Introduction
With his three feature films The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable
(2000), and Signs (2002), the India-born, US director M. Night
Shyamalan has established the difficult feat of achieving remarkable success
(in his time) on both the critical and commercial levels. 1 For starters,
Shyamalan is one of the rare filmmakers in the US who has achieved the enviable
pole position of being writer, director, and, in the case of Unbreakable
and Signs, co-producer. An important component to this dual success
is that Shyamalan knows how to craft a story that contains layers of meaning
and subtext alongside plot and character. And to his credit, these “layers”
are usually expressed through the film’s form and style (Signs is an
exception in that it relies more heavily on dialogue for its meaning and subtext).
Shyamalan uses the whole gamut of cinematic potential to build his layers
of plot, meaning, and subtext, including music, sound, color, performance,
and mise en scène. Doing complete justice to all areas of Shyamalan’s style
is beyond the limits of even a long essay. The elements of this cinematic
potential that I will restrict myself to is Shyamalan’s visual style, and
in particular, his use of the long take (in Part 1) and the following aspects
of his mise en scène, his use of ‘reflected images’ and mirroring effects
(in Part 2).
Shyamalan is fairly classical in terms of the stylistic approach he uses
to shape his material. There is nothing unusually radical or ‘subversive’
about his work. Above all else, Shyamalan constructs a believable fictional
world with believable characters and events, even if the genre he loosely
defines himself in deals with unbelievable events. But what makes Shyamalan
so interesting, apart from his willingness to deal with serious moral and
philosophical issues, is that he revels in stretching, updating, or adding
a new twist to the classical model. Like, for example, the classic shot-counter
shot editing pattern, which he often reconstitutes through camera movement
or framing (I’ll give examples of this later). Narrative credibility is of
extreme importance for Shyamalan in terms of formal expressiveness, as opposed
to the type of formal expressiveness that stems from beyond the strict narrative
or dramatic moment. Although the primary importance is that the formal expressiveness
serve a pragmatic (i.e. narrative, dramatic) function first, Shyamalan does
not shy from touches of formalism that go beyond narrative motivation and
signal the hand of an auteur playfully gesturing with the ‘cinematic possibilities.’
(An example here is his use of the color red as a signifier for dread or danger
in The Sixth Sense.) I would characterize this overall approach, respectful
of verisimilitude but not averse to touches of formal bravado, as ‘expressive
realism.’
My initial reaction was to refer to these three films as Shyamalan’s “spiritual
trilogy,” since in interviews he has not held back his conscious desire to
deal with issues of the human spirit (profound identity crisis, faith, the
power of human agency, chance and fate). With the exception of Unbreakable,
the other two films are loaded with religious imagery and metaphysical symbolism,
in the case of Signs, these are no longer subtext but text.
Although I think this would have been a valid formulation, I have opted for
the more general (and generic) title of “fantastic trilogy.” By fantastic
I am here distancing myself from Tzvetan Todorov’s use of the term, but simply
mean that each film depicts an event which has occurred within the diegesis
of the film that is unexplainable by the laws of science and nature. In The
Sixth Sense characters have a preternatural ability to ‘see’ and interact
with ghosts (as the young central protagonist Cole (Haley Joel Osment) says
in the film’s highly quoted line, “I see dead people”). In Unbreakable
a seemingly ordinary man, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), slowly discovers
that he is physically indestructible and learns to accept that he is a living
‘superhero.’ In Signs an imminent apocalypse in the form of a global
extraterrestrial invasion infiltrates the lives of a simple farming community
with ultimately life-affirming consequences. As I noted earlier, my approach
in this two-part essay will be to concentrate on the following aspects of
Shyamalan’s visual style, the long take (including camera movement) and two
general aspects of his mise en scène, reflected images and mirroring effects,
to explore a style I refer to as ‘expressive realism.’
