Although it is unfair to separate the plot of a film from its facture or its quality of construction, the narrative of Swedish Filmmaker Ruben Ostlund’s 2010 short film ‘Incident by a Bank’ goes somewhat like this – When two men meet at a fairly busy street in order to head to a predetermined destination, a couple of masked men make a clumsy unsuccessful attempt to rob a nearby bank. The sceptical protagonists keep a safe distance nonchalantly observing the events and then inquisitively record it on their mobile. The event ends when one of the robbers get caught by the guards. The two friends discuss the quality of the video that they have captured and walk away in a disconnected manner, as do the other bystanders who were also observing the events without any involvement.
In normal circumstances a dramatic event such as a bank robbery would have all the standard cinematic elements of an action thriller embedded into it. It would probably deal with the suspense of the success of the robbery or otherwise, the safety of the bystanders, the courage of the resisters, the strength of the guards etc… The ‘decoupage’ would also be such – the action would be parsed into numerous predetermined camera setups that would have different image sizes. The narration would also probably incorporate parallel actions that could happen around the main narrative. The editing pace would also probably be fast and the sound track ridden with suspense music. But Ruben Ostlund does none of these.
The drama of the event enacted in the film is expressed in a ‘seemingly’ single real time shot of about ten minutes in length. The camera is positioned far away from the main characters looking down on the events that they are observing. In the first frame of the film, in an extreme long shot all the areas of action of the street are established. As the protagonists observe the entry of the robbers, the camera zooms in to them, but the image size is still in the range of a long shot. From then on, maintaining the image size the camera slowly pans and tilts marginally – sometimes diagonally and other times parallelly or perpendicularly – in various directions to capture the relevant events unfolding before the observing characters. ‘Detachment’ is the self-declared word to describe the quality of execution or facture of the film.
History alerts us that cinema – factual or fiction – began with the practice of using long single takes to unfold a narration. The length of the shot depended on how much footage the raw stock magazine would hold in the camera. The camera was by and large static, a sequence or an event would get completed within the time frame of the switching on the camera to it switching off. Things would happen in front of the camera in real time and therefore the action continuous in nature. Actors would move around the area that is blocked by the camera. In Pathe studio’s 1904 short film ‘The Bride’s First Night’, a coy bride asks a naughty groom to hide behind a partition as she undresses herself. Much to her pleasure, the later naughtily raises his head to gaze at her. The positioning of the characters and their blocking is done in relation to the single shot static camera that is in a relatively distant unhindered detached position. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1nctOX3qmQ).
Things alter a bit in Thomas Edison’s ‘The Gay Shoe Clerk’ (Producer: Edwin S Porter), made in 1903. Here we can see the use of the ‘decoupage’ i.e… a preplanned change in camera setups resulting in the sequence having more than one shot. This necessitates assembly of such shots in post-production. As the shoe clerk helps a lady wear a shoe shown in a long shot, Edison changes the camera set up to go into a closer shot of the legs of the lady as the clerk’s hands tie the shoe lace. The lady’s skirt now slowly goes up revealing her stockings – implying that she might be lifting them herself. When the camera set up comes back to the original long shot, the clerk now kisses the lady only to be beaten up of the other accompanying lady. The ‘decoupage’, now called as the ‘classical’ or ‘analytical’ mode, is largely based on the cause-effect relationship, helps intensify the spectator emotion. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eD1DVsF5zM).
Early Cinema also figured out the utility of what is known as ‘parallel cutting’ in grabbing the unhindered attention of its audience. Edwin S Porter’s ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903) continued to work with the one shot–one sequence practice, albeit as a technical necessity. Later, in the 1940s and 50s such a practice was to be referred to as ‘sequence-shots’, guided by the theoretical writings of Andre Bazin (1918-1958) on long takes. But more on him in a while. In ‘The Bride’s First Night’ the ‘sequence-shot’ was uncut, un-parsed, continuous in time and singular in space. In ‘The Gay Shoe Clerk’ the continuity of time and the singularity of space was achieved by a ‘decoupage’ process of fragmentation of time and space as encompassed in the shots taken at the shooting stage and their assembly post shooting.
‘The Great Train Robbery’ went a step further. Although it worked well within the confines of the ‘Sequence-shots’ formula which had by nature a unity of time and singularity of space in them, these shots were placed parallelly together to give an impression of a certain continuity of time, although the spaces were different. So, while the robbers rob the train, the station master tries to free himself. While the unsuspecting policemen danced around, the robbers made good their escape. Such parallel narration provided the possibility of a heightened involvement of the audience as they were kept on the edges of their seats – Will the station master free himself? Will the police catch the robbers?
And then there was this Russian school of Cinematic language that laid emphasis on ‘Montage’ – meant here not as not just as assembly of shots or the act of physically splicing them together but as the rhythms, associations and ideas that get generated when shots are juxtaposed together. In ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925) directed by Sergei Eisenstein, after the innocent civilians are brutally massacred by the czarist forces at the Odessa steps, the battleship Potemkin’s guns fires back at the General’s headquarters. Three shots of the compound wall being blasted are immediately cut with three more shots of three different stationary marble lion statues – one is sleeping, the second is awakened and the third is rising. It is then followed up again by the shots of the walls being destructed. It is as if the narrative time here is suspended to suggest forth an idea. These shots are suspended in time and the singularity of space, immaterial.
On the face of it, Ruben Ostlund’s formal construction in ‘Incident by a Bank’ does not fragment the narrative time into a series of shots such that it be seamless reconstructed into a singular space and time like done in ‘The Gay Shoe Clerk’. Nor does it parallelly narrate two events happening at the same time but in two separate spaces, as in ‘The Great Train Robbery’. It also does not use unrelated shots that are manifested fragments of time and space and make a deliberate connection through ‘juxtaposition’ as in ‘Battleship Potemkin’. It is the direct progeny of the detached facture of the ‘sequence-shot’ visible in ‘The Bride’s First Night’, where time is unhindered and continuous. The time taken for the event to happen in the film is the actual time taken for the event to happen in real. Ostlund’s camera is not bound by the technical limitations that initial films like ‘The Bride’s First Night’ had.
The question now is this – for what reason would any director want to maintain the continuity of time and the singularity of the space? Or why would one discount the changing the camera angles and ignore the process of assembly and the ‘montage’? This is where we come back to Andre Bazin and his theory of long takes. Describing William Wyler’s ‘Mise en scene’ (events unfolding in relation to the camera) in ‘The Best Years of our life’ (1946) Bazin says, ‘All his energies are aimed at doing away with the self’. ‘Doing away with the self’ could be interpreted as the invisibility of the creator or an unobstructed use of the cinematic language that does not seek attention to itself. This necessitates that the events happening for the camera should seem un-staged. In other words, a certain amount of cinematic realism is to be involved.
In the Bazinian world of ‘Sequence-Shot’ i.e., the sequence expressed without fragmenting its time and space, the usage of ‘Depth of Field’ is of crucial element. ‘Depth of Field’ can be termed as the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects before the camera that are acceptably in sharp focus. The action of the sequence could happen anywhere within this ‘Depth of Field’ for the audience to comprehend and probably at times even beyond. The larger the ‘Depth of Field’, the better the action could be mounted in its various planes. The ‘sequence-shots’ therefore gave the freedom to the viewer to choose which plane to focus on. The image therefore thus gives itself an element of ambiguity; distinct from guiding the viewer’s attention in the ‘analytical decoupage’ of ‘The Gay Shoe Clerk’.
Bazin calls this as the ‘depth of field decoupage’ or ‘deep focus decoupage’. This is not based on shot changes, but on the shot itself within which the event – and the time and space within which it occurs – is cinematically organised. Since this is also meticulously thought out much before the shooting stage, it stays within the realm of abstraction, as much as the ‘analytical decoupage’; but its ‘additional abstraction derives from a surplus of realism’, says Bazin. This ‘surplus of realism’ is the surplus of the planes in which the event is made to unfold for the viewer. If Wyler and his ‘invisible’ ‘sequence-shots’ were at one end of the spectrum of such a ‘decoupage’, the cinematic language of Orson Wells is at the other end – expressive, indulgent and obviously visible in nature.
Here, within a ‘sequence-shot’ the camera could vary its image size from Extreme Close up to Extreme Long shot, it could change its angles from extreme top to extreme low, it could move around in various lanes of the city, it could play around with contrast, lighting etc. Some of these expressive modes could be seen is the opening scene of Wells’ ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958). ‘We can say that filmmakers write directly on film. Because it relies on a greater degree of realism, the image—its visual structure, its organisation in time—now has more means at its disposal to inflect and modify reality from within.’, Bazin would write. In ‘Incident by a Bank’, Ostlund also ‘inflects and modifies’ his reality. And it would seem that there are multiple realities within his camera frame and within the framework of the real time ‘sequence-shot’.
