On the Concept of Setting: A Study of V. F. Perkins
Seth Barry Watter
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Volume 58, Number 3, Spring
2019, pp. 72-92 (Article)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0023
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723809
Access provided at 31 Jul 2019 05:46 GMT from Guilford College
On the Concept of Setting:
A Study of V. F. Perkins
by SETH BARRY WATTER
Abstract: The work of V. F. Perkins is sometimes said to exemplify “mise-en-scène
criticism,” which is attentive to settings as they relate to film characters. It assumes
that a setting should not simply sit there but should be charged with meaning for the
figures within it. This first premise is often tied to a second, that the setting should be
and remain strictly credible. That is to say, the ideal setting is simultaneously credible
and expressive, and fiction films can thus be judged by how well they satisfy both.
The aim of this article is to show the real difficulty of sustaining this dynamic in
relation to characters, who continue to develop and among whom a film shifts. To
make their settings somehow always expressive of their habits, thoughts, interests,
and feelings is to place enormous strain on the limits of credibility. This strain can
be felt in Perkins’s writing itself, and we can appreciate the problem by reading him
closely. Insofar as we think setting is a fundamental concept, useful for criticism, his
problem is ours as well.
The question with settings always is: Can they be so used that they will
serve a greater utility than merely being a place where the action occurs;
can they, in other words, be integrated with and so intensify either the
character or action or both? —Thomas H. Uzzell, Narrative Technique (1924)
O
f Spaces and Settings. There is no shortage of writing on cinematic
space. Setting, however, is less often in our crosshairs. The two are distinct because setting, unlike space, strikes a humanistic chord. Space is
full of bodies, or things that have mass; setting is full of characters, or
things that have feeling. Space is the realm of colorless extension—of point, line, locus, and plane. Setting is that in which characters are set—in which they live and love
and die—and it really has no meaning independent of this. A beach without characters is hardly a setting, it is a landscape at best; and all the many figures we see dotting
sand and surf cannot make it a setting until the camera comes closer to pick out at
least one. There is always a space but there is not always setting. The latter is space
that is filled and recharged by the presence of people it enfolds without engulfing.
Seth Barry Watter lives and teaches in New York. His work has appeared in Grey Room, Camera Obscura,
Millennium Film Journal, NECSUS, and the collection Seeing Science (Aperture, 2019).
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© 2019 by the University of Texas Press
When we can see the characters and the action clearly, then the background
may fade out of focus.
—Robert Liddell, A Treatise on the Novel (1947)
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Although the concept of setting is at best undertheorized, it still forms a crucial part
of our common assumptions. And not merely our assumptions, but by extension our
teaching, at least if we can judge from the textbooks now available. “Setting sometimes
provides an implicit explanation for actions or traits,” says one; “[M]ost good films give
the setting and its objects nearly as much meaning as the characters,” says another.1
Such advice differs little from the earliest film textbooks, such as Frances Taylor
Patterson’s Cinema Craftsmanship: “The photoplay,” she writes, “is a series of pictures.
It consists of action which is taking place before a constantly varying background.”
And to show such a background without relevance for the foreground “is plainly a
grievous waste of kinetic and potential energy.”2 Whatever the science of eye tracking may show—namely, our gross preoccupation with faces and hands—we ask our
students to look around and behind the characters whom they espy onscreen.3 We
teach them all about le plan séquence and mise-en-scène, terms whose French pedigree
marks something of their importance. We set their eyes going between foreground
and background in search of some principle binding each to each.
From where does our faith in a binding principle come? Cinema’s technical forebear is the photographic strip; but the basis for setting-analysis seems more derived
from books. We know that many viewers of the first actualities—short films of baby’s
breakfast and electroshocked elephants—still held those films accountable to literary
standards. One might see the Lumières’ train arrive and depart when, in point of fact,
it only ever arrived. In a random human figure milling on the platform one could
see a scheming vagrant with whole histories behind him.4 The notion that film, like
photography, is but a junk heap of details, a “stockpile” of elements without import or
meaning, was by no means universal in this age of the book.5 For the noise of an image,
its accidents and oddments, could yet be filtered out by one’s novelized imaginary.
We have only to open The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to see such filtration everywhere
at work. Each of those settings that Henry James put there is lit less by gaslight than
by the inner light of characters. The mellow air and summer light of the grounds
of Gardencourt, its stately, if timeworn, facade of red brick, rows of oak and beech
trees that throw down their shade on rolling green turf: all this, when first given to the
gaze of Isabel Archer, “at once revealed a world and gratified a need.”6 Such charm
1 Richard Barsam, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 138; Timothy
Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film, 7th ed. (New York: Longman, 2010), 55. I use “setting” to stand for
a variety of kindred terms that writers often use interchangeably: “decor,” “background,” “milieu,” and so on.
2 Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 50.
3 See Tim Smith, “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Cognitive Film Theory,” in
Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (New York: Oxford University Press),
165–191.
4 Yuri Tsivian, “Some Historical Footnotes to the Kuleshov Experiment,” trans. Kathy Porter, in Early Cinema: Space,
Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 249–250.
5 “Photography merely stockpiles the elements”; “it consists of elements in space whose configuration is so far
from necessary that one could just as well imagine a different organization of these elements.” Siegfried Kracauer,
“Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 52, 56. See also Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10–12, 33–34.
6 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1917), 55.
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and simplicity stand in stark contrast to the gloom of her future home, the Palazzo
Roccanera, to which she is brought by her husband Gilbert Osmond. Its outside is
covered with crumbling statues and urns; inside are curtains and covers of damask.
Conspicuous above all is the ugly salottino with its huge Empire clock and pale yellow
upholstery. There is fragrance of flowers but no flowers in sight. And from the
depths of his study, among his rare volumes, the aesthete turns to face his wife now
in the doorway.
So the characters are set within their proper settings, or else they start to wither
once their stems have been cut. Still, as Isabel herself does not fail to note, “things
change but little, while people change so much.”7 She is thinking of settings she has
ultimately outgrown—palazzo and English countryside alike—for her development as
a character attenuates progressively the relation of her figure to every place in which
she stands. Something propels her from one site to another, then back and back again.
Harmonization can be only temporary if her tale is not to be a set of picture postcards. And that is why the setting disappears from description. It can and it must
periodically fade. For when setting is always visible behind one or more characters,
its expressive capacity soon dwindles to exhaustion. But if held and released—and held
and released—it gives retroactive force to all settingless intervals. Setting in this sense
is like the flicker of film, a flicker that somehow we perceive as a stream. Its very intermittence is one source of its power and its continuous import, an illusion of synthesis.
