Suspense With a Camera

by Jeffrey Michael Bays

  Figure 4.3. Pure cinema in Rear Window (1954). 1) He looks, 2) he sees, 3) he wonders. Rear Window ©1954 Paramount Pictures.

  And thus, you’re more involved in the story.

  THE POWER OF KULESHOV

  The magical thing about constructing visual sentences like this is that the “words” can easily be replaced to change the entire meaning.

  Director and film theorist Lev Kuleshov discovered this in the 1920s and it has since been referred to as the Kuleshov Effect.

  Let’s go back to the example from Rear Window. If we insert a shot of Miss Torso instead of the man in his garden, suddenly we think Jeffries is lusting after the woman (fig. 4.4). The surrounding shots didn’t change, but somehow we perceive his thoughts differently. That’s the power of Kuleshov.

  Figure 4.4. By changing only the contents of the middle shot, Jeffries seems to have changed his attitude, via the Kuleshov Effect. Rear Window ©1954 Paramount Pictures.

  He looks out the window. He sees a scantily clad woman doing acrobatics while making breakfast. He wonders about the limits of her multitasking skills.

  Visual sentences can get even more complex and they can even create people and places that don’t exist. Kuleshov discovered that if you use close-ups of various parts of different women’s bodies—lips, legs, back, eyes—and edit them sequentially, the multiple women merge into one woman. The mind imposes its own continuity onto the disparate shots. A new woman is created (Kuleshov). This is why stunt doubles have careers.

  The same goes for locations. Kuleshov once filmed two people walking through Moscow. They turn to enjoy the scenery. Kuleshov inserted a shot of the White House in Washington D.C. Next, back on the two in Moscow, they walk up the steps of a local church. But, because of the power of editing, the audience feels like they’re walking up the White House steps (Kuleshov). Here’s how Kuleshov explained it in his 1929 essay “Art of Cinema”: “This particular scene demonstrated the incredible potency of montage, which actually appeared so powerful that it was able to alter the essence of the material.”

  The visual sentence is more powerful than the script! They knew this in the 1920s and it’s still true today.

  THE ESTABLISHING SHOT SENTENCE

  Now I’m going to describe a famous shot from one of Hitchcock’s movies, and you tell me what the visual sentence is:

  A crowded ballroom is seen from above, filled with dancing people. We track down a stairwell over the room, getting closer to eye level. The camera tracks toward a woman, then down to her hand. In her hand is a metal key. Cut to: a reaction shot of the woman’s face.

  What’s the visual sentence there?

  Without knowing anything about the story or the plot, we can piece together a simple idea from this sequence.

  The visual sentence would be: “Here’s a room full of people that don’t know about this key, but the key is very important to the woman.”

  Don’t mistake this classic shot from Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) as a showboating establishing shot just for the sake of a director being cool. It’s telling a story—a visual story. The director is speaking to us with his camera. He’s also playing with hidden secrets.

  Now I’m going to give you a visual sentence and you decide how to shoot it: “Here’s a sunny beach full of happy people, but there’s something weird going on in that nearby house.” How would you portray this on screen?

  Perhaps you would start wide on the beach and then track toward someone walking toward the house. We follow along as she walks into the house. The house is dark and the shades are drawn.

  Every shot or sequence of shots in your film should be boiled down to a visual sentence. If the shots aren’t saying anything specific, you’re probably going to lose the viewer. This is especially true in dialogue scenes where filmmakers choose the standard over-the-shoulder setup.

  When it comes to writing and directing, the primary avenue of conveying your story is through the camera. Master that, and you’re on your way to finding a stronger bond with your audience.

  CREATING VISUAL PARAGRAPHS

  Now, imagine this opening of a film written in visual sentences.

  People are playing on the sunny beach, but a woman dressed in a pantsuit and carrying a flower walks into a nearby house. She walks in so quietly that the man in the next room doesn’t notice she has arrived. She holds the flower and looks for a vase. He’s talking on the phone while she eavesdrops. She hears something really important and is shocked. She drops the flower and stomps on it. She sees his wallet lying on the kitchen counter. She grabs the wallet and puts it into her pocket. Satisfied, she walks out in a hurry, forgetting to close the door.

  In that example, the visuals speak such volumes that dialogue isn’t necessary. Without even knowing what was said, we know that it prompted her to steal the man’s wallet. The audience is immediately engaged because we know she has the wallet. We know that all of those people playing on the beach have no idea what just happened. We also know that the man has no idea any of this occurred. The Triad of Secrets is engaged, and we’ve done it with purely visual sentences.

  How would you shoot that scene as the director? A long tracking shot at the beginning following the woman into the house? Close-ups of the woman listening? A point-of-view sequence of her deciding to take the wallet? Notice how each of those shots has a specific language. The establishing shot isn’t just there for no reason—it establishes a contrast between the sunny beach and the shady interior of the house. And it demonstrates that all of these people on the beach don’t know a secret.

  In the next chapter, we’ll go even deeper into crafting visual sentences and the words that can be used.

  FURTHER READING

  Auiler, Dan 2001. Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock, Harper Collins, New York.

