Communication in Cinema and Cinema as Communication

Michael Sherman

With a bevy of digital tools in the form of increasingly small cameras, fast computers, and robust software programs, filmmakers have never had more freedom and power than they currently do. Yet, these affordances should not be considered ends unto themselves. This paper will examine how these affordances self-reflexively address the socially and psychologically draining effects of the tools themselves.

Predating the origins of cinema to one of the medium’s forebears, theater, the act of communication between actors has been central to how audiences perceive not just the performance but also the narrative. Still, communication being an integral component of acting was not inherently pertinent to the early history of film as it was not yet evident that acting would necessarily be a part of the cinematic experience. In spite of the link between these two mediums not being connected intrinsically, cinema is a communicative medium of ideas per se. These unique properties that emerge in cinema are entirely facilitated by the technological innovations dubiously attributed to Muybridge, Edison, the Lumiere’s, and others. Occurring concurrently with technological advances in the moving image, a number of inventors and groups begin working on building another means of communication, the telephone. Obviously, this advent was more invested in solving the pragmatic problem of  transmitting auditory messages over long distances. Although a cursory reading of history would present these two events as only being tangentially related, Tom Gunning’s revelatory analysis in the seminal text The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde effectively demonstrates that these two advancements offered the same novelty to contemporary consumers, technological fascination. But the intersection of interest in these two nascent forms only continues to provide more intrigue as time progresses after 1906 and narrative cinema becomes the primary output of the film industry. Even at this preliminary stage, phones were appearing within the stories being told by filmmakers. One of the eminent silent comedians of this period, Buster Keaton, produced an example of this phenomenon with The Cameraman (Keaton, 1928). In Keaton’s Cameraman, he uses the telephone as a vehicle for telling jokes with physical comedy. Examining where this humor comes from offers an insight into the budding relationship that people were having with the technology. Knowing that this type of analysis yields these insights, this paper will perform that level of analysis on modern depictions of technological communication in film. Building further on this, rather than focusing on the technological affordances on an abstract level like Gunning with the idea of cinema of attractions, this paper will focus on the narrative possibilities afforded by depicting phones and other graphical user interfaces in film.

As advancements in digital technology have progressed into the 21st century, cinema has kept pace conspicuously with the advantages of digital technology allowing for Computer Generated Images, the more widely available distribution of film, and the democratization of the filmmaking process. More subtly though, the conveniences of digital technology have also continued to progress in not just how characters connect on screen, but also how a director communicates a narrative to her audience. Using a style of Classical Hollywood continuity editing and computer screen capture technology, directors now are able to use the digital tools not merely for pragmatic purposes, but for the narratological affordance of communicating the isolation and anxiety inherent to computing devices.

A Desktop Video Essay on Desktop Films

In the viral video essay from Every Frame a Painting, A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film, Tony Zhao dedicates the first half of the essay on explaining how the technique of depicting texting in film and TV has matured in recent years. Examining the technology from a historical perspective, Zhao lists flawed approaches to showing text, primarily being a shot-reverse-shot of a character reading and typing text. Zhao immediately dismisses this form as “boring.” To avoid this problem, directors and screenwriters have constructed convoluted narrative structures where characters provide uninspired explanations for why they need to read the text to the camera or that they simply do not have cell phone service. Fortunately for Zhao, a new convention has been established by doing simple single shots with the text overlaid into the environment. As Zhao understands it, the cinematographic technique has been established for three reasons: cheapness, efficiency, and elegance. In regards to cheapness, Zhao reasons that it is cheaper to do post-production editing than dozens of close-ups of phones. For efficiency, Zhao means that completing shot-reverse-shots require vast amounts to show the same amount of visual information relative to being able to see both the text and character reaction in a single frame with the alternative. Lastly, Zhao asserts that the onscreen text message is a subjectively beautiful aesthetic choice.

In this analysis, Zhao only makes one arguable claim: that the traditional way of shooting texting is boring and inefficient. In regards to his other claims, they are either objectively true or a value judgment. In any case, with the examples Zhao uses to prove his claim, I do not disagree that they would be more visually engaging had they been shot the way he suggests. However, the problem in his claim exists for the very same reason that he bemoans films with unlikely and unnatural expository explanations for not using texting. Like these dated films, Zhao’s examples of shot-reverse-shot, and for that matter the onscreen text examples, fail to integrate texting as narrative tool for developing character. Rather, every film example merely views onscreen texting as a “solution to a particular stumbling block.” (0:19-21) The larger and more imperative problem that Zhao hints at but never reaches is whether films are looking at presenting texts as more than just a problem. Building on that thought, what does it look like when a film decides to use texting as a narrative tool, and what effect would it have on the viewer?

