading over the script, Matt seemed to be considering the new part, as he tried to make a name for himself in Hollywood. ["Try to make a name for yourself different from mine."]

The 30-year-old chomped away on his sandwich outside the eatery, obviously not worried about being spotted. ["When you slobber away, only God's watching."]

The star seemed happy as he spent alone, moving on with his career in the US. ["May you grow up and live in Los Angeles."]

Which means that, yes, I may be the first person ever to pass time in Mississippi writing ersatz Yiddish insults.

“You know when you see a photograph of someone you know, but it’s from years before you knew them.”

As previously noted, my chronic insomnia and the scheduling of television in the night’s more obscure recesses often compel me to watch Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. One side-effect of such viewings is that I sometimes drift in and out of consciousness during commercial breaks, and I assume that anything I remember watching is a daft melange of half-heard words and half-remembered dreams of the sort an almost-deaf person might concoct to explain the episode to himself after the fact. Like the time I watched that episode about Big Boi being eaten by hyenas after Detective Stabler was shot over a monkey in a basketball — that had to the product of secondary elaboration.

Only it wasn’t.

So, when I awoke this morning convinced that I’d seen two seasons of Doctor Who spoiled by a 2008 episode of SVU about “sexting,” I couldn’t just chalk it up to shoddy dreamwork. I fired up the Netflix machine, turned on the closed captions and wouldn’t you know it? A 2008 episode of SVU does contain the mother of all spoilers for the fifth and sixth seasons of Doctor Who. See what I mean below the fold:

Art imitating life?

Art:

Life:

Teaching the cultural significance of the Doctor to American students just gets easier and easier.

On notebooks–and the thirty seconds of narrative time I can squeeze into them. (On Doctor Who, "The Impossible Astronaut.")

(I hadn't planned on writing another rhetorical analysis of Doctor Who until next quarter, but my Wednesday night class is composed of nerds and whiners who insist we keep on pushing through the Sixth Season even though the quarter's nearly over. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the Sixth Season is infinitely more complicated than its fairy-tale precursor. In short, imagine an English seminar full of committed Jamesians who demand to read late-James even though every sane person knows that–outside of the hilariously foreshortened "year" you spent preparing for qualifying exams–it's damn well impossible to do anything with The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors in two weeks. That's what this feels like.)

First let me tell you about how the sausage is made: I watch a film or an episode and I either enjoy it or I don't. If I enjoy a film, I'll watch it again to figure out what I enjoyed it. If I enjoy an episode, I'll usually wait for the next episode and then enjoy the season once it comes on DVD. I typically don't have the depth and complexity–such as they are–evident in these visual rhetoric posts when I'm watching them for the first time. Unless some detail is particularly compelling or some technical mistake particularly galling, I watch like a normal human being. It's only on those second watchings that I pull out the notebook and begin to figure out what I don't know. So what don't I know? 

Judging by the number of notebooks I've burned through since Christmas, the empirical answer would be that I don't know a damn thing. That I'm constantly confused by everything in the world and have begun to hoard the finer points of other peoples' narratives on the off chance they or I forget them. The obvious stuff is obvious and mentioned just in case its obviousness becomes important subsequently. Consider the opening sequence of the premier episode of the Sixth Season of Doctor Who ("The Impossible Astronaut"), in which director Toby Haynes begins by showing the audience some paint:

Paint can be important in this series, I think to myself, so I scribble "H. op w/ c-u paint & brushes." (That's "Haynes opens with a close-up of paint and brushes" for those who can't read my ideoletic shorthand.) I pause here because I want to remember what could be at play. Clearly there is a reason Haynes introduces the Sixth Season via the artistic tools the audience most closely associates with Vincent Van Gogh, but given that Gogh met his beastly death shortly after drawing an exploding TARDIS in the penultimate episode of Season Five ("The Pandorica Opens"), this likely has nothing to do with him. Then it occurs to me that Haynes directed and Steven Moffat wrote "The Pandorica Opens," "The Big Bang," and "The Impossible Astronaut," so the presence of meaningful continuity–even if that's not what I spy here–is more likely than not. I take a note to remind myself to take similar notes later and move on to the next frame:

