Gunning for a New Slow Motion: The 45-Degree Shutter and the Representation of Violence
2004; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoIN 1967, AMERICAN AUDIENCES WERE TRANSFIXED by Arthur Penn's Bannie and Clyde. The title characters were beautiful, ruthless, and doomed, and they died onscreen in a way that was radically different from the brief and bloodless expiration that viewers had anticipated. Instead, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde rolled and jerked in gory slow motion as a multitude of bullets sprayed their bodies, and American film gained a new and lasting phrase for its lexicon of violent cinematic death. Two years later, Sam Peckinpah included a lengthierand even bloodier climactic slow-motion sequence in The Wild Bunch (1969), and in the 19805 the technique became almost ubiquitous in blockbuster action-adventure movies. In the decades since its debut, audiences have been accustomed to the elaboration, exaggeration, and aesthetidzation that the use of slow motion adds to our view of the many, many ways a person can be wounded or killed onscreen. The edgy new code of 1967 has become standard practice, and thus has lost much of its power to or disturb. This is perhaps the impetus for more recent films' interesting use of anothertechnique that works as a vivid addition to, if not a replacement for, the somewhat stale trick of slow motion. The 45-degree shutter renders images in a staccato and intermittent fashion, yet it captures them more sharply than does the standard i8o-degree shutter; it debuted most notably in Iate-i99os films such as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998). Just as Arthur Penn used slow motion to highlight the bloody, destructive power of gunshots and counter the prevailing image of an actor clutching his chest and quickly falling over, filmmakers have used the 45-degree shutter to represent onscreen more realistically. In both cases, that enhanced realism is paradoxically based on visual distortion. In this paper I will explore how films like Bannie and Clyde and Saving Private Ryan use slow motion and the 45-degree shutter to visually reference historically relevant documentary films and photographs, and thus heighten the sense of realism. I will also discuss how this use of distortion-as-realism echoes Vietnam authors' claims about the seemed real, and how this relatively new film technique reflects a larger, national discourse about the perception and representation of violence. In the famous final sequence of Bannie and Clyde, the are driving back from a visit to town when they see C. W. Moss's father, Malcolm, waving them down, apparently with a flat tire. A flock of birds suddenly flies out of the trees, and Malcolm dives under his truck. Realizing what is about to happen, Clyde looks desperately at Bonnie, and she looks lovingly toward him immediately before the shooting starts. Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger previously humiliated by the couple, leads the assault. The are riddled with bullets that pierce them in visible bursts of blood, and the attack ceases only after Bonnie's body has slumped out of the car and Clyde's lies still after rolling over on the ground. Slowly, Malcolm and the lawmen emerge from their hiding places to stare down at the dead outlaw couple. For this sequence Penn used four cameras, each running at a different speed. He then edited the film into a montage of normal-speed footage and differing degrees of slow motion. The death of Bonnie and Clyde lasts fifty-four seconds-almost a full minute of what was then quite graphic violence-and contains fifty-one separate shots. Stephen Prince notes that [subsequent filmmakers might take slow-motion ballets of blood to much greater extremes, but Penn was the first American filmmaker to conjoin multicamera filming, montage editing, and slow motion systematically in the visualization of screen violence (135). Penn himself has stated that in this scene he wanted to show two kinds of death: Clyde's to be rather like a ballet, and Bonnie's to have the physical shock (Labarthe 169). …
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