Assayas’ Personal Shopper

One recently released film that attempted to answer the aforementioned questions was Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016). This genre-defying film functions on several different and interacting planes: supernatural ghost, stalker, spiritual, job disillusionment, grief, etc. To briefly summarize the plot, Maureen Cartwright (Kristen Stewart) is a personal shopper who travels around European cities (someone who buys clothes, accessories, and jewelry for a wealthy celebrity) for her boss, Kyra. The film opens with Maureen grieving the loss of her twin brother, Lewis, who shared a genetic heart defect. Confused about her identity and existence, Maureen begins the film trying to find a sign of contact from her brother, as they made a pact that if one died the other would attempt to contact them from the afterlife using their abilities as mediums. (28:00) After making contact with a phantom who releases some supernatural liquid when she is attempting to contact her brother (36:49), Maureen flees her brother’s mansion, and the screen transitions to black. At this point, the film begins presenting the viewer with the pertinent information for this essay: Maureen begins to communicate with some unnamed, ambiguous spirit through text message for (38:35). Given the events that have taken place so far, the viewer can understand that these messages may be from her brother. From the cut to black to Maureen riding on her motorcycle, the viewer is unsure where she is going. So, when she passes through the security checkpoint, the mysterious text saying that she is going to London simultaneously functions to further establish the horror verisimilitude while also serving as exposition for the viewer, who does not yet know where she is going. Additionally, it also serves to transition into a new stalker storyline that alludes to a sort of Hitchcockian voyeurism. This transition is made reflexive for the viewer, (49:07) when the unknown spirit or person asks Maureen what she finds unsettling, and she responds with “Horror Movies.” Then after acknowledging her fear of horror movies, the film itself employs the most tired trope of the horror genre, the jump scare. (49:40)

Societal Anxiety in Shopper and Beyond

While the conversation with the ghost continues on through the rest of the film, this ten-minute snapshot of the runtime provides the viewer with all they need to know in regards to why the decision was made to use shot-reverse shot as opposed to onscreen text. Over the course of this ten-minute sequence, Maureen spends most of this time in highly-populated public spaces, yet the painful feeling of her isolation is almost unbearable for the viewer. In this sequence, she talks to one person in real life and then she messages on her phone. In changing the texting mechanism to on screen text, there would be more efficient cutting. Yet, the viewer would lose the intense isolation that is brought on by the constant placement of Maureen in single, medium close-up shots. While one might be inclined to think that the shot reverse shot establishes the dynamic of a conversation, creating less isolation. In this case, it has the opposite effect. For the viewer, watching this sequence feels as if Maureen is having a one-sided conversation that, understood within the context of her deteriorating mental state, may or may not even be happening within the realm of the film’s reality. Thus, Maureen’s confused mental state, embodied by her visible shaking, in combination with the incorporeal nature of the messages have the effect of inducing and amplifying the anxiety that plagues smartphone users in the 21st century. In Neta Alexander’s Rage Against the Machine, she cites a New York Times article that hints at this very feeling: “As described in a New York Times article from August 2014, this is a new source of anxiety and obsession torturing users of chat software and instant messages. In the alarming account of the American writer Maryam Abolfazli, ‘The three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives. It’s the modern-day version of watching paint dry, except you might be broken up with by the time the dots deliver.’” (Alexander, 22)

Another film that accomplishes this same aforementioned effect is the 2013 short film, Noah. In this 17-minute desktop film, the eponymous protagonist is shown on two separate occasions using his computer. One major plot point of each use is Noah’s online video calls, the first of which is the setup for the rest of the plot of the film. In this first Skype call with his girlfriend, Noah is abruptly cut off by a glitch, which appears to be the result of buffering issues. Then, Noah’s rage leads to the paranoia, which is stoked by his friend on Facebook Messenger. Ultimately, the paranoia and passiveness is further agitated by his girlfriend’s seemingly flirty messages with another guy, which leads him to preemptively change her relationship status to ‘single.’ Understood in the context of Rage Against the Machine, Noah’s emotional response is explained by the following quote: “A possible answer is that the delay caused by buffering produces a nascent manifestation of masochism: viewers might feel rage against the machine, but they will rarely unleash their aggression on their lovable electronic Chihuahuas by breaking down their screens, hardware, or branded carriers. According to Bogost, since Steve Jobs’s products convinced us that gadgets are an extension of the self, “to do violence to them amounts to self-harm rather than catharsis.” This does not mean that the anger and frustration disappear; they are simply being redirected toward ourselves (or other unfortunate souls in our surroundings).” (Alexander, 20)

Conclusion 

With the preliminary history of the medium and contextualized analysis of Tony Zhao’s in A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film, sufficient grounding was given to understand the proceeding argument on the narrative consequences of depicting texting, and more broadly Graphical User Interfaces, in film. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of these types of depictions in Personal Shopper and Noah reflects a simultaneously profound and banal realization: the technology that permits the world and cinema to exist in its current state is also making the individuals who live in it more anxious and less connected to one another.

Works Cited

Alexander, Neta. “Rage against the Machine: Buffering, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety in the Age of Connected Viewing.” Cinema Journal, vol. 56, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–24., doi:10.1353/cj.2017.0000.

Zhao, Tony. “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film.” YouTube, YouTube, uploaded by EveryFrameAPainting, 15 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFfq2zblGXw.

Cederberg, Patrick, director. Noah (2013). Vimeo, 17 July 2021, vimeo.com/65935223.

Personal Shopper. Directed by Olivier Assayas, CG Cinéma, 2016

Bogost, Ian. The Geek’s Chihuahua : Living with Apple. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

“Bubbles Carry A Lot Of Weight (Published 2014)”. Nytimes.Com, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/fashion/texting-anxiety-caused-by-little-bubbles.html. Accessed 21 July 2021.