Turning Away
Paul Atkinson
Abstract
Image schemata are integral to understanding perception, for they provide the basis for the articulation of visual form and the parameters by which the body relates to already constituted visual objects. They also describe patterns of movement and, therefore, can be employed to understand the ordering of time in visual perception. This is of particular importance to film, where matters of proximity and spatial organisation are always grounded in onscreen bodily movement and mediated by the temporal patterns of camera movement, editing and montage. This article will address the relationship between image schemata and film form through an analysis of shot duration and in particular how bodily attitudes inform viewer anticipation in the long take. This involves an investigation of what differentiates the long take from other shots and the interrogation of why the spectator expects the shot to end within the time of viewing. In applying the theory of image schemas to temporal aspects of film, it is suggested that it is important to distinguish between those schemas that have a determinate end (such as the SPG schema) and those that do not (CONTAINER and BALANCE schemas). With respect to the long take, it is not only the expectation of the shot’s termination in the form of a cut that informs the viewer’s perception of shot duration but the indeterminate bodily inclination to turn away from the screen.
Résumé
Les images-schéma sont très importantes pour comprendre la perception, puisqu’elles offrent la base pour l’articulation de la forme visuelle et des paramètres par lesquels le corps fait un lien avec des objets visuels déjà constitués. Elles décrivent aussi des motifs de mouvement et peuvent donc être employées pour comprendre l’agencement du temps dans la perception visuelle. Ceci est particulièrement important pour le cinéma où des questions de proximité et d’organisation spatiale sont toujours ancrées dans du mouvement corporel à l’écran et transmises par des motifs temporels de mouvement de caméra et de montage. Le présent article aborde le problème des relations entre les images-schéma et la forme filmique par une analyse de la durée de plan et en particulier par la question suivante : comment des attitudes corporelles conditionnent-elles l’anticipation du spectacteur dans un long take? Ceci implique un examen de ce qui peut différentier le long take d’autre plans et pourquoi le spectacteur s’attend à ce que le plan se termine dans les limites du temps regardé. En appliquant la théorie des images-schéma aux aspects temporels du cinéma, l’auteur suggère qu’il importe de faire la distinction entre les schémas qui ont un but précis (comme le schéma SPG) et ceux qui n’en ont pas (le schémas-conteneur et le schéma-équilibre). Par rapport au long take, ce n’est pas seulement l’anticipation de la fin du plan sous forme d’une coupe qui informe la perception spectatorielle de la durée du plan, mais aussi la propension corporelle indéterminée de se détourner de l’écran.
Keywords
Image schemas, duration, long take, Mark Johnson, film spectatorship
The study of film has incorporated theories of cognition in a way that most other art forms have not, which may be due to the fact that psychology flourished as a discipline in the Twentieth Century alongside film’s development. It may also be due to the peculiarity of cinematic spectatorship, where people gather together and sit still before a lit rectangle in a darkened room or the perceptual complexity of film which combines the senses of vision and audition in a manner that is not tied to clear spatial boundaries as it is in the theatre. This complexity can be broken down into components, such as the movement of characters, the movement of the frame, the movement of editing and the movement of sound but, in order to understand how they operate, these filmic components must be aligned with the spectator’s experience. Mark Johnson’s theory of image schemas is suited to this task because it describes perception in terms of topologies of movement that are not limited to any one sense. This is of particular importance to film, where matters of proximity and spatial organisation are always grounded in onscreen bodily movement and mediated by the temporal patterns of camera movement, editing and montage. The suitability of schema theory in film theory will be addressed by investigating shot duration and how this relates to bodily attitudes and viewer expectations about how long a shot should endure.
The philosopher Mark Johnson highlights the importance of understanding the body’s role in all forms of perception, an approach which he argues is a critique not only of the mind-body split but of analytical philosophy’s tendency towards what he calls “objectivism” – that is, the assumption that mental representations can be correlated with real world objects. Johnson adapts phenomenological principles and theories of cognition to rephrase many of the questions posed by analytical philosophy (Body xxxvii). He argues that perception is always embodied and that reasoning and concepts, such as space and time, cannot be clearly separated from their perceptual foundations and the way we engage with our perceptual environment. This engagement can be characterised using embodied nonpropositional statements, which Johnson names “image schemas,” acknowledging Kant’s theory of schemata and underscoring the fact that an image, unlike a proposition, is not a pre-existent object but the product of an analogic relationship between perceiving subject and their perceptual environment.
