What Is Cinema?
Before Sunrise
Friday 13th March
Before Sunrise
Friday 13th March
THAT QUESTION HAS been asked since movies were treated as an art form at least by 1915 when D. W. Griffith's epic, Birth of a Nation forced the issue.
Since movies were silent, painting became an early model for directors. They composed with light and shade, created illusions of depth, used shadows to express moods, etc.
Because of their ability to narrate or tell stories, films were compared to novels. When sound came, films were an ideal theatre. Each spectator sat in the perfect seat and actors had ideal visibility no matter where they were in the scene. The close-up and camera angle insured this.
Some critics worried that each technological change (sound, scope, color, depth) would destroy the visual purity of the image. But French critic, Andre Bazin embraced those changes.
Sound, composition in depth (without the "art" of montage), color, and a wider screen increased the realism of the image, so its artistry. The screen was a window, not a frame.
Yet a window is a point of view (we choose one window, not another). Even the first "actualites" of the Lumiere Brothers (1895) involved framing (what to show and how).
Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995) is an example of a film that uses the window as its model. There's no plot, only two main characters (Jesse and Celine), and the story is just talk of life and love.
There are no tears, no suspense (Celine racing to catch a train), no conflict (arguments with themselves or others), etc. It's a "behavioral" cinema: What we see are gestures and expressions. What we hear is rambling speech we might hear on a train or in a coffee house.
Christian Metz said "A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand." Movies look real, so where's the art?
Some films foreground their artistry, using the screen like a frame. Plot, voice-over, closed compositions, special lighting effects, underscore, etc. "form" an image. That is Formalist cinema. But Realist cinema blends foreground and background, as Celine (in the film) says of Seurat's art.
Still, viewing a film as art (not just a pastime) involves the heuristic (that is, "discovery") principle of significance or design: we assume everything is part of a pattern (so significant), even fleeting gestures. Though the gesture came spontaneously (from the actor), it was kept in the final edit deliberately (by the director). So Francis Coppola, director of the Godfather films, called a director someone who uses accidents.
Before Sunrise begins on a credit sequence to music from Purcell, Dido and Aeneas. That is a choice which (by our heuristic principle) must signify (mean).
In the opera (and Virgil's epic), Aeneas leaves Dido to found Rome. So the credit music prepares us for the romance between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). But it also suggests their tragic end, though that end is not in the film.
The music changes tempo. The lovers change tempo too: from a casual relationship on a train to an intense, even desperate, separation before the train leaves.
The criss-crossed tracks after the credits suggest the criss-crossed nature of lovers and the most famous story of star-crossed lovers, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Bickering and elderly couples on the train suggest ordinary relationships (we assume they once knew romance like Celine and Jesse will know it). Celine moves her seat to escape a couple's argument and later asks Jesse if love is possible.
Stages of the fighting couple's relationship are shown by their movement to other cars in the same way that stages in the young couple's relationship are shown by their constant movement. First Celine reseats herself, then she and Jesse move to the lounge car, they deboard at Vienna, etc. Each location marks a new stage in their relationship.
Several locations and people resonate with romance. Vienna suggests this: the Danube, or the Prater (ferris wheel) where the lovers kiss (refreshingly, without an underscore). Later a Strauss waltz is heard.
In the church, the lovers seem to make informal vows just by talking. They merge into their background, as Celine said of Seurat's prints.
The train itself evokes movement and time (Celine meets Jesse on a train and separates from him on a train back to Paris). The first shot we see after the lovers deboard is the bridge under which the train passes and over which the couple walk—a symbolic moment as they consider their adventure.
Encounters seem both casual and meaningful. The fortune teller understands the lovers are living an adventure and are in the process of becoming (she says Celine will become a famous woman while Jesse is "learning"). The Austrian actors describe a play with a character somewhat like Bottom's ass in Shakespeare's fanciful A Midsummer's Night's Dream. (Emphasis is placed on the show's exact time [21:30], which the lovers forget because their relationship is outside of time.) The vagabond poet recites a poem about new love.
But the art of Before Sunrise is above all behavioral. There are several long takes, often with little movement within the frame, where the couple just talk. The scene on the bus, shot in a single medium shot of six minutes duration, is one example. Several walking scenes are filmed in long dolly shots (the camera dollies back as the couple walk).
Many compositions are two-shots, keeping the couple framed together. This establishes their relationship while excluding the rest of the world. (Their first names are the only names we learn of, linking them with the dead in the "No-Name" cemetery they visit.)
More importantly the two-shots establish the couple's equality. This is especially shown in the music room as they listen to a record, or as they talk around the pinball machine of previous relationships. It's also shown in the six-minute take on the bus.
These scenes depend on the viewer reading the faces of the actors, hearing their words, and linking them to the gestures and body movement of either character, talking or listening.
Each scene has a rhythm based on the exchange between speaker and listener. The music room scene is memorable in this regard, composed mainly of the couple stealing glances at each other. (A sound bridge carries the diegetic [source] music to the next scene, now as extra-diegetic music [underscore].)
