Perambulation, or the Real Miracle of Morgan’s Creek / Walter Metz

a jeep drinking wantonly in the bright light of the morning (Fig. 3). Again, the short scene of one minute is shot in one take. While the characters are now walking screen left to right, this reinforces the Act I operating rules, as Trudy and her sister are walking from downtown back home.

In the third walking sequence, in the middle of Act II, Trudy tells Norval that she is pregnant. This is a reprise of the first walking sequence, as Trudy stumbles over telling Norval the truth, in the same way she stumbled over conniving him out of his car earlier in the film. Again, they are walking screen right to left, heading away from Trudy’s home toward the downtown. While the mise-en-scène generally replicates the first walking sequence, with little between camera and characters, the streets are noticeably less deserted this night. Potential small-town busybodies populate the porches of the homes they pass, capable of overhearing Trudy’s secret at any moment. At one moment, Trudy is almost run over by a horse and buggy, demonstrating that it is not merely the modernity of the borrowed car that has led Trudy to ruin, but traditional small-town life itself (Fig. 4). Suddenly, in the midst of this one take sequence built on the same aesthetic foundation as the first walking sequence, Sturges cuts to an insert shot, a close-up of Trudy’s face (Fig. 5).

Was this cut forced by an inability to film the long take during production? Almost certainly, yet it is equally certain that the shattering of the film’s aesthetic rules is a stroke of genius. As Norval discovers Trudy’s secret as they arrive downtown, the film’s stylistic practices spiral into chaos. When Norval reels backwards, realizing that Trudy’s father, Constable Kockenlocker (William Demarest) will think that he has defiled his daughter, the camera stops its inexorable movement left, to instead follow Norval’s fall back screen right. Thus, the direction of character and camera movement still maintains its rulebased deployment of space, but now with significant disruption in the inexorable flow from home to downtown (Fig. 6).

Finally, during the last moments of Act II, Trudy and Norval try to solve her problem together. Trudy suggests suicide, but Norval, remarking that one is not supposed to use one’s tires during wartime for such frivolousness, suggests marrying her. The mise-en-scène has reverted to the Act I sparseness, nothing between camera and characters. The town’s streets are now deserted in broad daylight, indicating that Norval and Trudy are on their own; the community will not intervene to help them out of their mess. The editing of this fourth walking sequence is full of insert shots and close-ups; the orderliness of

Fig. 4: During the third walk, a horse and carriage almost run Trudy and Norval down while they are crossing the street. Fig. 5: An insert shot of Trudy during the third walk breaks the two-shot, long take pattern of the film’s representation of walking established by the first two sequences.

Fig. 6: At the end of the third walk, Norval sits down when he figures out that Constable Kockenlocker (William Demarest) will assume he is the father of Trudy’s baby. Fig. 7: At the end of the fourth walk, Trudy and Norval greet Constable Kockenlocker on his porch, interrupting the cleaning of his service revolver.

the one take walking sequences from earlier in the film has been completely decimated.

Finally, the direction of character movement tricks us: the characters are walking screen right to left, proposing a journey downtown, but the sequence comes to a shocking conclusion when Constable Kockenlocher brandishes his gun from his front porch at Norval’s line, “What’s the matter with bigamy?” (Fig. 7). The ideological point of the film is finally expressed, that all roads lead back to Trudy’s house; the home is the place wherein one’s problems will be solved. Act III will merely involve a mopping up, as Trudy delivers the litter of potential new soldiers, and the governor decrees with the force of law that the children have all along been Norval’s.

In as frenzied a comedy as ever produced in the Hollywood studio system, mise-en-scène analysis reveals that, as with the studied compositions of the films of the great masters—Bergman, Mizoguchi, Welles—the language of cinema is a mobile one. When people walk in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, things happen, and Preston Sturges’s cinema must move along with them to capture the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological implications of their mobility, both physical and psychological.

Works Cited

Henderson, Brian. “The Long Take.” Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, vol. 1, U of California Press, 1976, pp. 314-324. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Directed by Preston Sturges, Paramount Pictures, 1944. Petric, Vlada. “From Mise-En-Scène to Mise-En-Shot: Analysis of a Sequence.” Quarterly Review of Film

Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 1982, pp. 263-291.

Unseen Voices in Abbas Kiarostami’s TheWindWillCarryUs

by Kenta McGrath Curtin University

Consider the opening sequence of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). It begins with a series of extreme long shots – what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the “cosmic long shot,” a signature he identifies in many of the director’s films – to show a four-wheel drive containing a TV crew of three men as it winds through the countryside of Iranian Kurdistan (Fig. 1). If the sound were to be recorded from the posine of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest strengths and idiosyncrasies as a filmmaker was his commitment to offscreen space: the unseen reality existing O tion of the camera, we would perhaps hear little more than the distant hum of the motor and the natural sounds of the landscape. Instead, Kiarostami foregrounds the voices from inside the car; the men outside the parameters of the image. What are trying to find a village. remains on or off the screen is largely de- The practice of foregrounding distant sounds termined by a filmmaker’s mise-en-scène choices. in films is not unusual, but in fact, entirely conven-

To organize the mise-en-scène is also to organize tional. For example, it would be typical for a conver-what is not to be seen, a process of selection and ar- sation within a crowd to be recorded separately and rangement as much as a process of reduction and raised in the mix, so that it can be heard comfortably omission. In Kiarostami’s films, which always in- above the ambience (films do not simply overhear volve a complex interplay between sound and image, conversations; they create an impression of over-the mise-en-scène often emphasizes an absence, hearing them). More generally, a filmmaker may use where what is missing takes on equal or greater im- sound to draw attention to a section of the image so portance to what is shown.

Fig. 1: The opening shot of TheWindWillCarryUs.

Fig. 2: A tall, single tree.

that it will be noticed and prioritized among the mise-en-scène – a strategy often taken to comical extremes in Jacques Tati’s films, to which Kiarostami’s work has been compared (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 22-23).

What is unusual in this sequence is the sheer contrast between aural and visual distance: the clarity and closeness of the conversation, which functions almost like a voice-over, paired with the depth and openness of the landscape image. There is a visual referent for the men’s voices but it is merely a blip on the scenery, obscured and abstracted by distance. The disjunction between sound and image creates a paradox: the shot is simultaneously distant and intimate, realist and noticeably constructed. Additionally, an onscreen image (a car driving through the countryside) is transformed into a quasi-offscreen space (the inside of the car, whose occupants we can hear but not see).

As the men read out directions to their destination, the viewer is prompted to scan the scenery for signposts in the same way as they do. But the seemingly vague directions – they are looking for a “tall, single tree,” which is nowhere and everywhere – maintain a comical incongruity between sound and image. Then in a quietly stunning moment, what we see corresponds directly with what we hear. A lone tree atop a hill – far bigger and more magnificent than the others – comes into view from the right of frame. As the camera pans, the lens is just wide enough to capture the car passing at the bottom and the tree passing at the top. Both elements align at approximately the centre of frame, in a rare moment of symmetry (Fig. 2). Until now, the randomness of the landscape and the road’s arbitrary path through it had been stressed, with the camera panning along matter-of-factly to follow the car’s journey. Suddenly the image appears highly aestheticized, the scenery carefully and artificially arranged as part of the miseen-scène.

The sequence shifts to a shot from inside the car, looking out of the side window (Fig. 3). It would appear that the image has finally caught up with the sound; the distance between camera and microphone has been bridged, allowing us to see and hear from the same position. Yet Kiarostami still refuses