To do justice to the role of the fiction film’s settings was the task of V. F. Perkins
from 1960 onward: from his earliest criticism as a student at Oxford to the books
and essays written half a century later. It is perhaps perverse to credit Perkins with a
literary bias, he who proclaimed film’s independence from literature. But films, by his
own admission, “acquire many of the characteristics of novels” as soon as they play at
being filmed fictions.8 Among these shared aspects are settings and characters. Criteria
for success would then have to include the mutual contouring of said aspects to each
other. Real people live in places, hence inclusion of settings will satisfy realism. And
since settings are necessary, they may as well be expressive, and so satisfy aesthetics in
addition to realism.
This is the logic that informs Perkins’s studies, and we shall keep it in view in the
pages that follow. It is not without a measure of tension or strain arising from the fact
of its own central premises. Such is clear only upon detailed study, but we can state
here in brief the germ of later difficulty. Let “cinema” be the art of bodies in space
and “fiction” the art of characters in settings. Let a film gain in realism the more fully
it places its character or characters in appropriate settings. Let it gain also in expressiveness the more fully these settings reflect their several characters. Then the film
will have achieved both credibility and coherence, two criteria by which any fiction is
judged. But fiction tends to traffic in those changes of character that drive a story
forward and bring it to a head. Such changes might occur in sudden reversals or in
7 James, 600. The 1908 revision is perhaps more affecting but less to the point: “She envied the security of valuable
‘pieces’ which change by no hair’s breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty.” Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 569.
8 V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 25.
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shifting moods and affects of insensible gradation. To grow as a character is to outgrow one’s setting, or at least to chafe and make friction with it. And the setting cannot
keep up; its inertia is really a part of its realism. How, then, to balance the imperative
of unity with the imperative of change? How to maintain the relevance of settings
when “things change but little, while people change so much”? To answer these questions is the task of film direction. The half dozen artists whom Perkins singled out are
those he felt answered most fully, if not completely.
The Climate of Opinion. A famous passage in Perkins’s book Film as Film (1972)
opens its discussion of “significant gesture.” It describes a single moment in The
Courtship of Eddie’s Father (Vincente Minnelli, 1963) in which Eddie and his father
prepare their lunch together. The mother of the family has recently died, and it is
young Eddie’s first day back at school. “Both father and son,” writes Perkins, “are
making an effort to adjust to their new circumstances.”9 As they interact with the
prosaic objects of their kitchen, the father asks Eddie what he did that day in class;
to which the child responds, “I wanted to cry.” He says these last words during an
important bit of byplay. Standing on a stepstool, his back to his father, he takes a cup
and saucer down from the cupboard (see Figure 1). The action of the sequence is
entirely believable, grounded in a daily conversation and routine. “The action also,”
writes Perkins, “takes us graphically inside Eddie’s mind and feelings by stressing the
instability of his emotional balance.”10 His placement on the stool, his handling of
the objects, the rattle of china—all seem to say what the character cannot. The image becomes a single continuum wherein middle-class people do middle-class things
and one’s frailties are echoed in the frailest of objects. Even in close-up the CinemaScope ratio ensures equal presence of Eddie and kitchen. It is, in sum, “clearly very
skillful as a job of direction.”11
Perkins was not alone in his appraisal. His description closely follows that of Barry
Boys upon the film’s release: “Eddie is standing on a stool getting crockery out of a
Figure 1. Eddie Corbett (Ron Howard) takes a cup and saucer from the cupboard in The Courtship of Eddie’s
Father (MGM, 1963).
9 Perkins, 76.
10 Perkins, 76.
11 Perkins, 76.
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cupboard. . . . Balanced on the stool, holding a breakable object suggests the fragility
of his emotional state.”12 Witness also Charles Barr, who wrote of the wide screen’s
“gradation of emphasis” and called Minnelli’s film “[its] most beautiful example.”13
What unites these three authors beyond praise of one film is that all wrote for Movie,
the journal Perkins cofounded. He remained among the editors for all thirty-six issues
and, naturally, he published there often.
Movie (1962–2000) has always been associated with two things: a special affinity
for classical Hollywood and a particular approach to classical form. Indeed, one finds
much consistency among its contributors: a kind of group style, a unity of taste and
tone. It was Perkins’s special gift to distill that into principles. Even those who disagreed
were largely able to do so because he had reflected their own thinking back to them.
Much of their dispute concerned mise-en-scène, a technical term that Perkins rarely
used. But he had his definition ready when asked. It is “performance and décor, the
spatial disposition of people in relation to their environment”; and few would have
demurred.14 Hence the questions asked Minnelli when Movie’s editors sat down with
him for their inaugural issue of 1962, the year in which he finished Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse:
Were the colors (predominantly warm and golden) and the details of the
Argentine sets meant to indicate the warmth of Madariaga’s personality?
The candlesticks which divide all these close shots down the middle and
separate the characters, are they meant to imply any personal barrier?
The branch coming down symbolically cutting off Grandfather in the
open and blocking Marcelo’s path, and the swinging lamp; all this is meant
as orchestration?15
Such questions the critics must have often asked themselves in the process of viewing
almost any film whatever. And the answers they received are perhaps less important
than the form of aesthetic judgment implicit in the asking.
So if Minnelli had crafted a dense mise-en-scène—one that could invite and
reward such nimble questions—he was in that sense superior to the British New Wave,
at least as Perkins paints it in his first editorial. He wrote on his behalf and that of his
fellow editors, who then included Ian Cameron, Mark Shivas, and Paul Mayersberg.
Small journals of the era fed off polemic; Movie was no different in that regard. It
staked out its position in relation to everything it had deemed stupid, jejune, or inept.
John Schlesinger made for one object of censure, and the critics dismissed A Kind of
Loving (1962) as he made the streets of Manchester serve his social purpose. A man
12 Barry Boys, “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” Movie, no. 10 (1963): 29.
13 Charles Barr, “CinemaScope: Before and After,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1963): 19.
14 Ian Cameron, V. F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Michael Walker, and Jim Hillier, “The Return of Movie,” Movie, no. 20
(1975): 7. For background I have used John Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013); Jeffrey Crouse, “Fueled by Enthusiasms:
Jeffrey Crouse Interviews V. F. Perkins,” Film International 2, no. 3 (2004): 17–19; and V. F. Perkins, “Ian Cameron:
A Tribute,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, no. 1 (2010): 1–2, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie
/contents/ian_cameron_-_a_tribute.pdf.