  Bogdanovich, Peter 1997. Who the Devil Made It, Ballantine Books, New York.

  Kuleshov, Lev 1929 (trans. 1974). Art of Cinema, Berkeley, University of California Press.

  Martell, William 2013. Hitchcock: Experiments in Terror, First Strike Productions.

  Truffaut, François 1986. Hitchcock / Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Paladin, London.

  Wheldon, Huw 1964. “Huw Wheldon Meets Alfred Hitchcock,” Monitor, May 5, 1964.

  SUSPENSE MYTH NO. 3

  WORDS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IN A SCENE

  Not if your audience is awake. From the Hitchcockian standpoint, dialogue is just insignificant noise coming out of the mouths of the actors. Something else in the scene should be the focus of the camera. In a scene from the 1936 film Sabotage, for example, a character is cutting her food with a knife. Through close-ups, Hitchcock makes this gleaming knife the focus of the scene while trivial conversation carries on about the bad food—calling attention to the character’s guilt surrounding a murder.

  Hitch often treated dialogue like a composer would music, paying special attention to rhythms, movements and crescendos, as opposed to the face value of the words. He coached each actor carefully on where he wanted a pause, a glance or a nervous stumble, in order to call attention to something visual. So position something aside from the topic of conversation as the focus of a dialogue scene. It could be a secret withheld by a character, a glance accentuated in a close-up, or a trivial distraction.

       CHAPTER 5

      SYNTAX OF EYES, HANDS & FEET

  When we tell a cinematic story, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Truffaut)

  AS YOU’RE READING THIS BOOK, what are your hands doing?

  Are they holding the book? Holding a highlighter? A pen?

  What kind of book is it? Paperback? Electronic tablet?

  Now if I started filming you in a scene reading this book, it could get pretty uninteresting.

  But suppose I wanted to show that you were nervous. That highlighter, the pen, your stray fin
gers—all can be cinematic ingredients to express that your character is anxious. You’ve just been introduced to some new “words” you can use in the syntax of your visual sentences.

  If writing a visual sentence requires words, where’s the dictionary? While it would be impossible to list every camera shot and what it means, we can boil the cinematic language down to these three basics: eyes, hands, and feet. Pay special attention to hands because they can interact with important objects.

  By putting these basic body parts together as they interact with their surroundings, we can begin to tell a cinematic story. Each body part carries with it a unique set of emotional traits.

  Notice in the example above that I was using your fingers, highlighter, and pen to express anxiety—an emotion. Emotion is the primary reason to use these words in your visual sentence. Overusing them can lead to diminishing effectiveness. For instance, showing a close-up of a man putting a filter into his coffee machine means nothing—unless you’re trying to convey some kind of emotion with that action, or it’s a super special plot-driven coffee filter that will save the world later, or there are secret instructions printed on it. Then, yes, it’s effective.

  Here are some good reasons to use eyes, hands, or feet as emotional indicators:

  Eyes (face)

    Feeling and thinking

    Pursuit of curiosity

    Audience empathy

  Hands

    Anxiety and shock

    Grabs and hides objects

  Feet

    Confidence and safety

    Connection to setting

    Show personality

    Plot-changing decision is made

  Take a look through that list and find ways to combine them into a story.

  For instance, imagine showing a close-up of Jane’s hand holding a flower. Cut to: Jane’s face. Suddenly an emotional story begins, as Jane reacts to the flower. Then Jane looks off to the side. Cut to: a shot of a vase sitting on a table. Cut back to Jane’s face, thinking.

  At this point we can assume that Jane will put the flower into the vase to complete the logical construct. But, as a twist we cut to a shot of her hand dropping the flower onto the floor. Cut to: Jane’s foot stomping on it. Finally, we cut back to her face to get a reaction to what she’s done.

  In this sequence, we’ve conveyed a tremendous amount of emotional content with eyes, hands, and feet. We’ve involved the audience in a choice that Jane made, and pulled them into the moment of decision.

  A hyper-present clarity is generated by focusing on the simple goals surrounding eyes, hands and objects, and feet.

  EYES (FACE)

  Looks and glances. In chapter 4 we said a lot about the eyes and how they’re used as a cornerstone of visual sentences.

  The eyes can also convey certain ideas on their own. Very often during a nonsensical conversation, Hitchcock would cut to an actor’s face listening for a long period of time while the other person is talking. This immediately gives us a sense of untrustworthiness or of a secret being withheld. Eyes darting to the side can show awkwardness.

  Choosing an odd camera placement can also create an emotional charge. A profile shot of Elsa in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Revenge” (1955) gives us a clue that she may be lying, or delusional.

  Even a shot of the back of someone’s head can be an effective emotional indicator. In the TV episode “The Crystal Trench” (1959), Hitchcock lingers on a long shot of the back of the protagonist’s head during a conversation. She’s so distraught about her husband’s death that this conveys a feeling of distance and detachment from the conversation.

  Hiding parts of the face is also effective, as in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Banquo’s Chair” (1959). The guilty antagonist sits for dinner while a large candelabra obstructs our view of his expressions.

