Three dissolves from Thunder Bay (Anthony Mann, 1953; photographed by William Daniels, edited by Russell F. Schoengarth)

Scott's Metaphysical Romances, Pt. 1

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Many of our ideas about how cinema works and what a filmmaker is grow out of an idea of gesture and intention. This is understandable: in the 20th century, cinema brought some of the grandest gestures in history. And because for most of that century, the methods of production in wealthier countries (and by extension those whose films were most frequently seen, and therefore formed the foundations of film theory: the United States, Italy, France, Japan, the Soviet Union and Germany) involved a division of creative labor—a director would at best instruct an editor and, with a few notable exceptions, never operated a camera or a microphone—directing became a question of large gestures and instructions. In turn, we came to understand and attribute authorship in cinema based on obvious gestures. The theories that form the foundation of both filmmaking and film criticism concern themselves not with small or subjective properties, but with grand designs: montage, mise-en-scene, camera movement, framing. All of these things could be called the "obvious properties of style."

Cinephilia set itself aside from mere film-buffery by becoming the hunt for small moments and small films, things that appeared to exist outside the realm of obvious gesture. Criticism sought to explain the tracking shot; cinephilia looked for the meanings of drifting cigarette smoke, stray glances and apparent accidents, and to divine the patterns of hats, cars and donkeys.

Over the decades, the practice of filmmaking has changed. Though it's still rare for directors to act as their own cinematographers, it's common for them to operate the camera when they feel like it, especially during handheld shots.

It could be argued that the ongoing switch to working digitally has been more revolutionary in how it has changed the editing of films than in how it's affected the aesthetics of the image. Though most directors still use a professional for the job, director / editors are increasingly common and a director is more likely to take an active role in editing instead of just writing memos and putting together plans. In her recollection of working with the late Eric Rohmer for a recent issue of Senses of Cinema, Jackie Raynal writes that the director hired her as an editor because she was good with her hands; physical editing takes dexterity and skill. On the other hand, most people (and this includes directors) can learn the basics of Final Cut Pro in an afternoon. Editing has moved from the solitary, poorly-lit editing room to the Steenbeck and into comfortable multi-screen editing suites. Nonlinear editing gives decisions fluidity; it's no longer a question of cutting and splicing, but of composing and arranging. It enables more intuitive approaches. In big-budget productions, the approach to editing has increasingly shifted from the fulfillment of plans to the construction of scenes out of moments. The director, who was once defined by an iron will, must now also have a hunter's instinct.

Combined with the increased input directors have into the mixing of the sound in their films (which itself has gone from mono to stereo to surround), the control afforded by color correction and digital processing of the image and the fact that even productions shot on film stock use video replays to judge takes instead of waiting for the daillies, on the increasing prevalence of improvisation (which nowadays pretty much dominates American comedy, which was once the set domain of the screenwriter), multiple-camera set-ups and dozens of takes, it can be said that filmmaking operates on a more minute level now than ever before. The reign of the art director has ended, and the reign of color grader has begun. Though much of the way film is defined and judged is still based on grand gestures—on obvious stylistic propertie—the people making films have a greater than ever awareness and control of the small moments that had previously been the obsession of the cinephiles. In essence, filmmaking has caught up with cinephilia while outpacing commonly-accepted theory and criticism.

Part of the reason the Tony Scott movies of the 2000s are disliked by many—and intensely loved by others—is the total lack of "big" gestures in his current approach to directing. These movies consist entirely of small moments, off-the-cuff images, strung together into something massive yet lacking an "obvious" grand design. No big plans, just hidden smiles. This makes Scott a harder sell than similarly-concerned directors like Michael Mann, who anchors his intuitive moments to grand ones, or Claire Denis, who presents them as the directorial gestures that they are. The party line on Scott is that he's an "empty stylist," a man who makes "technically accomplished" and therefore insubstantial films with too much editing. On the one hand, I probably wouldn't be here defending Scott if his movies consisted of shots that ran for minutes instead of seconds; on the other hand, I wouldn't think they were worth defending if that were true.