15 “Method: Vincente Minnelli,” Movie, no. 1 (1962): 21, 24.
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and a woman neck in a park shelter, but the director hardly knows what to do with
his location. He “landscape-mongers” only—and he ruins the whole affair by tracking
past the characters to a close-up of graffiti. Thus he fails to achieve “the integration
of character and background” on which his moral point would depend absolutely. He
does not exploit “the power of his décor.”16
It was not filmmakers only who had to be chided. Criticism, too, was in a state of
disrepair. Prime targets were the British Film Institute and its journal Sight and Sound,
which all except Mayersberg had already snubbed in public. They did so in the pages
of Oxford Opinion, undergraduate magazine of Oxford University; and there one could
see their turn away from England to the critics of France, Cahiers du cinéma especially.
Together they could scorn the doctrine of commitment and those avowed liberal films
they called “très ‘Sight and Sound.’” Many Cahiers writers contributed to Movie, and
Movie in turn took up that journal’s heroes. All agreed with Perkins that good intentions
were fine, but “style is worth fighting for in the judgement of films.”17
But if Nicholas Ray was, as some mimicked, really much better than Satyajit
Ray, the terms of that appraisal were not strictly alike.18 Here we find something of
a family quarrel. For Fereydoun Hoveyda of Cahiers, for instance, Ray’s style alone
mattered; his films were successful insofar as they looked like his. “Party Girl has an
idiotic story,” he wrote. “So what?”19 To which Perkins responded, however indirectly: “The moment I begin to deal with [Ray’s] methods of composition, or his use
of camera movement, I become involved with his meaning”—in Party Girl (1958) no
less than in Rebel without a Cause (1955).20 Style needn’t indicate just the stylist behind
it, for style is also key to “psychological insight,” to “characters and relationships,”
to “the way in which behavior is influenced by environment.”21 Lacking these aims,
it devolves into mannerism.
There was no one use of setting to be prescribed for all films; nor did films need to
have settings at all. But as Perkins later tried to explain to his critics, when a film laid
claim to fiction, it submitted to a discipline. It had first to create and then to respect the
contours of a world in which its characters move and act. It thus had to acknowledge
the relevance of setting as determinant of character or as reflection thereof. For, really,
a character without a setting is quite an abstract thing. Time of day, seasons, different
altitudes or climes are among the many things that determine our behavior. “A man
will not react in the same way at ten o’clock in the morning,” writes Perkins, “and at
ten o’clock at night.”22 He must receive the mood of some given setting or else run the
risk of becoming unreal.
16 V. F. Perkins, “The British Cinema,” Movie, no. 1 (1962): 5.
17 Perkins, 7.
18 “Nicholas Ray or Satyajit Ray?” asks Penelope Houston in “The Critical Question,” Sight and Sound 29, no. 4
(1960): 163.
19 Fereydoun Hoveyda, “Nicholas Ray’s Reply: Party Girl” (from Cahiers du cinéma, 107, May 1960), trans. Norman
King, in “Cahiers du cinéma”: 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 123.
20 V. F. Perkins, “Nicholas Ray,” Oxford Opinion, no. 40 (1960): 31.
21 Perkins, 31–33.
22 Perkins, 33.
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Such a view would drive Perkins to his rejection of current film theory. In England
that amounted to the several rewritings of a theory of montage by Ernest Lindgren
and others. The theory maintained that the essence of cinema lay less in shooting film
than in combinations of what was shot. And while no one took Vsevolod Pudovkin
quite at his word when he called the single shot a “dead object,” without meaning,
nonetheless the English theorists had followed his lead in crowning montage as the cinema’s best feature.23 It was best if only because no other art shared it—which meant
that any film not making use of montage was ultimately guilty of being unfilmic. It
was not that these writers had no feel for settings; being social realists, they liked to see
reality; and if they ranked Pudovkin over Sergei Eisenstein, it was because Pudovkin
took his symbols from settings.24 For them the setting served a variety of functions so
long as one did not have to see overmuch of it.
Typical was Karel Reisz’s comment on Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), which is
composed of ten long takes joined end to end. Since it aimed for the illusion of a film
without edits, Rope, said Reisz, was terribly unfilmic. Worse yet, it wasted the viewer’s
time. For example: “At the precise moment that Rupert turns around, the two boys
know that they have been found out. The next significant event is their reaction.”25
Rather than cut from one to the other, a panning movement bridges the two events
in sequence. Why, asks Reisz, must we sit through these fifteen feet of film as the
camera plods along? Especially because, as it pans, “it reveals on its travels a series
of objects completely irrelevant to the situation.”26 A large neon S seen flashing
through the window adds nothing of narrative or even symbolic value. It is pointless,
a nullity, as indeed all space is when our focus is character.
It appeared otherwise to Perkins, at least in a film of quality; and surely Alfred
Hitchcock, one of only two artists Movie deemed “great,” could be trusted to appreciate the power of his decor. “He shapes it,” writes Perkins, “as a vital development of
his theme,” and in Rope this procedure can be seen at its purest.27 The film starts in an
apartment when Brandon and Phillip murder their school chum with a length of rope.
They then stuff his body into an old chest, which they later repurpose as a rude buffet
for dinner. They have guests due at seven, including the dead boy’s parents and the
schoolmaster, Rupert. It appears that this latter is partly responsible with his glib talk
to Brandon of murder as an art.
The entire film seems to turn on the optimistic principle that murder will out. And
it outs in two ways, in Rupert’s queries and the setting. That is, as the process of
detection comes nearer its goal, it is joined or even presaged by changes of setting.
Not that the setting gives way to another, for all the action is confined to this threeroom apartment. Rather, says Perkins, it acquires a hostile character and a power in
23 V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique, in Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V. I. Pudovkin, trans.
Ivor Montagu (London: Vision Press, 1954), iv.
24 See, e.g., Roger Manvell, Film, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1946), 123–133; Ernest Lindgren, The
Art of the Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 73–96.
25 Karel Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing (1953; London: Focal Press, 1967), 234.
26 Reisz, 234. Reisz’s text would eventually be updated by Movie contributor Gavin Millar; see Reisz and Millar, The
Technique of Film Editing, 2nd ed. (New York: Hastings House, 1968).
