Impulse

Think about the ways artists use composition to control your attention and mood: A photographer can set the focus to exactly what she wants you to look at first, and let the rest of the image go blurry. Or she might use a striking color on a bland background. Or she might use geometry, arranging the objects in the frame so your eyes fall where she wants them naturally. She can adjust the colors, lighting, and perspective to tune your mood: dark, grey, and moody, or bright and colorful. These are the tools that have been used from Da Vinci to LaChapelle.

Because video and film are temporal, filmmakers can use movement and time as a similar compositional element, for example in camera movement. When the camera pans away from a discussion to a closed door, we know someone’s going to come rough it. When a character throws a ball, the camera pans to see where it went. Camera movement is a little voice whispering, “look over here”. Filmmakers can use camera movement to draw your attention wherever they like. Additionally they can control the way it moves to set your moves: slow push-in for an intensely serious moment, jerkily erratic movement for confusion.

The temporal component has several effects that are subtle and psychological. For example, on several occasions, I’ve shown people a photo essay of mine, completely scrambling the order of the photographs each time I show it. I’ve found that people walk away with the same impression of the subject and same appreciation for the work regardless of the order of the images. They also don’t mind that some elements are missing. If I show a photo of people arguing, and another after they have resolved the matter, viewers feel satisfied. Viewers don’t need the photo of the beginning of the argument that shows what it was about. People fill in the gaps. In fact, with still photography, people expect to fill in the gaps.

But movies move, and as a result, I think people expect to have the gaps filled in for them. If I had shown you the same argument scene, this time as clips of video, again showing the argument and the resolution but omitting the beginning, you’d be confused or uninterested. You’d expect to be shown what it is about. That temporal component sets up a rhythm: this happened, then this, then this. If I leave out the beginning, middle, or end, it feels shoddy and incomplete.

I believe this rhythm forces the story to the foreground. With a photo essay, the story is abstract - the viewer creates the story themselves as they investigate the photos. With movies, the story is literal; the whole point of watching a movie is to see how a story unfolds. Think about it. If a friend told you about a photo show, you’d ask, “Did the show look good?” If a friend told you about a movie, you’d ask, “What was it about?”.

Why is this? Researchers have found that when a person watches another person, the watcher’s brain is stimulated almost exactly as if the watcher were doing the task themselves. That’s how we learn from others. Perhaps similarly, because movies move, we expect them to act more like real life - this happens, then this, then this - just as we experience real life. We expect each scene to have a beginning, middle, and end feel.
How you arrange those scenes, and how you show the elements of beginning, middle, and end is where the temporal component becomes a compositional component. Think of the movie Memento. It has a beginning, middle, and end feel, yet gives you the events of the story completely out of order. Compositionally, they played with the temporal aspect of the story timeline, yet it still follows the pattern of exposition, development, climax, denouement. The timeline of the audience and that of the story draw our attention towards the climax.

Watching a movie is like going on a tour - the audience moves through the landscape of the story. The director is your tour guide. While filming, his job is to be constantly aware of which scenes came before and after, and how the audience moves from moment to moment in the story. The feature film director places the camera and actors and directs everyone based on this awareness of time. The documentary filmmaker does all this on the fly, deciding where to point the camera, when to cut, and when to get extra reaction shots, all while the action unfolds in front of her. It’s much more improvisational. Either way, though, the director is doing the same thing: Using the traditional visual compositional elements as well as temporal elements, he shows you the story; “Look over there. Now over here.”

In the next post, I’ll describe how this temporal component affected my shooting.