Look who was wrong? That painting there has as much to do with Vincent's narrative as his style. It's the Doctor, which I could've imagined Vincent getting around to, but it's the Doctor in the nude. There's nothing wrong with a nude painting of a man–or wouldn't be a few decades later after Charles II dies and England rejoices by stripping off the gloom of their imported Flemish masters and then their clothes. (To be followed quickly by a intense desire to live in a world in which flat surfaces and solid colors were anathema.) Point being:

Mathilda's painting of the Doctor is too Rococo for its time–because it's not of its time. He's encouraged her to paint not in the departing style of the Flemish Masters, nor in the coming style of French Baroque or endemic Neoclassicism, and why would he? He doesn't need live time in order, and Mathilda, his companion at the moment, is herself learning a little morality lesson about the knowledge the Time Lord grants: more often than not the world isn't ready for it. Not that she minds:

She looks quite please with her anachronistic creation. Her benefactor seems less so:

Note that even though the shots of Mathilda and King Charles II are both medium long shots, she and the image of her Doctor are both bathed in natural light, as if they belong to the world beyond the window's grilles. King Charles II and his men are exactly where they ought to be: the King in the middle and lackeys at both flanks. They have come for the Doctor for reasons unknown–but their tone implies that whatever those reasons may be, the Doctor needs a grand entrance and the sooner the better.

Perhaps not that soon. Appearing from beneath the swaths of Mathilda's skirts suggests that King Charles's haste and j'accuse-face may be warranted. The high angle of framing here is completely warranted. The Doctor may not be physically powerless, but his given that his moral code only seems to allow him to significantly alter history when its in need of a significant alteration, the consequence of him having lost his social stature which much more likely lead to lots and lots of running. Which is exactly what Haynes has him do in the opening bits–and they are comedic "bits" in no uncertain terms–they establish both that he's no longer traveling with Amy and Rory but that he's no longer done with them (even when they fail to see him):

 

 

That's Rory's head you can't see failing to notice the Doctor trying to catch his attention. As I started watching these first few minutes–and keeping in mind I've seen the entire Sixth Season–I found it difficult not to see these as the Season's narrative arc written small. Bear with me: 

1. The Doctor's there, like the Silence, but Amy and Rory can't see him.
2. The Doctor's always been there, like the Silence, but nobody can see them.
3. The Doctor's happy not because he's alive–though I've little doubt that pleases him–but because his plan to redeem himself worked. Perhaps not in full, but fully enough for him to embark, alone, on a series of adventures through human time seemingly designed to taunt Amy and Rory. (The last time the Doctor went on walkabout the results were far darker, so much so I contend that the darkness left in the Tenth's wake is what the Eleventh's had to deal with throughout Season Six.)
4. The Doctor's no longer afraid of what he'll do, because he can't do any more damage to the universe than gambling that he could extinguish it back to life would somehow work. 
5. That it did is what allows him not only accept, but to crave the attention and flattery in oil of the otherwise insignificant Mathilda. Her ability to stand there, insignificantly, is a direct result of his actions, so whatever pleasure he gains from their interaction is because she exists, not because she exists in any particularly pleasing way. 
6. Other stuff you can suss out in the comments while I cook my wife and I dinner.

