FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

A European in Hollywood – Name the Man and the Shift of Production Systems 39
across the line occurs at a turning point in the narrative, where the perspective
on the diegetic level in one way or the other seems to be reversed as well. In this
case, Victor is named a judge.
The Phantom Carriage, which contains no less than eighteen cuts across
the line, may help to illustrate the point. Here, Georges, the future driver of the
phantom carriage, is just about to tell its fatal story when there is a cut across
the line of him sitting at a table leaning forward, his head in his hands, surrounded
by his three listeners. Directly on this cut follows an intertitle:
110.
LONG SHOT OF THEM /from the other side/. The light from the lamp faintly illuminates
their faces, where they stand leaning over Georges. He lifts his head, looks up at
them in fear and starts to speak again.
Title: “There is an old, old carriage –”. 35
This clearly shows that this cut had already been planned at the script stage,
and that it is not a mistake in continuity editing, but a conscious narrative device.
Another occasion where a cut across the line occurs is the scene where
David with an axe cuts his way through the door to access the other side, where
his wife and children try to hide, and where the cut unites the two separate
rooms to one, single 360-degree cinematic space, which lets the spectator take
part in the drama from the point of view of both the main protagonists. 36
Interestingly, this device was used by other Europeans as well, not least by
Sjöström’s contemporary in Soviet cinema, Eisenstein. Vladimir Nizhny, his pupil,
tells in his book Lessons with Eisenstein:
how the master theorized his doctrines of the “montage unit”, which advocates dividing
up a given sequence into subsequences defined by successive crossings of the 180°
line. These “bad” position/direction matches were, according to Nizhny, of course
meant to emphasize privileged moments of tensions in the narrative flow. 37
As I have suggested elsewhere, the dissolve in Name the Man might serve the
particular purpose of softening the spatial reversal. 38 This seems all the more
likely as it did not figure in the original script but was precisely one of those
details added during shooting and editing, thus appearing only in the cutting
continuity script.
The only time that a reverse camera position is inscribed into Bern’s script is,
quite conventionally, on the occasion of a subjective image which Bern clarifies
by adding the phrase: “showing [...] what he sees”. 39 Likewise, the dissolve is
planned for quite conventional use in the script, first between the credit titles,
and then also introducing the only flashback in the film.
In the finished film, however, two more dissolves worthy of attention are
added. An exterior medium shot of Bessie in a rainstorm, cuddling a lamb on