27 Perkins, Film as Film, 90.
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its own right. Its aspect obeys the strictest surface realism while nonetheless reflecting
the fortunes of villains. Its light fades down to darkness from the bright of early eve: a
change so gradated “that we sense, rather than observe, the nightfall.”28 The setting itself seems to grow smaller. It does, in a way, as we see less and less of it. First the dining
room drops out, then the hallway, until “we are confined to the sitting-room only.”29
Even so there is room for the two boys and Rupert to range themselves in triangles,
giving shape to the guilt they share. Tension mounts until it bursts. When Rupert at
last throws open a window, “one can almost feel a gust.”30 All this is made possible by
the presence of setting, its persistence in time, and its fusion with figures for whom it is
the hangman. And if the flashing neon S that so bothered Reisz remains unaccounted
for in this description, we might say that it resembles a loose piece of rope.
The Fictional World and Its Logic. The editors of Movie, we have seen, were prone
to argue with their critics. They argued also with one another as their values diverged.
Wanting to give their readers some of the flavor of debate, they published a roundtable under the title “Movie Differences” (1963). One point of contention was the impact
of modernism—and all the editors except for Perkins found themselves defending it
against Perkins’s charges. Of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) Perkins notes, “I’m
preoccupied with the devices at the expense of the content.”31 The content in this
case is the prostitute Nana and some scenes from her life in contemporary Paris. And
we see much of Paris. Yet there remains a certain sense in which Nana is separate, a
sense of which Perkins was acutely aware. He took the opportunity to hold the artist’s
words against him. “Godard has said that his method in Vivre sa vie is to strip away
the exterior to reach the interior, then strip away the interior to reach the soul,” he
explains. “But surely one can only reveal a soul through the interaction of a wide
range of exterior effects.”32 Unsurprising, then, that Perkins took issue with a scene of
Nana’s hands in close-up. She is writing a letter, and she writes for five minutes. Only
two cutaways break the fixed perspective. His stated objection is that it is “baroque,”
but the problem at issue seems to go deeper. For to strip the image bare in pursuit
of the “essential” is to block out that setting so possibly rich in feeling. It is to be
untrue to life. And if he never fell back on such big words as “Being,” never deferred
to an ontology, we yet sense in the critic some philosophic principle. We might call
it the belief that human existence unfolds in a world; and only in a world is it seen
to have sense. Hence any film aiming to show that existence will also have to render
the world of its unfolding.
To that end it will need to have texture and density in those fragments of world
I have so far called settings. These must in turn be shown to persist—and in their
persistence constrain what is possible. “The created world must obey its own logic,”
28 V. F. Perkins, “Rope,” Movie, no. 7 (1963): 12.
29 Perkins, 12.
30 Perkins, 12.
31 V. F. Perkins, Paul Mayersberg, Ian Cameron, and Mark Shivas, “Movie Differences,” Movie, no. 8 (1963): 28.
32 Perkins et al., 28. For his continued difficulty with this film, see V. F. Perkins, “Vivre sa vie,” in The Films of JeanLuc Godard, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Praeger, 1969), 32–39.
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writes Perkins, and the terms of this logic are the subject of Film as Film.33 It is a
logic less of possibles than of sets of compossibles, with each set the germ of a credible world. And this idea of credibility is based on another, solidity, or our mental
impression of a firm ground for actions. One must build not a stage but “an apparently solid world,” where some things can happen and some simply can’t.34 It is
alive and in process but is never so changeful as to assume, out of nowhere, a wholly
new arrangement. It is peopled by entities, human or otherwise, who are also solid,
determined, and to some extent predictable. Its logic, its physics, its sense of hardness and resistance, its impact on lives and their impact on it—all give to any world
its texture and cogency. It must resist even the caprices of its maker. And the only
essential difference of this world from ours is that its contents are raised to a higher
kind of power. It is “more concentrated and more shaped than that of our usual
experience.”35
His emphasis on shaping put Perkins in a field apart from the classical realists like
André Bazin, whom he otherwise follows closely. He tsk-tsked Bazin for the latter’s
suggestion that accurate photography is the cinema’s true vocation; a “purism of the
object,” Perkins called it, which all but forbids the artist’s shaping hand.36 But if photographic reproduction was not an end in itself, it did impose limits on what a credible
world could do. In the course of poetic or literary description, metaphors and similes
come and go as they please: one takes up arms against a sea of troubles, and the reader
is not likely to fret overmuch. A world seen on film is not so labile as this, at least not
when its facticity is displayed for us continually. That is why, for Perkins, the expressive in film slides easily into bombast—as when in The Criminal ( Joseph Losey, 1960)
all lights except the key light cut out on a convict’s monologue. He is in a cafeteria,
addressing fellow inmates, but no guard or prisoner turns down the lights; and even
if one had, the result would not resemble this strange illumination with the face alone
lit up (Figures 2 and 3). Such devices have the benefit of shutting out distractions, a
benefit outweighed by the loss of realism entailed. A camera could freely reframe its
objects, but a setting could not be freely relit; for the lights were still a part of that
fictional world which elsewhere had been so solid and regular. And the viewer is not
given “an acceptable reason for a change.”37
Worse yet was the method of Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin (1925), a film that, if
we follow Perkins’s reasoning, is first of all the story of a battleship’s mutiny. Hence it
has for its subject not Marx or dialectic but “the experiences and feelings of a group
of rebel sailors.”38 Their immediate setting is the battleship, then the sea, and finally
the port in Ukraine where they dock. Presentation of their hardship has been strictly
33 Perkins, Film as Film, 121. The concept was further refined in V. F. Perkins, “Where Is the World? The Horizon
of Events in Movie Fiction,” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and
Douglas Pye (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 16–41.
34 Perkins, Film as Film, 69.
35 Perkins, 69.
36 Perkins, 28–39, original italics; see also Perkins, “Rope,” 12. Charles Barr treats Bazin’s English reception in
“Rethinking Film History: Bazin’s Impact in England,” Paragraph 36, no. 3 (2013): 133–152.
37 Perkins, Film as Film, 83.
38 Perkins, 103.
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realistic. Yet their director feels free to insert into a battle three shots of stone lions
rising up in protest. The error lies first in the lions’ absence from the immediate setting in which mutiny occurs, and second in their absence from the lives of the rebels
inasmuch as those lives have thus far been disclosed. But the faults are clearest on
comparison. If in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father a teacup was a teacup before it was a
symbol, here the lions are symbols before they are statues.
Figures 2 and 3. Studio lights dim down around a prisoner as he delivers his monologue in Joseph Losey’s
The Criminal (STUDIOCANAL, 1960).
