Loud Quiet Loud

I got a crazy thing for novelists who write like guitars. Hammering out, wailing, ripping out solos, then settling back into feedback or quiet strumming or long passages of melody or backing chords. A friend and I used to go nuts for Jim Thompson, trying to find his best possible phrasing, his sentences that kicked you so hard in the guts you had to reread them over and over just to feel their impact each time*. Don DeLillo is, for me, another writer who can lull you into the languor of some deep thought or exploration only to tear you out again with one quietly delivered, heartstopping, clipped phrase that stops you in your tracks.

I think this kind of writing (combined with a long life of listening to the loud quiet loud rhythms of indie and punk) has shaped, to many extents, the kind of editing or film forms that I like. 'Pain is just another form of information' is a sentence that arrested me while reading DeLillo's 'Underworld'. The 'Pain' comes out of the preceding paragraph like a jumpcut, then there is the slow resound of the rest of the sentence that, at first seems like a glib exercise in style and cleverness, but slowly compounds into an idea you can't shake. This, to me, is like a great edit, that throws you hurtling into the next idea, but then follows any visual violence with languour to allow the severance to settle once again. DeLillo even alludes to the visual nature of his language when he says "I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like..." ('Conversations with DeLillo', Thomas DePietro) Or this:

"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. One one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence."

This approach makes sense to me because as much as there is a grammar of editing, a logic of information, of space and spatial relationship, there should also, always be the pleasure of the way an edit is assembled as a sequence itself. It's rhythm, it's inversions and trickery, and it's overall lilt and lean that encapsulates the indefinable heart of the film. Usually, when I have a 'swoon' moment when watching a film, it is usually because of exactly this kind of thing. When the edit, the assemblage jolts you for a moment, or gives you a moment of pure visual music or pleasure; it can be abrupt or gentle but just enough to startle you into enjoying the way things go.

Edit like words, like language:



Although understated, this relationship-severing edit in this clip from 'Climates', when seen in the context of the meditative pace of this film, was jarring and brilliant. For a moment the world of the film condenses and, in doing so, expands immeasurably. Swoon.

Or the percussive awesomeness (that's the correct film theory terminology) of this well known scene from Tran Anh Hung's 'Xich Lo' (apologies for terrible compression and frame size but you take what you can get on youtube)...



Or the undulating loud, quiet, loud of the riverside house party in Lynne Ramsay's 'Morvern Callar' as you fall in and out of intensity. Severing our intimate perspective, for a moment, the film takes us out to a worker's barge who, by torchlight, passes by Morvern standing by the river, like an apparition, like a ghost, who, slowly raises her skirt then lowers it again, before throwing you back into the scene with a smashing bottle. Swoon.



Some editors strive for invisibility but I'll always be a front row audience for a bit of editorial showboating that reveals the mechanics of film, that riffs on a moment or a piece of action and lets the rhythm do the work.

* We finally had no choice but to settle on the final chapters of 'Savage Night'. Chapter Twenty Six concludes with the sentence "I went over backwards, then down and down and down, turning so slowly in the air it seemed that I was hardly moving. I didn't know it when I hit the bottom. I was simply there, looking up as I'd been looking on the way down. Then there was a slam and a click, and she was gone." before hurtling straight into the final two chapters:

"TWENTY SEVEN

   The darkness and myself. Everything else was gone. And the little that was left of me was going, faster and faster.

   I began to crawl. I crawled and rolled and inched my way along; and I missed it the first time - the place I was looking for.

   I circled the room twice before I found it, and there was hardly any of me then but it was enough. I crawled up over the pile of bottles, and went crashing down the other side.

  And he was there, of course.

   Death was there.

TWENTY EIGHT

   And he smelled good."