Around Europe in 16:9

"Around Europe in 16:9" Notes on editing and new road movie aesthetics.
Abstract
There are many ways a movie that involves travel may be labeled as “a road movie”. But what are the characterizations that distinguish a typical “road movie” from a movie that simply has roads involved? Usually, in road movies, a character embarks in a journey to accomplish a goal, to reach an objective, sometimes even to save the world. Not always though, as the anthropological literature testifies, the journey is more important, or effective than the place to reach, nor the story, for its flow, needs the whole trip to be shown. Therefore, editing plays a great role in this process, allowing characters in different locations to be put on the same page, and making possible to the viewer to keep track of the places and times of the movie. This paper attempts precisely to draw a general picture of of the different editing techniques that characterize the contemporary road movie, highlighting the way in which, by means of editing itself, the definition of road movie is questioned. The resulting observations, and the considerations dealing with a possible new aesthetics of the contemporary road movie will work as a theoretical background for the early draft of a screenplay. Even though it’s only hypothetical (the screenplay is a work in progress) the different ways the camera moves from a character to another, and follows three connected stories might be, and this is the final goal of this research, a good empirical basis to get deeper in the new aesthetics of the contemporary road movie.

Introduction
The Film studies dictionary gives the definition of road movie as: “Film genre characterized by a journey narrative involving one or more characters, often with an episodic structure comprised of people and situations encountered en route, the physical journey across space reflecting the inner, psychological journey of the characters, who change and grow as a result of their travelling experiences.” Even though it may seem that this definition is comprehensive of all the notes that define a road movie, there are other voices that cannot be kept out of the picture, in the definition of what a road movie actually is about. Sam North, Senior lecturer and Course Leader of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth, argues that the 'road movie ' is not a specific genre,[...], there is the gangster road movie, the trucker road movie, even the horror road movie such as 'Kalifornia '. Some might say it is impossible to so categorise the road movie, lump all of them together and call it a genre (2009). It might be more correct not to think of the “road movie” as a genre itself, but more as a narrative technique, a “trending topic” on the base of which different typologies of stories can evolve, with different suggestions and reflections on places, travels, rediscovery of identity. The importance of the distinction lays in the fact that the “road movie”is not only about people and their stories, but also the journey itself, as a way the characters can confront with their fears and struggles, even though they always leave “on a mission”, as finding someone (This must be the place), escape some situation that breaks the equilibrium at the beginning of the movie (Thelma and Louise), find the inspiration for a book (On the road). Generally speaking, the road movie goes from A to B in a finite and chronological time. Normally the narration of a road movie follows an ordered sequence of events which lead inexorably to a good or a bad end, it’s iconographically marked through such things as a car, the tracking shot, wide and wild open spaces. (Hayward, 2006) The cinematic image is moving image per se, therefore movies are always about movement, and, as such, they are fundamentally different from other representations. (Creswell, Dixon, 2002). Every single film needs editing, cutting and montage, in order to give the cinematic representation signification and narrative logic. The german director William Dieterle states:”editing is not simply a way to put different scenes, shots and fragments together, it is indeed a way to guide, deliberately the spectator”, and again, Stanley Kubrick: “everything that comes before editing in nothing but a way to produce a film that can be edited”. Based on the definition given in the Film Studies Dictionary (2003), editing is the process by which shot film footage is assembled to create sets of meanings not wholly contained in the separate shots themselves. For clarity’s sake of the matter that is going to be treated later on in this paper here is a list of the different editing techniques that have been used throughout the history of cinema, on the basis of which we can start and work on the different techniques most used in road movies, and deeper analyze and understand the peculiarities that the new type of road movie has in means of editing.