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Although Film as Film has been described as “Romantic” or, worse yet, “Romantic parody,” it is really less Romantic than realist given its emphasis on credibility.39
Its author saw no value in a world so created only to be changed and changed again
at the artist’s convenience. Such work he deemed lazy and, moreover, untrue to
life; and this because persons are products of settings, even of those settings that
they themselves have built. They do not emit settings as a radiator does heat. Any
special aspect disclosed for one figure must still respect the contours of a space that
is shared.
At first, writes Perkins, “décor derives its meaning from character and action.”40 It
soaks up some aspect or aspects of character by means of a metonymy that seems to
unite them. A style of dress, a way of behaving, a social connotation, maybe even a
certain color can remind us of whence a character comes. A setting retains all these
aspects of character and duly recalls them on each time we see it. It retains, that is, the
life one sees lived there. The question then arises as to what extent a setting creates,
rather than contains, this life one sees lived there. It is somehow bound up with the
fates of its characters, and their behavior in turn is partly its result. It is “charged with
meaning.”41 And the tighter the fusion of figure with setting, the less we tend to ask
who or what acts on whom.
One early exemplar of Perkins’s aesthetic was Nicholas Ray. Few others, he wrote,
“have as great an appreciation of the suggestive powers of décor and locale.”42 In Ray
one could find “an ethical and poetic vision of the universe and of man’s place in it,”
however compromised by commerce that vision could be.43 One becomes aware of it
at the levels of plot and theme, but it is manifest above all in the treatment of miseen-scène. That people are marked by conflicting desires is an abstract kind of truth;
hence the artist must express it in settings and behavior. Johnny Guitar (1954), for
instance, shows the heroine Vienna split between her masculine and feminine qualities. Her two-story building, with her business below and her lodgings above, corresponds roughly to that split in her psyche. Downstairs is her saloon with its mostly
male patrons, from whom she takes refuge in her apartment upstairs; and the latter
“with its more delicate, feminine décor” expresses all the feelings she denies herself in
public.44 Nor is Ray’s topos always rigid and fixed. In Bigger Than Life (1956), the tale of
an addled teacher, “upstairs” represents his escape into fantasy. In Rebel without a Cause
it suggests domesticity, and what pains Jim the most is the sight of his aproned father
“timidly mopping” at the top of the stairs.45
Other features of style had their part to play, too, as they could further alter
the aspect of settings. Ray’s use of “static masses with bold lines—walls, staircases,
39 Editor’s introductions to Perkins’s chapters in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:251, 401; Sam Rohdie, “Review: Movie Reader, Film as Film,” Screen 13, no. 4 (1972): 143.
40 Perkins, Film as Film, 94.
41 Perkins, 94.
42 V. F. Perkins, “The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,” Movie, no. 9 (1963): 5.
43 Perkins, 8.
44 Perkins, 6.
45 Perkins, 6.
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doors, rocks—which intrude into the frame”; of abrupt or “dislocated” editing; of
camera movements starting too early or late, were not simply flourishes.46 They
gave form to neurosis and to the condition of “displaced persons.”47 In passing we
may note the aid of such idioms as “fitting in” or “out of line” in this move from
shape to symbol.
Settings have thus their two functions to execute. Their inner credibility gives a
solid base for action, and they express the inner nature of one who has acted. And
directors who opted for the credible only or expressiveness only would, by that token, not achieve a full utterance. Nor are there two kinds of setting, credible and
expressive, to be placed side by side. Rather, somehow, the expressive must become
coterminous with the credible. They must appear simultaneously in one selfsame
setting. The task of an artist is to synthesize the functions—the critic’s to make clear
their principle of synthesis.
Thus Perkins begins with the ascription of emotional and psychological predicates to one or more characters; for only that ascription turns figures into characters. And, once marked, they compose for the critic an inner circle of meaning
from which other circles of setting and style arise. Setting keeps the characters from
floating in a vacuum, surrounding them with decor and objects and space. Style can
further clarify and comment on character. These circles are concentric, ideally; a relationship of nesting has to obtain among them.48 Their fixity of center gives a rhyme
or likeness to each of those circles that take it as their center. And the center, to
repeat, circumscribes the traits of characters. Their habits and thoughts and above
all their feelings serve to organize images in meaningful ways. Thus a setting evolves
into more than a mere container. It becomes a reflection of the quasi-real person.
Any and all devices at the artist’s disposal can make that reflection more lucid, more
poignant.
The Antinomy of Setting. In the great film, writes Perkins, “no question arises
whether the camera moves to accommodate the movements of the characters or the
characters move to justify the movement of the camera . . . whether the décor takes on
meaning because of the action within it or whether it is the décor that makes action
meaningful.”49 But, inevitably, such questions do arise; for the premises on which this
statement is based are cogent taken singly but unstable when compounded. These are
the premises of order and credibility, “twin criteria” to which fiction films would have
to submit.50 In them lies a key to the antinomy of setting.
46 Perkins, 6.
47 Perkins, 9.
48 David Bordwell calls this a bull’s-eye schema and thinks it one of the commonest in use in film studies. See
Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 170–181.
49 Perkins, Film as Film, 131.
50 Perkins, 69. These are not essentially different from what Formalism calls “artistic” and “realistic” motivation,
respectively; see Boris Tomashevksy, “Thematics” (1925), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T.
Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 80–87.
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The premise of order is an aesthetic criterion. It holds that art gains in power
the more that its details can justify inclusion, in relation to every other detail also
included. John Ruskin called it “help,” such that everything in a picture gives “help”
to everything else.51 Others call it “organic form,” in which all parts of a poem (for
instance), from concept to meter must function together like organs in a body.52 But
whatever the medium, aesthetic order claims relations of part to part and part to
whole. Sometimes it demands that the work of art be freed from real purpose or use,
the better to focus on its own inner density. Its order is good because unity is good and
its beauty is enhanced when irrelevancies are excised.
The premise of credibility has a wholly other basis. Its aim is verisimilitude, the
compelling of belief. Even if it does not claim reality status, still it offers itself as much
like reality—as if its content continued beyond the work’s borders into a realm that the
artist has sampled, not created. This criterion derives neither from poetry nor painting but rather from the novel since Daniel Defoe. The works of the latter troubled
contemporaries because his fictive incidents had credible veneers.53 What Ian Watt
terms “formal realism” comprised those conventions by which writers could, while
spinning fiction, still create worldlike structures. Conventions included the theme
of daily life, with its particular people in particular places and times, and hence a
new depth of character, fullness of setting, and stricter chronology in the stories so
written. When Crusoe scavenged his island for items, the reader did not doubt his
“solidity of setting.”54
These, then, are the twin premises of Perkins’s aesthetic. Both of them deal with
part-to-whole relations. And yet the logics of each are not coextensive. Their differential emphasis reflects their different origins. With the criterion of order, unity might
spring from formal aspects alone. With credibility it would come from the bond we
think obtains between organic entities and their medium of existence, or between
character and setting, respectively. Perkins saw the difficulty of sustaining both criteria.
