"Even more eagerly than
The Aviator,
The Departed embraces what I’ve called “intensified continuity.” (See
Film Art Chapter 6 and
The Way Hollywood Tells It, Part 2) In this style, conversation scenes feature very little movement of actors around the set. Performers sit or stand and deliver their lines in isolated shots (singles) or over-the-shoulder (OTS) setups. The visual stasis is compensated for by lots of cutting, camera movements, and tight close-ups.
The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning these ASLs:
Mean Streets 7.7 seconds
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 8.0 seconds
Taxi Driver 7.3 seconds
King of Comedy 7.7 seconds
Gangs of New York 6.7 seconds
The Aviator 3.6 seconds
Like his contemporaries, Scorsese has succumbed to the fast-cut, hyper-close style that has made our movies so pictorially routine, however well-suited they may be for display on TV monitors and computer screens and iPods. In 1990 he seems to have realized that he needed to pick up the pace. Of
GoodFellas (ASL 6.7 seconds) he remarked: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [
GoodFellas] is sort of my version of MTV. . . but even that’s old-fashioned” (
The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 152). (For more on measuring ASLs, see the Cinemetrics site
here.)
Speaking of editing: It’s blasphemy, but I’ve been long convinced that Scorsese’s films aren’t particularly well-edited. Look at any conversation scene, particularly the OTS passages, and you’ll see blatant mismatches of position, eyeline, and gesture. Spoons, hands, and cigarettes jump around spasmodically. In
The Departed, Alec Baldwin somehow loses his beer can in a reverse shot, and in the swanky restaurant, it’s hard to determine if there are one or two of those towering chocolate desserts on the table.
This may seem picky, but craft competence is not for nothing. Current reliance on tightly framed faces tends to sacrifice any sense of the specifics of a place. In most scenes, actors are so overcloseupped that little space is left for geography, even the mundane layout of a police station. Choppy cutting also subtly jars our sense of a smooth performance. Why can’t our directors sustain a fixed two-shot of the principals and let the actors carry the scene–not just with the lines they say but with the way they hold their bodies and move their hands and employ props? Scorsese, though always a heavy shot/reverse-shot user, held full shots to greater effect in earlier movies."
THE DEPARTED: No departure
Estas reflexiones me parecen muy interesantes. Más allá de cierto academicismo que le podamos achacar a David Bordwell, creo que acierta en muchos de sus comentarios. El tema del ASL (Average Shot Length) es clave para entender la evolución del cine industrial americano en las últimas décadas. El problema no es tanto que los planos cada vez duren menos, sino que la puesta en escena ha perdido parte de su rigor.
El gran problema del cine es dónde y por qué comenzar un plano y dónde y por qué terminarlo (Jean-Luc Godard).
El director francés resumía en esta frase el dilema que muchas películas evitan plantearse. Yo admiro mucho la trayectoria de Martin Scorsese hasta Casino, que me parece su última gran película. Sin embargo, lo que viene a continuación en su filmografía me crea muchas dudas. Tomemos por ejemplo
The Departed, una película que tuvo muchísimos problemas durante su rodaje, donde creo que Scorsese no tuvo ningún rigor a la hora de rodar y luego se tuvo que arreglar todo en el montaje. Es justo lo que criticaba Godard de Cecil B. DeMille, que según él se limitaba a rodar una innumerable cantidad de material para luego intentar montarlo todo de una manera más o menos académica.
"
Not to compare “The Wolf of Wall Street” to another Scorsese film, but the way he used music — stopping songs off in the middle with jarring cuts — reminded me of “The Departed.”
When Marty scores a film himself, he’s just a genius at it. He has incredible instinct to putting music to film. The great thing that he was doing here, because of the jagged nature of the movie, was that he could do anything. We didn’t have to fade music out, we could just cut it out. Normally, you would fade that music down to make the transition, but Marty said, “No, no, just cut it off.” It’s representative of the craziness of their lives. They’re bombed out of their minds all the time! There was a few things he did with the guitar licks. He said to our sound mixer: I want you to zip up on that and down again. It was noted by two reviewers that there were sound glitches in the film. They weren’t glitches. They were deliberate. Marty just decided to shove up the guitar lick.
About that kind of deliberate “mistake”: I love the scene where Jordan’s first wife confronts him about Naomi, his mistress. He gets out of the limo, which then disappears in wide shot from across the street. Then the limo comes back again when the action returns to the sidewalk. It reminded me of the scene in “Goodfellas” when Paulie is talking to the owner of the Bamboo Lounge and he’s smoking a cigar ...
Oh, yes. The famous cigar [long sigh].
Well, you’re doing those on purpose, right?
Well, no, not on purpose in that case. The lack of continuity in a movie like this really doesn’t matter. It does matter in a movie like “Age of Innocence.” There, it’s very important. Not here. We don’t worry about continuity because when we’re doing so many improvs it’s better to get the laugh. It’s better to get the great lines even if they’re in the wrong part of the room. If you look at the great classic films that influenced Marty so much, there are continuity errors all over the place. But who cares? It’s ridiculous. People can now stop and say, “Oh, wait, there’s an error here!” Who cares? [laughs] I remember at the Oscars in 1991, “Dances with Wolves” won that year, and we were nominated for “Goodfellas.” One of my peers said to me, “Why’d you make that bad jump cut?” I said, “Which one? We had about 20 in the film!” He was really upset about it."