I could go, but as aforementioned, it's dinner time and much as I would like sharing my notebook with you, I need food. Also, I wonder whether some of you wouldn't rather toss my notebook at me, in which case, slinking away to make some hash is still a solid idea.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fellowship of the Ring (conventions of high fantasy) - Peter Jackson
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• The Dark Knight Returns (animated) - The Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players" 
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" I (Naturalism)
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" II (Realism)
• Breaking Bad - "Say My Name"
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All," Said the Fly to the Money Pile
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" the Invisible Lines and Immaterial Connections
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" Until You're Not
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who - "Vincent and the Doctor" 
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Doctor Who - "The Big Bang"
• Doctor Who - "The Impossible Astronaut"
• Game of Thrones - Embiggening Men in "Blackwater"
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Poor Will
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn Stark and Jon Snow
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man
• Game of Thrones - Everyone is alone, everyone is surrounded in "The Wolf and the Lion"
• Game of Thrones - How circular is "A Golden Crown"?
• Game of Thrones - Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"
• Game of Thrones - Learning to use "The Pointy End"
• Game of Thrones - Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"
• Game of Thrones - "Valar Dohaeris," Indeed. But who? Where? To what end?
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part I
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part II
• Game of Thrones - It's always been "Rain[ing in] Castamere," because yes, I am trying to break your heart
• Game of Thrones - Awful Greek words that apply to "The Rains of Castamere"
• Hannibal - The frail horror of shallow focus
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - "What will become of the children?" Why, they'll be raped and murdered, of course."
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Louie - "Daddy's Girlfriend II"
• Mad Men - "Don and Sally in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Ballad of Peggy and Pete, Redux, in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men - Who owns "The Other Woman"?
• Mad Men - Hands and hands and hands in "Commissions and Fees"
• Mad Men - Nostalgia, forestalled, and "The Wheel"
• Mad Men - "It's not the tooth that's rotten," it's "The Phantom"
• Mad Men - One foot in "The Doorway"
• Mad Men - "Collaborators" in the Secret, Sacred Curb Dances of Suburban Love
• Mad Men - Is the Awesomeness of White Men really "For Immediate Release"?
• Mad Men - Fencing with shadows over "The Quality of Mercy"
• Mad Men (I) - "In Care Of" what? OH REALLY?
• Mad Men (II) - Disappointment "In Care Of" Convention
• Mad Men (III) - Who's "In Care Of" What Now?
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• War is Boring - David Axe
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot

Time can be rewritten. And will be. Try to keep up.

(This will be the second-to-last Who-related visual rhetoric posts for a bit. It concerns the complicated conclusion of the fifth season, which is why it's the second-to-last. It's also a sequel of sorts to this post, though I reserve the right to introduce new material and present spoilers so inscrutable to the casual fans that unless you've watched the series three times through they won't even register as such.)

At the conclusion of "The Pandorica Opens" we learned that all of the Doctor's old enemies had formed a committee and decided the Doctor was responsible for the universe unwriting itself. They weren't wrong. As I noted in the post on "Vampires of Venice," the Doctor tells Rosanna:

He may have even wanted to believe this at the time, but he changed his mind in the next episode, "Amy's Choice," after vicariously experiencing the death of Rory Williams through Amy Pond, who asked him quite the cutting question. If you can't go back and change time,  

At the time, the only answer he could provide was that he someone becoming accustomed to either causing mass extinctions or standing idly by while entire species are wiped from existence. The former may be a more morally reprehensible action, but the passivity of the latter brings him no glory. In order to redeem himself—and I'm going to insist that this season is, among other things, a redemption narrative—he needs to rethink his relation to universe he tends. Which is precisely what happens in the episode "The Big Bang." He discovers that the point of him is that he can change time, so writer and showrunner Steven Moffatt and director Toby Haynes proceed to do exactly that. "The Big Bang" opens with a repetition of the slow tracking shot from the first episode of the season, "The Eleventh Hour": 

Vincent and the Doctor, Together Alone

(This be another one of those posts in which I “[feign] some kind of cultural superiority … even though [my] opinions and tastes are largely shite of the first water [that force most commenters to] make an effort to shaddup when [I] want to wax long and philosophical about some mainstream film [I'm] content to call art.”)

I covered the palette of "Vincent and the Doctor" in my post about the Leverage episode "The Van Gogh Job," so I'll save some time and just say the wheat:

The wheat: 

The wheat: 

The wheat may not seem that important—though damn do I love it—but it calls to mind Woody Allen's famous parody of Ingmar Bergman in Love & Death, which is relevant because "Vincent and the Doctor" is an episode devoted to the consequences of loneliness (felt or otherwise). The Doctor's alone because he's the Doctor; Amy's alone because (unbeknownst to her) Rory's been unwritten from existence; Vincent's alone because Vincent's always been alone; and the Krafayis is alone because it's been abandoned by its fellows. This is a story that's fundamentally about lonely people "coming together," only director Jonny Campbell doesn't shoot it that way. I bring up the visual punning on the wheat because the shots it parodies are relevant. To wit:

Foreshadowing and Genocide and Quite a Bit More, Actually, in "Amy's Choice"

(Another one of those now-more-conveniently-located posts.)