He knew that any film was pulled in two directions, “one towards credibility, the other
towards shape and significance.”55 That was why their joint fulfillment could function
for him as a marker of excellence in the judgment of film. Let us see then, just what
the fulfillment looked like.
He asks us to consider the following scene from Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger,
1954). Joe escorts Carmen to a military prison but is balked in his purpose by Carmen herself. Her whirligig nature disturbs his stolidity, and she is determined to steal
51 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1860; Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894), 5:174.
52 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), chaps. 7 and 8; Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1979), 90–105, 154–172.
53 Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco
Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 336–349.
54 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 26. Compare Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1953), 463: “The serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise
than as embedded in a total reality . . . as is the case today in any novel or film.”
55 Perkins, Film as Film, 120.
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him from his sweetheart. But disgust for his charge has become real attraction, and
two shots seem to mark the point of transition. First the travelers are seen frontally
through the windshield of a jeep; the jeep in turn constitutes their proximate setting.
Because the windshield from this angle coincides with the wide-screen image, the vertical bar that subdivides it also subdivides the image. On the driver’s side is Joe, with
Carmen beside him in the passenger seat (Figure 4). They too are sundered by the
vertical bar. Behind them we can see a country road in rear projection as the many
trees that line it recede into the distance. Carmen sidles up to Joe to fondle and tease
him, thus crossing the bar. Joe tosses her back. She puts her feet up on the dashboard
and begins to sing of café life with its dancing and drinking. Then she climbs into the
back seat and puts her arms around Joe. On her line “I oughta have a sweetie pie,”
the film cuts to a view of the jeep from its passenger side (Figure 5). We see it now
truly as an open-air vehicle, no longer enclosed by the geometry of the windscreen.
This and the vertical bar have been pushed beyond the frame. With Joe to the right,
intent on his driving, and Carmen to the left as she sings and harasses, the landscape
rushes by in a blur of brown and green. “Remarkable in this short sequence,” writes
Perkins,
is the way that character, ideas and states of mind are projected visually without compromising the credibility of the image. The first shot begins as a
graphic expression of Joe’s personality. It shows us his world as he wishes to
see it—a world of order and stability. But as the shot develops we see that
the order is rigid and inhibiting, the stability unnatural, claustrophobic and
rather lifeless.
Where Joe submits, Carmen challenges; the latter part of the shot gives us
her view of Joe’s world. She rejects external restraints; demands license to act
according to her own needs and impulses. She makes a brief effort to assert
her freedom within Joe’s structured world, by exploding the neat symmetry
of “his” composition.
In the second shot she has given up the attempt. We are offered a picture
of her world, and a direct contradiction of the previous image. This world is
open, vigorous, fluid, but also chaotic and essentially aimless. There is plenty
of movement but it exists for its own sake, to satisfy a restless craving, without
direction. Preminger’s camera extracts full value from the scenery’s flashing
passage, but we never see where the jeep is going. The framing of the picture
cuts off our view so as to deny the suggestion of a goal.
The contrast between the two images summarizes the conflict between
Carmen and Joe; but the development of the sequence, carrying us from Joe’s
world into Carmen’s, conveys also Joe’s mounting involvement.56
If we think of this scene as a set of concentric circles consisting of character, setting,
and style, we can see that the three are tightly aligned. But they are differentially
so across the pair of shots. Each has its own direction and magnitude; each has a
vector that flows through the circles. In shot one it is centripetal, for Joe appears
56 Perkins, 80–81.
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Figures 4–6. In a shot from Carmen Jones (20th Century Fox, 1954), Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) sidles
up to Joe to tease him. In the next shot, the angle shifts forty-five degrees as she gets into the back seat
and grabs him, singing. Later, her song complete, the framing changes to a frontal long shot and the setting
falls into neutral.
as turnkey in a jail of his own design. He has totally submitted to a rigid discipline
that presses him down and determines his actions, a rigidity here made visible in
the jeep’s solid windscreen. With the shift from Joe to Carmen comes also a shift
in vector. Its movement turns centrifugal, flowing outward from a center. It is as if
her emotion travels on a song to impregnate the landscape and then change the
camera’s angle.
If it did not change thus in accord with her feelings, then, by implication, the
circles would not be concentric. They would only overlap—which is also to say that
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any shift of vector, any marked change of character, requires realignments to hold the
whole together. And since alignment is a process, disorder will last until the process is
complete. So the circles must shift all at once or en bloc. Only then is their constant
mutual relevance assured. Of course, setting itself can change along with characters;
yet it would not be a credible setting if it did. For when it can be bent to the moods of
one character it is not the common property of all a film’s characters. The secondary
worlds that all create around them cannot destroy the one world they share. Luckily,
any setting is varied; Carmen can enter Joe’s world and Joe can enter hers. But when
we stop to consider how many such inter- and intracharacter shifts must occur over the
course of the average feature film, we are likely to regard these two shots as exceptions.
Indeed, when Carmen’s song is done, the setting falls into neutral and is just a country
road (Figure 6).
In sum, the basic elements of fiction are character and setting. Characters need
settings to achieve credibility; settings must be solid to seem credible at all. Characters
change in the course of narration, or the focus among them changes; and their setting
could alter in line with these changes were it not first debarred by its need for credibility. Therefore, a credible film with changes of character will have settings rendered
null by these same shifts of character. For, under the tenets of classical realism, all we
can change of setting is the angle from which we see it.
From Expression to Behavior. I have limited discussion to the logic of a concept,
the setting. But any hermeneutic or method of study involves some interaction of technique and concept. By “technique” I mean roughly what some call apparatus, some
dispositif: that general constellation of a tool and its user at some moment in time.
If we find that our hermeneutic undergoes a shift in accord with a shift in the technique employed, we are justified in asking what technical factors had determined or
affected our earlier concepts. We know that a film is viewed and that we can view
it in quite different ways—with whatever techniques we can or prefer to access. Yet
we rarely acknowledge that our history of ideas is just another name for our history
of observation.
