One of the mechanical charms of cinema is its simple ability
to track from right to left and vice versa. The dialectic
between movement within a fixed frame and the motion of
a moving frame pinpoints the kineticism at cinema's historical
heart - a will to move which has excited everyone from Abel
Gance to Busby Berkeley to Michael Snow to Sam Raimi. Surreptitiously
evoking a beautifully designed antique instrument, the pan-and-track
still seduces cinema patrons as they surrender their ocular
mechanics to the shifting frame. Despite the lubrication
required for the camera's laid tracks and the projector's
threaded film, there is no singular well-oiled machinery
that defines cinema. Instead, the cinema (as an animatic
apparatus) generates the dynamic resolution of the vertical
with the horizontal - of the vertical strip of still images
passing down in front of the projector lens, while each
image incrementally shifts sideways . This is an oft-ignored
feat by which we remain blindly seduced.
This is especially so when one notices that such movement
is physiologically impossible. Look out your window or around
your room and try to 'pan' your eyesight. The best you can
do is a series of montaged focal points or arcs as your
eye uncontrollably locks onto anything your brain presumes
to be the subject of your vision. The cinematic track-and-pan
is thus a wonderfully mechanical and proto-robotic effect
to which the human in us all thrills. Apostles of computer
animation gorge on the accelerated track-and-pan as they
deliriously speed along an X-Y axis. Tourists track-and-pan
their future memories on tiny camcorders with onanistic
repetition. Wannabe directors fix on 'tracking shots' as
signifying embodiments of the artistry they will never produce.
All testify to the base power of cinema's kinetic flow.
However, in this tres-modern ultra-schizophrenic world,
the flow of time and space has to be fractured and folded
into a rhythm of ruptures. Here, then, is one of cinema's
many fruity contradictions. It is already granting us a
gorgeously inhuman, out-of-body experience simply through
its cascading pans and tracks, yet it must then destroy
that sensation lest we become addicted to its flow (hence
the conservative fear of computer games which do not interrupt
flow). The interruption effect has been incessantly and
superficially celebrated in the modernism of montage and
the postmodernism of MTV, both of which lay claim to inventing
the effect when in fact they only disorient because they
break up something that already was doing a fine job in
re-orienting our ocular experience. Worse still, scant theoretical
regard has been given the audio-visual ramifications of
this conflation of optical effects which effectively cancel
out each other's purported visual narratological meaning.
The simple question to be asked is: what do you hear at
the moment of the cut? What does sound do at this point?
Does it continue or recommence? Does it run counter to the
edit, flow with it, cover it, rejoin it? Simply, sound is
operating in ways here that demonstrate exactly what is
happening: the sound you hear during the shots either side
of the edit is often not only the sound of those images,
but also the sound of all that has disappeared between those
images.
The technological and structural dilemma briefly outlined
above is evident mostly in 30s/40s Hollywood musicals and
70s/80s Hong Kong kung-fu movies. Both involve moving/performing
bodies which must move across visual edits. The space between
Busby Berkeley's astounding editing in the camera (he usually
filmed his amazing set pieces in sequence) and Gene Kelly's
canny editing for the camera (he choreographed on set in
anticipation for shifts in camera perspective and location)
is traversed and transgressed by the accelerated staging
of the modern kung-fu fight. Moreover, in kung-fu one is
dealing with body movements designed to be too quick for
the eye to see, requiring cinema mechanics to then disrupt
the posthuman abilities of the martial artist, reconfigure
it into a digestible physiological spatio-temporal continuum,
and edit it so that it appears to be happening at an inhuman
rate. The jump cut in Hong Kong action cinema (and its current
repatriation in Hollywood) is predicated on this bizarre
two-steps-backward/two-steps-forward conundrum of depiction.
