The most striking feature of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) is that the two main characters, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) and Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), scarcely share two minutes of screen time. Yet this movie still manages to develop a connection between the two, tangible enough to satisfy the demands of the genre.
When the two first “meet”, Annie is driving home listening to the radio, when Sam is on the phone with a talk show to discuss the death of his wife, and the status of his love life. During this interchange, the movie cuts between the scene in Sam’s lakefront house in Seattle and the scene in Annie’s car, near Baltimore. In the frame, Sam is usually on the left side of the screen facing the right side. Annie, driving, is naturally on the right side of the screen. As the movie cuts between the two scenes, Sam seems to be directing his words right to Annie, and Annie responds to his words accordingly. The lighting in the two scenes also match, Sam in his darkened living room, and Annie in her car. The two are on opposite coasts of America, yet the exchange seems intimate, because of how the two scenes are framed, and then edited together.
The above poster is a microcosm for the movie, with Sam and Annie spatially separated by the city skyline, lightness/darkness, but their eye lines match because of the placement of the two scenes.
Stephen Heath, in Questions of Cinema, discusses the role of space in cinema. “If film photographs gave a very strong spatial impression, montage probably would be impossible. It is the partial unreality of the film picture that makes it possible.” One of the original intents of film was “to reproduce life” (Louis Lumière), but film allows for time and space to be manipulated in a way which is impossible in reality, but yet can convey meaning to the viewer. In the story, space separates Annie and Sam, but film allows for the breakdown of space; the scenes spliced together exist together within the viewer’s mind, creating meaning and dialogue between two ostensibly unrelated events.
This technique is used throughout the entire movie. More often than not, Sam and Annie are looking off the frame at a target which the audience can not follow. By denying the audience access to the characters views, the movie creates suspense. When spliced together, the off-frame looks mesh together, and create a dialogue between the two, a twist the Hollywood convention of shot reverse shot.
Cinematically, Sam and Annie are inextricably linked; narratively, they are far apart. This tension between what the audience sees and what the audience knows is the driving force behind the movie. By creating a visual sense of closeness, the movie foreshadows the meeting that will take place. With this promise in mind the audience is held in suspense for nearly the entire movie. At the final scene of their meeting at the top of the Empire State, Sam and Annie share the same frame. The audience is finally able to follow their glances to their target, hidden for almost the entire movie, each other.
Kevin - Before you pointed out that "the two main characters, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) and Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), scarcely share two minutes of screen time," I did not realize it was actually that short of time! Once I thought about it, though, it is definitely true. Part of the reason I failed to notice this could be due to the excellent framing and then splicing you mention. I am not sure, however, that I completely agree that the audience is only able to "follow [Sam and Annie’s] glances to their target" in the movie's final scene. I would argue that the scene you mention, when Sam is sitting in his living room and Annie is driving in her car, is an instance where their eyelines match and the audience can follow their glances to their target. It is Sam and Annie who do not get to see their target, but thanks to Sam's positioning on the left side of the frame and vice-versa for Annie, the audience can. This creates the visual closeness that leads to the final climatic scene in the movie. At this point, the space of the film is really the space of reality (as Louis Lumiere puts it) and Sam and Annie get the bulk of their two-and-a-half minutes together.
ReplyDeleteYou pose a good argument that Sam and Annie seem somehow conversational with one another in the films first few scenes, despite the geographic (and cinematographic) barriers that seperate them. You also touch on the notion that when their glances meet, it creates a sense of closeness and connection as strong as if they were speaking to one another. However, I think this point is crucial to the understanding of the entire film as a whole.
ReplyDeleteNegar mentioned in her lecture on Monday, that "gaze" is what cues the viewer to the intrusion or allusion to something that is occurring or entering from outside the frame's shot.
In "The Maltese Falcon" the client looks outside of the frame towards what the viewer assumes to be the source of the knocking sound, which cues them to the impending entrance of the second detective. This "power of the gaze" shows how critical the gaze is in building a narrative understanding of a film's action, not to mention maintaining a steady flow of continuity between takes and scenes.
This isn't an accident, by any means. If I may don my pre-med behavioral studies hat, "gaze" is crucial for most humans (and many non-human primates) for determining agency, understanding, and context. Great apes who have no grasp or understanding of human language are able to follow human gazes towards contextually important or situationally significant objects and derive their meaning or importance. Just by looking at an object, or even in a certain direction, apes can understand that whatever or wherever you are looking to is somehow very important and worth of their own scrutiny.
Likewise, infants (generally considered "human precursors"), can follow the gaze of their parents when learning language to ascribe names or identity to people or objects simply by learning that the object which is being looked at is associated with a certain sound. In behavioral studies, it is generally understood that when teaching infants the names of objects, it is generally more useful to look at the OBJECT, rather than the infant. Saying "banana" when looking at a banana sends the message that the contextual "object" (banana) is associated with that word; looking at the infant, on the other hand, and saying "banana" indicates that the subject being addressed (infant) is in fact associated with the word "banana." And, in fact, for the first two years of his life, my baby cousin would only answer to what he understood to be his given name: "Papaya." (His real name is Rafael, although at age 13 I can still trip him up sometimes).
