Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  Walter is flying away again. Avik's grandmother (Jayko Pitseolak) does not want Avik to leave but, at the last moment, he clambers aboard the aircraft, leaving her disconsolately below, watching it climb into the sky.

  The scene leaves Avik's grandmother looking compositionally “abandoned” as Avik's excitement at flying takes over from any apprehension he might have had. Drawing the figure of Avik into the top right quadrant of the frame expresses his compositional suspension in the field of the frame, just as he is representationally suspended in the sky and also in a liminal moment between two worlds, his grandmother's and the white man's. Leaving that top right quadrant so visually empty in the shot of the grandmother serves to underscore the compositional effect. Even a composition can have poignancy.

  Composition in relation to interior spaces can be thought of as working within a box-ended prism. Spaces can then be thought of as a series of “rooms” within this shape. Placing a plane within this prism, as shown in the sketch, creates the “picture box” used by painters since the early Renaissance, as well as by theater designers working for a traditional proscenium-arch stage. Openings on the sides or back of this box then link notionally or actually to other interior or exterior spaces. The representational elaboration of this compositional framework into rooms, doors, windows, etc. soon takes over from the underlying compositional framework, and the adoption of varied points of view tends to reduce the effects of parallel lines, notional vanishing points and box-like compositional framings. But those elements can still be used compositionally to striking effect.

  Walter deposits Avik at the sanatorium in Ottawa for treatment of the boy's tuberculosis and leaves for Europe where he will be doing research in Dresden, Germany, on map-making and city planning.

  Avik experiences the hospital as a series of boxed spaces, from the corridors with their framed arches to the closet where he plays with his new friend Albertine (Annie Galipeau), the Métis girl (and where a disapproving Sister Banville finds them).The compositions emphasize Avik's introduction to the white man's world of enclosed spaces and parallel lines – a new geometry of space for an Inuit boy accustomed to the Arctic. This culminates in the perfect “picture box” composition of a storage room where one wall is a giant map of Canada.

  The map as back wall of a “picture box” composition ironically evokes the very spatial expanses blocked off for the children by these walls. They find that Avik's home is not named on the map, suggesting another kind of tension between the two worlds.

  Compositionally, exterior spaces can be thought of not as a continuous depth but as areas organized around the planar divisions of the space (e.g. the planes of foreground, midground and background). In plan view (i.e. from above) the planes are no longer visible as such but their compositional relationships come more clearly into view, as in this sketch. Starting from the bottom of the sketch (where the actual point of view will be located, not this bird's eye view), the foreground can be thought of as the area marked by the first arrow. A midground is then roughly a doubling of this first area. A background area is then, in terms of a useful compositional method, a doubling of those first two areas taken together. And a deep background space is in turn a doubling of the first three spaces together. Actual dimensions will vary of course depending on the context.

  This creates in effect a series of “stages” that are compositionally related to each other in a balanced way. In the sketch the foreground “stage” is empty. Three figures (left) are placed at the rear of the midground “stage” and two figures (center) are positioned at the notional transition between background and deep background “stages.” Hills define the deep background (the backdrop) in this example.

  The time comes for Avik's new friend Albertine, now recovered, to leave the hospital and go off to school. To stay the moment, the two children take off across the fields at dusk and in the rain, pursued by three adults, including Sister Banville (Jeanne Moreau), who eventually drag them back.

  The composition of the master shot (above right) leaves the foreground empty and places Avik and Albertine almost exactly where a doubling of the foreground and midground areas creates a compositional “stage” that dramatizes the feeling of attempted escape, without putting the figures into the deep background and severing our feeling of connection with them. Sister Banville and the two men enter the composition at the rear of the midground “stage.”

  Even the use of long lenses to get into the circle of action when the children are caught does not reduce the compositional feeling of space already created. Paradoxically perhaps, the intensity of emotion seems more vivid in this larger space than if the camera had stayed with the children throughout, like a moment of intensity on a theatrical stage viewed from the back of a theater – all the more striking because expressible across that distance.

  Shapes are the basis of many powerful compositional effects. The most potent shapes create and channel active forces on the compositional field.

  It is almost impossible to see the pair of lines on the top row of the sketch as anything other than leading upwards and away.

  The triangle also has a powerful channeling effect, creating a sense of force towards the apex.

  The oval contains and constrains the space it encloses and separates it from the surrounding compositional field.

  So even these simplest of shapes, if embedded in a composition, create effects at the purely compositional level that can then be harnessed representationally.

  As Albertine is bundled into a car to be driven away – the children will not see each other again until they are adults in war-wearied Europe – Avik watches from a hospital balcony. The striking use of a triangular composition (top right) formed by walls and paths in the hospital forecourt, combined with the strong compositional element of the road, creates an inexorable sense of potential motion off into the gloom, even before Albertine is pushed into the car and driven away.