You've probably figured this one out: I don't intend to brush off Scott's style, nor am I going to defend it as candy, as sugary, calorie-free style, as "pure color" or "style-for-the-sake-of-style-get-over-it-and-have-some-fun-why-don't-you." Scott's recent films are beautiful, but beauty is not a question of surfaces (contrary to the old saying, it's "prettiness" that's merely skin-deep). I am here to defend the substance and morality of Scott's recent films, and a defense of the recent Scott is, at its core, a defense of his editing: the jitters, the saccades, the 250 BPM intercutting, crashing and burning that are integral to the hidden-in-plain-view heart of Scott.

Scott's three great movies of the 2000s—Spy Game, Deja Vu and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3—are metaphysical romances, though only Deja Vu is a romance in conventional terms. Spy Game and Pelham can be summed up in the words in which Howard Hawks once described A Girl in Every Port: "'a love story between two men," an unerotic fraternity that borders on courtship, and which, described in terms of conventional romances, whether straight or gay, would make Spy Game a melancholy story of break-up and reconciliation and Pelham a sort of mutant screwball comedy, where two men start the film as strangers set against each other and develop mutual admiration by prying open one another's faults. This is fairly traditional Hawks Territory, but what's integral to Hawks is presence, which isn't just a question of two or more people occupying the same constructed (i.e. classically delineated) space, but the same frame, whereas the relationships between Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Game, Denzel Washington and Paula Patton in Deja Vu and Washington and John Travolta in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 all exist across canyons of physical space, narrative time and, most importantly, editing.

So here we leave Hawks Territory and enter the historical domain of Frank Borzage—yet Borzage's criss-crossing of space and time sprouts forth from classical ideas about both, and the love story in a movie like I've Always Loved You (the most Borzagean of titles: a sentence that includes the personal aspect of love while simultaneously painting it as something beyond time) is impossible without a firm grounding; love can't transcend nothing—to break through, you have to make a wall first. Borzage's reputation as a "transcendent romantic" is misleading—not only because it fails to encompass his varied work, but because it denies the tactile, fingertips-and-nostrils physicality of those films of his that are romances. Scott, however, is genuinely uninterested in both concrete reality and linear time—in the fabled "clear delineation of space" or the defined boundaries between scenes that are supposedly the mark of, respectively, good directors and dramatic construction.

The inter-title timestamps that periodically appear in Spy Game become an almost Miikean joke in a movie where action folds in on itself constantly (one of the ways in which, as Ben Sachs has pointed out, the film resembles Miike's Negotiator) and where personal history is fluid. Scott's greatest asset (both to himself and to cinema as a whole) is his ability to work on a molecular level. It goes without saying that these relationships, these marriages-through-montage that involve an editing so relentlessly paced (if it can be said to be paced at all, because at one point a beat becomes so quick that all you hear is a steady tone) that a flow of emotions or actions overpowers any sense of when or where something is taking place, mirror the relationship of an audience to a screen. Scott starts at the endpoint—the relationship between the image and the eye—and works backwards; it's no surprise that the time machine in Deja Vu suspiciously resembles an editing suite.

68 Sentences

Carax remains one of the few genuine mysteries in cinema because he puts everything out in the open. The Heartbreak Kid is a comedy of repeated phrases or words ("50 years," "teddy bear," "Minnesota," "wonderful," "don't like," "Jockey Club," "ni-i-i-ce," "pecan pie") that become mantras or magic spells that imprison the characters; for Charles Grodin's character, every utterance turns the key a little further in the lock. Tennis and soccer depend on an evenness of light, on illumination, to provide drama (through clarity), while the drama of boxing lies in shadows. In his 1960s and 1970s films, Zanussi delivers well-reasoned, well-argued reports on the narrative complete with facts (throwaway moments captured in images, like the old friends checking their hairlines in the mirror in Structure of Crystal) and figures (the cause-and-effect of the plot); the films are well-reasoned experiments devised in order to demonstrate certain theories about human activity and experience (human evidence). Moral vs. ethical filmmaking: the moral is that which reaches for the impossible and the ethical is that which chooses, out of a list of possibilities, the one that most closely resembles a shadow of morality. Fassbinder used post-synced sound extensively; it's the most brutal aspect of his films (as it was with Antonioni), even more than the fatalistic movements and framings he gives the camera, because, while the camera may turn away, the microphone remains poised in the same position in front of the actor's mouth. Few movies are ever saved in the editing, but plenty have been ruined in it. All films nominally about girls are really about the boys who watch them. In regard to classical Hollywood filmmaking, the editing is usually the most overlooked aspect; part of this might be the length of the takes, but it might also be a bit of auteurist bias. King Vidor's best characters are unindividualistic individuals. My Wife is a Gangster: a good laugh, sometimes resembling a pre-Code American comedy, but that’s it, since the movie's not directed much better than a joke is usually told. Van Damme directed poorly is still Van Damme. Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls: Metropolis' Hal + Shelley Duvall. Hartley was the best of the directors to emerge from the American independent filmmaking boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s: more sensitive than Van Sant, better at combining his interests and his education than Haynes, more concerned with form than Soderbergh. Verite (Clouzot): in the courtroom, to show her seriousness, Bardot wears her hair in a bun, looking like Tippi Hedren. Viewed as a Flash Gordon serial or a space opera (with Clive Owen as the dashing starfighter pilot), Elizabeth: The Golden Age ain't that bad. We had Westerns in Italy and Spain; we can handle a Romanian film from Chile (Tony Manero), though one wishes it was better. With Oliver Twist, Polanski's isn't trying to be Dickens -- he's trying to be Cruikshank, reducing Dickens' characters to their essences (looks, faces, features). When Claude Jade puts on the "Japanese" make-up in Bed and Board, Truffaut is making a reference to Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (Tashlin, of course, plays his scene for comedy, and sides with the wife). Directors are the ones who must learn to express themselves fully without having their voices heard or their words read. The least sophisticated forms of montage often have the most complex results. The landscape is the oldest image. The simplest ideas are the hardest to grasp / master (no one could play a scale like Coltrane). The bras women wear in 1950s and 1960s French films make their breasts look like knees. When someone says they don't care about artists, what they mean is they don't care about art, because art isn't some nebulous force that comes out of the ether: it is human expression and human work. Jesse Eisenberg: a second-rate Michael Cera but a first-rate actor. Everyone's been obsessed with the mundane, "the quiet;" too many films deny the excitement of everyday life. Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is set in Baltimore, but it could just as easily be St. Petersburg, Florida (like Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass), or a less urban part of the same state (like Trans, Julian Goldberger’s first movie), or in Jem Cohen’s Georgia or even somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (like, to a certain extent, Dance Party, USA, Aaron Katz’ debut), or Detroit or Cleveland or Northern Indiana or Toledo or Akron or any of the hundreds other American cities and towns where these sorts of movies haven’t yet been made but probably will be in the next few years, because for all their regional specificity, Putty Hill and the films I’ve mentioned share enough stylistic qualities and stances that it would be possible for them to swap locations; they constitute a shadow movement. What movies often forget: war is not corpses, it's the reality of having to walk past the corpses to get to the market every day. Jarmusch had discovered something that seemed obvious: a sort of rigid and physical non-time, the concreteness life takes on when you don't wear a watch. The Fountain: every image is carefully lit, designed and manipulated, and not one of them is worthwhile (see also: It's All About Love). In the early days of the cinema, no one thought to point a camera at the sky. There's no need for poetic realism, because realism is poetry