From Where You Dream (8 page)

When the narrator gets home, he keeps his own counsel and is very quiet, but he is critical of the adults that surround him, his aunt and uncle and old Cotter. The adults contend that you can learn too much; that you really need not pay attention to the dark and serious things of the world; that, as Cotter says, education is bad for children because their minds are so impressionable. All of this adds up organically, and deepens our understanding of the boy whose hunger for learning, and knowledge of the darkness and the seriousness of the world, whose very impressionability leads us to identify with him.

I caution you once again to understand that this is a secondary and artificial way of responding to literature, and that this philosophical articulation of these characters' yearning runs counter to the ways in which we are meant to and do respond to them in a story. But here our narrator
yearns
for the truth. He's going night after night past the window, reading the implications of what sort of candles are lit and working through the mysteries of religion in terms of where this man may be headed when he dies. The narrator yearns to face the dark things honestly. He's doing so in a world commanded by adults who would keep him ignorant, who would prevent him from knowing, much less speaking, the truth. And this yearning is inherent in every detail of image, of voice, moment by moment in the narrator's experience.

Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We're not talking here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.

The great D. W. Griffith (I say
great
in the sense of moviemaker; he was a loathsome human being)—who did those massive silent screen epics in the teens of the last century,
Intolerance
and
The Birth of a Nation
—was rightly credited with inventing modern film technique. Griffith himself credited one man with teaching him everything he knew about film, and that was Charles Dickens. Of course, Dickens died several decades before film was invented, but what Griffith learned from him about this new art form of the twentieth century goes to the heart of the experience of reading literature.

Pause for a moment and consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience

is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness. When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting and the actions are evoked as images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness, are they not? The primary senses—sight and sound—prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing, you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves through your consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. Consequently, it makes sense that the techniques of literature are those we understand to be filmic.

All of the techniques that filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as filmgoers, have direct analogies in fiction. And because fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness, you will need to develop the techniques of film as well. I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight, because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I've been describing in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and generalization, problems of rhythm and transition— how to get from one scene to another or one image to another or one sentence to another—how to put all the parts together, where to place your own personal focus when you're in your own creative trance.

I inveigh against abstraction in these works called novels and stories. Consider how Jack Nicholson as a crotchety old bachelor in a movie looks at Helen Hunt. We see his face on the screen; he lifts an eyebrow; his lip curls. If the screen suddenly went blank and the word "wryly" came up, or "sarcasm," or "contempt," how would you react? You can imagine: with great discomfort. For readers who know how to read, abstraction, generalization, analysis, and interpretation have the same deleterious effect.

Let's turn to a few basic film concepts, most of which will be familiar to you, and then let's look at some literature together and see how it is that writers have always been filmmakers.

The
shot
is the basic building block of film. From your point of view as spectator, the shot is a unit of uninterrupted flow of imagery. From the moment that image begins to whenever that image is interrupted, by whatever—that is the shot. That is the basis of every film.

Then there are a number of transitional devices for getting from one shot to another. By far the most common, used for the vast majority of transitions, is the
cut.
You see an image on the screen, and snap! it's not there; another image is there in its place. It's called a cut because originally when film was edited—and this has only changed in the last few years—the film stock was literally cut and then spliced together with the image that followed.

And, of course, shots are connected into scenes and scenes are developed into sequences. Scenes are unified actions occurring in a single time and place—maybe a single shot, more likely a group of shots. A
sequence is
a group of scenes comprising a dramatic segment of a film.

These concepts describe not only the inevitable flow of film but also the narrative voice as picture maker. These pictures have a life in time. They begin, they develop, and they end in equivalents of the filmic concepts. As in film, it is the manipulation of these "shots" accumulating into "scenes" and

"sequences" that creates meaning and produces the rhythm of the voice of the narrator.

The narrative voice in fiction is always adjusting our view of the physical world it creates, which is equivalent to another group of film techniques on a continuum from extreme long shot to extreme close-up, and the many stages in between. The long shot, the medium shot, the close-up, the extreme close-up—you can slice that sausage as fine as you wish. The narrative voice always places our reader's consciousness at a certain distance from the images it's creating. It can place us at a far distance or bring us into a position of intimate proximity by its choice of detail, by what it lets through the camera lens.