Among the many minor characters that Ostlund envisages observing the events unfolding in his film, we see a lady wearing a pink scarf at around 8.20 minutes curiously looking at the policeman who now has pinned down one of the robbers. She passes them and a few seconds later she exits the frame to our right. When Ostlund’s camera immediately pans right towards the lady’s direction, we naturally expect her to be seen again. But lo, she is missing from the area where she is supposed to have walked into! There is no other area within the space or setting where she could have hidden herself in real time, using the fraction of a second available in that pan. Where did she vanish? And on top of it, at about 9.30 minutes of real time into the film when the real time camera comes back to the area from where she was supposed to have exited frame (at 8.27 minutes), we see her hurriedly enter frame. From where did she reappear?
This small little insignificant detail could have been totally missed upon as unintended. Considering that this film is supposed to be happening in a single shot and in real time, the lady had no business to thus vanish unexplained – unless of course the exit and the entries are two separate shots and the transition is so smooth that it is hidden. In an interview to the website Vimeo the director confirms. The film was shot in 5K digital format as a static shot in an extreme long shot image size. The pan and the tilts were digitally created in the post-production. Apparently, out of the 14 takes that were shot, five of them were used in the film to make it look like a single shot and action happening in real time. Bazin’s ‘Sequence-Shot’, if you wish – but digitally manipulated as betrayed by the vanishing lady in the pink scarf.
‘Autobiographical Scene Number 6882’ (2005) is another of Ostlund’s short film. It has some four to five ‘sequence-shots’, digitally un-manipulated one would assume (But won’t be surprised if they are). This film too has an observing camera that is at a distance from the action that is taking place, the lensing too is such in its usage of the telephoto lens. The film deals with how the individual is affected by the group dynamics. The ‘Mise en scene’ as a stylistic device is as charming as it gets, but its organic alignment with thematic concerns of the film is undefined. In ‘Incident by the Bank’ the ‘decoupage’ and the ‘mise en scene’ seem to be aligned with the thematic concerns. Ostlund is not as much interested in showcasing the drama of the messed-up bank robbery as much as he is in the indifferent bystanders. The camera seems to be organically at a distance unobtrusive. Only in a very few films we see this amalgamation.
Does the film emit an ‘ambiguity of the abstract’, as Bazin would term it? In other words, is it free from the rigidity of the cause-and-effect syndrome that the ‘analytical decoupage’ mode of filmmaking throws at us? Agree that ‘Incident by the Bank’ does not have the point of view shots or close ups. But the very fact that the filmmaker has chosen to amalgamate five different takes to fake it into looking like it is one, tells a story by itself. Besides, at crucial points the camera goes relatively closer into the action (albeit not into a mid-long shot, mid shot or a close up), pans right or left, tilts up or down to ignore a particular set of action and to focus on another. By making these choices it mimics the rigidity that is inherent in the ‘analytical decoupage’ mode. It is also significant that the film did not unfold in the extreme long shot, further opening up the choices for the audience.
And then there is the use of sound where the maker makes decisions for us. Some characters who are far away from the camera but who are considered ‘important’, are loudly audible as against some others. At times we don’t hear the characters who might possibly be talking in the foreground, in favor of the ones in the background. When the characters go out of frame (but staying within the purview of the camera in its first extreme long shot position), their sounds too fade away. The guns shots of the shootout that happens at a distance are so loud that that they can be termed as ‘sound closeups’. The loudness forces us to concentrate only on the shootout, ignoring the rest – making it as good as having a visual close up of the shooter. The commotion behind the closed doors of the bank interiors positioned farthest from the camera, has no business to be heard by us. But it does guide our attention to that area.
So, whatever Bazin might say about leaving open an ‘ambiguity of the abstract’ in the ‘sequence-shot’ the endeavour in this film or in any others that have ‘sequence-shots’ in them is to concretize or fix the audience gaze into a certain element. Ostlund is on record to have said that he wants to maintain the continuity of real time so that the mundane – like the two men insensitive to the robbery but grumbling about the quality of their mobile camera – can also be brought out to its full expression. It can well be argued that it is this very ordinariness that is being highlighted in the film – and the construction works towards this and the audience guided onto this. So, the lines between the ‘sequence -shot’, ‘analytical decoupage’ and probably even ‘montage’ seem to blur. In this case the blurring comes about mainly through a generation through the computer. Does the sanctity of the image that the Bazinian world implies still exist at all in this digital world or does it vanish like the lady with the pink scarf hopefully only to reappear mysteriously?
It is as good as anybody’s guess.
Movie Murmurs 
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