John Woo's FACE OFF - continuing over 20 years of a Chinese
refiguring of so-called American action cinema - stands
as a contemporary landmark in grabbing those sonic moments
between the cut and exploding them into the cinesonic ether
sphere. FACE OFF boasts two Hollywood stars riotously mimicking
the other - as well as some of the worst body doubles committed
to the big screen. (Digital effects can do anything these
days except make a good wig.) No matter: the pleasure of
watching flabby Scientologists and balding bad dudes in
action movies is scoffing at the preposterousness of their
implied physical prowess. John Woo may be playing with at
least three levels of irony by pushing this to the hilt
in having Travolta and Cage be totally unconvincing in any
physical action they perform short of turning their head
to face a low-angled camera track. Shot after shot after
shot, Travolta and Cage exit the frame only to re-enter
the frame in the next shot in a manner that even Jackie
Chan would find difficult to execute. But at these precise
moments the soundtrack blasts one with a whole artillery
of orchestral, synthetic and incendiary sound effects. They
shoot across the surround sound space, creating breathtaking
maps of plotted action which confuse one into feeling that
the screen bodies have in fact performed the feat your eyes
do not believe. It's like accidentally swallowing a gulp
of water while swimming: you maintain your rhythm of breathing
while conscious of the fact that one breath was replaced
by an entirely separate physical action and sensory experience.
Just as 70s kung-fu movies traditionally supplant raw objective
acoustics (flesh hitting flesh) with brute subjective sonics
(flesh hitting your flesh), post-80s Hong Kong urban action
movies made in America exploit the clarity, definition and
sheer volume of full-frequency surround sound to create
spectacular sonic fireworks that dazzle one in synch with
the on-screen 'sleight-of-body'. This is an apt fusion of
culture (Peking Opera) with technology (Dolby Stereo). While
Hong Kong action aficionados bemoan the Americanization
of its great stars (most of whom would love dearly to break
into and exploit the American market anyway), the shifting
of Hong Kong sound post-production off-shore is enabling
its action and fantasy genres to develop advanced audio-visual
forms based on a more detailed and multi-dimensional approach
to sound design which home-grown Hong Kong cinema has been
renowned for ignoring.
In some respects, the sound of FACE OFF distracts one from
the visuals in a rush of milliseconds where theatre-space
- the sculpted sound field which you inhabit in the cinema
- becomes a sonar hall of mirrors, refracting sound effects,
aural devices and musical conventions. Raimi-esque bullet-cam
shots are matched by booming tunnels of wind rushes which
soar to the rear of the cinema like jets passing overhead
at an aviation pageant. Grossly cliched slo-mo hugs of children
on sepia-toned carousels are matched by syrupy stings of
glockenspiels which reverberate the whole auditorium. Obligatory
Tex-Mex church shoot-outs and stand-offs are matched by
diffused swirls of pigeon flaps and digital choirs. And
- best of all - guns fired in aircraft hangars and metallic
prison halls are matched by high-transient full-impact bullet
ricochets which punctuate the side and rear walls of the
theatre with such velocity that one flinches and ducks.
Yet in other respects, the detachment of these sounds from
the image track - the ways in which they tend to create
the moment for an on-screen occurrence rather then follow
one - posits them as corner stones in a scene's audio-visual
narration. Each of these moments is the result of extensive
post-production labour and a purposeful use of psycho-acoustics,
combined neither to enhance visuals, disrupt space, nor
synchronize action. Rather, the sound design in FACE OFF
is appositely engineered to compensate visuals, conjure
space and generate action. Following the logic of cinematized
kung-fu (rendering the impossibly real as impossible realism),
the film's momentum of sound is a hi-tech rush of Chinese
circus music: crashing cymbals and swelling gongs, sparkling
fire crackers and booming fire-balls, swishing blades and
clanging metal sheets. FACE OFF embodies much that destabilizes
cinema while exposing its unending attraction. Never forget
who created gun powder. Never presume action cinema to be
American. And never believe in the primacy of visuals in
an audio-visual medium.
