It assumes that there is a difference between something being factually correct and something being realistic.  Johnny Mad Dog might well express true stories about what it is like to be a child-soldier but this does not necessarily mean that it is ‘realistic’.  In fact, in my piece, I chide Sauvaire for allowing an editorial tendency to creep into the film.  I reasoned that because the world does not contain neat little truths, any attempt to present a cinematic audience with neat truths is unrealistic.  This suggests that realism is an entirely different formal quality than factual accuracy.  It assumes that ‘realism’ also carries with it certain aesthetic demands and formal demands.  This is, to put it bluntly, an idiosyncratic view.  It presents realism as an aesthetic and moral ideal that can be aspired to but almost never achieved :  Art, being artificial, is necessarily in some sense false.

For this piece, I have decided to look at the issue of realism from an entirely different perspective.  To present it not as an ideal but rather as an affectation, a stylistic quirk.  A quality that has only a tangential relationship with factual truth and almost no relationship whatsoever with the moral imperative to speak the truth and present the world as it really is.

What better place to start then, than with propaganda?  Art that is conceived precisely not as a means of telling the truth, but rather as a means of convincing people that a false vision of the world is in fact correct.  One way in which propaganda can be made more believable is if it chimes in some sense with the world-view of the people it is aimed at.  Propaganda films are works that are false but have that ring of truth.  They rely upon that ring of truth to be effective.

One of the best examples of this kind of film-making (along with 1942’s In Which We Serve by Lean and Coward) is Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went The Day Well? An absurdly fantastical every-day tale of valiant little Englanders banding together to fight off a cohort of brutish Nazi paratroopers dressed as British soldiers.

Let us get this straight right from the beginning.  Went The Day Well? is not a realistic film.  Its central plot is designed to flatter and to inspire the people who watched the film.  It romanticises not only village life but also the British class system, presenting both as idylls of happiness entirely devoid of anger, misery, envy or grief.  It presents the British people as saintly heroes before the main plot even begins.

Easy Going Gent

Nazi Brute

Its depiction of Germans is similarly fantastical as Basil Sydney displays a relaxed and easy-going manner while pretending to be Major Hammond only for him to transform into a swivel-eyed tyrant the second he reverts to his true nature as Kommandant Orlter.  “Silence!” he bellows, “Qviet you Fools!” he shouts, puffing out his chest.  Similarly, David Farrar is a handsome gent whilst posing as Lt. Maxwell but, upon becoming Lt. Jung, he soon becomes a swaggering sadist who gleefully announces that five children will be shot at dawn.  In fact, Farrar and Sydney’s performances as Germans are only slightly less absurd than that concocted by Ian Lavender for the episode of Dad’s Army in which the gang find themselves trapped in German uniforms.

However, while Went The Day Well? is clearly a fantastical film, it tries very hard to be realistic.  This is obvious from the opening scene…

The first thing you notice is the zooming in on a country road sign.  This is an attempt at using the iconography of everyday British existence to make the setting appear more real than it is.  This is not just some fictional town, the film appears to be saying, it is a real town.  It could be your town!

Countryside Semiotics = Verisimilitude

We then move along a country lane towards the town and, when we arrive in town we encounter a local who speaks directly into the camera.  The desired effect is clearly that we might have gone for a drive only to come across this little village with a big secret.  A secret, the local tells us, which only came out after the war.

A British Country Lane

A British Country-Dweller... from THE FUTURE!

This is a fascinating piece of script writing as Went The Day Well? was released in 1942 as a piece of war-time propaganda.  This suggests that the local is addressing us from some point in the future… a point at which Hitler had been defeated and Britain is victorious and at piece.  As a conceit this is a profoundly strange one, doubly so as it is never actually explained.  The film seems to be saying that the future is before the audience and it is inevitable that Britain will be triumphant and, at some point, the hardships and the secrets will cease.  In a film with such a strange set of ontological commitments and such a curtailed attitude towards truth, such messages from the future are accepted almost without question.
The film’s attitude towards realism is, ironically enough, perfectly encapsulated by a director who was operating in Germany during the Nazi years.  As G. W. Pabst said in an interview with Revue de Cinema after the war :

“Already in my first films I chose ‘realistic’ themes in order to show that I was a stylist.  Realism is a method;  It isn’t an end, it’s a means.”