The pinball sequence is carefully composed around an alternation of player and watcher as the couple talk (one plays, the other watches). This alternation suggests a model of equality in the relationship. The strategy is repeated in the scene where Jesse bargains for a bottle of wine while Celine steals the wine glasses.
The same equality is shown in the scene at the table during the fake telephone conversations, where both play the roles of the other's friend. Playing pretend, the game allows both to equally affirm their love for the other without pretense. Their partnership is similar to the lovers' equality in the biblical "Song of Songs."
Cinematography alternates between deep and shallow focus. For example, the first shots on the train are in normal or deep focus; but as the lovers start talking about the death of Jesse's grandmother, the conversation thereafter is shot in shallow focus. The exit from the train in Vienna is also shot in deep focus to place the lovers in a greater reality, which they will soon escape.
But Before Sunrise also uses montage effectively, as in the sequence after the credits; but, especially, in the final sequence showing, in a nostalgic summary, the places the lovers visited during their time together. The music of Bach (played by Yo-Yo Ma) suggests a melancholy coda to the film.
Purcell's Overture and the two other couples on the train suggest there is no future in romantic love. Jesse refers to his parents' unhappy marriage (they should have divorced sooner).
The fact that Celine and Jesse are the only couple we see and that their previous relationships ended unhappily also suggest this. Celine mentions "declarations of love" in a former romance but when asked if the romance thrived she replies, "Of course not." Jesse cannot imagine "unselfish love," after which Celine sinks her head in sadness.
Yet the question is open at the end of the film: will the couple meet again, as avowed? If so, will they have a future? Director, Richard Linklater apparently thought so since he filmed a sequel, Before Sunset.
A value judgment of the film cannot be separated from the sum of words spoken, the acting, the scenic context, the kind of shots, etc. Such a judgment also depends on the larger issues involved, spoken or implied.
The film has received mostly praise from critics. But to this viewer the film allows no reference point by which to judge the value of the lovers' romance or romance in general.
For example, Romeo and Juliet is not a tragedy about romance but about character flaws (Romeo's impatience). Romance in itself is not the final reference point of Shakespeare's play; rather romance is measured by values outside it by which we can judge the lovers as lacking. True, they do not deserve to die (or it would not be a tragedy, just a morality play), but we are invited to understand their deaths as partly their fault.
Similarly, in the biblical "Song of Songs," the lovers represent a partnership of equality and friendship that evoke the goodness of creation and suggest that such a relationship is the only answer to a tainted ("fallen") world. Their romance is not the final reference point; the goodness of creation is and (beyond that) the implied reference to God as Creator. Thus the book's inclusion in the Bible.
Despite hinting the lovers' romance is a challenge to death (Celine's fear of flying is overcome when she offers to fly to Austria for the couple's planned reunion) there is no sense how this is possible except as escapist fiction. In their visit to the Cemetery of No Name, death seems more like an escape than a doom, as Celine says of the nameless dead: "People can invent the best and the worst for you." (The lovers, like the dead, know only each other's first names.)
Is this what romance is to Celine: a fantasy of the best and worst? Then their day together is also a fantasy of the best and worst. Jesse, for example, becomes at once the "dumb American" he jokes about and the ideal life partner.
The couple's one-day relationship is evoked as a dream by Celine; and there is some suggestion even of the Dracula story, where the vampires disappear at sunrise (a word that becomes important as part of the title).
Celine herself seems to think that time stops for the dead, not life. The dead girl will always be thirteen, and therefore she has conquered Time (cf. Auden's poem, read by Jesse).
The film's dialogue is unfocused, never quite defining character or motive, though there is an effort to create thematic significance (references to death, relationships, personal integrity, fears, etc.). Transitions (especially the first words the couple speak to each other on the train) seem forced; and when the dialogue is convincing, the acting is not (Delpy's dramatic pauses to suggest thought seem contrived).
Celine's main speech ("God is not in us but in the spaces between us") rings hollow. It sounds more like a message from the director than from the character. Moreover, Delpy's delivery is not convincing.
Neither character is fully defined by their spoken words, though they have an entire film to define themselves. Other than as young people trying to build a future, we get no sense of them as people. They are stripped of all social reality, which is what romance is. By stripping social reality from the film the director strips reality from the film, making it escapist.
The acting seems just adequate (though one must acknowledge the difficult long takes). Ethan Hawke, as Jesse, seems mannered with his exaggerated gestures (as when he beckons Celine off the train), mugging (during the bus ride), and fixed smile.
Star charisma would have enriched interest in the characters. An actor such as Tom Cruise could have upped the stakes in the relationship's success, since (based on the star system) we don't want Cruise to fail. In any case, both he and (though too old for the part) Woody Allen kept coming to mind while viewing the film.
But the film's main fault is its thematic: that romance (at least such as its shown in the film) is able to carry the burden of philosophical ideas such as death and personality. But romance seems more like an evasion than a solution to those problems.
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