One of the core assumptions of the way I teach visual rhetoric is that directors often know more than they know (or are letting on). This is because shooting schedules often don't track with air dates—for example, the episode I'm going to be discussing today, "Amy's Choice," was the seventh aired, but last one filmed in Series Five of Doctor Who, meaning that writer Gareth Roberts and director Catherine Morshead already knew what would happen in the four episodes that would follow it. The result is a kind of foreknowledge masquerading as foreshadowing: the audience experiences the latter because the writer and director possess the former. 

Sound obvious? That's because that's how we think foreshadowing works. Only one problem: foreshadowing doesn't require authorial intent to be visible in a work. The Jews didn't sit around writing a book foreshadowing the eventual arrival of some guy named Jesus—they wrote a book that a bunch of Christians later interpreted to contain a number of moments when the coming of some guy named Jesus was foretold. Foreshadowing, in other words, often functions as an interpretation used to bolster the authority of a particular reader. ("What do you mean you didn't see Jesus's coming foretold in the Hebrew Bible? What are they teaching at the monastery these days?") Whereas foreshadowing was once largely a matter of readerly interpretation, thanks to some technological innovations I haven't the time nor the space to get into here—it starts with books and evolves into lending libraries and marches forward—foreshadowing is now considered to be more a matter of authorial (or directorial) intervention.

More succinctly, material that used to be wrenched from variably willing texts is now forcibly inserted into them. The classic example of the latter would be the medical drama in which someone suddenly feels a sharp pain in his or her head. The cause? Some writer forcibly inserted a tumor into it as a cheaps means of "foreshadowing" death. It's about as subtle as: 

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Buckling the frame

(This isn't only one of them posts, it's the bastard child of this and this one.)

I feel this post nips too obviously at the heels of previous ones, as I'm not going to be discussing anything I haven't discussed before. Creating a claustrophobic environment is a technical accomplishment that can be done irrespective of the environs in which one shoots a scene. Cramped quarters help, obviously, but they're not necessary. That said, the quarters in the second half of the Doctor Who episode "Time of Angels" are quite cramped, so the fact that director Adam Smith chose the default shots of his principles to be medium- and medium close-ups exacerbates what would've been a feature of every frame anyway. To wit:

That's the Doctor discussing the impending arrival of the Angels with the soldier-clerics assigned to assist him. Important here isn't merely the framing—though compositionally, the soldier-clerics bookending the Doctor can't be considered insignificant—but the tightness of it. The shallow focus leaves only those three in focus—although Amy's still visible by virtue of her ginger dress, not unlike a certain someone else—but the shot's overstuffed with folks in a way that completely obscures the background. Given that that the imminent threat isn't any of these three shot-stuffers, obscuring the background denies the audience access to whatever it is that might be lurking in the dark.

Point being, it's not just that this shot is claustrophobic, but that the claustrophobia it elicits is deliberately obfuscatory: by focusing, shallowly, on these three, the dangerous statues currently spooky-fishing* their way towards them are perforce crushed from the frame. They'll be revealed in shot/reverse shot sequences shortly thereafter, but the tight framing here makes the situation in which the Doctor et al. find themselves seem all the more hopeless. Consider: 

This is the Doctor coming up with one of his patented plans, but the framing still indicates that whatever trap he's in still possesses the upper hand. It's entrapping him, not the other way around. Of course, this entrapment is but a preface to a spectacular escape, and the way in which Smith films this desperation is but a means to increase the glory that said escape entails, but the heightening of this effect is a significant moment in this season.