One of the most striking aspects of Shyamalan’s expressive realist style,
with respect to how his films ‘feel’ compared to other mainstream, popular
American films, is their pacing. There are many factors at play in what affects
a film’s pacing, including the amount of dialogue and plot information, the
number of central characters, the level of character/subject and camera movement
and kineticism, and, of course, the editing style. With respect to editing
style, Shyamalan sets himself apart from most of his popular contemporaries
with a more measured, relaxed editing style that is statistically confirmed
by the average shot lengths (ASL) of each film. An important feature of this
more relaxed pacing is Shyamalan’s controlled and methodical use of the long
take. Of course many contemporary directors employ the long take, which can
be briefly defined as a shot which goes on for a considerable amount of screen
time before a cut occurs, but in the majority of cases it is used sparingly
as an emphatic device (to open or close a film for example), or as a device
to ‘energize’ a scene by accentuating the ‘spectacular’ side of cinematic
technology (steadicam, cranes, or other camera mount apparatuses) or high
production value. Of course this is a generalisation, but one never gets this
sense with Shyamalan’s long takes.
The dependence on the long take in all three films is confirmed by the average
shot length of each film, especially when contrasted with the majority of
mainstream and popular US films. In his essay “Intensified Continuity: Visual
Style in Contemporary American Film” David Bordwell notes a steadily increasing
average shot length (ASL from this point on) in American cinema since the
1970s. 2 The ASL in the years between 1930 and
1960 ranged between 8 to 11 seconds, and A-budget films with an ASL of less
than 6 seconds were extremely rare. In the 1980s the ASL dropped to around
5-7 seconds, with many films cutting as quickly as 3-4 ASL. By the late 1990s/early
2000 the ASL dropped further to 3-6 seconds, with many major and big box-office
hits having ASLs as low as 2-4 seconds. According to Bordwell, the fastest
cut Hollywood film he encountered in his research was The Dark City,
with an astonishingly fast ASL of 1.8 seconds! Concurrently, Bordwell notes
that the top range of shot totals for films also increased, moving from 1500
shots in the 1980s, to 2000-3000 shots in the 1990s, to the 3000-4000 shot
range by the end of the century (Armageddon, 1998, Any Given Sunday,
1999).
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By contrast Shyamalan’s ASL and shot totals for his three films, according
to my statistical analysis, are: The Sixth Sense (686 shots = 8.7 ASL),
The Unbreakable (322 shots = 18.7 ASL), and Signs (574 shots
= 10.3 ASL).
Aerial Angles in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs.
As well as using the long take to establish important character relations,
Shyamalan uses the long take to build a special emotional bond between characters,
with what I will call “intimacy long takes.” An exemplary scene with respect
to the “intimacy long take” is the powerful second kitchen scene between Cole
and Lynn. In this scene (59’25”-63’14”) Lynn tries to get Cole to admit that
he is the one who has taken her mother’s bumblebee pendant from her bedroom.
From Lynn’s perspective, there can be no other explanation for how the pendant
has moved from her bedroom to Cole’s bedroom. The tension is created for the
audience in this scene because we sympathize with Lynn’s position, but also
share Cole’s knowledge about the ghosts. The centerpiece of the scene is an
extremely long take, which also typifies Shyamalan’s stylistic preference
for having his characters face each other in profile. The camera is slightly
below table level, with Lynn seated on the left and Cole on the right end
of the table. The camera tracks in slowly to a closer medium shot, then begins
to slowly track left to frame Lynn and leave Cole off-frame, then tracks back
right to frame Cole and leave Lynn off-frame. The dialogue in this scene is
very important, as it is in all of the kitchen scenes. There is a line of
dialogue during the long take that encapsulates the film’s theme: Lynn: “If
we can’t talk to each other we aren’t going to make it.” Lynn once again asks
Cole if he moved her mother’s bumbleebee pendant. We feel the emotional anguish
Cole is experiencing, as he is caught between ‘lying’ for the sake of his
mother, or telling the truth. We can empathize with both characters, which
gives the moment an added intensity. Osmont’s acting, excellent throughout,
is especially wonderful here in the way he suggests the pain with which he
replies “no” to the final time his mother asks, “Did you take the pendant?”
During the shot the camera tracks left, right, left, right, left, before ending
on a close-up of Lynn, who angrily tells Cole to leave the table.
The fallout of this scene confirms the powerful love shared between Cole
and Lynn, and is again expressed through an “intimacy” long take (63’39”-64’25”).