Editor Thelma Schoonmaker On 'Wolf Of Wall Street,' Burning 'Goodfellas' & Continuity Errors | HuffPost
Todos sabemos que Scorsese lleva ignorando el raccord durante casi toda su carrera, pero lo que nos encontramos en la última parte de su filmografía es algo bien diferente a lo que el director acostumbraba hacer cuando empezaba a dirigir películas. Se trata de usar el montaje como técnica de ocultación o remiendo. Thelma Schoonmaker argumenta que incluso en una película tan admirada como
The Red Shoes se encuentran grandes fallos de raccord. Recordemos que esa película está dirigida por Michael Powell y Emeric Pressburger. Powell era el marido de Schoonmaker.
A mí los fallos de raccord me importan muy poco. Lo que sí encuentro molesto es utilizar el montaje para enmascarar una total falta de rigor. Cuando Godard llenaba sus primeras películas de fallos de raccord, todo iba en una dirección muy precisa. Había una intención clara y una puesta en duda de muchas posturas académicas. En Godard no hay remiendos. En las últimas películas de Scorsese, sí.
De todas maneras, lo realmente preocupante es cómo se ha ido perdiendo una manera de hacer películas y de construir una puesta en escena con rigor. Se ha extendido el automatismo y el descuido. Alguien como Quentin Tarantino sabe muy bien esto y lo ha comentado en muchas ocasiones. Hay que agradecer esos casos aislados dentro de la industria que circulan por un carril diferente. Paul Thomas Anderson es un buen ejemplo de ello. En sus últimas películas el tiempo de los planos no solo no ha disminuido, sino que ha aumentado. Y su cine no podría estar más lejos de los automatismos típicos del momento presente. Creo que Brian De Palma sería otro buen ejemplo: él jamás permitiría un desastre de rodaje y montaje tan llamativo como el que vemos en
The Departed. Incluso Francis Ford Coppola camina en una dirección distinta a la de las modas dominantes.
Como digo, lo realmente preocupante es la falta de rigor y no tanto el respeto por el raccord. No me importa que las cosas desaparezcan ni que las acciones se repitan, como cuando Frank Costello le rompe la muñeca a Billy Costigan y tira el dinero al billar en un plano mientras que en el siguiente plano el dinero sigue en su mano derecha y la acción de arrojarlo al billar vuelve a suceder. Aun así, hay algunos cortes realmente grotescos en
The Departed.
En una película tan alabada como
The Wolf of Wall Street ocurre lo mismo, aunque quizá en menor medida. Y tampoco me parece que Scorsese quiera romper la continuidad, sino que intenta de manera desesperada obtenerla pero no lo consigue. Hay una tensión entre el academicismo y el descuido en el montaje que a mí me resulta incómoda. No creo que se trate de una película iconoclasta en ningún sentido. Podemos encontrar innumerables fallos de raccord que hasta resultan divertidos, como un vaso lleno que Jonah Hill derrama al suelo por error y que vuelve a aparecer o desaparecer dependiendo de si cambiamos a un plano general o medio. Esto es solo un ejemplo. Como digo, la película está plagada de fallos de raccord que me dan la sensación de ser remiendos. Hasta nos podemos encontrar retoques digitales desconcertantes. Atención a cómo la mujer que entra en el encuadre por la izquierda se desvanece y a cómo Leonardo DiCaprio ya ni sale del coche, simplemente se materializa de la nada en la acera.
Afortunadamente, creo que
Silence es una película muy estimable donde Scorsese intenta hacer las cosas con un poco más de rigor.
"Silence is astonishing. Its pace is long and languid. When it comes to the pace of a film like this, how much is dictated by the director, and how much is dictated by the editor?
Well, the movie dictates the two of us. We knew the movie was going to be the real problem. How do you do it without becoming boring, right? We wanted it to be very different from the crash-bang films being made today. He wanted the film to be meditative. He wanted people to engage with it, and slow down, and think and feel. And so we were both very of a single mind about how to approach it. But we had to keep cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and see how far we could go with slowness or pace. And that was our big dilemma in the whole movie.
And also he wanted a score that was hardly audible. He was determined not to have a score tell people what to think. He was adamant about that from day one. And, fortunately we worked with some musicians who understood that. So the music is coming out of cicadas, or the wind, or waves. And it’s very low. There are a few times when you hear something loud, but mainly very low. Because he wanted people to
feel the movie, not be told what to think. Which is often what a score does, of course. Sometimes you
want it to do that. But not here. And I thought that was so brave. So we weren’t relaying on a score. We normally do have a very big score. And that was a whole new way to approach things. So it was fascinating to be given
yet another challenge by him. Each movie is a different challenge, and this was a big one!
But it was so great. And I loved living in that world. A world of spirituality. Which is something you don’t see much of. And I miss it. I wish I was still working on it, frankly."
Interview | Thelma Schoonmaker, 'Silence' and New Challenges
Thelma Schoonmaker: "Editing Scorsese is like working with Picasso"
Si os interesa, aquí tenéis una serie de reflexiones de Tarantino sobre la decadencia de la realización multicámara y la falta de rigor de la industria en el momento presente. La entrevista se realizó con el motivo del estreno de
Django Unchained. Según Tarantino, cada vez que estrena una película nueva, la industria se ha alejado todavía más de su modo de hacer cine.