I was first introduced to the notion of "Pure Cinema" at the Charles Theater in Baltimore, where I spent a great many nights with a good friend (and reader of this journal) prostrating ourselves before the glories of whatever film they happened to be showing in their delightful revival series.
The occasion was a screening of Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, and in our inevitably rambling discussions afterward, he mentioned the term. As far as I know, the idea of Pure Cinema originated in the French avant-garde of the 1920s. It was initially an attempt to articulate what it was that made cinema – then still a relatively new art form – different than things like novels and paintings and operas and the like. This was, essentially, the fact that cinema was composed of moving images. Cinema told a story, like a novel or an opera, and it was something you looked at, like a painting. But unlike a novel it was a visual medium, and unlike a painting it moved.
Cinema has, in other words, things that are unique to it as an art form. And it's the use of these techniques – motion on screen, the way the images are framed, the process of joining one shot to another through editing, etc. – that constitute cinema in its purest form. Two characters having a conversation or telling a story through dialogue is something that can be done in a novel, and so may not (to some people) constitute Pure Cinema. But one character chasing another in a sequence constructed to draw the viewer, viscerally, through visual means, into the fury of the moment? This involves techniques that are only available in on the screen.
As you'll see, I think this definition is more restrictive than it is helpful. There are innumerable dialogue sequences, for example – the final phone call in The Silence of the Lambs is one that pops into my head here – that strike me as being purely cinematic, regardless of whether in some technical sense they partake in techniques also used by other mediums. Put differently, trying to understand what constitutes Pure Cinema should be, I think, an expansive process, and one that attempts to articulate the multifarious nature of the art form. The phrase has power not because of its definitional pedantry but because of the way it captures the feeling of almost intoxicating harmony that attends the best movies.
Filmmaking, as anyone who's ever been on set can tell you, is a laborious process, usually involving groups of people doing rather mechanical minutia. Switching on a fog machine and waving the fog around with something large and flat, or keeping a dial turned to exactly the right spot so that the camera focuses on what it should, or weighing down C-stands with sandbags, or just standing around until it's time to get the next shot up.
And even the people who are doing the more "creative" things – the director, and actors, and cinematographer and the rest – can find themselves stuck in the mud of dull detail. For every moment in which you start the camera rolling and wheel it through some complicated and intimately choreographed set of maneuvers, there are ten in which you spend an hour filming someone's hands opening a box from five different angles, or trying to figure out where the humming sound is coming from in the house you've rented for your location.
And yet out of this process comes, at times, something magical. A moment when every element seems to join together seamlessly, acting in unison to envelop the viewer, sucking them away from their own time and space and involving them entirely in what's happening on the screen. That, for my money, is best described as Pure Cinema.
Sure, great. That's all wonderful in the abstract. But the real goal is not trying to put the idea into rather flowery language, but trying to understand how it actually works, what it actually is. So…
George Miller's 1981 film Mad Max 2 (released as The Road Warrior in the United States) is an extraordinary accomplishment. Set in the Australian outback sometime after a world war has devastated the planet, the action moves through a landscape composed almost entirely of desert and roads. Because the distances are huge and cars and motorcycles offer a modicum of safety, the few people who are left alive are dependent on gasoline for everything they do.
The story is centered on Max (Mel Gibson), who wanders this desert in his Ford GT Falcon with his trusty cattle dog, staying alive by scavenging anything he can (the events of the first film, Mad Max, in which he was a police officer whose wife and child were killed by a maniacal biker gang, are only briefly hinted at here, through flashbacks involving clips from that film).
At the opening, Max has a run-in with a group of barbaric, leather-clad, marauders who roam the waste on their motorcycles and souped-up doom-buggies. After running them off, he falls in with the madcap pilot of a gyrocopter (Bruce Spence); together, they stumble onto a bizarre scene. An armed encampment of apocalypse survivors has grown up around an oil rig, and the marauders Max tangled with at the beginning are laying siege to it.