Immediately after this kitchen scene Cole sees the ghost of a dead boy in
his bedroom. He is visibly shaken by the nightly visit, and goes to his mother
for emotional comfort. He finds her crouched down in the laundry room. The
static camera is at a low angle framing Lynn in the left foreground and Cole
standing at the door frame in the right background. We can see that she has
been crying. Cole walks toward her and asks, “Mommy. If you are not very mad,
can I sleep in your bed tonight.” Lynn replies, “Look at my face (a pet phrase).
I’m not very mad.” They embrace, and Lynn notices that Cole is shaking. The
scene ends on this emotional hug, as Lynn pleads with Cole to tell her what
is troubling him.
There is a noticeable pattern in The Sixth Sense concerning scenes
between Cole and Malcolm and those between Cole and Lynn which is linked to
the “intimacy long take.” This crucial difference is that Shyamalan uses the
long take more frequently in scenes with Cole and Lynn than in scenes between
Cole and Malcolm. The total screen time of scenes between Malcolm and Cole
total 33’25” and contain 277 shots for an ASL of 7.2. In contrast, the scenes
between Cole and Lynn total 15’03” of screen time with 55 shots and an ASL
of more than double, 16.4. This sizeable difference in ASL reflects Shyamalan’s
attempt to establish a more intimate and emotional mother-son bond between
Cole and Lynn.
An “intimacy” long take occurs in Unbreakable in a scene which parallels
the “Anniversary Dinner” restaurant scene in The Sixth Sense. The major
difference is that in Unbreakable the husband is alive and interacting
with his wife. But both scenes are filmed in one impressive sequence shot,
2’00” in the former, and 2’53” in the latter. As an additional note, the compositional
choice of framing the two characters in profile, a common stylistic choice
for Shyamalan, is partly a condition of his use of the long take in dialogue
scenes. By having the characters in profile the camera can record both characters
as they talk without the need of cutting in a shot counter shot style. (67’37”)
Like the long take in the hospital after the train crash (described later),
this shot begins in extreme long shot and remains static for a considerable
amount of time before beginning to dolly in slowly to a closer shot range
of the seated couple. The romantic setting, warm color tones, and hushed dialogue
situates this as one of the film’s most intimate moments. The use of the long
take during such as scene (and at 2’53” this is the second longest shot in
the film) is consistent with the way Shyamalan used the long take to underscore
intimate moments in The Sixth Sense.
Signs also makes extensive use of the long take to heighten intimate
moments where deeply personal or emotional feelings are revealed between characters.
The first of many such “intimacy” long takes in Signs comes just after
a kitchen scene, where Merrill and Graham sit in front of the TV with the
two children asleep between them. In what is the longest dialogue exchange
in the film, the two brothers express their feelings on the ultimate meaning
of this alien attack. Although the dialogue is handled in shot counter shot
fashion, cutting between Graham and Merrill, many of shots are held for a
lengthy period of time, including two successive shots of 1’25” and 1’28”,
the first in which Graham breaks down people into two groups, those who see
such an event as a sign, as “evidence that there is someone up there watching
out over them,” and those who see it as ‘pure luck.” In the second long
take Merrill recounts a story from his past which explains why he is from
‘group 1, someone who sees the event as a ‘miracle.’ In this scene there are
two things that set up the film’s conclusion: a) we learn that Graham, a former
man of God, is undergoing a crisis of faith, while his brother, a layman,
is a believer, and 2) a question posed by Graham hangs like a connecting thread
that bonds all the film’s plotlines, until it is answered by events at the
film’s climax: “Is it possible that there are no coincidences?”
Another ‘intimacy’ long take occurs at 68’20” (44”), during a scene where
Merrill, Bo, and Morgan watch a television news broadcast in the walk-in closet
(in an earlier scene Merrill had moved the television, with its constant news
bulletins of the alien attacks, from the living room into the closet to “protect
the children”). In this long take we learn how Morgan is estranged from
his father. After hearing some foreboding news on the television regards the
alien invasion, Morgan whispers loud enough for Merrill to hear, “I wish you
were my Dad.”
Later, Shyamalan interjects two ‘intimacy’ long takes as breathers during
the tense scenes where the family barricades the house in preparation for
the alien attack. In the two matching long takes Graham recounts to each child
a special moment during their births that formed a parent-child bond of love.