What Pabst appears to be saying is that realism is primarily as stylistic quality.  If one wants to present ‘the real world’, one is making a choice about the style of one’s films, not their content.  This certainly fits with what I was groping towards in my piece about Johnny Mad Dog, what Pabst is adding is that the idea that realism is some kind of philosophical absolute is actually not a necessary part of the equation when it comes to achieving cinematic realism.  Whether one is trying to tell the truth because the truth must out or whether one is trying to make a film look realistic in order to peddle politically useful lies, the methods and the creative processes are identical.

A few months back, I wrote about Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002).  Intrigued by the cerebral and somewhat extreme piece of French film-making, I tracked down the best known of Assayas’ works, Irma Vep (1996).  Set behind the scenes of a fictional remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent era crime pulp Les Vampires (1915), Irma Vep casts Hong Kong martial arts veteran Maggie Cheung as herself playing the titular Irma Vep character.  Much like Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), Irma Vep uses its film-within-a-film structure to comment upon the nature of film production in general and the health of the French film industry in particular.  The result is a hugely rewarding film filled both with touchingly funny moments of human frailty and insightful critiques of what French film has lost and where it should be heading.

Film Poster

The first scene I want to draw your attention to takes place about half-way through the film.  Production has begun and the over-the-hill and close-to-the-edge director has stormed off the set disgusted with the day’s rushes.  Shooting having run late, the crew all make their own way home leaving the film’s star all alone in a parking lot in a strange town that speaks a language she is unfamiliar with.  However, seeing her alone, the costume designer takes pity on her and takes her to a dinner with some friends.  Having had too much to drink, the costume designer blabs to her friend about how much she fancies Cheung only for the friend to then set about seducing Maggie on the costume designer’s behalf :

Much like the later Demonlover, Irma Vep is a film that is not only bilingual but which takes an active interest in the effects that different language capacities have upon social groups.  Here, Maggie (a fluent but non-native English speaker) finds herself being chatted to by a woman whose English is clearly limited.  Assayas rightly notices that in these types of situation, people make allowances for the linguistic short-comings of others.  They are more charitable, less literal and more forgiving of social faux-pas.  These allowances are ruthlessly exploited by the costume designer’s friend who begins by making small talk before asking more and more probing personal questions.  Cheung’s performance here is stunning (she would later win a best actress award for her part in another of Assayas’ films) as she tries to laugh off the questions or to deflect them without causing offence to the woman whose house she is standing in.  The hand is brought up to her mouth in an attempt to protect herself from the onslaught and she squirms and twists refusing to deny her possible sexual interest in women or in Zoe.

The scene is all about protocols of non-verbal communication but it is also about culture clash.  Traditionally, one of the biggest differences between French and Anglo-Saxon film has been the French openness not only in depicting sex but also depicting grey areas between relationships.  Yes there is love and there is loss in French film but there is also illicit sex, ill-considered affairs, unhealthy desire and sexuality transcending lust.  As Gerard Depardieu said in Menage (1986) “Never joke about these sorts of things, I’m going to bugger you and you’re going to get off…”

Maggie Cheung has suddenly found herself not just in France but actually inside French film,  a world she admits that she is not particularly familiar with (“We don’t get the big French films in Hong Kong”).  Cheung radiates with warmth in this scene.  Assayas left nothing up to chance, right down to the warm lighting and the horrible cuddly cardigan she is wearing.  The film wants us to fall for Maggie because she represents a future for French film.  A future that combines the clashing cultures of an internationalist outlook with the best of French traditions.  These theme is carried through to a second scene set later in the same evening.

There are two interesting elements here (aside from the lovely travelling shot at the beginning) and that is the music and the fact that it is set at a table.  The table full of friends is an icon of French cinema.  Like a cowboy riding off into the sunset.  From Tacchella’s sexually charged family gatherings in Cousin Cousine (1975), to the more sinister social functions of Chabrol’s Pleasure Party (1975) and This Man Must Die (1969), the communal experience of food, wine and high-minded chat appears again and again in French film and Assayas’ seems more than happy to recast it featuring a veteran of Hong Kong action cinema.  Musically, we also see a commentary upon French culture as it is a cover version by the band Luna of an old song originally recorded by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.  Again, we have the traditionally French combined with the cosmopolitan and the internationalist.  Because Bonnie and Clyde need not only be about a guy and a girl.  In fact, Bardot seems to be ahead of the curve by singing about a couple named “Bernie and Clyde” :