In The Body in the Mind, Johnson states that an “image schema is a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience” (Body xiv) and is nonpropositional because it describes a bodily disposition or orientation that is not reducible to a percept or concept. For example, our embodied understanding of the difference between up and down is not a perceptual fact restricted to proprioception, or a template for describing the perceptual field, but a mode of engaging with a perceptual environment:
We grasp this structure of verticality repeatedly in thousands of perceptions and activities we experience every day, such as perceiving a tree, our felt sense of standing upright, the activity of climbing stairs, forming a mental image of a flagpole, measuring our children’s heights, and experiencing the level of water rising in the bathtub. The VERTICALITY schema is the abstract
structure of these VERTICALITY experiences, images, and perceptions. (Body xiv)
An image schema is “abstract” insofar as it is applicable to any number of perceptual events and is extracted from experience. It refers to general patterns of bodily engagement that adapt themselves to a particular situation, hence the use of the gerund – “experiencing,” “measuring” and “standing” – rather than substantives to describe verticality.
Image schemas are nonpropositional and can, therefore, describe analogically the alignment of the embodied viewer’s movement with film movement. In this notion of embodiment, there is also a principle of continuity for a schema describes the arc of a movement and this can serve as a means of understanding film continuity over and above particular editing practices. Image schemas could describe continuity of feeling, kinaesthetic continuity or even continuity of orientation and it is this principle of topological continuity that forms the basis of film spectatorship. Johnson gives some indication of how schema theory could be used in the analysis of film form in The Meaning of the Body, where he argues that patterns learnt in childhood through mimicry are reproduced in film spectatorship. In a process called “joint visual attention” adults reposition or turn their face to engage with children and to facilitate recognition. Once aligned, the parent can shift the position of their face, which the baby mimics and in doing so follows the direction of the gaze so that both parent and baby are looking at the same thing (37): “This universal phenomenon is used to great effect in movie thrillers, in scenes in which a terrified character points with their gaze at the location of a threatening creature or person lurking in the shadows” (Meaning 37). For Johnson, it is the movement of the body that is of primary interest, first through alignment – which could be described in terms of VERTICALITY or BALANCE schemas – and then through redirection, which could be understood using the PATH schema. In either case, the process of aligning and orientating the body is linked to the cinematic structure of the gaze through analogy. The body is coterminous with the shot sequence through the deployment of a schema that correlates proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and optical perception. Identification is certainly a factor here but only in a way that engages the body in a sensorimotor movement.
Image schemas are available for analysis because they can be inferred from the organisation of the perceptual field and exist “on the borderline between bodily processes and conscious or reflective acts that we can focus our attention on if we choose” (Body 85). It is matter of distinguishing types of embodiment through “a reflective interrogation of the contours of our lived experience” (Meaning 136). When it comes to film analysis, it may be a matter of isolating one aspect of filmic organisation and linking it to an already defined image schema or, alternatively, using film form to reflect upon the “contours” of bodily organisation and reveal schemas that have not yet been isolated. The most direct way of isolating these contours is by matching visual perception to film’s organs of visibility (the projector and camera), and, following Johnson’s example of the eyeline match, accepting that the moving image is coterminous with the point of view of either spectator or character. This would not present too much of a challenge to existing film theory because, as Aumont et al. state, types of camera movement have often been associated with the movement of the gaze in human vision: “the pan would be the equivalent of the eye’s rotation, or of someone turning his or her head” but they do caution that this equation of the camera movement with embodied vision is not always valid, especially considering that most shots do not represent the direct point of view of a character (28). However, image schemas are not restricted to
a point of view because they can describe the organisation of a perceptual field as well as the placement of the perceiver in relation to that field. Even in reference to orientational schemas, which “presuppose a ‘viewpoint’ from which the movement is observed,” it need not be a first person viewpoint, for in a statement such as “she backed the car out of the garage,” one can imagine the viewer to be either in or outside of the garage (Body 36). Image schemas can make a significant contribution to film studies by the very fact that they are not visual constructs. They are cross-modal and operate at a general level of perceptual organisation not reducible to the characteristics of any one sense or constrained by the “specificity of particular rich images” (Body 24). So rather than talk about the distinct mechanisms of vision or touch, Johnson refers to how an image schema “reveal[s] itself in the contours of our basic sensorimotor experience” (Meaning 136).
