Paradigmatically-motivated discourse structure

Our second example considers a segment depicting three connected episodes taken from the made-for-TV cold war film The Day After (1983) directed by Nicolas Meyer; the corresponding transcript is shown in Figure 6.10, already overlayed with some of the structural information that we will derive more technically as we proceed.

The film concerns the events immediately leading up to and following a nuclear strike on and around Kansas City, focusing on the consequences of the strike for several small groups of individuals that survive the initial bomb bursts. It begins with various views around Eastern Kansas, often

taken from the air, while the credits are running. From around 445into

the film, these views become more focused on people and activities and the main characters of the film are gradually introduced. From the first of these scenes onwards, there is often a radio or television running in the background, where news reports are giving information about increasing East-West tensions. Sometimes the camera moves during scenes so that a television screen is made clearly visible, although not obviously central; what is being discussed in the news reports is always, however, clearly audible. This news is therefore placed within the unfolding story as a backgrounded, but persistent item to consider.

The individual groups of people and their locations are identified by superimposed captions. The film runs through several of these before reaching the segments that will concern us. Immediately before our seg-

Figure 6.10 Two (or three) connecting scenes from Nicolas Meyer’s made-for-TV film The Day After (1983, 00:20:00) 1 argument in progress 4 23.6s 8 31.7s Total time: 145.8s

Time spent in slow zoom: 72.2s Time spent otherwise: 73.6s 7 shots zooming; 4 shots otherwise

3 9s 5 8.6s 7 6s 9 2.8s slow zoom slow zoom slow zoom slow zoom 13.3s 2 5s 6 8.3s TV:"... to defuse..." 10 5.5s slow zoom slow zoom TV: baseball commentary

TV: "We interrupt this program to bring you a special report

blatant and unconscionable violation of international law." TV: "tomorrow Berlin

time , that's 6am Eastern Daylight Time, would be regarded as an act of war

was summoned to the White House three quarters of an hour ago.." TV: "Press secretary

David Townes reports that both sides

TV: "...this heightening crisis in Berlin." Mrs Oakes:

"My God it's 1962 all over again"

32s

slow

zoom

ments we see Dr. Oakes (Jason Robards) driving up to his house in Kansas City. The next shot is a close-up of a television, this time showing a West- ern, and introduces a scene inside the Oakes’ kitchen where Dr. Oakes and his wife are preparing a meal. After some familial small talk, the scene cuts to a close-up of the TV screen showing “Special Report” in large letters. They then listen to the latest reports of a blockade of West Berlin; the film again shows here close-ups of the TV.

The film then switches back to a location that the film’s introductory sequence has labelled as the “Dahlberg Farm” and the extract in Figure 6.10 that we will now analyse. The first part of the extract involves the father, Jim Dahlberg (John Cullum), watching a baseball game on TV down- stairs. In parallel to this, a noisy argument breaks out upstairs between the two Dahlberg daughters. In shot 1 of our figure we accordingly see Jim Dahlberg sitting on a sofa, occasionally looking upwards, and we hear the TV commentary of the baseball game. The first three columns of the transcription in the figure thus represent ‘upstairs’, where the argument unfolds, and ‘downstairs’, where the father is watching TV. At 00:20:15, we hear from the TV “We interrupt this programme” followed by news of the crisis.

The scene is then played out cutting between Jim Dahlberg sitting on the sofa and a straight-on view of the TV screen from what could be Dahlberg’s position. This entire sequence of shots of Dahlberg and shots of the TV is subjected to a continuous slow zoom. As we can see from the figure, each time we cut back to either the TV or Dahlberg we have moved closer, as if the zoom had continued across the time we were looking at the other figure. This structural unity is maintained despite the fact that, during what perceptually works as a ‘single zoom’, there are two quite lengthy shifts to the argument upstairs—in shot 4 lasting 23.6s and shot 8 lasting 31.7s.

The effect of this zoom is a stronger variant of that seen in our simple zooming examples in Chapter 1. Here we also see the segment’s highlight- ing of an emotional state: the fact that Jim Dahlberg is taking in the news and is being emotionally affected by it, presumably realising some of the potential consequences for himself and his family. There is also an obvious structural role being played by the zoom: just as was the case with Tom Cruise’s newspaper (cf. Figure 1.1), here the television report is similarly bound structurally into the segment since it is also subjected to the zoom. The zoom therefore holds some collection of elements of the segment together and distinguishes them from others. There are, for example, no such zooms with a static camera in the two interspersed shots 4 and 8 of our extract, nor in the shots preceding and following the segment. The film thus commits to this structural binding: the length of the individual shots renders the viewer’s perception of the commonality in the zoom effects to all intents and purposes unavoidable. This is, of course, strengthened still further by the continuous soundtrack of the TV commentary. We will

see the syntagmatic dependency effects of this constellation of technical features in a moment.

In shots 9–11, however, the complexity is built upon still further. Shot 10 is the final one of the sequence of views of the TV shown in the Dahlberg Farm downstairs scene. Shot 11 then switches to the bedroom in the Oakes’ house, depicting Dr. Oakes and his wife in bed watching the same TV news report; just visible in the lower left of the frame at the beginning of shot 11 is the side of the TV that they are apparently looking towards. And, throughout shot 11, the same slow zoom begun in shot 3 at the Dahlberg Farm continues, lasting a full 32s. We do not cut back and forth between the Oakes and the TV as before, but the film nevertheless commits to similarities drawn between the previous situation at the Dahlberg Farm and the situation at the Oakes house by means of the continuation of an identical technical effect.