Rarely do the Doctor's plans include genocide, no matter how malevolent the species he's dealing with. Daleks and Cybermen he traps in other universes or the empty space between them, but this Doctor? He disappears his enemies like a Chilean dictator—erasing them from history—or outright murders the last of them if they pose a threat to Earth.** There's much more to say, but for now I'm focusing on the abreaction of Doctor and audience to the claustrophobia he and it encounter. It's cathartic, most certainly, but there's purging and then there's purging, and only one of them is just and healthy.

*I can't directly link because Comedy Central is a ... but the relevant material's at 3:58.

**As in "The Vampires of Venice," which I'm also teaching today. Stupid three hour classes.

Claustrophobia, as Wolfgang Petersen recognizes, is a cumulative effect.

(The continuation of the previous post which, like this one, is yet another one of those posts.)

I was going to jump right into the episode of Doctor Who I'm teaching tomorrow, but due to a non-Whovian coup, I'm going to prove my point differently first. To that end, I asked my however many Facebook friends I have the following:

Please name the five most claustrophobic films and/or episodes of a television show you've ever seen. If your nominee is chosen, I'll honor you by naming you by name in the post I'm going to write this afternoon. (Not much of an honor, but hey, it's better than nothing.)

Patrick Slaven, Kyler Kuehn, Carrie Shanafelt and Gary Farber all recommended Das Boot, and since I own a copy of said film, Das Boot it is. Short plot summary: back when Wolfgang Petersen had talent, he directed a film about a German U-boat and its discontents, and because the majority of the film took place on the boat, it had plenty of shots that approximate the "coffin shots" I discussed yesterday. (Being stuck in a metal tube leagues and leagues below the sea is roughly equivalent to being buried alive.) But unlike the frames discussed yesterday—in particular, the awkward image of Reynolds in his coffin—Petersen relies on standard scaled shots to create a claustrophobic atmosphere for his audience. So long as the audience grants him the conceit that the men in his film live precariously in a long metal cylinder, he need not 1) employ conventional "coffin shots" nor 2) improve upon convention or go whole hog (as Rodrigo Cortés did in Buried).

Petersen's audience knows that these men are confined behind a brittle shell of metal and will miles below the sea, so the enclosed atmosphere of the film is implicit. But that's not enough. As I mentioned yesterday, audiences key in to conventions in ways that subvert their effectiveness. A director can put a person in a closed coffin, but because so many have done so previously, the effect is merely communicative. The simple fact of being entrapped comes across, but the sympathetic feeling of entrapment doesn't. Das Boot is different. It lacks any of the obviously constricted shots and opts instead for a directorial ethos of tight framing (much as I discussed in my counterfactual Bones yesterday): 

That'd be a typical dinner shot. It lacks the ostentation of Reynolds in a coffin, but by framing this medium close-up as he did, Petersen's use of shallow focus indicates that there's little more to the room than what's seen here. Typically, shallow focus emphasizes a face (or faces) and blurs the unimportant background into a hazy nothing; here, however, the shallow focus reveals that the walls behind these folks abut them so closely that they can't be excluded from the shot. There's simply no way for them to be in focus and the walls around them not, which an audience will realize (even if it doesn't consciously understand) means that these men are very close to their walls. (Or vice versa.) It's not a "coffin shot," merely a medium close-up with a depth of field that reveals, in its entirety, how little there is to see. Stack a few hundred similar shots together and the claustrophobic intent of every director who's ever buried an actor for effect can actually be realized. Just to prove my point, here are some other shots from the film:

That shot of the living quarters need not be perfectly centered in such a way as to create a frame whose composition is so damn mathematical as to be oppressive, but Petersen's got an agenda. Also: 

There are many ways to depict a man amongst his crew, but framing his head as Petersen has (in a close-up) and situating it in the composition against many other similarly framed heads limits the scope of the frame to this head and these other ones. The face, again, is in shallow focus and yet because every other head's within the depth of field the constricted effect is only heightened. Imagine watching a film composed thus for 209 minutes (if you spring for the director's cut): the knowledge of the predicament of the crew is augmented, visually and viscerally, by the manner in which Petersen frames them.