It is due to this cross-modality that image schemas cannot be considered specific to a medium. This does not present a difficulty for Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) because it often takes as its starting point the isolation of common metaphors in linguistic contexts and uses this to frame and discuss image schemas. Johnson and Lakoff argue in Metaphors We Live By that “In actuality we feel that no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis” (19). Metaphor operates within the field of culture and is structured and delimited by enunciation and there is a definite relationship between culture and “physical experience” such that it is difficult to separate one from the other (57). The aim then is to isolate those metaphors that have a much stronger experiential basis or which can be considered “‘more’ physical,” such as those derived from orientation and bodily movement, because they are the most “sharply delineated” and can be regarded as the foundation for much more abstract metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 58). Johnson argues that CMT is not based on similarity, whereby the properties of the metaphorical proposition must resemble something in the object or target proposition, but rather that there is some relationship in the logic of a primary metaphor to a founding or grounding experience (Meaning 224). The main aim of the theory is to clearly differentiate the primary metaphors and image schemas and use these to explain more abstract metaphors and their entailments.
In the study of film, the question arises should one begin an analysis using primary metaphors that have already been isolated or should one look to the conceptual structure of film to derive these metaphors. Charles Forceville and Marloes Jeulink argue that one of the main difficulties in explaining the operation of image schemas is the emphasis in the broader field of CMT on “verbal manifestations of conceptual metaphors” and that greater attention should be given to non-verbal forms (38). Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja echo this criticism and state that the use of verbal language in CMT as a means of isolating schemas leads to: “circular reasoning where the existence of image schemas is only proven on the basis of spoken and written words” (87). In integrating the body into an analysis of film form, image schemes should be specified that do not require the mediation of “linguistic metaphors” (Coëgnarts and Kravanja 89). In film studies this involves examining how the viewer engages with the film and recognising that the “conformity between the form of the film, on the one hand, and the subject’s body, on the other hand, constitutes an opening of the conveyance of abstract meaning” (96). Drawing on the work of David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese and their analysis of mirror neurons in aesthetic experience, Coëgnarts and Kravanja state that there are two main ways that schemas are deployed, on an
antefilmic level of depiction and on a “filmic level” where formal properties such as camera movement are considered (95). For Freedberg and Gallese, in the analysis of the plastic arts, the first category applies to those “instances in which beholders might find themselves automatically simulating the emotional expression, the movement or even the implied movement within the representation” (197). The movement of a depicted body, instability, exertion, imbalance, or even the image of a traumatised body in a work of art may invoke a similar feeling in the body of the viewer. In the second category, it is not the “representational content” but the gestural marks of artistic production visible in the work that invoke an “empathetic movement” (197), “such as vigorous modeling in clay or paint, fast brushwork and signs of the movement of the hand more generally” (Freedberg and Gallese 199). In film, there may not be obvious gestural marks but many aspects of film form, including the movement of the camera and the organisation of objects in the mise-en-scène, are able to provoke a “simulation” of movement as part of a general aesthetic experience. Coëgnarts and Kravanja refer to a number of schemas at the “filmic level” that serve as the basis for a broader understanding of metaphor in film. The Center-Periphery schema explains how we attribute value to the position of characters in the frame, where there is greater “intensity” the closer a character is to the center (91). Verticality can explain differences in the power levels depending on whether the point of view is from a high or low angle (92) and the shift from “erratic” to stable camera movement relates to the Balance schema (93). In each case these schemas mark out distinctions that are linked metaphorically to thematic differences in the film as a whole.
