Acephalous

The Walking Dead: We all die alone, broken, and afraid

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead, “Internment,” may well have been the strongest in what’s shaping up to be the strongest season to date. It was directed by David Boyd, one of the most talented men you’ve never heard of. He’s been the director of photography on such visually uninspiring fare as Firefly and Deadwood, so it should be no surprise that the composition and shot selection in “Internment” was barely this side of breathtaking.

What do I mean?

For one, Boyd’s use of close-ups in this episode weren’t used to cheaply intensify scenes whose dialogue lacked emotional impact. Unlike, say, the opening credit sequence of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which closes in to bring the pain and reassure you that the police always have your best interest at heart, the close-ups in “Internment” function as the necessary conclusions to terrible arguments.

Consider, for example, this close-up of Rick’s gun:

It’s the culmination of the should-he-or-shouldn’t-he-pick-up-arms subplot, but instead of having Rick say something about it, Boyd just places Rick’s gun in-frame and lets it speak for itself. Note, though, that the gun’s slightly off-center, a screen-position people have been trained by Hollywood to hate.

The audience, then, is primed for something to happen — and conventionally, that “something” would be that the camera shifts to the left and “properly” frames the gun, dead-center, since it’s the most important element in the shot.

Boyd knows that’s the expectation — he knows that his audience craves symmetry in its compositions — but instead of conceding to audience expectations, he recapitulates the should-he-or-shouldn’t-he argument:

When Rick’s pea-bearing hand enters the frame, Boyd racks the focus, shifting the emphasis from the arms he just took up to the green thumbs he put them down for. In a single shot, then, Boyd’s reminded the audience of the Big Decision Rick had to make, but he did so without having to use dialogue as a crutch, as the show so often has. What could have been a tossed off transition between scenes in which characters indulge in unnecessary expository monologues is, instead, a seemingly tossed-off reminder of past soul-searching.

Read the rest here.

The Walking Dead: The hands do the talking in “Indifference”

Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, “Isolation,” focused on who was with whom and the tightness of the quarters they shared, i.e. how isolated every single person in this episode wasn’t. The title of this week’s episode, “Indifference,” is equally ironic, because the entire episode is about inappropriately caring too much — whether it be Rick caring about Carol enough to banish her, or Daryl caring more about Bob the Alcoholic than he should’ve.

But that’s not what I want to discuss this week. Not because it’s insignificant, as it clearly isn’t, but because in visual terms, this episode is much more about what people do than who they are or what they feel. The episode announces as much in the opening shots:

That’s Rick bandaging his hand, and hands are important. Hands do things. And the director of “Indifference,” Tricia Brock, is not about to let the audience forget this:

The jump-cut from the medium shot of Rick bandaging his hand to the close-up of his hand while he’s bandaging it is Brock’s way of gesticulating wildly at this episode’s theme, which I’ll call “The Terrible Things We’ve Done With Our Hands.”

Before you object that every episode of The Walking Dead features many hand-oriented shots, since characters are constantly thwacking walkers through the head, let me assure you that I already know that. Brock’s shot selection in “Indifference” isn’t different in kind from other episodes, but in degree. Consider the second sequence with Rick before the introduction rolls…

Read the rest here.

The Walking Dead: You’re never alone, especially in ‘Isolation’

The title of tonight's episode of AMC's The Walking Dead couldn't have been more misleading: "Isolation" is an episode about the utter lack of isolation in the confined settings of a prison-cum-anti-zombie outpost. Even those moments in the episode in which characters were ostensibly isolated -- as when Herschel tells Carl that "It's peaceful out here" when they're "alone" in the woods collecting elderberries -- were undermined by:

Or, even more obviously, when Daryl, Michonne, Tyrese and that-other-guy-from-The Wire were driving along an empty road and heard voices on the radio, indicating that they weren't isolated, and then ran into this lot:

Those are the more prevalent examples of the episode's visuals defying its title, because they're both keyed in on plot points: Herschel appreciates being alone when he isn't, and Daryl et al accidentally run into one of the most populous zombie hordes on the show to date after hearing a faint voice on the radio. But I'm more interested in how the visuals themselves undermined the idea that this episode was, thematically, about "isolation," and you can see hints of it in that first image of Carl and Herschel above.

If you look at it, there are three planes within the frame: in the foreground, you have Herschel; in the mid-ground, you have Carl; and in the background, you have the walker. All of the planes are occupied in a way that, conventionally, makes a frame feel "crowded." If a director -- in this case, Daniel Sackheim -- uses a shot in which three people occupy all three planes in an episode once, you might not notice it. But in this episode, Sackheim consistently stacks the frame, almost from the opening shot of the episode...

Read the rest.

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 ...)

