The dissolve fell out of fashion decades ago. Alexander Payne’s latest movie is a gorgeous example of why it’s worth keeping alive.
“Somehow dissolves have entered the unfortunate club with voice-over and zooms — things in film you’re not supposed to use,” the filmmaker Alexander Payne has contended. “And I don’t know why.” He was reflecting on films like “The Last Detail,” a 1973 movie directed by Hal Ashby, whom Payne regards as “a master of doing very long and beautiful dissolves — very emotional dissolves.” Already, by 1973, the use of dissolves in film editing had begun to ebb. But this has not stopped Payne from pursuing a career-long study of the technique that extends into his affecting new film, “The Holdovers.”
In a dissolve, one shot noticeably fades — dissolves — into the next. This creates a brief, ghostly overlap of images, an effect far more languid than the decisive haste of the hard cut or the jaunty showmanship of the wipe, where a new shot slides neatly into place. In the dissolve, as in life, change is accompanied by crosscurrents and phantom traces. Payne and his longtime editor, Kevin Tent, are expert dissolvers. In “Citizen Ruth,” Payne’s 1996 debut feature, they use dissolves to exchange one close-up of Ruth for another as she rouses from a drunken sleep and to signal her dawning understanding as she comes to terms with a miscarriage. In “Sideways” (2004), dissolves do not clarify time so much as imply its fuzzy unspooling amid drinks and despair. In “Nebraska” (2013), dissolves let us dwell on Will Forte’s character as he dwells on his aging father. The meanings may vary, but a general poignancy comes naturally to the dissolve.
“The Holdovers” begins in 1970, on the snowy cusp of the year-end holidays at Barton Academy, a fictional New England boarding school. A student named Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) stands outside with his valise. Christmas awaits. So does a much-anticipated trip to the Caribbean. But Angus is beckoned in for a phone call and trudges away, looking back twice. It is a dissolve that guides us inside: Now he is on the phone with his mother, who has canceled their plans in favor of a honeymoon with his stepfather. Many dissolves indicate a story vaulting across time, but this one solemnly inches forward.
Each dissolve is a dawdling ellipsis. Over its course, feelings develop or disperse; life happens or doesn’t. With its slow, valedictory air, a long enough dissolve evokes the momentum of real experience. “One thing is going away, another thing is coming in,” Payne once observed. “I can’t explain it, but there’s something poetic and melancholy about it.”
In 1913, the year of Allan Dwan’s now-lost silent film “The Restless Spirit,” there were no optical printers or duplicating film stocks, let alone modern editing systems. But Dwan did have a good trick: cranking the camera backward while counting seconds of film, so a new shot could be exposed over the end of the previous one. He assigned this duty to the cameraman Walter Prichard, who connected multiple scenes using some two dozen dissolves and reportedly slept beside the celluloid, lest anything happen to his work. In the decades ahead, the dissolve would help mark the boundaries of scenes and dreams and hint at vast stretches of time and space. It could startle as well. In 1916, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg marveled at how techniques like dissolves could depict, say, a remembered garden melting into a present-day room. “In our mind past and future become intertwined with the present,” he wrote. “The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind.”
It also obeys the winds of change. In a 2011 study, the psychologist James E. Cutting and two co-authors mapped out the dissolve’s rise and fall: It accounted for up to about 8 percent of all transitions in their sample from 1935 to 1955, then “underwent a striking decline” between 1970 and 1990, eventually settling at 1 percent. Some in the industry blamed the rhythms of television for the change; others pointed to the expense of complex edits. The artifice of the dissolve also took on quaint, goopy connotations — especially in its rippling “flashback” variations, repeatedly parodied in 1990s comedy.
In “The Holdovers,” though, the dissolve still signifies so much. Sometimes it calls to mind the tempo of Angus’s teenage years. Already expelled from three schools, he maunders through interstitial spaces, dreading the final cut — being drafted to Vietnam, or becoming like his father, recently institutionalized with diagnoses of schizophrenia and early-onset dementia. For now, he must spend Christmas with his crotchety ancient-civilizations teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), and the grieving cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose son, Curtis, a Black alumnus of Barton, died earlier in the year.
A general poignancy comes naturally to the dissolve.
Mary nurses her wounds in prayer and, like Hunham, in drink. Curtis was a casualty of Vietnam, and of more besides. “Barton boys don’t go to Vietnam,” Hunham says. “Except for Curtis Lamb,” Angus observes. “Except for Curtis Lamb,” Hunham concurs, trying to get Angus to read between the lines, to notice how the deck is stacked. Hunham lectures about the ancient world but is more guarded with his own history; he parrots Latin maxims and institutional creeds but has grown weary of the “glazed, uncomprehending expressions” of his well-heeled students. He is a man quietly enduring life but scarcely living it.
In Payne’s work, such endurance can seem akin to circling a drain. Dissolves add a somnambulant dimension to a montage of Angus wandering through Barton’s dim passages at night. Sights dreamily commingle: gulps of sacramental wine, plumes of smoke, a photo of Curtis. Just outside is the repose of the snow-blanketed campus. But too much repose can wear us down. One dissolve slips away from Angus while he sits with his confused father. The next shot returns to him some time later, his expression forlorn — another dissolve that is less about a chronological leap than a fine emotional increment, and Angus’s sense of the past as an anchor pulling him into an abyss.
Hunham nudges him toward another conception of time, one that echoes the hold-and-relinquish duality of the dissolve. We must study the past, he says, but we need not be ensnared by it. “You can do this,” he tells his protégé, tearfully shaking his hand. In a climactic scene, Mary, too, invites Angus’s hand into hers, making literal a connection that was previously entrusted to form: a dissolve from Angus, shaving in front of a mirror, to Mary, standing alone before her own reflection.
This is what the dissolve complements so well: the woolly, idle moments that fill our lives but are seldom represented on our screens. Breakneck speed can be found anywhere, from social media to restless blockbusters. But even the quickest dissolve suggests languor and contemplation. The characters in “The Holdovers” spend much of the film spinning their wheels, but their downtime does change them. The film’s dissolves ask us to ponder that change, to feel the passage of moments and acknowledge the gaps and disorientations between them. Too much repose may wear us down, but too little erases the rhythms and textures of life.
Any given cut can gather disparate emotions; any cut can introduce continuities and discontinuities. But the dissolve, with its tentative overlapping, has its own soulful way. With the solicitude of a hand gently held, it can layer together a welter of thoughts even as it yields, hesitantly, to the next image. It captures the slower registers of our spare hours. In those woozy intervals, life shifts and wavers, moments blur. Change is in the air.
https://ift.tt/BGx6cD8
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar