Seeing What We Don't Want to See

Films went through a huge transformation throughout history. When films first appeared, they were nothing but short clips of people moving. But this amazed everyone! No one could believe that the static images that they were seeing were no moving. After D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, films began to take a different form. Instead of short clips, films were now feature length and expressive. They were expressive in the way that they were trying to evoke an emotion in an audience. Films began to create worlds instead of just replicating the world we already lived in. The most important figure of this time in film was Sergei Eisenstein, who saw the true potential of film as a form of expressive art. Eisenstein’s main method was to use a specific type of editing, known as montage, to evoke an emotion in the audience. As he saw it, combining two shots would cause the audience to think about what they saw and force them to think about how the two shots were interrelated. Eisenstein’s masterpiece was the film The Battle Ship Potemkin, a film that tried to evoke the feeling of revolution in the audience. Eisenstein’s had perfected the method of montage, which is now used in all types of moving image media we use today. All the highlight shows we watch, we have Eisenstein to thank for. All the time we spend getting riled up by a compilation big hits in football and amazing goals is all thanks to him.
However, as film kept developing, the exclusive use of montage in films was disappearing. Now the technique of mise-en-scéne was being used in films. This technique dealt with how the objects in a shot were located. This strayed away from the thought that just editing shots together was enough to evoke emotion from an audience.


We think of language as just words assigned to objects that allow us to communicate amongst ourselves. Films also have the same basic concept of language. It, however, uses it much differently. The different techniques, such as montage and mise-en-scéne, are what films uses as language to tell the audience a narrative. Icons and objects in shots are also used to tell the audience things. Icons have connotations attached to them. The symbols of superheroes, such as the symbols of Superman and Batman, are automatically recognized by an audience as belonging to someone. Directors know this, so putting something on the screen that has an obvious connotation would obviously evoke a bad response from the audience.
Even though every film uses different techniques to try to tell a story, films have one thing in common: the presence of a narrative of some sort. Every single film has characters that progress that progress the story. There is always some sort of conflict and then resolution. But what if we watch a film that does not have closure or some sort of resolution at the end. How are we supposed to feel? We are used to the language of film and are completely thrown off by anything that strays away from this. The film Cache by Michael Haneke does just this. Shots in this are completely different than what we are used to. Some of the shots are much longer than what we are used to. While watching the film, you are looking at all the empty space on the screen, waiting for something to happen. However, when you realize that what you were watching was nothing but a very long establishing shot followed by a tracking shot, you feel a bit cheated. We, as a society, have become to accustomed to quick cuts that lead to immediate action. When something different is thrown at us, we don’t know how to react at all.