  HANDS & OBJECTS

  As the previous example with Jane and the flower demonstrates, hands are the primary means of a character interacting with the objects around them. Hands become a primary driver of plot within the story-world.

  By focusing on an object in someone’s hand, a director can demonstrate an emotion without showing it obviously on the actor’s face. In Sabotage (1936), for example, Sylvia Sidney’s memory of murder connects with the carving knife she uses when sitting down to dinner. Even though the conversation at the table is quite innocuous, the camera cuts from her eyes to the knife and back as her tension rises (Hitchcock).

  SUSPENSE OBJECTS

  Objects are everything in the Hitchcock storytelling language. Often these objects are evidence of a crime and carry with them emotional guilt, such as the frozen leg of lamb in “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The closer the police get to uncovering this murder weapon, the more tense it gets for the protagonist, and us! So when the police take the cooked leg of lamb out of the oven, you can bet it’s in a close-up along with a close shot of Mary’s guilty face.

  Objects can generate paranoia, like the cigarette butts and beer bottles which Ralph sees in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Four O’Clock” (1957). He thinks they are proof that his wife is cheating. Or, in “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” Pelham hopes that the bank checks and his new tie are proof that he is real, and that his doppelganger won’t be able to mimic this hard evidence. They’re also a way for us to track evidence through the story and confirm his sanity.

  Focusing on triviality and simplicity is a key element of suspense. When the darkest, most serious things are happening, turn the focus of the suspense on a small, insignificant object.

  A proxy suspense object is an object in a narrative that is aligned with the hidden secret and represents an ominous threat toward the story’s likely outcome (see chapter 15). In my film Offing David (2008), David’s phone is charged with such dramatic weight that it becomes its own character in the story. It is a proxy for David’s body. Each time someone discovers it, it’s packed with the suspense of blowing the whole secret. The phone’s mere presence in a scene causes suspense. In Offing David it is precisely because the audience has the only clear vantage point of the phone’s importance that each “that was close!” moment has such power.

  EMOTIONAL HANDS

  When a hand knocks over a glass of wine, such as in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Dip in the Pool,” a quick close-up adds emotional weight to the scene. The character who made the mistake is obviously on edge, being careless, or is overly self-conscious for a reason important to the plot.

  Hands can also show anxiety and shock. A finger tapping, a hand squeezing a pillow, or a hand playing with a pencil—all are ways of building the feeling of nervousness from a character. Shock can be conveyed by having a character suddenly drop something, flail out while being choked, or going limp at the time of death (see the oven scene in Torn Curtain).

  In the TV episode “Breakdown” (1955), Hitchcock takes the narrative importance of hands to the extreme. The protagonist is paralyzed in a car accident and can only move one finger. That finger becomes the only way for him to signal to the police that he’s still alive. All of the tension and plot surrounds whether his plan will work, as noise in the area makes it impossible to hear his finger tapping.

  FEET

  You might remember the opening sequence to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) which follows feet getting out of a cab and walking into a train station. Another set of feet get out of another cab and do the same. Eventually the two pairs of feet bump into each other and the story begins.

  Feet can hold a lot of power in the cinematic world. In Strangers on a Train, the two sets of feet convey differences in personality of the two characters. One has flamboyant shoes and walks with a certain boyish swagger. The other’s shoes are conservative in style and he walks more pensively.

  Shots of feet can also be a dramatic introduction to a character that will make an important impact on the story. When the suspicious brother is introduced in “Four O’Clock,” Hitchcock focuses on his feet walking through the doorway. It em
phasizes that this character’s entrance is significant. Similarly, in “Revenge,” he shows the feet of the villain (Carl) stepping out of his truck on his way to murder the stranger. Carl has made a decision that will profoundly change the plot moving forward.

  Feet also represent safety and confidence in the surrounding environment. When feet are planted firmly on the ground, all is good, but when they aren’t … danger is afoot. Take this example (fig. 5.1) of feet and hands interacting in North by Northwest (1959).

  Figure 5.1. Feet and hands tell a story in this single shot. North by Northwest ©1959 MGM.

  The villain’s feet are standing on Cary Grant’s hands while he’s hanging from a cliff. In the same shot, a gunshot is heard, the villain’s legs and shoes fall sideways to indicate he has been shot, thus freeing the hands. The villain’s feet are no longer on the ground indicating that he’s no longer safe. Similarly, in Marnie (1964), when Marnie struggles to decide whether to steal the money a second time, her feet wobble and spin as Mark tries to force her to face it.

  In Lifeboat (1944), a man’s leg must be amputated, and that’s a bad sign for his fate (he falls overboard soon after). There’s a memorable romantic moment in Lifeboat where a couple is laying together and Hitchcock pans down to their bare feet playfully tickling each other.

  Eyes, hands, and feet are vital elements of the visual sentence. With them, you can construct an endless number of stories with emotional emphasis. Once again, it is all done without a word spoken.

  PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

  Remember the example from the previous chapter with the woman stealing a wallet? Here it is again, and this time, think about where you can use eyes, hands, and feet to help tell the story.