In this approach to film schema theory, the aim is to isolate forms of movement or aspects of the spatial field in which there is “conformity” with the movement of the film spectator’s body. The long take is an aspect of film form that should be readily analysable using schema theory because it describes a continuity of movement onscreen as well as a continuity of movement in film production – the continuous take of the camera and the continuous movement of the camera operator. In this respect it is structurally different to editing where the rhythmic continuity of montage does not correspond directly to the bodily movement of the filmmaker; there is no “empathetic movement” in the way that Freedberg and Gallese understand it. The director Pier Paolo Pasolini claims that the long take is distinctive because it is an aspect of film form that is most closely aligned with human optical and temporal experience. It is the “schematic and primordial element of cinema,” and the closest we come to a notion of human “subjectivity” and the real in film, because it involves a single perspective constituted in a continuous present tense (3). For Pasolini, the “long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality and the reproduction of the present” (5), with all the indeterminacy of lived experience (6). The viewer occupies a position similar to that of the camera operator for the duration of the take and this can be contrasted with the use of multiple shots, arranged through montage, to describe a particular scene. For, with each shot, there is not only a change in point of view but a “multiplication of ‘presents,’” and a relativisation of time and space where the montage “abolishes the present, empties it” (4). In this process of re-composition, there is a shift from the subjective point of view to that of a narrator who looks back on the past in order to recompose it as a narrative, or in temporal terms, to engage in an act of “rendering the present past” (5). The documentary filmmaker David MacDougall proposes a similar argument when he claims that the long take is much closer to the film’s rushes because there is a feeling that one is in the “present tense of a camera running” and in the process of the events unfolding. In watching the
rushes, there “is really the excitement of sensing that in the rushes anything can happen next.” The edited and finished film removes this uncertainty of the present because the filmmaker cuts to best present the “central meaning” of the narrative (41).
This emphasis of the presentness of the long take means that it should be readily aligned with the
“contours of our lived experience” and patterns of bodily engagement. However it does not resolve the
issue on the level of film form as to what actually constitutes a long take. It cannot be the same as the film rushes because, from the perspective of the film viewer, the footage has already been placed within an edited sequence and is thus bounded like any other shot. If it is structurally the same as another shot, then the only way of defining a long take is by its duration but this a relative measure which changes depending of the film under analysis, its style and particular way in which the shot is used (MacDougall 39). Jean Mitry, in his comprehensive study of film aesthetics, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, argues that the viewer’s sense of how long a shot endures – the “impression of duration” – is dependent on a number of factors including the number of events depicted, the shot distance, the dynamism of the shot and the movement of the camera (125). As a general rule he proposes that “the more dynamic the content and the wider the framing, the shorter the shot appears; the more static the content and narrower the framing, the longer the shot appears” (125). The perceived duration of the shot is therefore contingent on the manner in which the content of the image and the dynamism of the camera movement holds the viewer’s attention.
What actually constitutes a long duration also changes with the aesthetic conventions of the period in which the film is made, and in the history of mainstream cinema there has been a decrease in the average shot length (ASL) leading up to what David Bordwell describes as the “intensified continuity” of recent cinema, where the ASL is often less than three seconds (16-17). Taking the ASL as a guide, it would be possible to argue that a long take is anything that exceeds three seconds. However, this quantification does not provide a foundation for the analysis of the qualitative differences that are often ascribed to the long take, including its indeterminacy and presentness. If the long take is to have any value as a film concept, then its definition must include some reference to these qualities and this involves coupling the viewer’s experience with the purely formal features of film. This experience has to be defined in terms of the “impression of duration” or the degree to which the viewer understands the shot to be a long take. The long take could therefore be defined as a shot of a sufficient duration such that the viewer becomes aware within the time of the shot of how long the shot endures. The fact that this impression is formed within the time of the shot, differentiates the long take from short duration shots, where the duration is only acknowledged after the shot is cut and a new shot has taken its place.