enough. Up in the Air: a mixture of "Yes We Can" populism and passable melodrama that suspiciously resembles an American Airlines ad; hypocritical while also lulling its audience in hypocrisy. Serge Daney once pointed out that cinema could be like the rear view mirror in a car, moving forward while it keeps looking back at a dissolving past. I think there's been enough chance and accident in film methods; time to get back to a cinema of decision-making. The way Peter Lorre puts on his shabby coat in Crime and Punishment: pure Chaplin. Love with the Proper Stranger: film about uncompromising people than ends in compromise. The problem with modern Westerns is that so few are made nowadays than whenever someone gets around to making one, they feel like it should be the Western to End All Westerns. The dialogue and the camera eliminate every tangible "naturalistic" emotion, leaving only the basic urges Blier is interested in. Only forgeries need to be realistic. It's a well-known fact that Bela Tarr is a fan of Night at the Crossroads, and it's become something of an "accepted idea" of sorts that The Man from London is largely indebted to Renoir's intoxicating, enigmatic movie ("BT does JR") -- but actually, the movie The Man from London resembles (and I don't mean just a passing resemblance, but a total physical resemblance) is Henri Calef's Les Violents. It's important to make serious inquiries into unserious subjects. In A Gentle Woman, Bresson reduces a complex domestic drama to several shots, intercut, of two people eating soup. Shin Eun-kyung has the sort of face that gets ruined by showy make-up and the sort of slim figure that looks good in a men’s suit; she's better with her hair short, and her slouch is more attractive than her saunter. Wenders' goal: to mix literary "great themes" with observations of the minutiae of life. A note to directors: even children don't like being treated like children. Though Amreeka's script seems to have been collaged out of panels from Sally Forth, For Better of Worse and Cathy, it contains the only convincing high school principal in the history of American cinema. Montage is, at the most basic level, "the presentation of images," so Russian Ark is, in fact, a masterpiece of montage. Walter Hill belongs to the best sort of hardworking men, a sort that's always damned when they become successful: he works well with sparse resources and no expectations, but give him too much money (Another 48 Hrs.) and he doesn't know what to do with it. There has never been as much variety in cinema as there is now. What I like about I Can Do Bad All By Myself, besides the fact that Tyler Perry writes consistently funny, snappy dialogue and the fact that he knows the rhythms of his actors and the fact that Madea's verbal / vocal shenanigans make me laugh the same way Julius Kelp's and Eugene Fullstack's do and the fact that every actor can sing pretty well and might at any moment break into song, is the sense of purpose in its every element. Gerard Depardieu is slowly turning into a perfect sphere. We think of the movie camera as something beyond writing because a writer is only capable of writing down his or her thoughts, while the moment you start filming, you begin recording all sorts of things you aren’t even aware of, maybe even things you won’t discover until decades after the fact. Scripts are expected to be written slowly, and films are expected to be made quickly. Tilda Swinton in Julia is every graceful attribute taken to the breaking point, with a leg emerging from a car becoming unsteadiness and the lighting of a cigarette a disaster. Radzilowicz, Depardieu, Gabin: the most trustworthy faces in cinema belong to wide-nosed men. There's no image in cinema that brings a person closer to being a monument or a statue than a figure against the sky. The definition of Woody Allen's style is a struggle with the self to prove that the subject matter he's chosen was worth choosing; form, therefore, becomes that which justifies the content. Chahine was cinema's great slave: to the culture he was born into, to the history taking place during his lifetime and, of course, to the movies, to whose many shapes he was passionately devoted. Jean Rabier is the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague cinematographers (and maybe that fate seems inevitable for the man who was for decades the regular DP of Chabrol, the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague directors; but then again, Rabier shot Cleo from 5 to 7, Bay of Angels, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Le Bonheur and lent his precision as camera operator to Leon Morin, Priest -- but we're back where we started, because that's the most underrated Melville). What is admirable about Dirty Work is that, though not everything about the movie is funny, every element of the film constitutes a joke. There is great cinema that goes unnoticed because no one regards it as cinema. Abraham Polonsky understood words chiefly because he understood feelings; he could see the emotional punches in the gestures and actions that made up everyday life. Eisenstein may have made his films based on theories, but he developed those theories out of curiosity, not out of the assumption that cinema always functioned based on principles. Ethics constitute the lowest form of morality; the moral is often unethical. People who contend that everything is bad are the ones who'll most readily settle for mediocrity. Good ideas are not good enough.