Not only do fiction and film adjust us in terms of our physical relationship to the image, they are also constantly adjusting our sense of time. Fiction and film both often speed time up or slow it down, operating in
slow motion
and
fast motion.
You're familiar with the moment when the lovers are finally reunited and they run to each other in slow motion across the plaza or the meadow. In the late sixties or early seventies Sam Peckinpah invented slow-motion violence—at the end of the Western
The Wild Bunch,
for example, when a gang of criminals all get blown away in excruciating slow motion. That technique has by now become a filmic clich6: every bullet's impact is in lugubrious slow motion.

Fast motion in film, however, is almost always comic in effect. Some filmmakers have tried to overcome the comic uses of fast motion, but without much success. A wonderful and deadly serious early silent film,
Nosferatu
, has a sequence in fast motion when Nosferatu's coffin arrives from abroad and is taken

off
the ship and carried into the hearse—and it looks comic. I can't think of an example in modern filmmaking where fast motion is used except for comic effect. In fiction, though, fast motion can be used with an infinite variety of emotional nuance.

The last film technique I want to lay on the table for you Is one of the most crucial. It's called
montage.
Montage is a concept developed by Sergey Eisenstein, a great Russian early film director. Simply put, montage creates meaning by placing two things next to each other, juxtaposing elements. In a work of art everything is laden with affect, and whenever you put two of
anything
next to each other, a third thing emerges; that's what montage is about. If you see an image on the screen of a grassy slope and a freshly dug and refilled grave, and we cut to a woman in black walking slowly down a gravel path beneath some trees, the montage leads you instantly to understand that this woman has left a loved one in the grave she just visited. In film the juxtaposed elements are most often visual, but in fiction the flexibility is almost infinite.

Let's look at some examples now. I'm going to start with a piece from a short story by Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain." I want you to just listen to the flow here of Hemingway's narrative voice, and then we'll come back to it and examine it in cinematic terms.

The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on.

"I'm going down and get that kitty," the American wife said.

"I'll do it," her husband offered from the bed.

"No, I'll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table."

The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.

"Don't get wet," he said.

"The American wife stood at the window looking out." Hemingway here evokes the full figure of the wife standing at the window. In interior terms, it's a kind of medium long shot. We see her fully from across the room.

"Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables." What has happened here? We have now cut to what she is seeing. You understand this same technique when you're watching a movie: in
Out of Africa,
you see Robert Redford's face on the screen. He looks. Cut. We now see a lion bounding toward the camera. We understand that this is what he is seeing because of that montage: Robert Redford's face, a Hon coming this way; and the third thing emerges. The most deprived, illiterate youngster understands this.

Hemingway has just used the same technique. "The American wife stood at the window looking out," and "Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables." We see that cat, again in a kind of medium long shot, the table and the rain and the cat underneath. How many inexperienced writers, having written "The American wife stood at the window looking out," and now wanting us to understand what she's seeing, are going to put her back into the next sentence? "The American wife stood at the window looking out. She watched a cat crouching under one of the dripping green tables." Right? You now have a slack, awkward run of prose. It is as if, in the film, we see Robert Redford's face on the screen. Cut. Now we see the lion bounding this way, but in the foreground is the back of Robert Redford's head. Can you imagine the awkwardness of that shot? Yet we all write sentences with that kind of built-in awkwardness, when we don't need "her" in the sentence; montage takes care of it much more elegantly and powerfully.

"Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on." What just happened? We zoom in for a close-up on the cat.

" 'I'm going down and get that kitty,' the American wife said." How many times in film have you seen an image, and then a line of dialogue, somebody's voice coming in over that image, and then an image of the speaker? Images linger and other images come in on top. This is all happening very fast, but I promise you it's happening as you read, and it's exactly what Hemingway does here. The dialogue tag doesn't come until the end; first it's a voice, then we know who speaks. There's an after-image of the cat until Hemingway puts in the character.

" 'I'll do it,' her husband offered from the bed." Notice that we don't have any equivalent to "The American wife stood at the window." We know he's on the bed but don't know what his physical position is; we do not see him fully, and so for the moment it's a close up of him as he speaks.

" 'No, I'll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.'" No dialogue tag this time. So we stay with him as her voice floats through. We know it's her because of the conventions of paragraphing in dialogue. But our attention is not brought back to her. We stay with him, and we're still close on him. And then, the husband "went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed." The camera pulls back slowly, revealing him finally in full figure, reading and lying propped up at the foot of the bed." 'Don't get wet,' he said."