The first take lasts 1’13” (73’51”-75’04”) and the second take lasts 59” (77’12”-78’11”).
What’s interesting about these two long takes is how they subtly reveal that
Graham still lacks faith, since the timing of his storytelling, moments before
the aliens attack their home, implies that he does not think they will survive.
The penultimate shot of the film, which is its emotional climax, follows
the film’s ‘visceral’ climax, that being the family’s encounter with the alien
in the living room. This shot is the film’s last ‘intimacy’ long take (1’10”),
and resolves the vexing ‘faith’ crisis which has formed the film’s emotional
core. During the showdown between the alien and Merrill and Graham which preceded
this scene, we saw the alien, who was holding Morgan through most of the showdown,
spray a poisonous vapor into the face of the unconscious Morgan. In this penultimate
shot Graham is holding his still unconscious son in his arms, Pieta style,
murmuring to himself, “That’s why he had asthma….it can’t be luck…his lungs
were closed…no poison got in….no poison got in….” Graham and Morgan
are joined by Bo and Merrill. The camera assumes a rough, hand-held style
during this touching moment, panning quickly from one crying character to
another. When we hear Morgan’s below frame voice utter the word “Dad,” the
moment becomes Graham’s epiphany. When Morgan asks his father, “did someone
save me?” he replies, “yes, I think someone did.” This final ‘intimacy’ long
take sequence shot has retroactively supplied the answer to the earlier question,
“Is it possible that there are no coincidences?”
Long Take and Domestic Spaces: Questions of Class
It is interesting that Shyamalan, born into an upper class family of doctors
(both his parents are medical doctors), has consistently represented the working
class in his trilogy. The single mothers in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable,
the ex-football hero, security guard David Dunn in Unbreakable,
and the minister Graham Hess and former minor league baseball hero
brother Merrill in Signs are all from the working class. A key signifier
for this working class environment are the domestic spaces that are consistently
featured across the trilogy. One of the most important of these domestic spaces
is the kitchen. In The Sixth Sense the kitchen is where Cole and his
mother Lynn hold many of their key dialogue exchanges. Their apartment kitchen,
with its modest size and simple furniture, not only reflects the working class
status of Cole and his single mother, but represents a space where much of
the family bonding occurs.
The kitchen assumes a similar function in Unbreakable. In one of the
key kitchen scenes the young son Joseph is seated alone at the kitchen table
while his father and mother wash the dishes. The scene is made up of four
shots, including the centerpiece, a 2’08” long take. In the long take, the
third shot, Joseph surprises his parents by revealing a hand gun which he
threatens to use on David to prove to them his father’s invincibility. The
camera pans back and forth from Joseph and the parents as they eventually
convince Joseph to put the gun down. The single long take adds to the scene’s
tension while accentuating the domestic intimacy of the kitchen space. Although
the scene is ultimately positive in that it functions as a crisis that helps
to unite the estranged family, the use of the gun suggests a possible critique
of US gun control policy. For one, the presence of a gun and threat of violence
as the act which brings the family together is typical of what writer/academic
Mark Seltzer defines with respect to the US as a ‘wound culture.’ According
to Seltzer, the US is a nation that normally bonds only as a result of violence
or catastrophe. (“Studying
America’s ‘Wound Culture’” (Accessed Dec. 17, 2003).
Elements of this ‘wound culture’ also exist in the other two films. In The
Sixth Sense it is through the self-realization of death that both Cole
and Malcolm are able to mend their emotional pain. Signs dramatizes
a ‘wound culture’ scenario where the potential Armageddon posed by the alien
invasion unites the Hess family and enables Graham Hess to return to “God’s
fold.”
In Unbreakable the incident is thankfully resolved without any tragedy,
but the scene brings to mind an alternate tragic consequence of a similar
scenario from The Sixth Sense. The scene in question involves one of
the ‘dead people’ that Cole sees in his house. In this case a young teenage
boy who comes out from Cole’s room and whispers to Cole “I’ll show you where
my Dad keeps his gun.” As the boy turns to walk into Cole’s bedroom we see
a bloodied hole in the back of his head. Whether one wants to be critical
of Shyamalan’s association of this ‘wound culture’ with the working class
–stigmatizing the working class as emotion-driven rather than reason-driven,
and being more prone to violence- or see it simply as a dramatic device, is
open to interpretation.