To understand how a long take is embodied involves investigating how the film form – the duration of the take, camera movement and mise-en-scène – intersects with the specific movements of the film characters. In Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film L’Enfant (2005), there is a consistent use of long takes but the “impression of duration” alters with the composition of each shot. A hand-held camera is used throughout and is characterised by the way it accommodates the movements of the main characters. In most scenes the action proceeds at a reasonably slow pace determined by the speed of the characters’ movement, which, as in their earlier film Rosetta (1999), is primarily a walking pace. There are many unbroken long sequences where the camera follows the movement of the characters as
they conduct a series of tasks including pushing a pram along roadways, walking up the stairs to their apartment, or engaging in discussion while standing in a line for unemployment benefits. The temporal organisation of the shots is not determined by the editing but by the rhythmic properties of the action, for example, in one long take we watch the protagonist Bruno repeatedly dip his foot into a muddy puddle and then leap against a wall to leave his footprint. This repetition of his action internally divides the shot into shorter durations and by increasing the amount of dynamic content reduces the “impression” that the take is overly long. In examining this aspect of the long take, image schemas can be used to describe character movements and the degree to which they conform to the movements of an embodied viewer. However, this only takes into consideration one aspect of the long take and does not address the shot on a filmic level. This aspect comes to the fore in one scene in particular, where the duration of the shot begins to signify extra-diegetically. The camera initially follows the movement of Bruno in a manner similar to most other scenes in the film – as he enters a room, talks on the phone, shuts the door – but at a certain point, the structure of the action changes and Bruno stands still with his back to the wall in a medium shot as he waits for his child to be taken away in another room by participants in the illegal adoption trade. He can infer what is happening by listening to sounds issuing from the other room but he cannot act and has to wait for his phone to ring to confirm that the child has been taken, and as Bruno waits so does the film spectator. However, the forms of waiting are qualitatively different because as Bruno fidgets and turns his head to listen to sounds from the other room, the spectator’s viewpoint is restricted to Bruno’s actions and the wall that frames him, for there are no eyeline matches or shot reverse shots. During the time of waiting and in the absence of any significant changes in Bruno’s behaviour, the spectator has the time, and increasingly the inclination, to look away from Bruno to the edges of the frame – the frame is now something that contains the gaze rather than leading it into new diegetic spaces. As the gaze wanders within the contained space, the duration of the shot is foregrounded and there is an expectation that the shot must give way to another. Consequently, there are two types of waiting: a diegetic waiting for the character to act or for the scene to change and an extra-diegetic waiting for the shot to end.
The theory of image schemas when applied to the long take must take into consideration both the movement of the characters within the frame and the actual duration of the take. The two are related according to Mitry’s argument that the decrease in the dynamism of the shot (both camera movement and character action) will increase the impression that the shot endures, and therefore the viewer’s expectation that the shot should end. The SOURCE-PATH-GOAL or SPG schema is suitable to this task because it directly links movement with time: “Physical journeys always involve motion. Motion, in turn, is used metaphorically to structure TIME” (Forceville 243). In the SPG, FROM-TO and PATH schemas there is also a definite beginning and end that can be stretched to fit the continuity of the long take:
This image schema consists of three elements (a source point A, a terminal point B, and a vector tracing a path between them) and a relation (specified as a force vector moving from A to B). This FROM-TO schema is a recurrent structure manifested in a number of seemingly different events, such as: (a) walking from one place to another, (b) throwing a baseball to your sister, (c) punching your brother, (d) giving your mother a present, (e) the melting of ice into water. (Body 28)
The SPG schema can be considered to be coterminous with the shot’s duration and the spectator’s experience of time passing, with the beginning and end of the shot serving as the schema’s poles: the opening transition or beginning of the shot is Point A; the final transition or end of the shot is Point B; and the duration of the shot is the moving vector joining the two points. With regard to formal properties of the shot, this corresponds with Brian Henderson’s characterisation of the role of the cut in the long take as one that “does not relate, arrange, or govern the whole of the pieces it joins; it merely has a local relationship to the beginnings and ends of the connecting shots, at the place they are joined” (318). It is specific to the mise-en-scène rather than part of the overall rhythm of editing (318-19). Because Point B is the telos of the movement, the path can be readily mapped onto intention and purpose (Body 114) and thus explain the spectator’s relationship to the shot. The longer the shot endures, the greater the tension as the spectator anticipates the possible conclusion of the shot or reaching Point B. Tension is not an abstract concept but embodied in the musculature, often as the expression of expectation or the degree to which we think we will use the muscles in action, or in preparation for action (Johnson, Meaning 22). Depending on how the action is constituted within the long take, the tension will vary within the general schema of the SPG.