There are four categories of editing: Chronological editing; cross­cutting; deep focus and montage. Chronological editing follows the logic of a chronological narrative,and is very close in spirit to continuity editing1 . One event follows “naturally on from another. Time and space are logically and unproblematically represented. Cross­cutting editing is limited as a term to the linking­up of two sets of action that are running concurrently and which are interdependent within the narrative. Cross­cutting implies that the actions shown are taking place in different spaces but in the same time frame. As well as temporal simultaneity, cross cutting can also imply thematic comparison or contrast, as in Coppola’s final scenes of The Godfather, as well as Leone’s A fistful of dollars, both based on the end of Ėjzenštejn’s Strike. Deep focus Shooting in deep focus means that less cutting within a sequence is necessary so the spectator is less manipulated, less stitched into the narrative and more free to read the set of shots before her or him. It represents a way of shooting that keeps a number of planes of action in any one shot in sharp focus, allowing a number of significant actions to take place simultaneously in different planes. Montage intended as an editing technique per se, and not as a synonym of editing, montage came out of the Soviet experimental cinema of the 1920s and, although the first experiments were made by Lev Kuleshov, it’s primarily associated with Ėjzenštejn. Kuleshov’s fundamental theory is that collision or conflict must be inherent to all visual signs in film. Juxtaposing shots makes them collide or conflict and it is from the collision that meaning is produced. Montage creates a third meaning through the collision of two images, the sequence of images in conflict, defined as montage of attractions, provoke a creative reaction within the spectator who produces for himself a third meaning. Ėjzenštejn describes a successful film montage as one which provides an audience with a “collision of ideas”. Ėjzenštejn’s thesis suggests that “ elements of a production could be arranged in a formally determinable order so that a viewer would be “aroused” (shocked in Ėjzenštejn’s terminology), in precisely the intended manner and to the intended degree (Aitken, 2011). Editing creates space; analyzing the problems of the diegetic frame, the frantumation and recomposition of the scene becomes more evident . Space, in it’s edited reconstruction becomes dry and synthetic. The rules of audiovisual language study the cinematic space of the scene: direction of the eye and of the movement. These basic rules allow the spectator to recognize the spatial bond between frames, but also allow the editor a wide range of “cheating possibilities”, creating the illusion of a junction between frames. It’s presumed that real life experience in enacted within a continuous and uninterrupted spatial and temporal sequence. To get from one place to another we must move through the intervening space. Similarly we must get from one time to another (that comes after it) by passing time (Creswell, Dixon, 2002). It therefore becomes necessary, in road movies more than anywhere else, to set rules to make the viewer understand the spatial and temporal flow of the story. The eye of the spectator needs to be guided through time and space, since not all of the travel, unless it’s highly relevant for the story, can be shown on screen. To give the idea of the travel, it’s enough to show an accelerated shot of a landscape, as someone looking out of a train window, or images of dusk and dawn, to represent the passing of time through the travel. The viewer understands the jumps in time and the ellipsis in space represented through the different editing techniques. In a very controversial essay on “The illusion of continuity”. Todd Berliner and Dale Cohen analyzed the functioning of human brains in means of understanding and processing edited information regarding the moving image: Classical editing conventions are developed not arbitrarily but deliberately to exploit and accommodate the processes and limitations of our perceptual system. The spaces presented by classical cinema are imperfect, disjointed, and filled with gaps and discontinuities. However, the brain perceives spatial coherence when observing classically edited cinema because the perceptual system evolved to accept imperfect and disjointed visual information, to reconstruct the fragmented information into a model of the physical world, and to ignore gaps and discontinuities. Given classical cinema’s common goal to create utmost spatial clarity, some technical devices for depicting space are more probable than others because they obey the format, patterns, and logic of active perception (2011). After this overview on the road movie and the different editing techniques, the need is now to apply one to the other, in order to deeper analyze the peculiarities that the genre object of our analysis has in terms of editing. This will be done by analyzing two movies, both adaptation of literary work, that can, in different ways, be labeled as road movies. One of them is the most cliched example of all, On the road, the other one is 360, a film that given some thought can be considered as a road movie, not because it has roads involved, but because it makes the spectator travel through the whole world, even though the characters just make short distance journeys.