The final scene takes place after Zoe has deposited Maggie back at her hotel.  The pair separated on amicable terms with the evening’s discussion never having been touched upon.  Maggie returns to her room and decides to don the Irma Vep cat-suit (by the way, this scene is not safe for work after the first couple of minutes) :

Assayas’ perfectly captures Maggie’s restlessness.  She’s not only wired after a good evening out, she’s also wired because of being given the third degree over not only her sexuality but also her fetishes.  Her appetite has been whet and now she cannot rest.  She paces back and forth throughout the room like a tiger, accompanied by the opening to Sonic Youth’s song about Karen Carpenter “Tunic (Song for Karen)” with its dazzlingly conflicting feelings of being stuck somewhere unable to move and kind of liking where you are whilst also thinking about where you’ve been.  In fact, Assayas even seems to have inspired himself from some of the shots from the song’s video :

The scene addresses one of the film’s early speeches.  When Zoe and Maggie first meet, Zoe candidly says that it’s a stupid idea to remake Les Vampires and that the director should have stuck to more personal films grounded in real people and real experiences.  Assayas then presents us with Maggie, a real person in a real – if somewhat postmodern – situation and then shows us how she might be drawn into a life of crime… a life of sneaking into people’s rooms dressed in a rubber cat-suit and relieving them of their prized possessions.  The film brilliantly conveys the thrill to be had by living the life of Irma Vep.  The heady sense of power from sneaking past people’s outer defences and into their most private moments and places.  Again, Assayas shows us a possible future for French film.  A future that does not seek to plunder the past and give it a make-over featuring hot chicks in rubber, but which instead touches upon new subjects.  Subjects that might very well be informed by genre sensibilities but which remain rooted firmly in the realities of life and the constraints of the human condition.

Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis.  It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over.  After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does.  The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.

The scene opens with a blurry shots that quickly snaps into focus on a young child playing on a rather desolate beach.  The camera zooms out and shows that the child is utterly alone and has been for quite a while.  There are no footprints in the sand.  No parents looking on benignly from a nearby café.  In fact, the parents are conspicuously absent, neatly foreshadowing what will come to pass.

The Opening Blur

Alone on the Beach

Next, we see the car.  A mustang.  Moving fast and accompanied by what can only be described as a funeral dirge.  The piece is Vier Ernste Gesänge by Brahms, sung by the post-War contralto Kathleen Ferrier.  A singer noted for the particularly dark timber of her voice, a timber reportedly due to a birth-defect.

Chabrol cuts back and forth between the child and the car.  We see the child moving up the beach and the car eating up the road and immediately a sense of tension is created.  These two bodies, even though they don’t know it yet, are on a collision course.  As the scene progresses, it becomes more and more tense.  Shots from the inside of the car show the changing countryside and we expect the child to suddenly spring into view but we do not know when.

The view from Inside the Car

The cutting back and forth is accompanied by the music fading in and out, as though it is playing on the car’s radio.  As with the absent parents on the beach, this is another act of foreshadowing that serves to ramp up the tension.  The dirge is not for those already dead, but for those that are about to die.  Chabrol lays down further morbid imagery as the village is filled with old churches, local shops called “The Pope” and a tolling bell.  The absurd Gothicism of it all is almost unbearable but it is precisely the heavy-handedness of the imagery serves to increase the tension.

Death

When the car finally hits the child it is dramatically downplayed.  There is no slow-motion.  No screaming child.  No death-rattle as the child closes its eyes for the last time.  It is impersonal… just another bump in the road.  The only emotional reaction comes from the woman in the car and even then the driver mutters “Ta Gueule!”… “Shut it!”.

We then move into a fixed shot.  It could have been the last thing the child saw.  The camera points up towards the grey sky, the old church peeks into shot on the lower left-hand side.  The camera does not move but people move in and out of shot.  By not moving the camera, Chabrol is making it clear that he does not want us to focus upon the locals’ reaction.  He wants us to focus upon the final thing the child saw.  That is the object of the scene.  That last minute of life.

Eventually, with surprising slowness, the child’s father comes into shot, he picks up the child and howls his anguish and sadness.  Suddenly the emotional impact of what has just happened hits us.  By downplaying the moment of the child’s death and focussing our attention upon what happened immediately after, Chabrol has kept all of that built up tension in a holding pattern.  Suddenly, with the arrival of the father, that tension is released.  The father is a simulacrum of the audience’s sense of tension, his howl of anguish could almost be fuelled by the breath of our collective exhalation.  And because the father is the audience’s simulacrum, he is instantly sympathetic even though we know nothing about him other than the fact that he shares our shock and horror and what has just happened.