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:

Establishing the tone of AMC's The Walking Dead

The first few minutes of the first episode of AMC's The Walking Dead need to establish the tone of the entire series, but they need to do so without boring the audience.  Given that the comic on which it's based alternates between menacingly quiet moments and long stretches of extreme chattiness, it may be a mistake to think about the tone in a singular fashion; however, the fact that these two tonal elements could be characterized as "opposites" means that the opening scene of the series will have to choose one or the other.  Director Frank Darabont not only decided on quiet menace, he emphasized the future significance of silence by turning down the diagetic sound and eschewing non-diagetic sound entirely.  The result?  The series introduces itself to the world with a unusually quiet establishing shot of a car approaching the camera on a deserted road:

As the car nears, the camera tracks it and Darabont uses the resulting tracking shot to create the impression that the person behind the camera is hiding behind the car.  The camera pulls back until the burnt wreck in the foreground nearly obscures the patrol car, only to pan right at the conclusion of the long take and reveal that its "hiding place" has been compromised.  In short, the camera seems to be hiding from the patrol car, which strongly suggests to the audience that there's something to hide from and that it may be in that patrol car.  As if to emphasize that potential danger in the car, Darabont moves the camera-spy-without-a-hiding-place further away from the patrol car before cutting away:

Even after the cut away, the camera still behaves as if the mind behind it wants to remain hidden while scoping out a better hiding place.  It begins behind and to the right of the burnt wreck and tracks to the back and to the left as Rick Grimes moves toward it.  The resulting shot keeps Rick occupying the center of a long shot until the camera knows he can be trusted:

"I put a zombie in his head? I can put zombies in people's heads?"

Such was the reaction of my students after I informed them of their murdering ways and asked them to tell me what happens in the gutter between the first two panels. 

Needless to say, teaching The Walking Dead will be directly responsible for me hearing countless things I never thought I'd hear in a classroom.

Panel transitions in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead

After discussing the wordiness of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, it only makes sense to discuss its visual counterpart, by which I mean pages like this one from the third issue:

Kirkman fiddles with these quiet panels that transition from moment-to-moment.  On the one hand, panels without textual components read more quickly, as Kirkman himself frequently notes on the letters pages.*  On the other hand, panels without textual components encourage readers to linger on the images.  When combined with moment-to-moment transitions, then, text-free panels compel the reader to search for minor changes of great significance.  Consider the first two panels above:

Rick is asleep in his tent with his wife and son the first night after being reunited.  From panel one to panel two the only change is a slightly furrowed brow.  While brow-furrowing may not seem significant in and of itself, when combined with what the reader knows about what Rick went through to return to them—having to fight through hoards of zombies to escape Atlanta—the reader can infer, if not the precise content, at least the character of the nightmare that causes Rick's sleeping brow to furrow.  Now compare panel two to panel three:

On wordiness and time in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead

I'm transitioning from teaching film to comics in my unfortunately named "Slow Horror" course tomorrow and so I'm preparing to introduce my students to comic conventions using Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.  Kirkman's wordiness works to my advantage, as with duo-specific word-picture relations:

Kirkman didn't need to inform the reader that Glenn returned with toilet paper because the paper is clearly visible.  Because the characters are constantly carrying on, examples of them pointing out the obvious abound.  The same applies for interdependent word-picture relations:

Notice the difference between the examples McCloud used at the link and Kirkman and penciller Tony Moore's panel?  The examples use textual elements in a variety ways—be it thought balloons or captioned narration—but the Kirkman and Moore panel only uses them as a means for delivering direct dialogue.  It wasn't until I wrote the previous sentence that I realized the same might be true for the entire run of The Walking Dead. After I flipped through the first few issues to confirm my suspicions, I thought about why he might have chosen to eschew one of the formal properties of comic grammar that differentiates it from televisual media: natural interiority. 

Unlike first-person voice overs in television and film, thought balloons and captions provide a window into the mind of character without calling attention to themselves as narrative devices.  In other words, there is nothing special about the audience's access to the mind of the characters because such access is a feature of the medium so ingrained as to be beneath notice.  A comic book in which such access is never granted creates characters whose motivations seem cryptic despite the fact that such access is almost never granted on television or in film.  To be uncharitable: Kirkman is writing a television show that happens to be in a comic book and the fact that it was adapted is a function of its easy adaptability. 

But to say that would be to miss the point, which is that the ease with which it could be adapted obscures what has been lost in the translation to the small screen: because interior access is only very rarely granted, whatever is gained by withholding it in the book is lost in the transition to the screen. The characters will no longer be ciphers whose thoughts must be inferred from their words and actions: they will merely be characters on a television show.  The implications for the television show are obvious: recreating the suspicious atmosphere of the comic must be done by other means ... which I will discuss when I teach the show next week. 

Returning to the panel above: the wordiness of that specific panel and the book generally creates some interesting formal difficulties, the most interesting of which relates to the disconnect between the single expression on his face and the time it would have taken him to speak all those words.  As represented in that panel, time is both slowing to a halt (visually) and speeding up (verbally).  Moreover, Shane's face must adequately account for all of the emotions he communicates in those text balloons because the fact that some of them are burst means that some will be more strongly felt than others.*  It must account for both the double exclamation points in the first balloon and the ellipses that trail off his his quieter remarks in the third. 

How did Moore accomplish this?  He draws very well.  How was Kirkman complicit in this?  By joining the balloons directly instead of connecting them, Kirkman creates the impression that this entire speech is the articulation of a single train of thought.  It clearly isn't: his fear for his life intermingles with his need for a family and those two intertwine with his desire for creature comforts, but they are all independent emotions that become entangled only when they all refer back to the same face.  The wordiness works to Kirkman's advantage here: Shane becomes more psychologically complex because his single expression is associated with a host of conflicting emotion. 

In short: time is out of joint and even the simplest characters seem psychologically complex simply by dint of the wordiness.  The effect disorients the reader and leaves them unsure about their relation to narrative time or the characters—which is exactly the same situation in which the characters find themselves as they lose track of the days they've lived in a world in which they must suspect that the motives of everyone are more complicated than they seem.

*This and subsequent balloon images borrowed from Nate Piekos's excellent Comic Grammar.