The conception of motion and time in the SPG are also associated with other primary metaphors, such as the “MOVING OBJECT metaphor” that conceptualises time in terms of movement and orientation, where front describes the object in terms of the direction of movement and back, the direction from which an object has come (Lakoff and Johnson 42). More importantly for the analysis at the filmic level, it can be linked to the “MOVING OBSERVER Metaphor” in which the present is established by the “location of the observer,” again with the future in front and the past behind but in this case relative to the path the observer takes (30). This can be understood through the ostensibly spatial metaphor of the “journey” and expressions such as “getting closer” to describe the placement of events in time (Johnson, Meaning 31). When applied to a film, it can be used to metaphorically link the movement of the character to camera movements such as the use of the moving camera tracking across the visual field (often from left to right) to indicate a change in time (Coëgnarts and Kravanja 91). In L’Enfant, it is the relationship between the camera and characters’ movement that conditions the impression of duration. In many of the long takes, the movement of an object (character) is matched to the movement of the camera (observer) such that each action can describe the complete path from source through to goal without obstruction. It is the enactment of the SPG schema with regard to the character’s unhindered movement that decreases the tension, and also decreases the impression of an overly long duration. When the action is incomplete or blocked, such as the shot of Bruno waiting, there is no longer a direct correlation of the two forms of embodied movement and the viewer’s attention shifts from the action to the formal properties of the shot.
The SPG schema can be applied so broadly – from the completion of an action to quest narratives – that it is not sufficient in itself to identify the specificity of the long take. The SPG schema can describe the completion or incompletion of an action but it is important to also analyse the particular way in which that completion or incompletion is manifest. The shot is not only contained by the cut but also by the frame and as the shot endures there is an increasing recognition of the frame as a border that limits the viewer’s capacity to see. In its capacity to limit vision, the CONTAINER schema could be
said to underlie the SPG schema because it refers to the “in-out orientation” implicit in each shot – the balancing of onscreen and offscreen space – and is derived from our bodily sense of being a container and the fact that our bodies are always confronted with “physical containment” (Body 21). Like “physical in-out orientation,” the relationship of the spectator to the formal properties of the shot in the long take “involves separation, differentiation, and enclosure, which implies restriction and limitation” (22). Taking the CONTAINER schema as an organising principle, the use of the moving camera in L’Enfant is a removal of “restriction,” where the camera moves to accommodate the viewer’s interest in widening the visual field and sphere of action. However, when the long take is combined with a static camera, the viewer’s attention is directed away from the sequence of narrative events and the continuity of the action to the “plenitude of the real,” a process that “seems aimed at exhausting the frame” (Rhodes 20). The longer the shot endures without a significant change in the action the greater the degree to which the viewer is able to exhaust the visual possibilities of the shot. The viewer’s attention is then drawn to the frame and the process of containment; an extra-diegetic aspect of the film that is closely aligned with the final cut or goal of the shot, because the latter is a form of temporal containment.
In both of these applications of image schemas, the limit defines the whole arc of the movement – the frame is used to define the containment of the shot and the cut to describe the path or duration of the shot. But does this actually accord with the “contours of our lived experience”? Does the viewer, while watching a film, actually understand the structure of the shot in the same way as the researcher does when retrospectively analysing it? Forceville does not distinguish between the two when he argues that the SPG schema is embedded in our lived experience because we engage with film through the “aesthetically pleasing dimension of narrative integrity (‘everything fits’)” (259). The schema is stretched to fit a whole range of narrative elements due to the viewer’s expectation that narrative must be complete and this corresponds to the structured whole addressed in film analysis. The problem with this argument is that it does not distinguish between a goal that is present to the action and a goal that remains indeterminate – a goal that is expected but its actual properties remain unknown. In the examples Johnson provides to explain the FROM-TO schema, except perhaps in “walking from one place to another,” the end state or “terminal point” is already known at the beginning of the action – the brother is visible at the time he is punched. However, for Pasolini the degree of indeterminacy and attention to the presentness of the action in the long take is dependent on the fact that for the viewer the goal, or final cut, remains indeterminate.