On the road, presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2012, is the cinematic adaptation of the novel by Jack Kerouac, symbol of the beat generation and the myth of the road, that so strongly influenced the production of the New Hollywood, will be the example of the “official way” of editing the road movie, given its fidelity to the original novel and the great expectations that have grown all the way through the production2.

360, presented at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, based on Schnitzler’s play Reigen (La Ronde), is the fourth cinematic adaptation of the austrian piéce, the first one in which the thread leaves the borders of Vienna and reaches the whole world, becoming somehow a road movie itself. Each of the 15 characters embarks in a journey, an episode of the movie, that gets him or her involved with another of the fifteen and so on and on until the movie, to reach them all and connect all of their stories, travels around the world, from Bratislava to London, to Brazil going through the US, resolving in an endless battle for the emotional survivance of the characters. On the road Directed by Walter Salles, starring Sam Riley, Garreth Hedlund, Kirsten Stewart, Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen, the movie is about young writer Sal Paradise that has his life shaken by the arrival of free­spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly. The screenplay remained faithful to the original novel, that has mobility as it’s central theme. As Cresswell states in his essay Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac 's 'On the Road ' : there is a repeated pattern of excitement with the prospect of a new city, a period of exploration then dejection and sadness followed by continued travel. The focus is on two elements: the disillusion with places and the fascination with “just going”. In terms of defining what could be called a “road movie” by all means, On the road could be considered one of the best examples throughout the history of the genre, even though it has not been object of study due to it’s recent production. Most of the statements made for the road movie itself can be extended to Salles last work, because if it’s true that the road movie reflects a cultural psychosis that not only is tomorrow another day, but the road is the passage to which a new beginning is possible, free from the bonds of the past, On the road is the emblem of this cultural psychosis. The road movie, and this movie in particular, is rarely about the road, or even the journey. It’s always about hope and despair (North, 2009). The main theme of the movie is mobility, but it cannot be so simply mapped on the landscape. Mobility is also a deeply threatening and transgressive form of behaviour often described as deviant (Cresswell, 1993). On the road almost never shows the road by itself, it always shows what the travellers see while on the road. In terms of moving image and takes, we get the idea of the travel by seeing the landscape quickly pass through the characters eyes (Image 3), or footage of the road, and the car strolling on it (Image 2) with Home I’ll never by, by Johnny Cash as “travelling theme song”. Every time the characters arrive in a new place a caption3 tells us the spacial and temporal coordinates, for most of the movie the editing is made in the most classical way of Hollywood’s tradition, continuously, invisible editing, following all the rules of the 180 and 30 degrees, becoming almost a statement of the continuity of the mobility on screen and in the diegetic universe. As the movie begins the screen is black, the only thing to be heard is Johnny Cash’s song and slowly it fades in to Sal Paradise’s feet, walking (Image 1). He walks and walks, until eventually a truck picks him up. We see him sitting back with other hitchhikers, and he starts narrating his story, as in the greatest tradition of the narrations about travel. Landscape is shown, always through the characters eyes, with a voiceover, or just the travel theme song, there is never a surprise, the viewer is always guided where he is supposed to be, following a character that doesn’t really know where he’s going and just rolling on the road with him. It seems strange, but the way the classical road movie is edited is as plain and simple as it has ever been. There are though many different ways travel can be shown, and many different ways a film can be considered a particular, but not less important part of the cinematic idea of travelling and road movie itself.

