In The Cut: “The Dark Knight”
We have our Script To Screen series. What Jim Emerson is doing with his new In The Cut series is more like from Script To Sequence. From Indie Wire:
There are plenty of ways to make a movie. There are plenty of ways to make a mess, too. But sometimes when I and fellow critics and moviegoers complain of “incoherence” in modern “snatch-and-grab” movies (particularly action sequences), some people say they don’t know what we’re talking about. This is an attempt to be very, very specific about why some of us get confused. What it boils down to this: we’re actually watching the movie.
When, for example, we’re shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there’s a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at. But that’s not always the case. Why? I don’t know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible — and indefensible.
This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River. It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would — but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time. At last, I now know exactly why.
Anyone who has participated in the making of a movie, whether a D.I.Y. project or a Hollywood studio picture (I’ve been involved in both kinds of productions), can tell you about the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of planning, shooting and editing a movie. Surely the use of large IMAX cameras for this segment of The Dark Knight made the filming more of a challenge. Problems that could have been easily fixed on a film with such a huge budget (removing that phantom extra police car with CGI, perhaps) were also no doubt complicated by the IMAX process. And to the filmmakers’ credit, they decided against using CGI for the actual stunts, using real vehicles, miniatures and explosions instead.
In the end, however, all that matters, to paraphrase Martin Scorsese, is which pieces of film wind up in the picture and which are left out (intentionally or otherwise). And then, to quote the great actor Sir Edwin (John Cleese) on all those words in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” you’ve got to get them in the right order.
P.S. If you want to see how this part of the chase sequence appeared in the “Dark Knight” script, click to view these .pdf pages.
In the Cut is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Parts II and III will examine two terrific action sequences — one recent, one older.
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Jim Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.
His analysis focuses on two aspects: The composition of each shot and how they are cut. And he states that he thinks TDK is pretty much a visual “mess.” Here is breakdown of the big action chase sequence in the middle of the movie:
For more of the article, go here.
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