Suspense With a Camera

by Jeffrey Michael Bays

  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.

  Perhaps in that example you can use a close-up on her face when she hears the man talking and becomes curious. You can use a close-up of her hand squeezing her purse-strap when she is shocked about what she’s hearing. Notice that the presence of the wallet allows a simplistic story to be built around an object. Use a close-up of her hand when she grabs the wallet, then cut to her happy face, indicating that she’s pleased about her decision. A shot of her feet shuffling down the sidewalk could help indicate that she has made an important decision but is still nervous. This would be a great time for her to be interrupted by a kid chasing a stray volleyball right on her path. The story continues.

  Looking at narrative in this way helps write the script, too, because it forces you away from dialogue and toward visual ideas. Once you start putting together objects in a room and allowing your protagonist to interact with them, a story is sure to bubble up.

  Remember to only use these techniques for emotional emphasis to tell the story. If you start overusing these close-ups they will get worn out and become ineffective. Only use them to lure the audience into a secret, or when an important emotional reaction prompts a decision. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss savoring close-ups and how to combine them with wide shots in an “orchestra” of camera proximity.

  FURTHER READING

  Hitchcock, Alfred 1937. “My Own Methods,” Sight and Sound, accessed online Sept 2013: http://www.hitchcockwiki.com.

  Truffaut, François 1986. Hitchcock / Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Paladin, London, p. 61.

       CHAPTER 6

      CAMERA AS A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

  Cinema is the orchestration of shots. I, myself, use musical terms when I direct. I say, “Don’t put a great big close-up there because it’s loud brass and you mustn’t use a loud note unless it’s absolutely vital.”—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Auiler)

  YOU MIGHT NOT REALIZE THIS but your camera is like a musical instrument. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines music as “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity.” Just like an instrument, your movie camera can combine various intensities of visual stimuli in a harmonic and pleasing way to evoke emotion. This combination happens late in the game—in the editing room—but its inception lies with the director in pre-production and principal photography.

  Directors may wish to shoot coverage of each scene from all significant vantage points—master shot, mediums, close-ups, and cutaways. This gives the editor a lot to work with. But a careful craftsman has a working knowledge of what each of those shot proximities does, when each one is needed, and how they work together among the greater rhythms of the film. Rather than random chaos in the shot selection in the editing room, suspense filmmakers can benefit from carefully orchestrated intensities of shots. Ideally, these shots can be prioritized in the shooting schedule in advance, and directors can save time on set by minimizing wasted shot setups.

  Figure 6.1. Directors make choices along these two axes, determining how close to put the camera to the subject and how long to hold the shot before cutting away.

  Firstly, the axis of proximity is the range of possible distances the camera can be from the subject. Close-ups naturally tend to hold more tension than wide shots. Secondly, the axis of frequency is the range of editing speeds. Edits that fly by in fast succession tend to be more intense, and little to no edits naturally tend to be more relaxed. There are important exceptions to this which we’ll look at later.

  By choosing various patterns between shot proximity and frequency throughout a film, the director has ultimate control over the rhythms of the film’s visual “music.” He can choose fast edits and close-ups for a tense moment, and then move into wide shots and slower edits for a more contemplative moment. He can choose to stay on a single close-up and not cut away in order to provide a desired emotional emphasis. Or, he can stay on a vapid, wide scenery shot for minutes in order to provide a necessary emotional ebb.

  And just like in music, the most important thing here is variety. Staying on one note for too long can cause boredom and aesthetic fatigue in the same way that overusing close-ups can deflate their impact. For close-ups to have power, they must be surrounded by moments of wider shots, and vice versa. As the wise editor Walter Murch once said, change is perception and “without change there is no perception” (Ganti).

  Don’t think that cramming a bunch of close-ups and quick edits is the path to a tense film. Audiences can only stand a certain amount of tension before it must be relieved and rejuvenated. Failure to be aware of this can result in creating fatigue and boredom in your audience.

  In our docu-series Hitch20 we picked apart an episode of Hitchcock’s TV series and counted all the shots he used. Here’s the breakdown of “Dip in the Pool” (1958):

    There were a total of 47 camera shots in the 26-minute film.

    94% of them were standard medium shots.

    Only 3% were close-ups—each specifically emphasizing an important piece of plot information or internal character emotion.

    Another 3% were wide shots, which were either establishing shots or served as a counterbalance for a dolly-in.

  This data confirms what Hitchcock always said about camera proximity—that close-ups should not be overused. He believed each time a close-up appears on the screen it will have less of an effect the next time it’s used. It’s like the high note in the “Star-Spangled Banner.” If there were five or six instances of this high note in the song, they would have less and less impact each time. This law of diminishing returns is an important takeaway for modern filmmakers in choosing shot size.

  For Hitchcock, close-ups, mediums, and wides were all notes of intensity in a symphony of emotions. They all worked together in order to convey a specifically planned orchestration of visuals.