Towards a new aesthetics of the road movie. 360 and the “travelling film”. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law and Rachel Weisz, the movie gets into the sexual relations between people of different social statuses. It starts with the episode of a prostitute and a salesman in Vienna, then follows the salesman back to London, and from there Denver, Phoenix, Brazil, Berlin, Paris and finally back to Vienna. The screenplay is an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s theater play La Ronde, that follows the same criteria, but it’s only set in London. The episodic narrative allows the viewer to follow the flow of the story around the world, even though the characters just take one part of the film’s journey. Thinking of it as a road movie can sound strange at first, but the mobility, that’s the main point of a road movie, is stated clearly throughout the 106 minutes of the movie, and the spectators get involved in a journey of personal identities and roads crossing, as the tagline of the movie states, “if there is a fork in the road, take it”. The current world seems indeed marked by the immobilization of people and the motion of images. If filmic spaces are not simply the suturing together of static instants but the creation of sections mobile within themselves, then images move from quantitative accumulation of banalities to the multiplication of qualitative singularities. Objects and so forth are linked on the film by motion between, which brings with it a past that it bears info the unseen future. Everyone is heading from somewhere to somewhere else; in every moment there is the just passed and just past that is part of the present, there is the intended future within the present (Crang, 2002) The editing within the episodes is quite linear, and there is no confusion between the episodes, every time the storyline stops following one of the characters it remains on the following one, without jumping back and forth with flashbacks or ellipsis. The way they cross paths is organic, but the way the story moves beyond one city to go to the next one is really interesting. There is one photogram (image4), as one character is talking to his analyst about the girl he loves that is flying on a plane in that exact moment, where we see a little airplane on the back of his head. It is an innovative way to treat the cross cutting technique, and the movie has lots of moments like this one in the example. Split screen is also used to underline moments in which the stories, even though separated still have to interact with each other (image 5). In this case though, the way split screen is used just allows us to see the expression on the faces of the different character, it’s splitted in four, and just one of them is talking. Captions are used in this movie as well, but always after a jumpcut, that always takes us to a different city and a different story. The IMDb review of this movie end with this sentence that summarizes well the reason why this kind of narrative could easily be considered a road movie on the same page as On the road. Screenwriter Peter Morgan and director Fernando Meirelles ' 360 combines a modern and dynamic roundelay of stories into one, linking characters from different cities and countries in a vivid, suspenseful and deeply moving tale of love in the 21st century. Starting in Vienna, the film beautifully weaves through Paris, London, Bratislava, Rio, Denver and Phoenix into a single, mesmerizing narrative (IMDb, 2011).

Concluding and moving forward The analysis of these two movies, in terms of narrative and editing, can give a close image of what the mainstream thought about road movie as a genre is, but also how a movie can be travelling with the spectator throughout the world, without following a single character 's path. It could be argued that the road movie must, to be true to the genre, involve a road. Yet, many of the essential ingredients of the road movie were and are encompassed by the 'Western ' (North, 2009), therefore, even a roundelay kind of editing of three different stories bind together could become an interesting way of experimenting the road as not only made of concrete, but also as turns and forks in life.

Bibliography Aitken, Stuart (2003): Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, (review) Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:3, 771­773 Aitken, Stuart, (1991), A Transactional Geography of the Image­Event: The Films of Scottish Director, Bill Forsyth, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 1 Berliner T, Cohen DJ, (2011), The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System, journal of film and video 63.1 / spring 2011 Blandford S, Grant, BK, Hillier J, The film studies dictionary, Arnold publishers 2003 Cudar, David (2004), Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, (review), Film Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Winter 2003­2004) Creswell, Tim (1993), Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac 's 'On the Road ', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 Creswell, Dixon, Engaging Film: geographies of Mobility and Identity, Rowman and Littlefield 2002 Hayward, Susan, Cinema studies, The key concepts, Routledge 2006 MacKenzie. Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone. POV 1998

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Bibliography: Aitken, Stuart (2003): Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, (review) Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:3, 771­773 Aitken, Stuart, (1991),  A Transactional Geography of the Image­Event: The Films of Scottish Director, Bill Forsyth, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 1 Berliner T, Cohen DJ, (2011), The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System, journal of film and video 63.1 / spring 2011 Blandford S, Grant, BK, Hillier J, The film studies dictionary, Arnold publishers 2003 Cudar, David (2004), Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, (review), Film Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Winter 2003­2004) Creswell, Tim (1993), Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac 's  'On the Road ', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 Creswell, Dixon, Engaging Film: geographies of Mobility and Identity,  Rowman and Littlefield 2002 Hayward, Susan, Cinema studies, The key concepts, Routledge 2006 MacKenzie. Closing  arias:  Operatic montage in  the  closing  sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone. POV 1998 11