As tangential as this may sound, the principle is the same for film. Don't believe me? Mute the audio of the entire scene with the back-and-forth shots between the car and Seattle, and it almost appears as if Sam is talking on the phone to Anny, and Annie is responding to him while in her car. The only explanation for this (aside from the skillful continuity editing) is the subtle hint that they APPEAR to be looking at one another from beyond the frames.
I think Kevin is right when he claims that the poster is a microcosm of the use of narrative space in the movie. Both Sam and Annie eyelines match, though each are in obviously different photographs. I think it is also significant that both figures are lit in the same way. Though Sam is standing in daylight and Annie is standing at night, both are actually illuminated the same way. This is quite artificial, and not indicative of reality. However, it is necessary to complete the illusion created by the eyeline match, and the placement of the figures at corresponding sides of the frame.
ReplyDelete"Glance" has a direct effect on the audience when watching Sleepless in Seattle. The eyeline match in the poster would give audience who has not seen the movie a clear clue as to what the main plot of the movie is without having to read any sort of synopsis about the movie.
ReplyDeleteOther scenes in the movie also take full advantage of the power of the glance. Especially when both Tom Hanks' character sees Meg Ryan's character after Meg Ryan flew to Seattle to find Tom Hanks. They do not know who the other is personally, but they know each other in some way. Ryan knows Hanks through research she has done and Hanks knows Ryan because he was immediately attracted to her when he saw her in the airport. In that scene, a form of the shot-reverse shot is used because both of them are shown in the same type of shot looking at each other. They are in the same position on the screen and are at the same eye level. This means that they are obviously connected, just through this use of the shot-reverse shot.
I, like Laura, am shocked that the total time of Annie (Meg Ryan) and Sam (Tom Hanks) is under two minutes! It felt like ages, to be frank, but some of that might be due to the tension that even the hardest of hearts felt when they thought that Annie and Sam might, via elevators, miss each other.
ReplyDeleteI like what you are saying about lack of "strong spatial impression" in the film. I had not considered this much while watching the film, but in retrospect, the shots that give us a sense of who is where and at what time are always those that pertain exclusively to that individual. On the other hand, shots that link Annie and Sam almost as if they were in converstion (or would be, if muted as Daniel says) are always close ups with little to no background. There are, however, two functions of this. The first, as you mentioned, is to create visual continuity (or to avoid discontinuity) between the two separates spaces. The other, however, is equally crucial. If each character were given an establishing shot, it would be impossible to read the expressions, emotions, and glances from each character. That is, we would have no concept of their emotions. Without being able to see the loneliness in Sam's eyes, we cannot understand the significance of Annie's love for him. So while the spatially ungrounded shots may seem deceiving (they are, for the most part), they are also necessary to give meaning tp those shots.
If you think it was hard for Sam and Annie to gaze longingly into space, never knowing if there was someone on the other side, think how hard it was for us, the omniscient viewers! Woe to us, those who knew so much but could say so little.
ReplyDeleteThe arrangement of shots and eye-line matches seemed to shrink the distance between our heroes, but all the while we stood between them, trapped in a space that was somewhere between Baltimore and Seattle. It was we, in our perception, who brought them together for much of the movie (we could see Sam with our left eye and Annie with our right), but it was we who never quite accepted that they were truly in the same place, as persuasive as the cuts tried to make it. I think much of the tension and suspense of the movie came from not just the character's space, but the space that the audience was forced to preoccupy.
I agree that the poster seems to be a microcosm of the film. Both characters seem to perpetually gaze out to each other from across the continent.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will have to disagree that this space created suspense simply because the movie seems to follow classical Hollywood conventions throughout and so you tend to think it will have a happy ending. That is, our protagonists will ultimately get together. By the very fact that we know this, it cannot be suspenseful, in my opinion. If I already know what to expect I cannot feel anticipation.
I do think you are right, though, that these looks and spaces unite the narration and fuel it, but after all while they become rather boring, I think. We become so accustomed to them we eventually begin to expect them. Another reason why there is no suspense. At one point, I even thought, "Let's just get on with it." Every time they encountered each other and then did not speak to one another I became frustrated at the story's attempt to create suspense. It felt like the movie was more concerned with keeping them a part in order to make the ending more spectacular than to "reproduce life," as you quote in your post. Besides, I cannot really see any sane woman giving up a man who loves her for a voice on the radio!
Greetings Kevin,
ReplyDeleteThis is Alexis. I'll be the person gradingt he blog component of the course this semester. In this post you do a good job of concisely demonstrating the major argument of the reading with a specific technique within the film. Good job, but it would be good to see a couple more points of interest or examples for your argument in the future. I look forward to continuing to read your work!
Best,
Alexis