Letters and Literacy in Hollywood Film

E. Gallafent

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781349437818
  9781137022189
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137022196
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

We are so used to images of words that it is easy to ignore the different ways in which they work in films. This book explores both the letters that come in the post and the many other kinds that are offered to us on screen.

1

Introduction: Letter from an Unknown Woman

To read the information as transparent is not to read it.

Andrew Britton, Britton on Film¹

Seeing words on screen

Most of this book consists of close readings of four films, and I begin by outlining my approach to them. The object that the first word of my title brings to mind may well be the package that comes in the mail or, in grander contexts, the missive, the epistle. I look at how such letters are treated in the films, but I shall be engaging with other meanings of the word as well. ‘Letters’ of course also means the characters of the alphabet, and the use of the word extends to refer to anything written or printed in letters, any text, sign or inscription. I approach the films via the meanings I derive from the treatment of words we see in the course of their narratives, those written by hand or printed or incised. I also look at particular moments in which words are dramatised: they are being read out, or we watch them being written or both of these things happen in succession.

In undertaking this study I am conscious of the work that has been done in the larger area of the thematics of reading and writing, which has unsurprisingly been a rich field of enquiry in areas other than cinema. I am in debt to literary scholarship, and to those writers who have looked at the presence of the sign and the word in American culture.² Most specifically, in that it has given me an understanding of the ways in which some of these issues can be treated in both American painting and American prose, I wish to acknowledge Michael Fried’s inspiring studies of Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane.³ In terms of film scholarship, much of the work that has been done on writing in cinema has had other kinds of words in mind – the screenplay, film criticism, adaptation – but I have profited by work on words in photographic images and by work that has laid out the larger field of which I am exploring a specific corner.⁴

One cautious response to this project may be to point to the frequency of the phenomenon: huge numbers of films, Hollywood and otherwise, could be said to present us with words to read. While this is certainly true, it is also the case that not all films include such words. We might initially think of this as having to do with settings. A movie that takes us to a distant tropical island, especially perhaps one set in the past, may well find fewer occasions to show us words on screen than one set in the contemporary city.⁵ Even so, there are not many settings that render the use of written words impossible, as opposed to unlikely or unnecessary. But there are perhaps a surprising number of film narratives which are set in contexts in which words could plausibly appear on screen, but where they do not do so to any significant extent. Into this category fall many films in which the words we see are mostly confined to what we can think of as elements of set-dressing: names on shop fronts, advertisements, signs giving instructions or indicating place names.

Part of what is at issue here is the ordinariness of the appearance of words in plain view on screen. Such a device does not have to be marked or intrusive. Leaving aside for the moment other forms of the appearance of words, we might say that seeing characters reading or writing is no more remarkable than seeing them walking, laughing, fighting or driving a car. These actions are not what we remember movies for (or not quite, as remarkable instances of these might stick in our minds, say Fred Astaire walking down a pavement or Rita Hayworth’s laughter).

I do not wish to argue against this unremarkable quality. Clearly large numbers of uses of words on screen are little more than a practical film maker’s tool, telling us where we are or what building this is, or written words used to convey a particular point in the progression of a narrative. Beyond establishing that we are looking at a literate world (and this point is so implicit that usually we are not being asked to pay any attention to it) such moments may have nothing much that is memorable to say about reading, writing or print. We find this in many films where the use of words on screen is occasional, but it can remain so even if their use is relatively extensive. For example, My Cousin Rachel, the 1952 film version of Daphne du Maurier’s novel, directed by Henry Koster and written by Nunnally Johnson: the plot involves the sending and reception of a number of letters which we see on screen, but I would be hard to persuade that they do more than further the plot, or that the film has a larger point to make about how words matter to the characters or to us, by virtue of their form rather than their content. The film is no worse for this – it simply has a different project.

In selecting the films that I am studying, I have been drawn to work which does have ambitions to make us think about the significance of the words on the screen. I do not claim that these films make the use of their words strange or extraordinary. Rather they are mostly at pains to present the activities of reading or writing, and the words they give rise to, as routine products of the worlds in which they are set. However, they concentrate more often and more intently on the realm of the written, and this concentration prompts me to make an argument about how words figure as part of the lives of their characters.

In viewing the films from this single perspective, which only one of the four – Stephen Daldry’s The Reader – seems explicitly to invite in its title, I have been forced to leave aside many elements that would be more prominent in a differently focused account of the film, issues to do with performance in particular. This is probably less damaging to some films than others. My hope is that the readings will expose to view significant aspects that escape notice by their being so bound up in what we take as the commonplace qualities of words and our relations to them. Words are generally all around us: that is why we do not see them.

My argument so far has already implied a distinction between these words and film’s long-standing interest in that other form of writing that we are used to seeing on screen, words used to support the representation of the literary author. This too has its long history, one marked not by the idea of commonness and connection to us, but generally by the idea of the extraordinary, of the genius and of separation from our own possession of words.⁶ While quotation, which we might call what ordinary people do with the words of genius, is important to several of the films that I consider, the figure of the author is always absent.

As I have suggested, the appearance of words on screen carries the buried implication of a literate world. The implication affects both what we assume about the characters (and the actors) on the screen and how we see ourselves, the audience. There are actions that we can directly share with the characters we are watching, such as reading – in the moments when we read as they read. Then there are actions that we watch in the light of shared education, such as writing: we do not write as they write, but we watch as writers, knowing that we have this in common with them. That the ability to read and write is so naturalised suggests the dramatic possibilities of the opposite case, that of the figure who can do neither. In two of my films there is an initially illiterate character. Such figures and their stories have, as we shall see, something to say about how our relation to the written connects us to the world, and what the limits of this are. In these cases the revelation of the character’s illiteracy comes as a something of a shock, suggesting the possibility that one figure has made a mistaken reading of another.

One element of words on screen which this study will not look at is the data with which films frequently begin and almost invariably end: opening titles and end credits. Some scholarly attention has been understandably paid to these and there are occasions where the treatment of titles clearly relates to the themes of the movie.⁷ But there is no connection that demands discussion in a large majority of cases, including those to follow here.

The look and sound of reading

So far I have tended to lump together a number of subjects and actions: the figure of the reader, the figure of the writer, the acts of reading and of writing. But most times they tend to come to us separately. This is largely the result of the way the camera captures the physical spaces in which the act of writing takes place. It has been noted by art historians discussing the representation of letter writing in painting that it commonly involves two planes, the horizontal plane of a desk or table on which the paper rests and the vertical plane in which we view the writer, that is, the plane in which we commonly view a painting or an image on the cinema screen.⁸ This division is addressed in a solution to the problem that is specifically cinematic in that it takes up the opportunity of offering a sequence of different images, in a way that a single painting, of course, cannot. In this solution the act of writing, that is the sight of written words on the page, is photographed from above, so that we look down on the horizontal plane in which words appear on paper. This is either with a point of view shot that mimics the eye line of the writer or a shot which suggests that the camera is standing behind and bending over the writer, sometimes so obviously that a lock of hair or part of a shoulder appears in the image. This will do for the words, but of course we cannot see the face of the writer. So such a shot, or shots, is coupled with an image of the writer herself or himself, viewed in a vertical plane from the front or the side. This shot might take in an inclined head and a moving pen, but it will not be possible simultaneously to read the words on the page.⁹

Voice offers another way of tackling this issue. There are cases where a narrative justifies a letter being read out loud, but we also commonly hear letters voiced purely for our benefit, when there is no other party present and when the image is such that we cannot simultaneously read the words off the page. These moments may be used to reinforce a preceding or subsequent image of the words themselves, so as to underline their significance, in effect asking us to absorb them twice. For the sake of simplicity of description, let us take the case of a letter being written by a woman to a man. A common convention is the shot of the writer viewed in the vertical plane and accompanied by voice-over in which we hear her speak the words that she is writing, not so much reading them as voicing their composition. This can be followed by a shot of the manuscript, so that we are given a chance to do our own reading, to repeat to ourselves the words we have just heard.¹⁰ A related convention operates when we see a letter received, where two possibilities are open. There is the voice-over which speaks the letter in the voice of the sender (we could say that he imagines her composing the words or that he reads them in her imagined voice). The alternative is voice-over by the recipient (where we could say that the film dramatises the recipient’s ordinarily silent act of reading the letter to himself).