Perkins’s first studies were made under conditions of theatrical projection, meaning: he sat in the audience like any paying customer. He could not stop or rewind or
slow the film down with those home-viewing gestures we now know so well. At best
he could screen it two or more times in sequence, and the same went for most of his
colleagues at Movie. They took notes in darkness to the best of their ability, and whole
monographs were often prepared in this fashion.57 So one went to see movies; one
duly took notes; then one wrote essays with the help of one’s memory and the results
of one’s scribbling. Sometimes one referred to the work of other critics. A few frame
enlargements or publicity photos could further aid in reconstructing what had been
seen. In special cases one might question the filmmaker directly on a point of technique or the import of a symbol. This set of operations defined advanced criticism. It
57 See Ian Cameron, “Antonioni,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1962): 58: “Script extracts are mainly taken from the
published scripts. . . . The other extracts are based on notes made in cinemas, except in the case of Le Amiche,
which . . . I was able to view on a Moviola. For L’Eclisse, which I have only seen once at the time of writing, I have
had to rely very heavily on John Francis Lane’s invaluable book.”
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raised normal filmgoing to a disciplined practice by means of concentration and the
available mnemic aids, which is to say, by imagining.
“Imagination,” writes R. G. Collingwood, “is indifferent to the distinction between
the real and the unreal.” If a mullion partly blocks a view of grass from my sight,
“I also imagine the grass going on where this mullion hides it.”58 The missing grass
is neither real nor unreal; it is simply unavailable, and so it is imagined. The act is
no different from that of the historian who imagines Caesar’s journey from Rome
into Gaul, on the basis of good evidence that he was in each place successively.59 In
this it differs from make-believe, which falsifies deliberately. If we thought imagination gave rise only to error, we would not tell friends to use it when they have asked
the obvious.
Still, it is not direct perception, which retains the possibility of correcting its
mistakes. Its object is explored one facet at a time, and through that exploration
new relations are revealed. There is thus a lag of time between perception and
knowledge as one runs to catch up with the mass of perceptions—and all the more
so when these are really in motion. With regard to film objects, this form of observation was enabled initially by the analytic projector and the editing table. These
afforded their user both continuous viewing as well as stop-start. They were standard paraphernalia for editors, scientists, and ambitious football coaches.60 But for
critics and even teachers they were scarce into the 1960s, as their cost would limit
purchase to large institutions.61
It was likely Perkins’s efforts in film education that first gave him access to such
technical amenities. The editing table was a fixture at Bulmershe College, where he
taught in the 1970s, and he later kept one in his office at Warwick.62 “The rewind
lever,” he recalled, “freed the work from dependence on the hazards of memory.”63
He was aware that this machine might yet harbor its own distortions. To repeat or to
pause is to give a new emphasis; to give a new emphasis is to make a different film. So
he cautioned film analysts always to check results in light of their experience of a film
viewed continuously.64 He cautioned, that is, against loss of that holistic seeing which
had played no small part in his creed of cohesion.
There is, nonetheless, a development in his aesthetic after Film as Film. If in 1972 he
admits that great films are still burdened by things “whose sole function is to maintain
58 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938; New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 136.
59 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (1946; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 240–241.
60 See Seth Barry Watter, “Scrutinizing: Film and the Microanalysis of Behavior,” Grey Room, no. 66 (2017): 32–69.
61 Certainly Cavell did not have one for his 1963 seminar; even when composing The World Viewed in that decade he
was not yet “involved . . . with the metamorphoses of moviolas [sic].” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), ix.
62 Richard Dyer, personal communication, November 22, 2017.
63 V. F. Perkins, personal communication, February 8, 2016. This is from a draft of “Omission and Oversight in Close
Reading” later cut from the published version.
64 V. F. Perkins, “Omission and Oversight in Close Reading: The Final Moments of Frederick Wiseman’s High School,”
in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2017), 392.
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the narrative,” still he believes that such “one-function elements” can be constrained
within the limits of a film’s early sequences.65 For as soon as the setting, the characters,
and the film’s premise are given, they can ramify and blend with more or less rapidity.
They can then remain cohesive for the film’s remaining run time. And any segment
one ponders will reveal that cohesion. Or so it seemed to Perkins, for nothing had yet
forced him to see what lay between the segments impressed on his memory. But this
can hardly be shirked when one’s hand is on the rewind and dissolves the concentric
back into asynchrony.
Perkins wrote no second treatise after Film as Film. Effects of the new technology
are to be found only in the ever-increasing detail of his descriptions. A 1982 essay on
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) can serve as our example, coming
as it does after a nine-year hiatus.66 Not only does it read like a shot-by-shot analysis,
by then a standard hallmark of academic rigor; it also deals with a sequence—the
so-called Linz sequence—of which the crux is one character’s noninvolvement with
setting. This character is Lisa Berndl, a Viennese woman at the turn of the twentieth
century. She is in love with a pianist, also from Vienna, who scarcely knows she exists.
Her romantic hopes are further dashed when she is forcibly moved to Linz, a backwater in her estimate. So she nurses her passion and fantasy in private as she attempts,
for a time, to conform to social dictates. Her parents arrange for her to marry, and on
a Sunday she meets the prospect. The young lieutenant hails her with military briskness before propelling her mechanically through the streets of Linz. She is awkward
and skittish. If the scene gives an impression of “extraordinary unity,” it cannot be
discovered in her sympathy with setting.67
The scene consists of sixteen shots. The first three depict Lisa walking with parents
to greet the lieutenant before going into church; of these the second shot is a close-up
inserted in an otherwise continuous crane shot from afar. Hence we see the characters
totally surrounded by the bustling banality of the city of Linz. We do not see inside
the church; a dissolve signals merely that service has ended before the company files
out. The fourth shot shows a bandleader conducting his band as Lisa and the lieutenant make their exit in the background. They walk to the nearby park. In a fifth shot
they sit on a bench within an alcove. From the sixth through the twelfth they hold
an abortive dialogue, either in two-shots or shot–reverse shots. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth they return to their families, who are watching from
a distance. “Where other episodes in the film are of immediately striking brilliance,”
notes Perkins, this five-minute sequence “appeared to be excellent in a straightforward and rather marginal way.”68
It had its possible emblems nonetheless. When Lisa and her suitor sit in the alcove,
the frame reveals behind them a wrought-iron fence. Because bars, doorways, and
other framelike enclosures were often taken by Movie’s critics to stand for entrapment,
to have called this fence a prison would be tempting and logical. Then it would express
65 Perkins, Film as Film, 131–132.
66 Discounting interviews and roundtables, he published nothing between 1972 and 1981.
67 V. F. Perkins, “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” Movie, nos. 29–30 (1982): 61.
68 Perkins, 61.
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the two figures’ repression, their mutual alienation summed up by the bars behind
them. But the critic takes a different tack. He gives the iron fence no symbolic weight
at all. For him the setting has just a limiting function and is notable chiefly for not
being someplace else. “It is a hard little alcove which offers no means of evasion or
convenient distraction.”69 It locks people in place, and in them it fosters some words
and behaviors.