Another key kitchen scene from Unbreakable takes place immediately
after David performs his first true ‘superhero’ act in the besieged home.
(93’37”) In this breakfast scene David and his son Joseph strike a bond of
secrecy with regards David’s superhero status. The scene confirms his superhero
nature, but as important, by admitting what the son already knew implicitly,
David re-establishes a trust and bond with his son. (Unbreakable also
features the kitchen in another brief scene where we see David sitting alone
at the kitchen table).
As in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Shyamalan uses domestic
spaces to stage important dramatic and revelatory ‘family’ moments in Signs.
With Signs taking place largely within the farm house, the overall
location is domestic in nature, with key scenes being split among the kitchen,
the living room, the dining room, the large walk-in closet (where they ‘hide’
the television for a while), and the basement. The first key kitchen long
take occurs directly after Graham gets visual confirmation of an alien presence
in their corn field, and returns home frightened. The static 57” long take
(38’33”-39’30”) frames Merrill seated in the right foreground on the dining
room table, and the adjoining kitchen in the background with the two children
washing the dishes at the sink. Graham enters the frame left and quietly sits
at the kitchen table. (This marks a reverse of the kitchen ‘gun’ scene in
Unbreakable, where the mother and father are washing the dishes and
the child is seated at the table.). This long take signals an important
moment in the film because it marks the beginning of the family’s solidarity
against the aliens. Up until this moment Graham was the only member of the
family who did not believe in the aliens. Graham appears visibly distraught
sitting at the table. The two children and Merrill walk over to the kitchen
table and stare at him intently. Graham looks up at them and whispers the
shot’s only line of dialogue: “Ok, let’s turn on the TV” (the television is
associated with the media’s constant coverage of the alien invasion, and in
this sense, confirms the ‘veracity’ of the alien attack). Although the interior
of the farmhouse appears slightly more upscale than the domestic spaces in
The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, the occupations of Graham and
Merrill, minister and former minor league baseball player respectively, would
suggest that we are still in a working class environment.
Reinventing classicism
I earlier characterized Shyamalan’s style as being within the bounds of classicism,
but marked by a freedom to reinvent or invigorate traditional rules of classical
continuity. An example is the way he sometimes restages the conventional method
of shot counter shot dialogue scenes. One of the ways Shyamalan does this
is by positioning characters in profile to the camera, and tracking in to
the characters as they talk (as in the restaurant scene in Unbreakable)
or tracking laterally from character to character (as in the second kitchen
scene in The Sixth Sense or when David and Joseph meet Elijah at his
art gallery). The earlier described left-right camera movement in the
second kitchen scene in The Sixth Sense is very similar to the left-right
‘pendulum’ tracking shot in the opening train scene in Unbreakable.
After Unbreakable’s brief credit roll, we are introduced to Elijah’s
opposite, David Dunn, who is visually framed on a train leaning against the
window with his face reflected in the window pane. This scene, which contains
nine shots, is marked by a single long take, the longest of the film at 3’49”,
which echoes the pre-credit ‘flashback’ scene of Elijah’s birth in its reinvention
of the shot-counter shot pattern and thematic parallel between the opposing
physical conditions of the two characters, David and Elijah. The camera is
placed in the seat in front of David, and frames him through the space in-between
the two seats. An attractive young woman sits next to David, and the camera
records David’s play for the woman with slow, semi-circular left to right
dolly movements which alternatively frame the woman and then David through
the seat opening. Where most directors would have handled this exchange by
cutting back and forth between close-ups of the two characters, Shyamalan
achieves the same narrative effect with more visual dynamism by camera movement
and mise en scene.
The scene as a whole establishes the diametrically opposite natures of the
two characters: in the previous scene Elijah is born with a frail, weakened
body, while this scene sets up a scenario where David becomes the sole survivor
of a train crash (alluded to but not seen) which kills every passenger. In
both cases the acts, Elijah’s condition at birth and David’s train crash survival,
shock and amaze the attending doctors and authorities.