All of which is only to say that a claustrophobic effect isn't bound to a claustrophobic situation. Certainly, both coffins and U-boats lend themselves to a claustrophobic treatment, but the reason Das Boot succeeds where yesterday's episodes and films failed has nothing to do with the narrative situation. It's all about the mechanics of how such a situation is filmed.

Tomorrow, I promise, I'll address this within the dictates of my class and discuss Andrew Gunn's direction of "The Victory of the Daleks."

Claustrophobia is a cumulative effect.

(Yet another one of those posts.)

Representing claustrophobic situations on screen should be simple enough: you take a person, put them in a confined space, and then you bury them alive. Doesn't matter if they're Buffy (in "Bargaining"):

Or Bones (in "Aliens in a Spaceship"):

Or some character played by Ryan Reynolds (in a dull film I wish I hadn't seen): 

Each of those cramped shots communicates to the audience that, like Everett in O Brother, Where Art Thou, someone's in a tight spot. But that's the problem: it communicates the narrow confines in which the characters find themselves, but because the "coffin shot" has become so clichéd, it does so the same way that a sequence of reverse shots inside a car communicates that the participants of a given conversation are driving. Only the oblique angle of the shot of Reynolds comes close to doing what a "coffin shot" is intended to do: duplicate in the audience the claustrophobia felt by the character. (And it only does so because of the odd angle. Most the film uses more conventional "coffin angles" and is as enervated as the other shots above.) Point being: filmmakers are quite proficient at representing people in enclosed spaces and communicating that said people are feeling claustrophobic, but they're not nearly as accomplished at making the audience feel the confinement represented the on screen. 

From the examples above, it's obvious that two techniques don't work: 1) placing characters in an enclosed space for a short duration and 2) placing characters in an enclosed space for a long duration. The first falls victim to convention, whereas the second flirts dangerously with boredom. (I disagree vehemently with Ebert on the effectiveness of Buried.) But if acclimation to convention has vitiated the tools with which a director could cajole claustrophobia from the audience (and if said director's not interested in making a tedious stunt of a film), how can an episode or a film be claustrophobic? 

The answer is: holistically. By which I mean, burying characters for X-amount-of-claustrophobic-time won't cut it, because that still leaves Y-amount-of-non-claustrophobic-time acting as an atmospheric counterweight. The entire episode or film must be shot with claustrophobia in mind. To use the episode of Bones as an example, too many shots in the episode are scaled too long: 

Does this long shot feel claustrophobic to you? Of course not. It's a brightly lit long shot: the lighting (and depth of field) allows the audience to observe details in the fore-, mid- and background, while the scale assures the audience that there's plenty to observe in all those grounds. To think counterfactually for a moment, it's not that shot couldn't be made more claustrophobic. Had the director cropped out some unnecessary visual information:

Still a long shot, but by focusing more narrowly on Agent Booth and the lab technician, the space on-screen seems more cramped. If those officers in the back were to scoot a few feet to the left, the composition of the shot would be more structured, creating an impression in the audience that the characters are bookended or boxed in. Tweak every shot in the episode thus and it'd be possible to create an atmosphere that would inspire claustophobic identification in the audience. ("Sympathetic identification with characters feeling claustrophobic" sounded like too much of a mouthful, but that's essentially what I mean here.)

All of which I write as preface to a post about Andrew Gunn's direction of the Doctor Who episode "Victory of the Daleks," because unlike the above, Gunn seems to understand that claustrophobia is a cumulative effect. More on that in the next post.

Just in case you need to bluff your way out of a war.

(This be yet another one of them posts. The direct sequel to this one, in fact.)