  Avik is framed in an oval that emphasizes his entrapment, along with the more obvious representational elements of wrought iron balustrade and heavy architecture.

  So before any actual movement apart of Albertine and Avik the compositions are absolutely saturated with the feeling of their impending separation.

  In a moving image the composition becomes dynamic. The field of forces can shift and change as action takes place within the frame.

  Strong static graphic elements can anchor these compositional dynamics, becoming points on the visual field around which shifting patterns and forces change. Here (sketch) a strong element of this sort becomes a kind of hinge around which two compositional diagonals are articulated. In the top version an initial line is established but the two moving elements that form it shift across the frame into a second alignment with both the “anchor” and a new element in the right foreground.

  Such movements feel neither random, on the one hand, nor artificially choreographed, on the other, but the overall effect is of compositional dynamics that have a purpose, once the representational details of a scene harness their purely compositional effects.

  Avik is now a healthy young man and has returned to his northern community. However he is having difficulty re-integrating. It is 1941. Unexpectedly Walter shows up again. Unknown to Avik, he is now in the wartime military and, because of his cartographer's knowledge of the area, has been sent to find a German submarine that has been trapped in the ice, its crew dead by now but its code books hopefully intact.

  As the newly returned Walter climbs the hill towards the inunnguaq (cairn), an excited Avik by his side, they form a strong diagonal across the frame, emphasizing behind them the vastness of the Arctic tundra over which the inunnguaq, sentinel-like, stands guard. But the camera cranes slowly down to find Avik's grandmother waiting for them. When Walter and Avik reach the top the new diagonal, from inunnguaq to right foreground, aligns the four figures strikingly. What also gets brought into view here, as it were, is the complex set of relationships between traditional life and
the new world that Walter will be telling Avik about. The human or cross-like figure of the inunnguaq is a newer development of the traditional Inuit inuksuk cairns, already the beginnings of a negotiation with the white world's representational conventions.

  Yet again Avik is going to be drawn away into that other world, although his grandmother's increased dependence on him gives him pause at first.

  There is a kind of understanding between dynamic forces in the compositional field that can produce a complex feeling. This is often connected with how the eye is encouraged to move across the visual field. Composition takes the eye's natural tendency to roam and captures it. Producing the complex feeling is then a matter of what connections are possible between capturing the eye and everything else that is going on: narratively, performatively, affectively.

  Out on the tundra with Walter's search party, Avik hears Albertine singing. Realizing where the sound is coming from (the radio operator in the previous shot has tuned to a channel from Ottawa), Avik runs and leaps crazily over the ice formations trying to get there before the signal vanishes again. A hand-held camera tries to keep him in frame but he bounces all over the place. However, through all the movement the framing orientates itself around the same place in the frame as the radio operator occupied. So, as we rush with Avik towards that compositional point, we feel both the frenzy and the focus in his astonished reaction, with all that it means for his future.

  The compositional capacity to distract the eye can be as important as focusing it. The visual field can be put in motion compositionally so that the complex feeling is one of uncertainty, fluidity, shifting points of attention, narrative hiatus.

  For this feeling to be effectively used, it has to be captured as it were. The immediate visual pleasure of a busy, complex, shifting field of view, gets followed by a shot or shots assigning the point of view to its “owner” in the narrative field. Compositionally, the sketched “eye” below is not permitted to float freely, as perhaps it does in the viewing of a painting in a gallery.

  When Avik, now in the air force in wartime England, goes to an elegant dance to find Albertine, not knowing that she will be there with Walter, he feels out of place. As people very different from Avik dance around him, the camera shares his confusion visually. Spatial relationships become compositionally uncertain. The eye gets distracted by this blur of movement, that passing shape. Albertine, when he sees her, is not a stable object held by his and the camera's gaze but a glimpsed figure with whom his compositional relationship has become suddenly uncertain.

  That relationship will not clarify itself until what we shall call a meta-compositional moment, which we are now going to look at in more detail.

  The Meta-Compositional Effect

  In Fail-Safe (1964), the director Sidney Lumet, cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld and editor Ralph Rosenblum gave us perhaps the best two intercut counter-dollies in cinema history. After more than an hour of seeing the two central characters in a rigid composition (top left), the final minutes of the film deploy two agonizingly slow dollies from profile to frontal shots of their faces. The dollies produce a formal effect that we can call “meta-compositional” because it depends for effect on the previously established composition.

  THE META – COMPOSITIONAL MOMENT

  Compositional elements, as we have seen in the preceding examples, slip rapidly behind their representational elaboration (from left hand page to right hand in each of our examples). So each of the simple circular compositional elements below becomes instantly an object in the sequence opposite and on the next two pages. Following his disorientation at the dance where he discovered that Albertine has been with Walter, Avik arranges to meet her after his next flight. When they do meet he thinks he has only one more bombing mission over Germany in his tour of duty. Compositionally, the scene begins to organize itself around a series of circular shapes.