Another way that Shyamalan modifies the classical continuity strategy of
shot counter shot is by cutting between or panning to real images of one character
and a reflected image of the other character(s). This occurs in the opening
pre-credit scene in Unbreakable (a wall-sized mirror) and in the second
scene in The Sixth Sense with the reflected image of Malcolm and Anna
in the glass pane of Malcolm’s civil award plaque being intercut with a two-shot
of their living bodies.
Signs’ penultimate long take sequence shot dissolves to the
film’s final shot, another impressive long take sequence shot which represents
another common element among the three films (the ‘one scene/one cut’ 5 style is most prominent in Unbreakable).
At 1’35” this is the film’s ‘longest’ take, and also introduces a relatively
daring formal gesture for a mainstream film, and a first for a Shyamalan film:
a manipulation of narrative time within a continuous ‘real time’ long take.
The shot begins as a dissolve from the previous ‘epiphany’ scene, reframing
the moment from the high angle vantage of the house’s top floor window. We
can see, in long shot, the four characters huddled together as they were at
the end of the previous shot. As the camera begins to dolly back we can also
see the broken shard of the window pane, which confirms a continuous, linear
time. It is important to note the brown leaves on the trees that suggest the
fall season. The camera continues to dolly screen left past another boarded
up window (further confirmation of continuous time). There is a noticeable
change in the light quality at this exact point, with the image darkening.
The camera continues to pan left across the bedroom, only now we see three
windows in normal condition and, most surprisingly, snow falling amid a wintry
outdoor setting. Within the continuous panning movement from the first window
to the other windows, signaled by the change in light, the narrative has advanced
a few months in time (from fall to winter). The camera continues to pan left
until arriving at the ajar bathroom door, stops momentarily, and begins to
dolly in slowly toward the door. Graham exits from the bathroom, only now
we seem him dressed in his minister’s frock. The camera stops at a medium
long shot of Graham and fades to black once Graham exits frame left. Although
it is fairly common to see this type of time-manipulation within a
long take in art-house cinema (for example, certain films by Bernardo Bertolucci,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky,
or Ettore Scola), it is quite rare in mainstream Hollywood film and is another
example of Shyamalan stretching the boundaries of classical mainstream style
(this time-bending ‘real time’ also occurs in John Sayles’ Lone Star,
although Sayles may not be considered as ‘mainstream’ as Shyamalan).
Shyamalan also resorts to a more conventional device by having this sequence
shot form a circular structure by echoing the opening scene of the film (the
opening shot of the film is from the same window looking down at the same
space, and later in that early scene we see Graham in civilian clothes standing
in the same bathroom that we see him exit from in this last shot). The scene
also falls into the common ‘repetition with difference’ dynamic with Graham
exiting the same bathroom but now with his faith in God restored.
Bazinian Homage?
In Bazin’s famous essay on editing, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage”
Bazin uses a scene from the British film Where Vulture’s Fly,
set on a game reserve in South Africa, to demonstrate how spatial
and temporal continuity can render a sense of realism that heightens
a moment’s inherent drama. In the film a young boy picks up an abandoned
lion cub and begins to wander home with it. The cub’s mother is alerted
to the cub’s absence and begins to stalk the little boy. The scene
does cut between the boy and the cub, but there are two key shots
where we see the boy and the lioness in the same frame which, Bazin
argues, validates and increases the danger of the situation. 6 Shyamalan uses the long
take to achieve a similar tension in a scene between the two children
and the family dog, Houdini, a large German Shepherd. The shot frames
the dog in the left foreground with its back to the camera and the
two children in the middleground facing the dog/camera. The children
fill the dog’s water bowl, but during the action the dog barks aggressively
and begins to growl menacingly at the children. Although we only have
a profile view of the dog, we can make out its snarling nose and mouth.
True to Bazin, Shyamalan never cuts once during the scene, but holds
the static shot for just under a minute (54”) until cutting away.
Read Part 2 Here.
Notes
Donato Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997. Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK), is a part-time professor in Film Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a longstanding member of AQCC (Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma).
Volume 7, Issue 11 / November 2003
Essays
cinematography film style genre_horror horror m. night shyamalan
