ANATOMÍA NORMAL DEL ÁPICE

The first example provides an analysis of the sequence from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) shown in Figure 6.8. This is deliberately chosen to be extremely simple in order to make the step-by-step progression clear.

Figure 6.8 Simple extract from the beginning of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)

Here we have just four shots, the main character, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) has just got out of a taxi and is looking at it driving off; he then turns and runs up the entrance stairs of a hotel. In shot 2 we switch to a view inside the hotel lobby as Thornhill comes through the door. He walks into the lobby and past the front desk, which occupies one corner of the lobby, on his right. The camera is generally stationary apart from

a smooth pan in the middle of the shot as Thornhill makes a90◦ turn

and continues past the front desk to a corridor leading further into the hotel. Shot 3 then shows him coming round a corner into the corridor and walking towards the camera to a door on the right; the camera is again stationary. Shot 4 then shows him being welcomed by a waiter at the door, which turns out to be the door of the hotel restaurant. Both shots 1 and 2 therefore have a cohesive camera pan to the left, following Thornhill as he moves into the hotel.

The analysis is similarly straightforward. The paradigmatic features we are concerned with have the task of classifying the transitions between shots. Thus, in the transition between shot 1 and shot 2, we have to select features from the network that describe as accurately as possible the relation that holds.

Crucially, this is done on the basis of the images and the soundtrack. We are not licensed at this point to employ unrestricted background or common sense knowledge about what is going on. This is one of the restrictions that we rely upon to move our entire account in the direction of supporting empirical analysis more effectively. In shots 1, 2 and 3, therefore, there is a match-on-action, continuous diegetic sound, and a continued cohesive ‘reference’ to Thornhill as he walks out of and into frame at each transition.

S1 S2 S3 S4

pan left and up,

His continued trajectory and the matching colour and other audiovisual qualities do not suggest anything apart from a continuously unfolding event.

The match-on-action together with the explicitly cohesive devices of the hotel door, the matching decor, a sign presumably giving the restaurant’s specials of the day, and Thornhill himself indicate that we are dealing with a sequence of ‘dependent’, i.e., hypotactic shots: the interpretation and placement of each shot builds on material given in the previous shot. We show this using the notation introduced for broad syntagmatic dependency organisation above thus:

shots: S1 S2

hypotactic organisation: α β

i.e., S2 is related to S1 as hypotactically dependent as required. This then

gives us the first feature selection we require from the systemTAXIS: i.e.,

‘hypotactic’.

Two points must be emphasised here: first, this classification is a defeasi- ble hypothesis, i.e., because we are dealing with discourse each selection of a feature is only a ‘best approximation’ given the evidence available at that point and may need to be revised when further information be- comes available; and second, this hypothesis is clearly an interpretative ‘leap’ performed by the viewer: there is no necessary connection visually between the shot outside in the street and the one in the lobby—the viewer has done the work of putting these together (and, for this very reason, the assumption may turn out to have been wrong, i.e., it is defeasible).

Because of the defeasible nature of the mechanisms of the discourse stratum, any significance initially assumed for configurations by a viewer within the observed material may in general be overridden and changed by interpretations found for higher-order structures within the film and by subsequent information becoming available as the film progresses: we return to this process of abduction-driven revision in our detailed example in Chapter 8 below. This possibility is often used for narrative purposes within film; for example, a viewer might come to conclusions which sub- sequently turn out to have been wrong, even concerning basic temporal relationships between units or within units that were not previously distin- guished. One good illustration of this is provided by Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair (1999), in which a sequence of shots appears on first viewing to represent an uninterrupted flow of time whereas in fact there are temporal ellipses where other events critical to the story have occurred. Again, we see exactly the same phenomena regularly occurring in linguistic discourse interpretation.

In the present example, then, the link between shots 1 and 2 is a clear example of Lev Kuleshov’s ‘creative geography’ that we mentioned in the previous chapter. The viewer’s work is not arbitrary, however: on the one hand, the film has explicitly selected cues to make the interpretation

unavoidable—this is the evidence on which the paradigmatic classification usually draws—and, on the other hand, there are only very few possibili- ties available: i.e., the features of the grande paradigmatique.

We then need to consider the other features from the network that apply in order to reach a full classification. Continuing with the options under

TAXIS, therefore, we can note that in moving from shot 1 to shot 2 that there is insufficient evidence for any possible embedding structure (i.e., [X I X]) and so the most appropriate further choice at this point is simply ‘extending’. The structural consequences of this choice are shown in the box in the network and can be seen to correspond directly to the dependency structure given above.

In terms ofPLANE, there is no evidence that anything but a single diegetic

level of a specific event is at hand. Moreover both spatial and tempo- ral continuity is strongly indicated (e.g., by the match-on-action). The choices from the network in this area are therefore the features: event, non-contiguous, prolongation, and continuous. There is similarly no in- dication that there is any change of ‘mental’ or perceptual level, and so

the choice inPROJECTIONis ‘non-projecting’. Thus, for these two shots,

we have the basic structural configuration of hypotactic dependency plus the specific set of paradigmatic features indicating the kind of inter-shot relation holding over that configuration.

When we move on to shot 3, an identical set of features would be selected for the transition between shots 2 and 3. This also now rules out the possibility of an ‘embedding’ structure because shot 3 does not pick up any features of shot 1. In the transition to shot 4, however, there is a slight difference in that now the focus on the entrance to the restaurant indicates that the spatial relationship may be better described as contiguous and narrowing rather than the previous non-contiguity, although the cut does not show the exact match of content and angles that would be desirable for this classification. The selection of features then continues to be compatible with the sequence of structurally dependent shots begun in shots 1 and 2.

Figure 6.9 Paradigmatic analysis of the extract from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

The complete paradigmatically-motivated structure is shown graphically in Figure 6.9, which combines syntagmatic dependency and appropriate

non-projecting, extending, continuous, prolongation

α

β

continuous, prolongation non-projecting, extending, continuous, narrowing

paradigmatic inter-shot relations. The organisation therefore exactly fol- lows, and follows from, the possibilities defined in the grande paradigma- tique network.

This style of discourse analysis can be seen as providing a kind of ‘read- ing path’ for the viewer: i.e., given the shots presented in the order given in the film, the paradigmatic relations that we assign suggest how those shots can be aggregated into a particular structural organisation that is ‘meaningful’ in the way the features describe. This level of description then captures which shots relate to one another and how they relate. A different ordering of the shots is quite possible filmically but would then have called for different paradigmatic relationships to be assigned—for example, since any change in order here would have interfered with both the temporal and spatial flow, different selections of features would have

been necessary from theTEMPORALandSPATIALareas of the network.

Syntagmatically, then, we see the film document ‘as a whole’—i.e., as a collection of shots that may be layouted in various ways; paradigmatically, we provide an account of the path required for any particular layout of those shots. This will be taken up further from the syntagmatic perspec- tive in the chapter following and illustrated in detail with respect to an extended example in Chapter 8.