The theme of behavior is announced early in the essay, when Perkins notes the
bearing and posture of the principals: the lieutenant’s smugness, Lisa’s passivity,
the rigidity of his father, the punctiliousness of hers. Their behavior is derived
from “social institutions” of class, the military, marriage, and sex that animate this
world of circa 1900.70 That Lisa seethes beneath the surface is really quite secondary to the social interlock of that surface itself. No objective correlative betrays her
thoughts and feelings, no part of mise-en-scène points up the inner life. There is
only her behavior as it mixes and clashes with adjacent behaviors in the surround.
Her “dejected submission,” for instance, “is pictured not just in the costume—with
a hat that seems to be wearing her—but in the awkwardness of [her] movement.”71
And the lieutenant’s true nature is to be found in his gait, in his ridiculous ramrod posture, in convoluted sentences that supposedly speak of love. The setting,
meanwhile, “is entirely exterior and ostentatiously irrelevant to Lisa’s”—or anyone
else’s—“emotion.”72 To look now to the background would be to miss the point.
The cause of the behavior is in another person; it is social and immanent to the
given context.
“These points,” writes Perkins, “are borne out in a further element of the film’s
gestural vocabulary: the use of hands.” His discussion is long but worth quoting at
length, if only for what it tells of the new mode of reading. For the setting seems
to vanish behind this play of gesture, of whose hands do what and how often and
to what effect. “Lisa’s hands,” for one, “never leave her lap, at most twisting there
in resourceless agitation at the neck of her handbag.” The lieutenant, for his part,
“has command of his gestures, to such an extent that he can silence Lisa . . . by
peremptorily raising his stiffly gloved arm” (Figure 7). There is, however, an air of
the hobbledehoy about him, and after minutes of fumbling he receives his rebuff.
The time has come to save face. “He terminates the conversation by rising (in one
movement, like a released Jack-in-the-box) to salute her and then extending his
right arm to her with a disjointed ‘Oh . . . then . . . please!’ as his sense of correct
procedure asserts itself over his confusion.” Meanwhile the parents misread this as
69 Perkins, 67.
70 Perkins, 67.
71 Perkins, 64.
72 Perkins, 64. C. S. Tashiro notes a more general difficulty in making public or street scenes expressive of character; see his Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History of Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998),
32–34.
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success. They enjoy that illusion as he begins to rise. And when the camera returns
to the bench for a final shot, we see Lisa on his arm­—because he has offered it.73
In short, the characters are seated for a significant duration. The camera almost
always frames them within the same shot. Hence one can see how a gesture is made
and how it is registered in a reaction. The man marks speech with his hands; the
woman wrings hers. The woman tries to speak; his hand urges silence. She confesses unwillingness to marry this man; he rises abruptly from the park bench. He
proffers his arm; she rotely accepts it. And these are but the grosser movements one
might observe.
The work of V. F. Perkins began as an attempt to identify the means by which
films express character. Along with this it made some claims as to which films had
done so, and how well they had done it. But with a change in technology comes also
a change in emphasis, a new field of observation for the lifelong student. And what
does he find there in a
length of filmstrip, in
the intervals that lie
between “total cohesion”? An assortment
of behaviors, of actions and reactions, a
nullity of setting and
a maintenance of
narrative. Prior discussion of characters’
thoughts and feelings
turns into detailing of
their behaviors.
These behaviors,
moreover, are hardly Figure 7. In Letter from an Unknown Woman (Universal Pictures, 1948),
unique. They are ge- Lieutenant Leopold (John Good) uses a manual gesture to silence Lisa
Berndl (Joan Fontaine): “Oh, please allow me to finish.”
neric, habitual, and
socially sanctioned. The figures on film simply carry them out and, in so doing, carry
them on to others. They belong neither to her nor to him because, as behaviors,
they do not belong to anyone. Their general structure precedes all who use them.
To study them closely is thus to dissolve the dramatis personae into that structure.
And the dissolution is literal as one starts and stops the filmstrip, breaking actions
into gestures and words into phonemes. These details of behavior are disclosed by
machinery; nullity of setting is the price paid for detail. One is then pushed beyond
the realm of fiction as a stage for some figures in apposite settings—where the setting ideally integrates the character and the critic is one who extolls that integration.
We can hardly extoll anything else, if and when we cannot see anything else. But
criticism changes when performed at the level of character happenings of subsecond
73 Perkins, “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” 68–69.
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duration. It changes in accord with the change in its object, which now is segmented
and repeatable indefinitely. It trades out its method for a new method, its concept for
another still dimly perceived. For it is no longer the study of fiction or, at least, not
only of fiction. It is natural history, the study of the organism: the study of what is
called human behavior.74
✽
For V. F. Perkins (1936–2016). Thanks to Adrian Martin, Philip Rosen, Joel Simundich, Faith Holland, and my anonymous
readers for their comments.
74 Adrian Martin points out to me that I may be “slightly distorting” the shape of Perkins’s career, insofar as I imply
that with analytic machinery Perkins “entirely swapped setting-analysis for gesture-analysis” (personal communication, December 27, 2017). And he has usefully drawn to my attention some of the later essays that would
contravene this claim, such as V. F. Perkins, “Johnny Guitar,” in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian Cameron and
Douglas Pye (New York: Continuum, 1996), 221–228. Here we find comments on, for example, “the architectural
expression of wariness” with reference to a character’s gambling house (224). I do not want to give the impression
that one hermeneutic simply supplants the other. All change and innovation are haunted by survivals, especially
when modes of observation are combined. I note, however, the near absence of such rhetoric from Perkins’s last
book, La règle du jeu (London: BFI and Palgrave, 2012), and the assumption in its place of “social performance”
(83) as the overriding theme. The tiled floors of the film’s chateau are no longer a “chess-board” expressive of
guile, as they were in Victor F. Perkins, “Moments of Choice” (1981), in Movies of the Fifties, ed. Ann Lloyd (London: Orbis, 1982), 211. We might call this, with Heather Love, a shift from “thick” to “thin” description; see her
“Close Reading and Thin Description,” Public Culture 25, no. 3 (2013): 401–434.
92