In the previous post, we learned that the Doctor can accomplish quite a bit by yelling at things. Admonishment, it could be said, is his only consistent source of power. He has the uncanny ability to be clever at precisely the right moment, and if he lacks the tools required to bring his clever plan to fruition, he possesses an improvisonal knack for making do with whatever's at hands. As a list of powers go, the Doctor fares quite favorably to no known hero—though he could be compared to a Malthussian Lex Luthor. (He did steal the TARDIS, after all.) Point being, by the time the Doctor regenerates into his Matt Smith incarnation, his reputation is such that he can stand on a rooftop, unkempt and in other people's clothes, and stare down the very same spaceship that, moments earlier, was going to incinerate the entire planet. 

Quite the reputation, that is, but what has he done to deserve it? "Been very clever with stuff on multiple occasions" covers it, but inadequately. Unlike Superman, the Doctor possesses no singular power that would require him to face a particular kind of foe in a particular type of manner. He can stand alone against an alien armada precisely because he lacks any clearly defined (or plausible) method of doing so. To quote the man himself in "The Pandorica Opens," in which the Doctor finds himself trapped beneath Stonehenge and the Earth surrounded by an alien armada:

Note how director Toby Haynes monkeys around with the shots in this short sequence. In the first frame, the Doctor is looking out the door, the locked Pandorica behind him, and he looks sheepish not only because of his slumped shoulders and pathetic frown, but because he's being oppressed by the compositional elements of the frame. Amy Pond and River Song flank him, and even though the shot scale is medium close-up—meaning the camera captures him from the waist to the top of his head—Haynes uses an unusually high level of framing, which creates an awkward amount of space between the top of the Doctor's head and the upper limit of the frame. This unusual level of framing makes it so the compositional oppressiveness parallels the narrative—or vice versa, as the relation between the narrative and composition is interdependent in film. In other words, it's as if Haynes squished the Doctor but left the camera in the same position it occupied pre-squishing.

But wait! There is a second frame in which the Doctor has one of his brilliant ideas!

How the great and mighty dress themselves.

(This be another one of them posts.)

Remember that post I wrote at the beginning of the quarter about the first episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who? Of course you don't: it's still in my draft folder. The whole point of that post—which I'll briefly recapitulate here—is that there's something unusual about a man sporting tweed and bowtie playing the cultural equivalent of Superman. Spandex and tights? That's American. But tweed and a bowtie? That's academic, and surely no one wants the weight of the world resting on academic shoulders.

Unless, of course, you're English. In which case it makes perfect sense. So, to begin that post I never posted, here's Superman coming out of the closet and into his own:

Note that Richard Donner's American version of making manifest the hero's heroism involves stripping in public, entering a random office building, and emerging in jammies and a cape. The English version of this scene maps particularly well onto its American equivalent, with the one exception that director Adam Smith attempts to out-America America and film it in the sort of long tracking shot Scorsese favors. I'm only going to show the end of the first (Fig. 1) and the end of the second (Fig. 7) tracking shot, because the reaction shots in between are actually more crucial:

Some days I love my job.

For example, today, as I've been given permission to teach a course I'm calling "Alien Saviors," whose syllabus looks like this:

• Action Comics #1
• Superman (1978)
  
• Superman Returns (2006)
• Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"
• Doctor Who, "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"
• Doctor Who, "The Victory of the Daleks"
• Doctor Who, "Don't Blink"
• Doctor Who, "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who, "Flesh and Stone"
• Doctor Who, "The Vampires of Venice"
• Doctor Who, "The Fires of Pompeii"
• Fiona Hobden, "History Meets Fiction in Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'"
• Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who, "The Hungry Earth"
• Doctor Who, "Cold Blood"
• Doctor Who, "Tooth and Claw"
• Torchwood: Children of Earth

I'm tackling historical context with the explicitly historical episodes, but if anyone can suggest some Baker-era episodes that would make sense to teach alongside the Smith, I'd be obliged. 

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud. 

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud. 

And I missed it. 

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late.  I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents.  There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable.  (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there?  In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp.  To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be.  ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.)  But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film?  I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped.  The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters.  The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle.  There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving.  (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc.  That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot.  But it seems doable.   That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

How, exactly, do you film someone being stalked by a statue? (Being lecture notes on the Doctor Who episode "Time of Angels," obviously.)