The eleven shots making up the extract are all naturalistic and so there is no problem in taking them as reliable ‘cinematographic measurements’ of the material portrayed. The breaks between shots are also therefore all perceptually prominent with high contrast of visual features; we can assume that any reasonably attentive viewer will perceive these transitions and so has the interpretative task of relating the contributing elements discoursally. The fact that there are perceptible cuts means that we have a structured filmic document in the sense of Definitions 2.1 and 5.1 above. It is therefore appropriate to apply the interpretative schemes supplied by our paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of description. As before, we will show how the interaction of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes guides us to an analysis.

The first two shots show Jim Dahlberg and a TV set respectively. The second shot is clearly distinct from the first shot and so we are faced with a decision as to whether this is some independent shot (paratactic) or a dependent one (hypotactic). Several filmic features suggest that there is some relation between the two shots—for example, there is both the formal organisation of a point-of-view structure as described by Branigan (1986b) and a continuous sound track. Nevertheless, since the shot itself has no formal similarity with the preceding one, an interpretation of parataxis

(independence) is to be preferred.2 _{TheTAXISfeature selected from the}

network is therefore taken to be ‘paratactic’ with a corresponding structural realisation of [1 2] as given in the paradigmatic network as before. The syntagmatic dependency state reached with a viewer’s perception of the second shot is then simply:

shots: S1 S2

paratactic organisation: 1 2

2_{We will see in a moment that even had we selected a hypotactic relation, the continuing} dependency organisation would soon require a revision to a paratactic structure and so we can safely omit this complication here.

We then fill in the remaining features to be selected from the network as required.

For thePROJECTION subnetwork, there is indeed clear evidence that

the second shot depicts what the character in the first shot is paying at- tention to; this leads to selection of the feature ‘projecting’. There is no evidence against considering the shots to be diegetic and continuous in

time and space and so appropriate features from thePLANEsubnetwork

are continuous, contiguous, and connected—i.e., the region of watching the TV is connected to the region of the TV itself and the scenes play out in real-time. This then augments the bare syntagmatic dependency with further (defeasible) interpretations as before.

Moving on, the third shot then brings a visual variation of the first shot; this means that there is clearly a dependence relation between shots 1 and 3 and we need to start considering the hypotactic perspective also. If the second shot had also been dependent—for example, showing a close-up of some item in the first shot, as in the classical case illustrated in Figure 6.3 above, then we would have a ‘closed-off’ insert at this point. But this is not the case here and so there is already a strong indication that we may be dealing with the beginnings of a multitrack alternation. The syntactic dependency state reached is then:

shots: S1 S2 S3

paratactic organisation: 1 2 3

hypotactic organisation: α1 α2 β1

Here we can see that dependencies have begun to develop that span across shots that are not immediate neighbours. This means that a hypotactic per- spective should be taken into account in revealing the unfolding discourse organisation at this point.

For example, although there is no dependency relationship between shots S2 and S3, giving us a simple continuing paratactic relationship in the second line, we see in the third, hypotactic line that this is in fact depen- dent on something we have seen before, i.e., S1, by virtue of the hypotactic

relationship:α1→ β1. Since, as we proceed, we will be concerned primar-

ily with dependencies within the distinct chains begun as ‘1’, ‘2’ , etc. in the paratactic description, we will from now on omit this line and rely on the subscripts within the hypotactic classification as we suggested above to avoid redundancy.

Shot 4 then takes us to a different location, which due to the recognisable character we would presume to be upstairs in the same house (since we saw this character go upstairs in shot 1 of the fragment). However, this is not indicated directly in the shot itself and so we have again an independent shot—this one independent of both the preceding tracks. This gives us:

S1 S2 S3 S4

We use the vertical bar to denote the ‘most recently added’ shots as we proceed.

The other paradigmatic features follow again straightforwardly: the paratactic relation is more specifically a non-projecting transition with continuous time and contiguous, connected location—connected again because of the character we saw previously going upstairs and the fact that the main character has also clearly indicated that he can hear what is going on there.

Shot 5 then returns us to the segment formed from S1 and S3, again setting up shot 4 as a possible insert. In shots 6 and 7, however, there is a return to the TV and so the conditions for a syntagmatic multitrack clearly hold: S6 continues S2 and S5 continues S3. This then defeasibly revises the previous assumptions made so far—the TV as an insert is finally ruled out and the features paratactic internal contrast come to the fore. The relation between shot 5 and 6 is, again, projecting.

Shots 6 and 7 then continue the multitrack and so the three shots 5, 6 and 7 together continue the alternation between the main character and the television screen thus:

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7

α₁ α₂ β₁ α₃ γ₁ β₂ δ₁

Shot 8 then establishes the upstairs track as its own strand in what now becomes a three-way multitrack; and shots 9 and 10 complete the scene, with shot 10 again in a projecting relationship with shot 9. Shot 8, by picking up the upstairs scene again, shows an explicit dependency back to

shot 4{α3β3}. Shots 9 and 10 then add in the final two alternations of the

‘man watching news report’-multitrack giving the dependency state:

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 S10

α₁ α₂ β₁ α₃ γ₁ β₂ δ₁ β₃ ₁ γ₂

before the final shot 11 presents a completely different locale: the Oakes’ bedroom. Shot 11 therefore stands in no dependency relationship with the previous shots and is simply a paratactic continuation of the segment not yet classifiable more finely than having a different time, a different location, being diegetic and not a projection.

For comparison, the final dependency structure is also shown in graph- ical notation in Figure 6.11, which directly corresponds to the final form of the algebraic representation. This shows well how the regular grid-like structure of the ‘ideal’ multitrack illustrated in Figure 6.5 above can be

modified substantially in actual films. The regularn × m organisation of

the ideal case is here much more sparsely filled. This does not alter the account in any way however and, in Chapter 7 below, we will see how this graphical representation can be directly transformed into an explicit representation of syntagmatic alternation in film in general.