Jean Cocteau once said that for some people, style is a way of saying something simple in a very complicated way.  For others, it is a way of saying something very complicated in a simple way.  Given the ease with which Chabrol is capable of making us emotionally invest not only in the child’s death but also the father’s struggle, it strikes me that it is the second of Cocteau’s remarks that is closer to the truth.  Dialogue, character and plot ; in cinematic terms, all of these are just long-winded ways of communicating what a great director can say with visuals alone.

However, it is my contention that Repulsion is a substantial landmark on the the road of Polanski’s artistic development.  The low-budget British Horror film allowed him not only to perfect some of the cinematic techniques that would feature prominently in his later works but also to tackle some of the themes dear to the generation of 1930s surrealist film-makers who clearly had quite an influence on Polanski’s thinking.

Film Poster

Set in around London’s South Kensington, Repulsion is the story of Carole Ledoux (played exquisitely by 20 year-old Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian girl whose repressed sexuality tips her into first paranoia and then psychosis.  Initially, Carole is a normal if somewhat shy and withdrawn girl living with her sister.  She works in a beauty salon but has no friends aside from her sister and a young man whose romantic ambitions she struggles to keep at arms length.  Indeed, when we first encounter the young man he acts in a way that suggests that he knows Carole but you would not get this impression at all from the way she behaves towards him.  The situation degrades when Carole’s sister starts bringing her boyfriend home with her.  Carole is repulsed not only by the sounds of sex that filter through the walls but also the presence in the bathroom of a man’s razor.  However, things start getting really bad when Carole’s sister goes away on holiday with her boyfriend, leaving Carole completely alone with her fears.

This scene comes close to the end of the film, once Carole has been on her own for a while.  The state of the apartment mirrors the state of Carole’s mind.  We can see cracks beginning to form in the walls and the place is a mess, full of upturned furniture, rotting food and (though not included in the scene) two dead bodies. Aside from the cracks in the walls, the most obvious signs of Carole’s mental state are the fact that the ringing of a nearby bell is taken as a signal at which she is raped by unseen assailants lurking in the shadows.  As she descends further into madness, the cluttered apartment suddenly expands in size, resembling a huge and cavernous expanse of darkness and menace.  From this huge space we move to the claustrophobic confines of a corridor whose walls excrete arms, groping and caressing Carole as she crawls towards her bedroom, seeking out childhood’s safest hiding place under the bed.

It is possible to detect in this scene the same psychoanalytical concerns that animated surrealist film-makers such as Bunuel and Cocteau.  Indeed, the prominence accorded Repulsion to a straight razor seems to be a deliberate tipping of the hat to Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and the famous sequence in which an eye-ball is sliced open as a cloud passes the moon.

The film’s desire to return again and again to the rotting potatoes and rabbit carcass are also reminiscent of the scene in Un Chien Andalou in which ants crawl out of a hand.  Bunuel himself claimed that this sequence was an hommage to the rotting meat in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  Another clear reference to the surrealist tradition are the arms exuding from the wall.  Right down to the lugubrious black and white, this portion of the scene invokes the famous scene in Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete (1945) where Belle enters the castle through a corridor full of candelabras held by real human arms poking through the walls.

All of these sequences obey a psychoanalytical dream logic through which unconscious fears and desires are made manifest through dreams.  In both the Polanski and the cocteau sequences, arms reach out from some other place and brush up against the protagonist, driving her to terror and madness in her efforts to get away from them.  However, while these arms symbolise unconscious fears reaching up towards the conscious mind, they also capture the reality of life for many women.  Faced by a world full of men – always leering, lusting and two thoughts away from reaching out and grabbing – Carole retreats first to the all female world of the beauty salon and then to the safety of her apartment but once there she is still not free of male advances both real and imaginary.  Eventually, Carole’s entire world seems to turn against her as the apartment itself starts groping and grabbing at her.  In Repulsion‘s powerful final scene, we see the reasons for this fear of men; a peaceful family picture with Carole’s parents in the foreground and a younger version of Carole glaring resentfully at her father.  Suddenly the identity of the shadowy rapist becomes clear.  If there is one man a woman should be able to trust not to lust after her it is her father.  Once that taboo is broken then the world of masculine sexuality would rightly start to seem like a relentlessly oppressive and invasive space, once Carole’s terrors start manifesting themselves in the fabric of her apartment then her only chance of escape lies in catatonia.

The way in which, at times of extreme psychological stress, the unconscious mind can bleed through into the conscious mind is a recurrent theme throughout the Apartment Trilogy.  Indeed, one could almost go as far as to suggest that it is explicitly what all three films are about.  Consider, for example, the dream sequence from Rosemary’s Baby in which the imagery is dreamlike but also completely real.

This sequence also features another of Polanski’s visual motifs; the use of optical illusions.  Aside from the dream-like imagery, the above scene features a moment in which the camera appears to slide under the bed, looking up at images of heaven reminiscent of the Sisteen Chapel and so given an impression of depth through the use of perspective.  Polanski also plays games with perspective in the dream sequence of the final film in the Apartment Trilogy, The Tenant.

In this scene, Polanski uses the same trick as in the Repulsion sequence to make the room suddenly seem a lot larger, but he augments this trick by swapping in some out-size replicas of the apartment’s furniture, further increasing the cognitive dissonance and the sense that something is not quite right.

One of the books that Polanski evidently kept on set with him during the filming of Repulsion was Richard L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain : The Science of Seeing (1966), he even enlisted Gregory as a kind of perceptual consultant and dragged him round a number of cinemas and camera manufacturers in order to research the possbility of making Repulsion a 3D film.  Gregory is most famous for developing the idea of Perception as Hypotheses, whereby the brain does not directly process visual information but instead compares the data it receives from the eye to known schemas and paradigms that allow it to make sense of objects that do not look quite right.  Gregory’s homepage includes a number of films of optical illusions that demonstrate this principle but perhaps the most famous example of this kind of thing is the Muller-Lyer illusion.

The Muller-Lyer Illusion Explained

Optical illusions are culture-specific.  We view those two lines as being off different lengths because we are used to living in built environments in which we are used to interpreting things through the use of perspective even though perspective clearly does not apply to a couple of lines on a screen.

Other than in artificially constructed Optical Illusions, Gregory points out that perception can go wrong in cases of mental illness or drug use and this is where I think psychology links up with Repulsion.  Polanski fills his scene of psychotic breakdown with optical illusions in order to make the audience share Carole’s sense of cognitive estrangement from the world around her.  The surrealists of Cocteau and Bunuel’s generation based their understanding of the human mind on the writings of Freud and so their attempts to make film about madness involved the use of dream-like imagery.  While Polanski also makes use of these kinds of techniques, he also makes use of more advanced psychological thinking trying to induce in the audience symptoms of the same psychological disfunction as the protagonist.

Repulsion‘s images of psychotic break-down are not only an important moment in cinematic history, they are also an important turning point in Polanski’s career.  The scene acknowledges the psychoanalytical and surrealist traditions but it also stresses much more recent thinking and the need to move on from tried and tested modes of artistic expression.

The first scene to go under the microscope is the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).

French Film Poster

Touch of Evil was intended to be Welles’ return to mainstream Hollywood film-making after a decade spent in Europe.  The shine on his wunderkind reputation having faded in the 17 years since Citizen Kane (1941), Welles set about reminding Hollywood of his skills as a writer/director by taking on the weakest script he could find and turning it into a work of considerable power.  However, this triumphant return to Hollywood was hampered by the fact that the studio hates Welles’ final version of the film and re-cut the film before bringing in a second director and reshooting a number of scenes.  In response, Welles wrote a 58-page memo to the studio detailing the changes he thought were needed.  A version of the film based upon this memo was released, but not until 1998, 14 years after Welles’ death.

One of the most notable differences between the early versions and the 1998 memo-based version was that the early versions of the film ran credits over the film’s 3 minute and 30 second long opening take.  The early versions also decided to run Henry Mancini’s (admittedly excellent) score over the scene instead of Welles’ intended layered sounds of duelling radios and street noise.

The most obvious characteristic of the scene is its incredible tension.  In the opening seconds of the scene we see a shadowy figure placing a time bomb in the car’s trunk.  We know that the bomb will go off sooner rather than later and so every time the car drifts back into shot, we expect an explosion.  Welles brilliantly feeds this sense of tension by having the car stop at a crossing, then drive slowly past Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston before stopping again and again for goats, handcarts and customs officials.  It is only when the car exits the scene that it explodes. Off-screen.  Robbing us of the expected mid-street effects shot.

This long take shows Welles at his most aggressively brilliant.  Aside from the pacing and framing that perfectly ratchet up the growing sense of impending doom, Welles plays games with our expectations.  As the shadowy bomber makes his way to the car the camera follows him, shaking as it goes suggesting the kind of subjective POV shot you get from a hand-held camera.  But then the camera bounds into the sky and begins to glide slowly and serenely above the decaying but vibrant streets.  This use of a crane shot is reminiscent of the closing scene of Citizen Kane, there too it was used to gain a wide-angled impression of a complex thing; in Touch of Evil it is the border town, in Citizen Kane it was the extent of Kane’s madness and his desperate attempts to fill the void left by the childhood and simple life he was deprived of.

Another reason to adore this scene is that it tells you about the world the film inhabits.  The border town’s architecture hints at a long-gone age of grand city planning and civic ambition.  The vaulted pavements of the border town are utterly at odds with the fly-blown shacks and old churches so beloved of the directors of Westerns.  To the extent that the border town resembles anything else, it is the medieval parts of Bern, the capital of Switzerland.  Also worth noting is the lighting.  Less obvious in the above clip from the original release of the film, the town does not have many street lights and yet is full of light and incredibly long shadows.  The kind of shadows that seem entirely appropriate for a film noir such as Touch of Evil.

Less abstractly, the scene perfectly juxtaposes the huge American cars of the 1950s with the handcarts and goat herds of the Mexican locals.  The two inhabit the same world and the ramshackle nature of the border post (more concerned with greeting local celebrities than thinking of security or policing the flow of immigration) speaks of a border between America and Mexico that is entirely permeable.  Regardless of which side of the border the characters stand on, they are in the same world of long shadows, faded greatness and duelling radio stations.

While one might excuse the studio for its decision to play the credits over the opening scene, it is completely unforgivable that they decided to do away with Welles’ sound-scape.  From the first moments of the scene we are treated to rock and roll pouring from an unseen radio.  As the car drives through the town and the camera’s focus shifts to different things, this soundtrack changes between different radio stations, different songs, different types of music.  The layering of different sounds is one of Welles’ better known techniques.

In this scene from Touch of Evil, Welles has several conversations going on at once.  This is a radical departure from both cinematic and theatrical norms where even crowd scenes tend to work on the assumption that the audience can only pay attention to one line of conversation at a time.  In a tip of the hat to naturalistic dialogue, Welles shattered this convention in the very first scene he appeared in in his very first film.

Just as Welles’ use of layered dialogue conveyed energy, disagreement and activity, the same can be said for Welles’ carefully constructed sound-scape.  In addition to the street sounds and the few lines of dialogue, Welles presents us with a melting pot.  Where the originally released version of the film came with one tune and one theme, Welles’ version of the scene features different types of music from different radio stations from different countries all competing for our attention.  This layered soundtrack speaks to us of a place where national boundaries are purely academic; where different types of people from different cultures and with different aspirations rub up against each other and compete for prominence.  Without saying a word, Welles escorts us to a corner of the world that is nothing short of a melting pot.  The use of this technique to convey a sense of place and time will be familiar to SF fans for its use in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), in a long (though admittedly CGI) take, Zemeckis pans the camera backwards from the cluttered airwaves of 20th Century Earth, back through time and the waves of broadcast information until we reach a point of deafening silence.  Just as Welles’ use of sound tells us who his characters are and what world they inhabit, so too does Zemeckis; driving home not only how vast the universe is but also how short human life-spans seem when measured against the vast expanses between solar systems.

As an example of not only technical brilliance, this long take is also a masterclass in cinematic story-telling.  Yes, the scene’s few lines of dialogue serve to introduce us to two of the main characters, but the rest of the scene lets us know what kind of film we’re in for and what kind of place the film is about.  The clashing radio stations not only pre-empt Welles’ use of layered dialogue, they also foreshadow the film’s central conflict between a young, cosmopolitan and idealistic Mexican law enforcer and an old, provincial and corrupt local cop.  As an exemplar of how much information a skilled filmmaker can pack into a 3 minute and 30 second-long take, I think this scene is a perfect example of the importance of looking at film not as one unit but as a collection of smaller scenes and ideas, each with their own individual beauty.