This encampment has what Max (and everyone else) desperately wants: gas. So when one of the encampment members is wounded by the marauders in an attempt to escape, Max rescues him and brings him back to the encampment, hoping to be rewarded with fuel. After some negotiations, Max makes a deal with the leader of the encampment. They need a semi to tow their fuel tanker when they make their escape; Max knows where one is (he found it during his battle with the marauders in the opening sequence). If he gets the semi for them, they'll give him all the fuel he can carry.
That night, he sneaks out of the encampment carrying cans of diesel fuel and, with the help of the gyrocopter pilot, makes his way to the semi. He gets it running, and then drives back through the gauntlet of marauders, into the encampment again.
Now preparing to make their escape, the people in the encampment ask Max to drive the semi for them. He declines, taking his car and leaving. But this time the marauders are ready; they chase him down, wreck his car, and kill his dog (always one of the surest ways to convince an audience of villianny). The gyrocopter pilot rescues him and flies him back to the encampment, where Max finally agrees to drive the semi.
The film closes with a 20-minute chase sequence, often regarded as one of the finest ever put on film. Max drives the semi out of the encampment, towing a fuel tank protected by a few fearless encampment members, while the other besieged people flee in the opposite direction. The plan works. Nearly all of the marauders follow Max, desperate to get their hands on the fuel he's towing.
He fights them off for as long as he can, until he finally wrecks the semi; we learn then that it was filled with sand, not gas. Max has been, in essence, a decoy, and the people from the encampment are carrying their gas in barrels hidden in their convoy. At the end, Max is rescued once more by the gyrocopter pilot and reunited with the people from the encampment. But he decides not to join them in their journey out of the desert, staying behind to continue his life on the road.
The skill with which Miller pulls all of this off is immense. With the help of no CGI, using real vehicles and live stunts, he creates an immensely rewarding visual experience. The many action sequences in the film – mostly chases – are completely absorbing, and entirely believable. There are almost no moments that strain physical credulity, and once we are in the flow of the film, its "fictional dream" (to borrow an idea from John Gardner), there is nothing that pulls us out by interrupting that flow. This is Pure Cinema at its finest.
And the first thing I'll note is that the Pure Cinema here rests very much on a foundation of non-Pure Cinema elements. Take, for example, the structure of the plot. I've written before, here and here, about the complex magic of plots, and Miller's construction in this regard seems to me to be brilliant. Boiled down, the action of the film can be reduced to this: Max wants gas, so he figures out a way to get into the encampment, then he goes out again to get the semi, then comes in again with the semi, then goes out again with his car, then comes in again on the gyrocopter, then goes out for the final time on the semi.
The motion of it, this back and forth, in and out, is almost comically reduced. But the effect of this is wonderful, because in its sparsness – get in, get out – it lays the groundwork for visceral action sequences. Another way of putting this is to say that in The Road Warrior there almost is no plot; instead, there is movement. The goals are so simple – and the repetition of it, the in-out, in-out, emphasizes this – that the motion itself, the attempt to escape or break in, becomes the point.
The reductive effectiveness of this becomes immediately clear when we think through comparable examples. Miller's 2015 follow-up/reboot Mad Max: Fury Road employs a remarkably similar plot structure, involving an extended chase that first goes out into the desert, and then turns around to retrace its exact path and come back into the vestiges of civilization.
The Wages of Fear (and William Friedkin's retelling of it, Sorcerer) also employs a similarly minimal and geographically-direct plot: men carrying highly explosive materials across bumpy roads from one place to another. The great success of these and like-minded films makes it clear why the folks behind later films like Speed, Crank, and The Raid adopt the same approach, to varying degrees of success: by paring down the plot to something that involves only movement, one allows the Pure Cinema elements to come to the surface.
Secondly, and perhaps more subtly, Miller prepares us for his immersive, purely motion-based sequences through several non-motion-based techniques. One of these is simple: occasional pauses that let us catch our breath. John Carpenter once noted that he discovered while he was still in film school that moments of pure silence could work wonders on an audience, because of the inherent building of tension in them. Similarly, Miller uses quiet moments – like one of Max with the Feral Kid (Emil Minty), a boy who befriends Max and then stows away on the semi for the long final chase sequence – to give us a chance to recover from one action sequence, and at the same time build our anticipation for the next.
