MID-CENTURY: TORN CURTAIN

We'll be looking at the ways in which the movie stages Cold War tropes – of paranoia, polititicization of desire,
nuclear anxiety, death-drive geopolitics, refugee fantasies of flight and pursuit, secret state violence, the
governmentality running I/Other relations – as comedy, as a farce of the ordinary lit up garishly by power
politics and melodramas of the enemy's police state.
The very woodenness of the performances of Julie Andrews and Paul Newman is designed to enact the
impossible contradiction between the Cold War heterosexual couple as guardian of 1950s values of liberal
freedom, light comedy and safe sex, and as dreamers of their two nations' special relationship as guardian of the
Free World.
The contradiction has to be performed as stiff awkwardness, and badly acted double agency. We'll concentrate
on four episodes:

 the killing of Gromek (as an enactment of the real secret passion of the Cold War, Newman and
Carolyon Cornwell as the only genuine sexual partnership in the movie);
 the museum scene (thinking about art and surrealism and paranoia, doubling);
 the bus-ride scene (as farce of the ordinary politicized by Cold War melodrama, looking at doubling);
 the ballet theatre scene (looking at why Hitchcock chose Francesca da Rimini as ballet, and at the
staging of paranoia as bourgeois embarrassment).

The big question: is this just a bad movie, or is it a movie whose badness is revelatory of the clumsy machinery
of Cold War psychology?

General
 Narrative elements: Of course, you’ll always want to consider the sort of things relevant to any
narrative, such as characterisation, dialogue, action, settings.
 Mise-en-scène: A general term referring to design aspects of the production, especially the
arrangement of the set and props.

Analysing Individual Shots

The best strategy when analysing individual shots in a film is to approach them as you would a photograph or
painting, considering all relevant aspects of its visual composition, including:

 Composition: How are visual details arranged within the shot? Is it a balanced or more ‘squeezed’
composition?
 Framing: How are the objects of focus framed? Are they centred, or cut-off by the edges of the frame?
 Contrast: The balance of light and darkness in the shot, which might be high contrast or low.
 Depth: Most films are two-dimensional, of course, but a sense of depth can expressed through the use
of lighting, and lines, especially diagonals towards a ‘vanishing point’ (as in painting). Depth can also
be suggested through ‘depth of field’ (see below).
 Depth of field: This refers to the distance from the camera in which objects are still in focus. (It’s
controlled by the use of different lenses and aperture.) If everything in the shot is in focus, you have a
‘deep’ focus or a ‘wide’ depth of field. If only things up close are in focus, which things blurry behind,
you have a ‘shallow’ focus or depth of field.

Beyond these basic visual aspects, you’ll also want to consider the position and movement of the camera in a
given shot:

 Position: What is the distance of the main subject from the camera?
o Close-up: Head and shoulders or less.
o Medium shot: Waist up.
o Wide shot: Shows subjects or the scene in full.
o Tilt: Tilting to the left or right.
 o Angle: Are we looking up from below eye-level (low angle) or above (high angle)?
 Movement: Is the camera moving in the shot?
o Zooming: Camera is stationary, but lens zooms in or out, closer or further away.
o Pan (panning): Camera is stationary on a tripod, but turns left or right, up or down.
o Tracking: The entire moves, either on a track or carried.
o Smoothness: Is the movement smooth (usually a tracking shot, pan, or steadycam) or is it less
smooth, and possibly meant to imitate human movement (with a hand-held camera or other)?
 Speed: slow-motion, sped up, or normal speed.

Editing (Relationship Between Multiple Shots)

 Length of individual shots – i.e. in relation to each other.

 Transitions: normal cut, fade to black or white, dissolve, etc.
 Spatial effects: How does one shot relate spatially to the next?
o Reverse shot: As if the camera had been turned roughly 180 degrees, so that we’re looking at
what was behind before.
o POV (Point of view) shot: Showing what a character sees, either without them in the frame or
sometimes looking over their shoulder.
o Reverse-shot-reverse: A conventional combination of Reverse and POV shots which help
establish who or what a character is looking at.
o 180-degree rule: A convention in which the camera remains on one side of an imaginary
‘axis’ across the ground/floor throughout a scene. Conversely, ‘jumping’ this line can create
certain effects.
 Temporal effects: Has time passed between shots? How do we know?
o Continuity: Editing that suggests no time has passed.
o Cross-cutting: Cutting back and forth between two scenes in order to suggest that they are
taking place simultaneously.
 Match cut: A technique of ‘matching’ objects or shapes from one object to the next, often in order to
suggest a conceptual relationship. (A famous example of this is the cut from the caveman’s bone to the
space orbiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
o Note: even if it isn’t an exact ‘match cut’, the pairing of certain shots can create other
‘conceptual’ effects.

Sound

 Diegetic sound: Sound which is meant to originate from a source within the narrative – e.g., a gunshot
from a gun, or music from an onscreen source.
 Non-diegetic sound: Sound from a source outside of the narrative – e.g., the orchestral score.
 Continuity: Sound can be used in relation to editing to help establish (or break) temporal or spatial
continuity.

David Bordwell on film art: http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/index.php

 [Best book on cinema techniques and how to analyse movies: Bordwell's Film Art: An Introduction
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010)]

eyeline-match editing and subjective or point-of-view camera position

 Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much – assassination attempt scene, Royal Albert Hall
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoN2v6w3Gbc
 David Bordwell's analysis of this scene – at end of this pdf:
 http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/ManWhoKnewTooMuch_FilmArt_2nd_1988_292.pdf
intellectual montage - Innocence Unprotected, dir. Dušan Makavejev
 Bordwell's analysis of segmentation:
 http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/Innocence_FilmArt_4th_1992_401.pdf

 The most salient instance of this enterprise in the classical era of film theorizing is the
anthology Poetika Kino (1927). Here prominent literary critics affiliated with the Russian Formalist
school joined filmmakers to propose some general principles governing film structure and style.
Granted, the essays don’t wholly avoid evaluation, and some make passing declarations about what the
essential conditions of cinema might be. Yet to a surprising extent for their period, the writers try to
elucidate principles of plot construction, stylistic texture, and spectatorial uptake.
 Here is that anthology, aka Eikhenbaum's edited collection, the Poetrics of Cinema:
https://monoskop.org/images/0/08/Eikhenbaum_BM_ed_The_Poetics_of_Cinema.pdf

Also Eisenstein as teacher of film:

 'Problems of Composition' essay on how to represent the defence of Stalingrad, Christmas Day lecture,
1946, pp. 155-183:
 Sergei Eisenstein, FILM ESSAYS and a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982)
 https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/film-essays-and-a-lecture/450070820-1601363851/
eisenstein_sergei_film_essays_and_a_lecture_1970.pdf

 [For basic primer on film analysis: https://nofilmschool.com/Film-theory-basic-terms ]