Film Culture (1956)

successive episodes may or may not be interconnected by an intrigue justifying their appearance at this or that place and taking a more or less pronounced course of its own. Paisan with its six episodes set against the common background of war—a diffuse and very cinematic frame of reference—exemplifies the second alternative, Dead of Night the first. This first alternative—several episodes interlinked by a story—gives rise to the following observation concerning the character of that story. One might arrive at such an episodic story film from two sides—by bringing isolated episodes onto the common denominator of a story, as in Dead of Night, or by evolving a given story in such a way that it yields a succession of episodic units. An instance of the latter possibility is Cavalcade with its relatively independent war, beach and street episodes, not to forget the Titanic incident. In the case of this film type one thing is evident: regarding its form, the story must be loosely composed so that its episodes may retain the desirable degree of independence. (This applies perfectly to Cavalcade despite its theatrical origin.) Of interest with this context is Renoit’s insistence on loose composition for the sake of the episodic—manifest in La Grande Illusion, The River, La Régle du Jeu. . . It is as if he wanted to disintegrate his story while evolving it, as if, in a state of absent -mindedness, he time and again permitted seemingly insignificant incidents and the like to flood the story patterns proper. (Here belongs also Love of Jeanne Ney as a fairly good example.) But not all intrigues lend themselves to episodic treatment. When applied to stories which call for straight narration rather than loose handling, Renoir’s “absent-minded” approach, however legitimate cinematically, might well lead to confusion. In his River he palpably wavers between advancing his small human-interest story and displaying episodes of Indian life. Yet since the episodes do not seem to come out of the story, the whole is an awkward mixture of intentions which tend to cancel each other. b) Permeability An episode is all the more true to type if it is permeable to the flow of life from which it emerges and into which it debouches again—that is, it inevitably resembles the found story in this respect. Similarly, its affinity for the cinema varies 4 in direct ratio to the degree of its permeability for the obvious reason that any increase of the latter is tantamount to an increasing influx of the kind of reality which the camera is predestined to capture. Take Brief Encounter: it certainly owes much of its cinematic quality to the fact that it is punctuated by references to the material environment out of which its story grows—references which at the same time help characterize the latter as an episode. “Brief Encounter,’ says Albert Laffay, a French writer on film, ‘confines itself to two or three sets, not more... Yet these settings are ‘open’; people circulate in them; one is constantly aware that they might change any moment. They send you away to other places because they reverbate with the movements of the vibrations of trains.” Frévre incessantly reverts to the customers in the bar; Lonesome resounds with city life; Menschen am Sontag, a remarkable semi-documentaty, incorporates the amorous adventures of its two young couples into a reportage on Berlin weekend enjoyments; and what would Ueberfall be without its reiterated shots of desolate streets and dilapidated houses? One might also think here of the silent comedy, an episodic genre which not only inserts incidents but builds action from them. c) The danger of self-containment Consequently, the episode deteriorates if it becomes impermeable to the flow of life from which it arises. With their pores being closed, episodes in this vein threaten to gravitate toward an intrigue which has traits of the theatrical story. Many a so-called ‘‘semi-documentary” thus crosses the borderline separating the episode from the type of story which is essentially a ‘‘whole with a purpose.” (This term, which covers a feature of the theatrical story, is drawn from Proust’s definition of the classical tragedy as a composition which neglects “every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help us to make its purpose intelligible.”) In any such case the all but hermetically sealed narrative (with patterns of meaning which tend to overshadow the references to the material environment) does no longer seem to be grounded in physical actuality but gives the impression of availing itself of documentary shots as a background to the action, a new stimulant. The closer the episode which has ceased to be one comes to a self-contained story, the more these documen