In the time of the long take the viewer may wait for the transition – they expect that the shot will end –but this does not mean that they foresee the form of the transition. They do not know when it will break the internal rhythm of the shot or even the type of transition (cut, wipe, dissolve, etc.) that is involved. It is only determined when the shot ends and the transition becomes visible, at which point the path of the shot is understood reflexively. There is therefore a significant difference between the expectation that a process must end, where the ending constitutes a type of indeterminate goal, and a process in which the goal is implied in the action, such as throwing a ball to someone. The long take has a definite starting point, the initial transition, but the goal only becomes present to the viewer as part of a process of increasing tension:
When you see a movie, try to guess the moment when a shot has given its all and must move on, end, be replaced either by changing the angle, the distance, or the field. You will get to know the restriction of the chest produced by an overlong shot which brakes the movement and that deliciously intimate acquiescence when a shot fades at the right moment. (Leenhardt cited in Merleau-Ponty 54)
In this account of the long take, Leenhardt highlights the change in bodily tension that is derived from the fact that the viewer understands the shot to be “overlong”; a feeling that is not present at the very beginning of the shot. This end of the shot is not even posited as part of the schema in the first few moments of viewing the long take. The viewer would not turn their attention to the end of the shot – that is posit it as a goal in the SPG schema – when watching Bruno walk into the room, it is only after an extended period of time, as he stands with his back to the wall, that the tension and the feeling of constraint in the shot is mapped onto the diegesis. The form of the schema is always contingent on the duration in forms of embodiment in which the goal is indeterminate.
This matter of the futurity of the schema relates specifically to the time in which it operates. In a long duration the end point of a schema will not necessarily be known at its beginning, whereas in a schema mapped onto a short duration the future is given as a type of protention of an embodied movement. In the BALANCE schema, for example, balance is always linked to the immediate future or past of imbalance; one could even say that they both form part of the same embodied specious present. Therefore, in addition to the SPG and CONTAINER schemas, there must be an embodied process that leads to the growing awareness that the shot is overly long before the goal or other limits of the shot are posited. In other words, there must be a schema that describes the path of movement in the transition from the beginning of the shot to the point in which the viewer determines that it has “given its all” and a new shot must take its place. One way of addressing this issue is to accept that there is an embodied movement in cinematic spectatorship that is prior to the particular image schemas deployed in a film.
J.J. Gibson, in his analysis of the environmental conditions of visual perception, states that vision is always “realized over time” and is in largely an “exploratory” process comprised of a set of interrelated bodily movements: the movement of whole body in “locomotion” where we create a “cognitive map” of our environment; “head-turning,” which describes a smaller arc of movement, and the movement of the eyes within the structural limits of the head and body. Visual attention to a particular object might employ all three of these types of movement, with the body moving toward the object, the head turning toward the object and the eye scanning its surface (258-59). In the cinema, the first two types of movement are largely precluded because the viewer sits in a fixed seat and will only need to move their head slightly, if at all, to see what is presented on the screen, for it is predominantly with eye movement that the visual field is scanned. Although these forms of embodiment are suppressed in cinematic spectatorship, this does not mean that they no longer perform a role. There could remain a willingness to move our bodies or our heads while watching a film and if this “exploratory” attention/vision cannot be accommodated by editing styles that allow for the continuity of this movement, then we may feel tension, restlessness and irritation. It is the not the goal of the long take, the cut, that defines the tension but rather a restriction of the movement of exploratory attention. The goal is only posited over time as this tension persists. In
most films this exploratory attention is accommodated through the widespread use of shot reverse shots and eyeline matches, which align the viewer’s attention with the character’s viewpoint or a third person participant, with the requisite turns of the body and head. While the exploratory visual attention is coordinated by the movement onscreen, it is less likely that the viewer will become aware of the degree to which their own movement is restricted.
This visual exploratory movement could form the basis of the “impression of duration,” which increases in direct proportion to the spectator’s embodied inclination to look away from the screen over the duration of the shot. The most appropriate schema to describe this aspect of perception is the “CENTER-PERIPHERY image schema” which refers to how we orientate ourselves with respect to a horizon line, place objects in focus in the centre of our vision and less distinct objects at the periphery (Johnson, Meaning 137). The CENTER-PERIPHERY schema links with other schemas, such as NEAR-FAR in the determination of horizonal properties or SCALE and CONTAINER schemas, with the latter specifying the bounds in which centre and periphery can be understood (Johnson, Body 125). Films are usually edited and framed in a way that draws the viewer’s attention to the centre of the shot or to a centre of action, often the protagonist. In this narrative approach to filmmaking, the shots should be of a sufficient duration for the viewer to directly apprehend the meaning (MacDougall 39-40), however in the long take:
there is a certain threshold of narrative and expository efficiency beyond which the motivated meaning of the shot is exhausted. If the shot unexpectedly remains on the screen without further developments, we may feel impatience or annoyance, during which we perhaps look away or withdraw our attention. (MacDougall 40)
In those long takes where the object of vision only varies slightly it is this increasing disinterest in the centre that pushes the viewer’s gaze towards the periphery in exploratory attention, but this periphery is not the goal of perception. The goal is rather to find a new centre of vision but, because the frame does not move in a static shot, the centre can only be sought in a movement to the periphery. The longer the viewer is engaged in this movement away from the centre, the greater is the awareness that the gaze is contained by the boundaries of the frame, which in turn leads to the impression that the shot is overly long. Unlike the SPG schema, the CENTER-PERIPHERY schema is able to explain incipient embodied movement in the time of viewing that is not yet mapped onto a completed aspect of film form. It allows for temporal change between two points without requiring a preconception of an endpoint because the viewer turns away from the shot rather than towards a goal. However, as the shot persists this incipient somatosensory organisation of the perceptual field – the movement away – becomes aligned with the SPG and CONTAINER schemas.
Image schemas are a means of rearticulating the boundaries of film spectatorship by explaining the structures of mise-en-scène in terms of embodied perceptions and patterns of movement. The difficulty is in working out which schemas are most appropriate to the analysis of a particular aspect of film form. As is evinced in this examination of the long take, it is not a matter of using a single schema as an explanatory principle, but rather in articulating how a range of schemas are coordinated and embodied by the film
viewer even when viewing the simplest of film forms. The feeling that a shot is overly long is actually grounded in the interrelationship between different schemas that relate both to the spatial and temporal structure of the shot. The fact that a long take is characterised by a relative duration also complicates the use of schema theory because schemas often have a diagrammatic structure and are therefore much more easily accommodated by mapping time onto space in the conceptual structure of the TIME IS SPACE metaphor. The problem with such a metaphor is that it does not distinguish sufficiently between the act of viewing a film and analysing a film’s formal and narrative structure. It is important when analysing a film to posit a schema that is most “directly grounded in our experience,” and clearly aligned with the embodied viewer’s movement, before examining metaphorical extensions and the abstract structures of formal film analysis. In relation to the long take, this involves understanding what it means to watch the film within the time of the shot but also to understand the schematic preconditions of spectatorship where to look is also to look away.
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Dr Paul Atkinson teaches at Australia’s Monash University in the School of Applied Media and Social Sciences. His research is largely informed by French and process philosophy and investigates the relationship between temporality and form in both the arts and sciences, in particular, the application of theories of comparative aesthetics to the analysis of time. He is currently working on a book on Henri Bergson’s aesthetic ideas which proposes that temporal patterns should be considered in the analysis of visual structures and aesthetic judgement. Published articles explore a range of topics including Bergson’s vitalism, duration and cinema, the relationship between animation and comic books, time and recognition, the durational contours of affect and implied movement in still images.