These devices address the problem and exploit the opportunities of the visual separation of clear views of the writer and his/her words. They also help to deal with another problem too, which is that the act of writing by hand is almost invariably slower in practice than our ability to read the script, so that a danger in watching writing happen on screen for any extended amount of time is that it will strain the patience of a viewer.¹¹ The pace is too leisurely for our reading eyes, whereas a voice-over can deliver words faster than we might expect a writer to be able to write. When shooting writing on the page, this problem can be ameliorated by minimally increasing the speed with which the words appear to be written. Particularly in classical Hollywood film, the impression is sometimes given of writing so neat and rapid as to be somehow unlikely.¹² Another technique is a camera movement which enables the eye to scroll down the page at reading speed, coming to rest on a pen writing the final few words of a sentence.¹³

Qualities: Absence, fragility, endurance

Films using words on screen ambitiously can present us, then, with a counterpoint of writing and reading, of the different voices of various readers and, of course, our own silent voices as we read words presented to us. And in some cases these can be contrasted with the use of voice in the form of the telling of a tale, where what is happening is not reading and may never lead to writing. This last may seem to be remote from writing, but it is important, as we shall see.

Absences and omissions present further possibilities for expression. Crucial parts of the meanings of my films turn on refusing, or withdrawing from, the world of words. While the case of illiteracy is a specific and different one, films dealing with words on screen repeatedly offer us moments which invoke the subject through negatives. Characters refuse to read, or to write, or both. Words are struck out, torn up or otherwise discarded, erased, lost, stolen, buried, burned, shot to pieces. They can also be significantly missing, blank spaces appearing where our expectations tell us that words ought to be or might once have been.

Words can be as innately fragile as the material they are written on or as temporary as the medium used for writing. They can last as long (say) as it takes the tide to come in and wash away letters in the sand or for someone to wipe away condensation on a window. Or they can be deliberately or accidentally enduring, promising to outlast the writer. Again materials are important: words cast in bronze, carved into the stone of various kinds of monuments, even signs that have endured long after those who caused them to be erected are dead are only a few examples of the persistence of words.¹⁴ And yet of course mere endurance is not necessarily positive. Looking back to words written in the past might offer an opportunity for sentiment, but it can equally invoke the gap between what is written and what is remembered. What we might find is not how well the written words contain the past but how conscious we are that they have come to seem threadbare or inadequate.

In making distinctions largely based on the different materials that govern the appearance of words on screen, I am for clarity’s sake treating the examples individually, but we should bear in mind the potential force of such imagery when we see a sequence in which different kinds of words are juxtaposed. A particularly rich effect is possible when types of script compete for our attention in a single image, such as when a printed text is endorsed with a handwritten message, or when graffiti appear over other, perhaps more official, words.

Private letters, public words

The invoking of matters to do with the private and the public is nearly as central to the use of words on screen as the issue of literacy itself. It is difficult to think of an example of their appearance that does not carry with it some meaning in these terms, from the very simple to the complex and nuanced. Showing something in writing or print can be a way of dramatising, or emphasising, its exact position in relation to privacy and public life. (I might for an example quote any one of those routine shots in classical Hollywood film in which a wedding between private individuals is confirmed as a public event by our seeing a newspaper item about it.)

Such a moment may also be simultaneously pointing to the possibility that an event can become either more or less public. For example, we can assume that an intimate exchange of spoken words between lovers generally works at the level of the resolutely private. While we, as an audience to the film, have privileged access to it, the larger social world of the film generally does not, and apart from memory, it may have no persistence. But the same sentiments put down in words in a love letter are another matter. They may still manage to remain private, but the fact of wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Letter from an Unknown Woman
• 2. Inscription and Erasure in All This, and Heaven Too
• 3. Of Lessons and of Love: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• 4. Into the Wild: The New Unreadable America
• 5. The Reader: Embracing Reading, Denying Writing
• 6. Conclusion: The Intimacy of Writing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index