Interior / Exterior, or The Kids Play Russian

For all the cults around Near Dark and Point Break, all of the recent hubbub about The Hurt Locker and the defenses of Strange Days, it's really K-19: The Widowmaker that happens to be Kathryn Bigelow's finest film. This box office failure, already half-forgotten, from the most artificial of conceits -- an American film about the Soviet military-- complete with those half-British, half-"Russian" accents that sounded dubious even in Cold War spy thrillers. The credits are even in that blocky font, like Enemy at the Gates or some other nonsense. And, yes, it was a vanity project for Harrison Ford, but that isn't a strike against it: he's got the right face for playing a Russian, and he works surprisingly well as a shorter man, framed next to lanky Liam Neeson in a way that takes away his usual control of the frame and makes him work hard to get it back.

But these are all extras. They're beside the point. Let's get back to it: why'd I write that K-19 is Kathryn Bigelow's finest film? Because it's the most complete realization of that tendency that makes Bigelow not just distinctive, but important: her interest in relation. Not just relationships, but the very idea of things relating to one another. In her films, that means, on the most basic level, the relationship between the elements of an image, between a sound effect and a piece music, between one shot and the one that follows it. But there's also the relationship between a genre and a person's understanding of it -- she's certainly a genre director, but not in the sense most other people work in genres. She picks one, an exterior, and then makes a film out of its interior -- Point Break's direction, for one, is all about finding the psychology of a certain kind of action movie. And of course there are the relationships between characters and, even more importantly, between these characters and their actions: the dynamic between what a person is doing or saying and their facial expression or the tone of their voice. Interior / exterior.

Like John Carpenter, Bigelow's the kind of director who edits and frames in order to create a perspective for the audience. Carpenter seems to have derived it from an education in Hitchcock; Bigelow is more like Otto Preminger's adopted daughter. The goal of the perspective she creates is to show how different things form a whole -- Preminger's psychological direction taken to a level even more basic than human psychology. K-19: the relationship between people of different ranks, between the living and the dead, the able-bodied and those dying of radiation sickness. Between what's going on underwater and above, back in Moscow. Between simulation and reality, intention and result. Every aspect of the film is used towards this end. She even manages to find a function in this approach for CGI shots of the submarine's exterior; elsewhere they'd be just perfunctory special effects, but here they're always relating to something else. We feel how the crew feels their vessel. When the hull dents, it's framed and edited the same way you'd frame a face with a strained expression and then edit it into a series of other shots of faces. There are relationships men develop with their machines and instruments -- the meter with the arrow that always gets stuck and the cruel, temperamental reactor are certainly characters. We could even say they're part of the crew, as are the too-small doorways or the bottles of red wine that get rationed out by the captain. When the periscope shares the frame with the captain, we understand that there's a relationship between them -- even if we can't quite fathom what such a relationship would be like. But we know it's there. It's been shown to us.

2007 in Review: Two Subtle Leaps

Everyone has already written about their favorites. I've been lazy. I've spent January cleaning the salt off of my shoes; my fingers stink of vinegar. "What was your top ten for the year?" was a December question. It was asked on slow buses and in movie theater lobbies. Everyone agreed it'd been a "good year." Everyone wanted to know your favorites.
There's a difference between speaking and writing about movies. The problem with writing is that movies age differently from essays. Written words always feel like they're a million years old, already so far behind, but at the same time they don't get old quickly like films, which are so much like people--they get wrinkles, gray hair, they start to forget. What once seemed right becomes questionable. Movies are hard to judge, at least with traditional language. They shift in your memory and they tailor themselves to your experiences. What was a bad movie six months ago becomes a good one. The last year's masterpiece crumbles.