Which is to say that the classically-defined Pure Cinema moments do not exist on their own, but in counterpoint with the non-Pure Cinema moments that set them up. They are only effective because they exist in tension with elements that people do not think of as Pure Cinema. (This is, perhaps, one of the reasons for the comparative lack of staying power of something like Crank, which seems to try to dispense with anything that is not Pure Cinema in its most accelerated form).
Beyond this, Miller also uses a remarkably intelligent sequence early in the film – focused on the act of seeing – to prepare us for what's to come later on. This takes place when Max and the gyrocopter pilot first encounter the encampment. They hide out on a high rock escarpment and look down on the marauders laying their siege; it's from here that Max spots the escape attempt that results in the injuries to the man he rescues and then uses to get inside the encampment for the first time.
What's fascinating about this sequence is the way Miller employs a variety of different shots of the same material to tell his story. The sequence is introduced to us in a beautifully-composed shot that starts on the feet of Max and the pilot as they approach the edge of the overlook and then pulls back and up to show us the encampment in the distance, with Max and the pilot now framed to the left. Max pulls out a pair of binoculars and we inspect the scene with him: the marauders circling, the people in the encampment defending themselves.
Max and the pilot settle in to spend the night, and the next morning, the people in the encampment make their break: a few cars and buggies dashing madly out into desert, with the marauders immediately chasing them. Along with Max and the pilot, we initially watch this chase sequence in a series of long-distance wide shots. As the action escalates, and the marauders wreck one after another of the fleeing buggies, Max watches through his binoculars, again pulling us in closer to the action. Then the pilot pulls out a huge spyglass, which Max appropriates from him, and through that we punch in even closer on the action, as the marauders pull the escapees from their wrecked cars and assault them.
The effect of this sequence is threefold. First, it builds suspense by moving us closer and closer in toward the action as it intensifies. Second, it connects us to Max and the pilot because we share their view of the carnage, and the reaction shots of them being sickened by it, match our response. This has the effect of humanizing them for us, differentiating Max, who is still a mercenary scavenger at this point, from the marauders, who are monstrous.
Finally, and most importantly for our purposes today, it primes the viewer to be alert to the kinetic elements of what is to come. The binocular and telescope shots add a visceral, realist quality to the story by forcing us to view the action as we actually might, if we were there, rather than through the more emotionally-distanced eye of the camera. They also lodge somewhere back in our minds the idea that the prime mode here is visual and experiential; they involve us in watching, at once sharpening our attention and pulling us into the events of the story; as do things like the early point-of-view shots in Carpenter's Halloween, they both increase our envelopment and heighten our attunement to our own sense of seeing.
These shots, in other words, serve as a kind of psychological preparation for the Pure Cinema that is to come, working in harmony with it in much the same way as do the pauses in the action.
In these and many more ways, Miller sets us up for his finale. While this is a sequence that can be, and has been, thought through fruitfully from a filmmaking perspective, from a Pure Cinema perspective what's happening is actually very simple. There is, for 20 minutes, almost no dialogue. There are no establishing shots, no static images. Everything is kinetic. In every shot, something is either moving fast across the screen, or a person is dealing with the running fight on a personal level: trying to control a wildly-moving vehicle, or getting shot, or trying not to fall beneath the tires of a car.
It should be noted that the decisions Miller makes here are impeccable, from camera placement to his understanding of how to stage the sequences themselves. And one should never talk about this film without noting the complexity and danger of the stunt work involved. If you want some of the flavor of this, watch the video at the bottom of this paragraph, which includes behind the scenes footage of 21-year old Guy Norris (who would go on to a long and distinguished career as a stunt coordinator) breaking his leg filming a stunt in which he drives a motorcycle at maybe forty miles an hour into a buggy, launching him end over end into a big hole filled with empty cardboard boxes.
Eventful stuff, indeed. And when cut together into a film, it becomes one of the definitional examples of enveloping action on the screen. But, like everything in filmmaking, it has to work in harmony with all the other elements of the movie, has to interact with the plot and the dialogue and the characters and all the rest, if it's going to instill the feeling of Pure Cinema.
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Such an enjoyable read! I haven't seen the film but I was gripped by the heart pounding action you so wonderfully articulated.