| | | | | | Godard had in mind when he remarked that "today one doesn't know how to frame anymore. Most films confuse framing with the window in the camera, whereas composition consists in knowing when to initiate the action and when to cut it." 24 If I understand Godard correctly, it is the "music" generated by a film that we should pay attention to: as a shot unrolls itself in time, it functions as a "note" answering another note, preparing us for the subsequent one. And it is only when all of them have been played out that one has a sense of the melody or the ''composition" in the piece. Let us take a familiar example: a conversation between two people. The first character is shown in a close-up on the left side of the screen, looking right. For the time being, the frame is somewhat out of balance. But, as soon as we go to the reverse shot, bringing in the second character, placing him on the right side of the screen looking left, the balance between the two spaces is found anew. What happened in this case is that there was a delay in the realization of the composition. Hitchcock provides us with a marvelous example of this at the beginning of Vertigo (1958). In the scene, Scotty (James Stewart) is being urged by his old schoolmate to investigate the comings and goings of his wife. As the scene proceeds, shots succeed one another in almost a musical manner, all the while telling us a great deal about who is winning the argument. Masters versus singles, who is standing and who is sitting, the distance between the two men, even the room they are speaking from (the conference room that is adjacent to the husband's office happens to be two steps higher), every device in Hitchcock's arsenal is activated to modulate what would otherwise be dull exposition material. A cinematographer thus does not necessarily compose each shot as if it were a complete unit. Rather he or she must weigh the entire scene, understand the multiple units of power, their change or evolution over time, and find an overall scheme that will bring out visually the core meaning of that scene. In a word, film composition embraces relations between shots as much as conventional displays of forces within them. | | | | | | | | | So far we have looked at the frame from the point of view of the filmmakers. The audience, however, has nothing to look at but the image itself. Or is there more? To be sure the role of the cadre for the narrative imaginary created by the film has been the object of a lively debate among theorists. Andr Bazin, as usual, started the ball rolling when, using judi- | | | | |