Bill Morrison (left) and Ralph Tyler (right) in a still from Peoples House (2007)

I watched Andrew Bujalski's short Peoples House on the little TV set in my living room, sitting with the remote in my hand. Peoples House is only 8 minutes long. It lives in the extras of the DVD of Mutual Appreciation, Bujalski's second feature, just above the commentary and the trailer. It's Bujaski's first work in video, and his first in widescreen.
Aesthetically, Andrew Bujalski is Maurice Pialat's cousin. He is also Pialat's opposite. We see the same techniques in their films, but used for completely different reasons. Pialat's elliptical edits nonchalantly jump across time; he treats a few seconds or a few months the same way. The things that happened in between, the events we didn't see, have been omitted because they didn't matter. Certain events that we experienced seemed important at the time, but they aren't worth a damn in the long run. It can be heartbreaking.
Bujalski's ellipses instead give us an expansiveness. We cut from scene to scene because those are the moments we're focusing on for now, but the film acknowledges that a lot happened in between, or might have happened at the same time as the actions we're watching.
Peoples House is Bujalski's most elliptical film and his most quickly paced. We see moments from a lazy afternoon: Jerry Peoples (Ralph Tyler) shows Walter (filmmaker Bill Morrison) around his house. They talk about a grand piano, Walter takes a piss, Jerry shows him a sculpture in his back yard where hornets nest. It's set in the outside world Mutual Appreciation's gaps suggest: the subjects are supporting characters from that film. They are not the twentysomethings Bujalski's famous for: they're well-off middle-aged men; they talk about retirement, their children, work. Removed from the aesthetics , settings and subjects of Bujalski's other films, the film shows the expansiveness of his vision. It is a leap forward, and, appropriately enough, a subtle one.

Lars von Trier during the production of The Boss of It All (2006; released in the States in 2007)

Lars von Trier is a liar. He's a traveling magician and a trickster. He distracts you this his left hand so you don't notice what his right hand is doing. He tells a cock-and-bull story while he's sliding your silverware into his jacket.
"The Boss of It All is a light movie," he says, and everyone nods along. We believe because it seems to make sense, like he's done all the detective work for us and, after all, he made it, so he must be right. It's a clever ruse: we don't notice that he's made the greatest leap of his career. He's the emperor who's fooled everyone into thinking he's got no clothes. The truth is that The Boss of It All is the first of von Trier's films to be moral instead of moralistic. Automavision is a fraud, but it's a fraud that's greater than the truth of Dogme.

The Vague and The Painstaking

A still from Kenneth MacPherson's 1929 film Borderline

Borderline is an action movie. Kenneth MacPherson's only feature takes place in a universe of reactions--in fact, the movie seems overtaken, distracted by them, like someone trying to tell a story all the while following a tennis ball with their eyes, back and forth. The plot is reduced a series of title card interjections, the movements at the heart of it so fetishized, so examined that we no longer recognize what they are: climbing a staircase, opening a door--simple actions become so alien through the emphasis placed on them. It's like looking at the world through binoculars--we identify individual parts, but they become so fascinating that we can no longer grasp the whole. It's a re-examination that would make Francis Ponge proud, one where a new object seems to be created simply by describing an old one. The door knobs and coffee cups in MacPherson's film are not the same as their analogues in our world, all thanks to the miracle of transformation at the heart of cinema's alchemical side.
It's a terrifying world sometimes, too--the sheer interconnectedness the editing suggests, cutting to "reaction shots" of motionless objects, creates a sense of constant consequences. The film's small town is so tangled with the reaction a chair has to someone sitting down on it that we miss the melodramatic story that supposedly forms the film center, with Paul Robeson and his wife as two black outsiders in a community vaguely defined but painstakingly described, more vivid as a set of sensations than a set of buildings and people (a feat considering the small cast and repeated use of recognizable exteriors and interiors). So perhaps it isn't just Ponge that the film evokes, but Kafka as well.

Cinema as a Revue

The Gene Siskel just concluded the first half of Jacqueline Stewart's excellent African American Auteurs series, which focuses on two race film directors (Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams) and two middle-aged, contemporary black directors (Spike Lee and Charles Burnett).
I wrote this down in my notebook after the screening of Spencer Williams' Juke Joint (shown as a double feature with the Dirty Gertie From Harlem, which is probably the best way to see Williams' films):

Juke Joint don't seem to come from a cinematic source--rather, it seems like an attempt to film "performance" and put it on the screen.
You've got to think of all the wide shots as performances--every edit within a set-up, every close-up, is not as much a cut as a digression. The cutaways feel awkward because they are canned inserts into what is essentially documentary (the documentary of how these actors and musicians perform fiction). Scenes with several characters seem jarring because every character is performing their "routine," their vaudeville act, without seemingly any cooperation. The film feels most natural when an "audience" is present--such as the extras in the juke joint scene, who react and laugh at the dialogue.

The film's juke joint sequence, which inspired these notes, is standard race film fare--a few dance teams, a band--the kind of number you find in any Micheaux or Williams film. At the start of the scene, a pair of dancers--Mack and Ace--perform several a lengthy routine. The female dancer has thighs out of an R. Crumb comic. At one point, she does a handstand while the male dancer pretends to mimes the bass part of the backing band on her leg, transforming her body into an upright bass. Suddenly, you can hear some snickering, and realize that there is a live audience behind the camera (Williams' films use one-track sound, so the soundtrack is always either direct, or completely post-synced; more on that later).
After another, less impressive duo performs (with a much shorter routine), the film's featured band, Red Calhoun's Orchestra, begins to play. Extras wander into the shot and dance naturally--the feeling is of total documentary, perhaps even a tad voyeuristic. The microphones have been placed near the band, so we can't hear the dancers talking, but we can see their lips move as they flirt and joke around.
Occasionally, cutaways of the band (possibly the only angled shots in a film full of room-encompassing wide shots and above-the-waist medium framings) are inserted, but they feel like interruptions--not only because they are clearly shot at a different time, but because they seem to break the flow of the "performance." Which is what Juke Joint essentially is--a revue, a set of performances, broad comic acts and beauty pageants. In Juke Joint (and in Dirty Gertie), Williams builds films out of neither the tradition of sound nor image nor narrative nor even acting, but out of the simple idea of watching people "perform"--the idea of a stage rather than a theater, if you will.
The film's strongest scenes therefore all occur towards the end, in the titular juke joint, where the actors, with their clashing talents and acting styles, have a real audience to perform to. Extras turn and laugh to each other in the foreground as Inez Newell attacks Leonard Duncan, playing the part of her philandering, lazy husband. At one point, Katherine Moore, playing the black sheep daughter who wants to run away with the juke joint owner to Chicago, almost swears, but the take is kept (no doubt due to budget constraints). It's almost like everyone is waiting for their number: tap dancer Howard Galloway, who plays the aforementioned juke joint owner, stumbles over dialogue, but in a scene where he has to introduce the band and attract the (real) audience's attention, he shines as only a showman would.

In the more visually dynamic Dirtie Gertie from Harlem, which features many of the same actors (including Spencer Williams himself in drag), it the sound and not the cutaway that creates digressions from the performance. The film's island setting requires effects to be added to the soundtrack (such as the sound of steam ship announcing its arrival), and these drown out all dialogue. The acting in the film is also more traditional, more caricaturish than archetypal. The film also features a dance number, featuring Howard Galloway as one of the lead tap dancers--his routine is fantastic, but the sound has been replaced by a crisper recording of the band, therefore leaving us with the eerie result of a tap number with no clicking-and-clacking sounds.
Dirty Gertie does feature the most astounding single "performance," though: a non-actor, a servant playing a servant, whose single line, "Yes, ma'am," is said in a way that more instinctual and automatic than any actor could ever manage. It takes more than a lifetime to perfect it: it takes generations.