Something lumbering as quickly as a zombie wouldn't seem to pose much of a threat, so it goes without saying that turning them into something threatening would entail speeding them up or increasing their numbers unto ubiquity.  In the former case, their uniqueness is reduced and they become just another movie monster; in the latter, they're horrifying because our inability to grasp the greatness of their numbers approaches the sublime.  But how would they pose a threat if they were unable to move at all?  I'm teaching the episode of Doctor Who entitled "Time of Angels" because the answer to that question is that they move via film cliché.  More on that in a moment.  First, let me introduce you to the Doctor:

He is a funny old man with a magic blue box whose Wikipedia entry is longer than New Hampshire's, so I'm not sure I'll be able to briefly sum up who and what he is.  Suffice it to say he's the English equivalent of Superman, only intellectualized instead of strong.  You don't really need to understand the Doctor to understand this episode or my post, though; more important for the present are the Weeping Angels, a malevolent race of statues created by the current show-runner, Steven Moffatt.  Let me say it again: they are a malevolent race of statues.  How do they demonstrate their malevolence?  When you're not looking.

There's a purity to the concept of creating a monster whose movements perfectly (and can only, because they must) match the cinematographic vocabulary of horror.  Every time the camera is on them, they must be statues, meaning the audience must actively infer their off-screen movement.  The audience must be attentive because they won't be able to sit back and observe the proceedings (and because if they do there won't be any proceedings to sit back and observe).  The challenge for Moffat and director Adam Smith is to take this ingenious metaphor for horror films and turn it into something genuinely horrifying.  What follows is how they do it in the beginning of the episode. 

First, they place the Doctor's companion, Amy Pond, in an enclosed space:

This is a fairly long shot, the purpose of which is to provide the audience with a sense of both a character and that character's status relative to his or her environment.  It also uses deep focus ironically, keeping everything in focus so that the audience can see just how much of it there isn't.  Additionally, the tight framing of the shot is similar to this scene from Mad Men, except here those lines are both imagined and actual because she's in a metal tube.  The result is a claustrophic atmosphere, but a bit menacing, too, because the audience knows the cheat cut is effected from the position on the wall occupied by the recorded image of an Angel:

Note that Smith eschews a point-of-view shot and instead places the camera equidistant between the recording and Pond.  The previous shot established that these are extremely tight quarters, and zooming in to this eyeline match makes them feel even tighter.  This is espeically true because the series often consists of the camera following the Doctor as he whirls about in his magic blue box, which is itself whirling about through space and time.  The entire series is predicated on an escapist conceit, which is why "it's bigger on the inside" is so critical to the show's appeal—not to mention why a box that isn't bigger on the inside is such a terrifying concept to this audience.  To return to my point: this is a bad box.  A confining box.  Only bad things can happen in a confining box, and Smith is framing these shots in order to heighten the impression of confinement.  Both shots above are impressively framed themselves, but more significantly, the shots and reverse shots within the bunker use the same angle of framing.  The level of framing shifts as Pond approaches the image, but not the angle, which results in the scene feeling very constricted: can't look up, can't look down, only straight ahead:

Note that the camera seems to have zoomed slightly when it reversed, resulting in aggressive frontality as Pond's eyes directly address the audience's.  But not only does she not see us, she sees straight through us.  She's staring at the image behind the audience, and there's an unsettling disconnect between the directness of her address and the audience's knowledge of its actual recepient.  It's also disorienting because shot sequences of this sort often signal that a character is paying more attention to an element in the scene, as the next shot, a close-up of the Angel, seems to suggest:

As Pond becomes more interested in the image, the camera zooms in to communicate that interest to the audience.  Why is the next shot disturbing?

Because it suggests that the image is staring back, and images shouldn't be capable of staring back.  Moreover, the zooming in suggests that the image is paying an increasing amount of attention to her, and images ought not be able to express increasing interest.  It's almost as if the audience becoming uncomfortable because the episode is telling them, in filmic terms, something they know can't be true.  Pond then leaves for a moment to ask the Doctor a question, and when she returns so too does the camera, first to its original position: