Scattered throughout Mikey and Nicky are continuity errors, mismatched cuts, out-of-synch post-dubbing, boom mics and production assistants. Shortcomings like these leave the film open to charges of slopping filmmaking, and yet these visible slip-ups, the surefire evidence of a production swimming in trouble, remarkably all find expression, a place to be purposeful for once, beyond the intentions of author or conditions of production, within the film’s grand design. Without all these so-called flubs, Mikey and Nicky would not be Mikey and Nicky, for they are part and parcel of the film’s personality as cracked pavement, bad graffiti, and broken windows are to certain neighborhood streets.
(The cut of the film I watched, the one shown in theaters to poor box-office and the only one available on DVD, is apparently a rush job done by Paramount, impatient with the cutting board perfectionism of directress Elaine May. Couple of years later, May released the director’s cut of the film, which reportedly extended the film’s running time as well as removing all the flubs of the theatrical cut. Although I would love to see the director’s cut, I’m more than satisfied with the cut currently available, surely one of the great films of the seventies).
Hovering over this discussion is the dreadful concept of film grammar. Pushing the outrageous analogy between cinema and literature, film grammar, like linguistic grammar, becomes “a set of prescriptive notions about [the] correct use of a language” (def. from Oxford English Dictionary). Note how the definition does not include the term “rules” but instead uses the term “prescriptive notions”, characterizing a set of beliefs, subject to argument, rather than a list of fundamental principles. Mistaking a set of “prescriptive notions” for a set of “rules” becomes the source of every cinephilic squabble on how a film ought to be shot, how a scene should be staged, how a sequence should be edited. Mickey and Nicky is below mediocre because the directress refuses to provide any spatial connection within the scenes; Les Miserables is terrible for no one should ever film musical numbers solely in close-ups; while Johnnie To’s films are excellent since he knows how to choreograph actors and objects in space. All these arguments, no matter how well thought out they are, are based on film grammar, and following this cinephiles, especially those of a formalist bent, tend to demand that the respective film subscribe to the fundamental laws of film grammar. This is the zero point of formalist cinephilia, where everyone carries with them a cinematic rulebook, expecting the film to exactly follow what’s inside. But the avenue open to formalism (using this term vaguely, but here I’ll pin it down to a way of looking that focuses attention on the way a film is constructed using various cinematic elements, from cinematography, editing, staging, production design, lighting, etc.) is a method to map out various cinematic techniques and their various cinematic effects, not to place them in an arbitrary do and don’t list. Of course, privileging one cinematic technique (say, classical decoupage) over another (scattershot editing) has resulted in some neat insights on the way we look at films (from Bordwell and Thompson to Vulgar Auteurism), but never should these be mistaken as fundamental rules, for all they do is state why these cinematic techniques are effective in some instances, implying they are limited in others. Film grammar is ultimately an arbitrary concept. There is no correct way in shooting a scene, editing a sequence, or choreographing mise-en-scene. This does not mean that there are no films that are poorly shot, edited, or choreographed, but it is not because it fails to follow the imaginary cinematic rulebook, rather the answer to this lies somewhere else….
Why do I prefer the whip zooms of a Shaw Brothers flick to those in a Tarantino revenge film? Why do I favor the abstracted fights scenes in The Blade to the clearly choreographed kung-fu showdowns in, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Why do I find the long takes in the terrible Colossal so lackluster compared to the longer takes in Lav Diaz’s epics? It all comes down to taste most likely, but I want to dig deeper. I want to go back to Mikey and Nicky, and how all the slip-ups in that film found its place within its grand design, becoming part of the film’s unique personality. Every cinematic element (acting, cinematography, editing, lighting, production design), no matter if it is performed professionally or off-the-cuff, is not good or bad in itself, however they are almost worthless if they cannot find a place within the total design of the film, where they can find the utmost expression. This expression is created by the film’s organization of its various elements, and every film organizes its elements in a different manner. So right now I’ll speculate that all films self-institute, whether purposefully or by chance, a manner of organizing various cinematic elements, finding places where to fit these elements so that they can all find expression within the film’s construction as well as harmonize with all the other elements. To make this vague concept a bit clearer, the shaky-cam, sloppily edited feel of so much chaos cinema works wonders in Gamer but becomes a total failure in Battle: Los Angeles. I’d argue that the chaos cinema feel in the Neveldine/Taylor film becomes part of its personality, its ass-cams and POV shots completely appropriate to a sci-fi film that whizzes by lightspeed the trash of a post-Youtube world. The chaos cinema feel in the latter film, however, only acts as an unimaginative sheen, representing the supposed authenticity of real combat footage, an illusion the film cannot hold for long. The self-institution, the construction, the mode of organizing cinematic elements works in Gamer, but doesn’t in Battle: Los Angeles. Why so? Because the cinematic elements of the former film all fit in within the construction of the film and thus find expression, and similarly the barren long takes of Colossal never harmonizes with the rest of the film’s elements, unlike in a Lav Diaz film. Of course, these are subjective statements, open to argument, but what I want to say here is that looking at film as construction offers a better vantage point for articulation, a better place for criticism, of the subjective kind, to step in.
I’ve teased out some ideas from this post somewhat from the Endless Love post a couple months back, and I still think this post is a bit vague, but hopefully from the bits and pieces here and there in this piece some ideas may be formed. I think that looking at films as a construction, an organization of cinematic elements, offers far more possibilities in thinking out a film, what it does and how it does it, than methods that look at films from the aspect of film grammar. Now we can talk about the aesthetics of not just the action or art film, but also the documentary film or the television soap opera, because cinematic elements are no longer isolated, so that we can think of whether a scene is shot well or poorly, but part of the entire filmic construction.
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