  It’s about what mood he’s in. What’s his state of mind? You can only think of the screen and how best to communicate that emotional state of mind compositionally and rhythmically. —ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Bogdanovich)

  IMPORTANCE OF NOT CUTTING

  Hitchcock also believed that cutting away from a close-up immediately causes the tension contained within it to dissipate to some degree. That’s why throughout his work you’ll see protracted close-ups during tense moments, and often whipping the camera to the next shot instead of cutting. See the section below on whip pans.

  Holding onto a shot without cutting away allows the dramatic tension provided by the actors to carry the tension of the scene. A prime example of this is in Hitchcock’s TV episode “Revenge” (1955), in which Elsa is in shock from just being attacked in her home. She is in bed and stares motionless as her husband Carl tries to ask her what happened. Her response is contained in a long, single close-up, as she stutters out her answer. The result is that we feel how trapped she feels, and we share her sense of shock.

  Saar Klein (editor of The Bourne Identity) uses a similar protracted close-up in his film After the Fall when the protagonist is driving away from committing burglary. The camera stays on his close-up as he begins to process the emotions of what he has just done. Music rises and he begins to have a panic attack, all within the close framing. See our Q&A with Saar Klein at the end of this book which discusses this scene further.

  Even if the character gets up from a chair and begins walking, the camera should follow along with the
m in a single shot, in order to maintain the intensity of their emotional reactions (Truffaut).

  Jean Luc Godard once said about Hitchcock that he was “able to assemble the equivalent of several close-ups in one shot, giving them a force they would not have had individually.” Godard continued:

  Above all—and this is the important thing—he did it deliberately and at precisely the right moment. When necessary, he will also do the reverse, using a series of rapid close-ups as the equivalent of a master shot. (Martin)

  Deciding when to use single tracking shots should be dependent on the emotion the audience needs to feel. Certain sequences can be shot in continuous takes to hold onto tension (Gottlieb). For example, a man walks into a haunted house that has already been established as dangerous in previous scenes. Rather than splitting it up into close-ups and mysterious angles, you can shoot the man’s entrance in a single tracking shot. The reasoning: because the man is innocent and the audience should be made to feel that he’s innocent. Stylizing the shots to emphasize the creepy house could distract from the feeling you really want to convey (Bogdanovich).

  Toward the end of Marnie there’s a sequence where Marnie grabs a gun and walks down a long spiraling flight of stairs. Hitchcock frames this in one long traveling shot, framed closely on her face. As she walks down the stairs, it naturally turns into an above angle view. Because the framing is so tight and the camera moves to keep her constantly in the frame, it holds onto a great deal of emotional tension. We don’t really know what she’s going to do with the gun, but the emphasis makes us wonder.

  Lingering on a wide establishing shot is also a way of providing relief after a tense sequence, but story should creep into it pretty quickly to build forward curiosity. For a great example of this, watch the beginning of the crop-duster scene in North by Northwest (1959), which starts with a 60-second stationary wide shot on the flat plains of Indiana. A bus pulls up to the stop and lets a man off. The shot is so wide he looks like an ant in the frame, allowing just enough intrigue to keep the story moving.

  TENSION IN A WIDE SHOT?

  On the axis of proximity graph (fig. 6.1), we’ve shown that wide shots provide relief. But is it possible for a wide shot to contain high tension? Hitchcock’s answer to this would be absolutely yes. While the shower scene in Psycho (1960), made of fast cuts and close-ups, is the most famous from Hitchcock, many of his greatest suspense scenes consist of one stationary wide shot.

  Case in point is the long shot in his TV episode “Back for Christmas” (1956), in which the protagonist faces a “that was close!” moment. Herbert has just killed his wife and buried her in the basement. But in his cleanup efforts he faces a new dilemma—he can’t wash the dirt off his hands because the water has been turned off in preparation for their planned vacation. He rushes back down to the basement to turn the water main back on, then as he’s rushing back upstairs to the sink, he freezes at the stairway door while the doorbell rings. Two friends have decided to stop by and see them off on their trip. Herbert must hide while they walk in. They’ll surely find out the wife is missing.

  Figure 6.2. A man hides from unexpected guests in “Back for Christmas,” holding a secret that he doesn’t want revealed. Composing the scene in a single shot allows this close-call moment to maintain tension within the frame. “Back for Christmas,” Alfred Hitchcock Presents, © 1956 NBCUniversal.

  This encounter happens in a single wide shot (fig. 6.2). The right side of the frame includes the stairway door to the basement where Herbert is hiding. The left side of the frame is a view of the front doorway where the visitors have stepped in. The visitors chat among themselves on screen-left, wondering where Herbert is. Herbert is on screen-right, hiding from them. Tension is built into the composition of the shot—a wide shot on the left, and a close-up of Herbert’s reaction on the right. The viewer can look back and forth at ease during this scene and calculate the actions of each side. Hitchcock holds the framing until the guests give up and leave.

