Monday, May 12, 2008
From Fox's "24" to Destiny's Child videos to Hollywood, the splintered aesthetic of multichannel storytelling -- once the province of the '60s avant-garde -- is suddenly everywhere.
May 14, 2002 | In Fox TV's cult-hit series "24" (which has its penultimate episode tonight and concludes next week), the screen serenely fractures into two and three frames against a black background. It does this for scene changes, for cellphone conversations, before and after commercial breaks and sometimes just to be beautiful. In doing so, "24" has quietly become the first prime-time dramatic series to employ multiple screens as an active storytelling technique: Playing federal agent Jack Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland drives through the San Fernando Valley, his ex-lover on one phone in one panel, his wife on another. Far and wide, close shot and medium shot, assassin and hero, mother and daughter; as many as six simultaneous images, often locked by the visuals of a ticking digital clock, keep the concurrent stories lines careering past us.
Splitting up the screen has slipped into movies and TV shows so deftly that almost no one has pointed out what a break it makes with the past. Except for a brief, astonishing moment in the late '60s, with movies like Richard Fleischer's "The Boston Strangler" and Norman Jewison's original version of "The Thomas Crown Affair" and, of course, "Woodstock," edited by the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker (among others, including a then-unknown Martin Scorsese), the history of film has been a history of the single screen: one image, one shared moment in time. An artist once insisted to me that you couldn't have it otherwise; the moment you break up that screen, you destroy the illusion that allows you to carry off your audience.
No longer. A new story form is here, where the splintered frame is not an aberration, not a trick, but an integral part of the story's syntax. Take the three-channel Destiny's Child video, "Emotions," directed by Francis Lawrence and released in August of last year. Each panel follows the three singers simultaneously through a triptych of frustrations and petty disappointments until they join, in the end, to comfort each other. In "Timecode," director Mike Figgis' four-quadrant take on Hollywood development hell, an ensemble of actors improv their way through 90 uncut minutes, divided solely by their placement in one of the four squares that are always on the screen. "The Laramie Project," a Sundance film (adapted from a New York play) that premiered this spring on HBO, uses an array of divisions to navigate through a complex series of flashbacks that tell the story of Matthew Shepard's death and its impact on the eponymous Wyoming city.
Director Stephen Hopkins says he first got the idea for "24" because "there were so many phone calls in the script that these people would never share any screen time together." A great fan of "The Boston Strangler," Hopkins had just had a two-channel independent film felled when he was approached by the producers of "24." He immediately saw that the show offered a unique opportunity to use the divided screen. "I loved the idea of showing what people were saying on the phone but also what they didn't want other people to see," he says.
A handful of filmmakers have been trying to divide up the single screen almost since film began. In 1927, Abel Gance made the three-screen silent classic "Napoleon," using a process he called "Polyvision." To those whom Polyvision confused, he wrote: "Do me the favor of believing that maybe your eyes do not yet have the visual education necessary for the reception of the first form of the music of light."
The music of light, he called it. Which is what you could call New York's Times Square, whose very buildings blink and shimmer. "It is the future of the cinema which is at stake," Gance continued. "It will become a universal language if you make the effort to try to read the new letters which, little by little, it adds to the alphabet of the eyes."
Could Gance have foreseen that the necessary visual education would come from our contemporary glimpse culture: computer screens, channel-zapping, video games, CNN crawls, JumboTrons, surveillance cameras, Web sites, screens in our stores, on our desktops and in our nurseries? The much-maligned shortened attention span is actually, as Gance predicted, an ability to navigate through simultaneous images. It's the alphabet of our eyes.
When so many images flicker at you, you see differently. You glance. You glimpse. Your eyes keep moving, and you use your peripheral vision, the kind of sight connected to fight or flight (and actually processed in a separate part of the brain than the direct gaze). You don't get the entire picture; you can't, and you learn to take this partial experience as being accurate enough.
Get Salon in your mailbox!