  In themselves, these very simple but insistently present compositional elements do not express anything other than a growing circularity occurring within the visual field.

  The viewer will not “see” this circularity but, as the previous examples have demonstrated, composition quickly sets up forces and dynamics within the plane of the image. What happens quite strikingly to these forces here is that they take on their most dynamic physical presence when Albertine and Avik start spinning slowly round an iron column in the middle of this unusual space.

  What is constituted here (and roughly represented in the sketch above) is a meta-compositional moment in which the circularity has built up a kind of insistent pressure within the visual field's pattern of forces. The camera movement picks this up by semi-circling the figures outside the “cage” of iron lattice-work in which they spin and then dance. So a sort of compositional vortex is created by “seeding” the images with this circularity and then releasing it in one central action, on which other aspects of the film also converge.

  Though one's objects are prized and “precious,” they are no less objects and no less defined by being possessed. Avik, the Inuk rescued by Walter the map-maker turned military planner, and Albertine, the Metisse whom Walter has taken to London as his lover, have both become objects in Walter's world. The worlds they have come from are respectively that of the Inuit, the indigenous people of the Arctic, and that of the Metis, a Canadian “first people” of mixed European and aboriginal descent. Children together in the Catholic sanatorium and orphanage in Ottawa, Albertine and Avik were separated when the girl was taken away to be fostered by a white family. They meet a decade later in London during World War Two and, thanks in different ways to Walter's influence, are both now working in Bomber Command. England is “carpet bombing” German cities with massed night-time bomber raids. Germany, the aggressor now on the defensive, is launching rocket-propelled drones known as “flying bombs” or “buzz bombs” against London.

  A bomb-aimer on a Lancaster aircraft that the crew has nicknamed “Holy Boy” after him, Avik knows that Albertine is a photo analyst interpreting daily images taken by on-board cameras over German cities. On the way back from what should be his penultimate bombing mission, he sends her an invitation to a secret tryst by photographing the Royal Albert Hall in London. He waits for her there the next evening.

  Opened by Queen Victoria when her Empire was at its height (and named for her late husband), the red-brick confidence of the Royal Albert Hall was reportedly described by the Queen at the time as looking “like the British Constitution.” In 1936 it hosted a celebration of the “Youth of Empire,” attended by thousands of young people from Britain's then still precious “possessions” and “dependencies” across the world. The Hall's wrought iron and glazed dome was designed by an English architect also known for designing a famous iron-framed hotel in Bombay and a bridge in Singapore: those were the days when British Empire builders were followed by builders and planners of all kinds, a legacy that Walter inherited. Albertine climbs up to the dome where Avik waits (the frames on the preceding pages). The “floor” of its iron cage is an open grille. Far below a section of an orchestra rehearses.

  Albertine catches her stocking on a piece of wire. She takes it off, so as to balance better with her bare feet as she precariously crosses the dome's grille. She lets the stocking drop through, drifting down towards the musicians. It lands on a timpani drum, to the evident bewilderment of the musician. Albertine shakes her long, unruly hair out of the net it has been done up in. Then Albertine and Avik use the dome's central iron shaft like a carousel, wheeling around it as they talk. They dance. A buzz bomb interrupts the moment, its explosion nearby shattering panes in the dome and showering Albertine and Avik with chalky dust and shards of debris. They laugh, as much with relief as anything, but then, in the gloom, the question of who and what they really are unexpectedly surfaces like a repressed thought that has been released by the explosion.

  Albertine's very name carries the same imperial echoes as the Hall's (while also the name of Proust's orphaned object of atta
chment, trapped by his narrator but also by her own longing for status, in the multi-volume novel In Search of Lost Time).

  How quickly compositional elements that are purely visual take on increasingly dense layers of meaning. We could identify other features of the composition here – especially the ways in which diagonals and frames derived from the dome's iron “cage” are used to direct the eye. And we could block out the staging and camera positioning as we have done for other scenes, especially the use of a hand-held camera as Albertine balances on the grille. But the point here is to emphasize how composition becomes another layer to the moment, and in particular how a meta-compositional layer (or second order form of composition) draws simpler compositional elements into being more than the sum of their simple parts and into an intimate relationship with what the moment is expressing.

  It is, of course, very tempting to interpret the “cage” in which Albertine and Avik are represented here as the “cage” of Empire, Albertine's bare-foot letting go of decorum and their dance in the darkness as a reassertion of identities. There is some considerable justification for such an interpretation. But jumping too quickly to it tends to miss how the moment feels. Indeed the fact that Albertine and Avik do feel is what comes across most strongly here. The momentary vortex of feeling they find for themselves, before the bomb wrenches them back to a sense of reality, is as much physical as it is a “meaning” to be interpreted in terms of displaced and assimilated identities re-expressing themselves. Appropriately then the viewer feels the question of identity more than intellectualizes it, which is entirely characteristic of how Vincent (above) works.