  Another great example of this is toward the end of Rope (1948) as the maid begins cleaning. Within a single wide shot, we watch her as she carries dishes from the wooden chest (hiding the body) in the foreground through the kitchen door in the background. She walks back and forth nonchalantly through each step of this process until she begins to open the chest. Hitchcock uses the tension of this close-call moment and the camera composition to carry it all in a single shot.

  A third example of tension in a wide shot is the key close-call scene in Marnie when Marnie steals money from the office safe. Framed in a wide shot, the janitor enters the frame and begins mopping, setting up a close-call moment that builds tension through the shot. Both sides, completely unaware of each other, slowly work toward a chance encounter. Hitchcock cuts to close-ups as Marnie puts her shoes in her pockets and sneaks away, but then he goes back to another wide shot as she flees down the stairs, barely avoiding being caught by a second janitor walking into frame.

  TENSION IN MONTAGE

  Montage, on the other hand, relies on editing in order to build tension. Psycho’s shower scene is montage. The word montage holds many varied definitions in the film world. In this context, I’m referring to the common American usage, as a quick succession of shots. It combines quick impressions of the same event into a fast collage of images. The basic idea is that this style mimics the process of the human brain.

  When in a room, for instance, the mind focuses only on key objects in a room and ignores everything else. It would be useless to examine every detail of the room all the time, so the brain selects only those things relevant to the current train of thought. As the eyes look around, the brain takes snapshots of each important object and places them within a larger impression of the whole room. Montage then, utilizes small pieces of a scene and combines them in succession in order to convey a whole scene.

  Montage is a form of fragmentation. Splitting up a scene into a series of shots edited together provides more control over the timing of the scene. It allows the director to expand the duration of a fast event, to draw out its time on screen to increase its tension. Conversely, it can make an event go much quicker than it would in real time by compressing the passage of time between shots. Because of this time manipulation, it also negates the inherent dramatic pacing provided by the actors and imposes its own synthetic tension.

  In the climax scene of Strangers on a Train (1951), a merry-go-round is spinning wildly out of control. An old man carefully crawls under the merry-go-round to reach a lever to turn it off. As he does so, we get close-ups of screaming kids and wooden horse heads bobbing up and down. As the ride is shut off, it flies off its supports and crashes. We see a montage of close-ups, which then settles into medium and wide shots. The pacing of the edits slows down as the shots get wider.

  To sum it up, you are transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Schickel)

  Montage also provokes psychological closure, or gestalt, by leaving out key visuals, forcing the mind to fill in the blanks (Zettl). The Psycho shower scene comprises seventy-eight shots but not one of those shots shows the knife actually stabbing Marion Crane. The impression of stabbing is created in the mind of the viewer through the continuity created by placing these shots together, and the added sound effect of the knife. Since the stabbing isn’t actually there, the mind must create it to provide closure on this fragmented continuity. The mind, then, is tricked into experiencing the stabbing much more intently than if it were on screen.

  So you gradually build up the psychological situation, piece by piece, using the camera to emphasize first one detail, then another. The point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of leaving them to watch it from outside, from a distance. And you can do this only by breaking the action up into details and cutting from one to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Hitchcock)

&nbs
p; BASIC “NOTES” OF CAMERA ORCHESTRATION

  Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose. You cannot put it together indiscriminately. It’s like notes of music. They must make their point.—ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Gottlieb)

  Now that you’re ready to start planning and arranging your shot selection with your “musical” camera, here are the basic “notes” in your arsenal.

  MEDIUM SHOT: WHITE SPACE

  Framing the character in a medium shot (generally from the waist up) is a neutral position of emotion. This is where your camera should rest when anticipating a forthcoming dramatic event. Medium shots are like the white space on a canvas or piece of paper. They serve as the contrast to the more extreme shots used for dramatic emphasis.

  The exact framing of a medium shot is quite variable from film to film, and from era to era. In the earlier decades of cinema, they were much wider than they are today. Small TV screens from the 1960s to the 1990s influenced a shift toward closer cameras overall. Now that home screens are getting bigger, this may change again toward wider neutral shots.

  CLOSE-UP SHOT: EMPHASIS

  Framing close on an actor’s face (from shoulders up) provides more focus on the emotion felt by the character on screen, and thus the emotion is shared more intently by the viewer.

  Essentially all important changes in the plot and moments of characters reacting to those changes should be saved for close-ups. If they are overused they will gradually lose their impact, and even more extreme close-ups will be needed.

  When to use a close-up:

    Intense emotion

    Suspicion

    Listening

    Keeping a secret

    Showing the audience a secret

  It is quite common for close-ups to be used to show a character listening to another person talking. Reaction shots used in this way allow us to “watch the listening” (Auiler). Because it is sharing a reaction, it allows us to internalize what is being said, rather than the act of saying it.