My post below, inspired by a happenstance viewing of Michael Curtiz’s great 1939 Dodge City, inspired some astute commentary both on and off its thread. Some readers were moved to cite their own favorite dissolves. A particularly persuasive citation, drawn from Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane, by commenter Charles Hartney:
“The scene in question occurs during Kane’s first encounter with Susan Alexander, when she provides him hot water and he the necessary comic relief to alleviate her toothache. He starts to question her about her age, her occupation, what she wanted to be when she was little – “A singer,” she responds sheepishly – and then asks that she sing for him in the parlor.
Susan begins to sing as Kane regards her approvingly, though her voice is tinny and her piano-playing unintentionally dissonant. It is here where Welles inserts a dissolve, and the resulting scene is very familiar: Susan at the piano, singing the same song, and Kane rapt with attention. But the scenery is changed: we are no longer in Susan’s claustrophobic parlor, but in a more refined, capacious environment. Susan has changed as well: her dress is more elegant, her piano playing and singing smoother, more melodic, confident.
These elements suggest a number of narrative developments: a significant passage of time; that Susan has been given the freedom (see: money) to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a singer; and not only the continuation but the deepening of the relationship between Susan and Charles – he has obviously moved her into more luxurious surroundings.
Watching Kane for the I‑don’t-know-how-many-th time, it struck me what a formal marvel this transition was. To communicate so much with so little…astonishing.”
Here are screen captures of the, let’s say two-and-a-half shots in question:
Indeed, a whole dissertation could be written on the change of interior lighting apparatuses alone…
In an e‑mail, my friend Joseph Failla notes quite a few things: “One of my favorite dissolves (can you believe I have favorite dissolves?) is in SEVEN CHANCES [1925] when Keaton gets behind the wheel of his auto and instead of driving off, the background dissolves to the location of his destination without any movement at all. It’s a weird moment that at first feels very disorienting but actually makes plenty of sense in an absurd kind of way…”
“…If this simple technique doesn’t get one to think of the possibilities of the medium, I don’t know what would.” Joe continues:
“I also remember some very striking use of dissolves in SHANE [1953], in particular a sequence with Jack Palance crossing a barroom as he fades from the background into the foreground. It’s a great touch which gives him and the sequence a suitable sense of menace…”
“…if I’m not mistaken Scorsese appropriated it for a similar effect in TAXI DRIVER [1976]…”
Indeed:
What’s super-interesting about the dissolve in Shane is that director George Stevens is more often cited as a great cinematic storyteller rather than a visual stylist. But there’s literally zero diegetic function served by that dissolve; not only that, but there’s no rational reason for it to exist at all. It’s absolutely right, of course, but it’s right as a stylistic flourish, something of the sort that Stevens doesn’t have much of a reputation for. It’s because of this bit that I tend to look at all of Stevens’ work harder than I might have. I believe that Scorsese, also, values Stevens as a stylist; whenever I’ve heard him refer to, say, the content-problematic Giant, he always specifies that for him its greatness is “visual.” I also find that much of Shane is rather explicitly Eisensteinean, but that’s something for another time, another post.
Back to Mr. Failla: “Of course there’s the crucial sequence in THE WRONG MAN [1957] when we get that long slow dissolve from an at the end of his rope Henry Fonda, praying for a miracle in close up, to the hold up man Fonda has been mistaken for, as the scene switches to his point of view.”
Indeed, and this is worth going into at some length…first in terms of screen caps, because it’s a long dissolve. I’m also including the shot prior to the dissolve, of the picture of Christ that Fonda’s character prays to.
There’s quite a bit that’s extraordinary here; first off, the rather staggering notion that Hitchcock is taking the idea of an answered prayer at 100 percent face value and absolutely unironically depicting one. And that’s not the only reason that the word “Bressonian” springs to mind when considering this sequence; there’s the lean, impassive face of actor Richard Robbins as the actual right man, that is, the guilty party of whose crimes Fonda’s character has been unjustly accused. It’s a very Bressonian face, at the same time as being rather absolutely American. I also like how Fonda’s and Robbin’s right eyes (left side of the frame) line up pretty much exactly at one point during the dissolved; boy, is that a purposefully locked-down camera(s), or what? In Hitchcock/Truffaut, the auteur under examination requests that Man be filed among “the indifferent Hitchcocks,” and Truffaut protests, “I hoped you might defend the picture.” It’s easy to understand why. The quasi-documentary feel combined with a high level of very intelligent stylization, the psychological acuity and the unstinting perspective on the story’s valleys of emotional bleakness—all these became signal features of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and quite a few other movies of the French New Wave.
Aside of this one, my other favorite moment in “The wrong man” happens at the end, when Henry Fonda has been cleared and stumbles upon the two women who had mistakenly fingered him. He tries to confront them, saying “do you know what happened to my wife because of this?”, and the two women glance a bit at him, as if not knowing what to say… and then walk away really quickly without looking at him again.
As for the subject matter, I work as a video editor, and although my daily work has little to do with the masterpieces we’re talking about here (it’s more like soul-deadening video reports for big corporations), I should mention that, when I was learning the job, I was told that dissolves were the quick & lazy way to fix mismatched cuts, and that the real “art” of editing lies in matching two shots so that the cut is invisible. (A similar view is expressed in Richard Pepperman’s book “The eye is quicker”, though more nuanced and less crudely expressed, of course). Then again, in both cases this advice was given to counter the tendence of so many Avid/FCP-educated editors to do precisely that, to use the dissolve as a lazy crutch (Pepperman tells in his book a story of an Avid demo he attended, where the rep shows two mismatched shots and says “look how easily it’s fixed”, and adds a dissolve). And of course, we’ve all seen the vacation videos made by people who have just started using Windows MovieMaker and feel the need to use every single transition in the program…
Anyway, all of this is quite below the level of the people who edit professional feature films nowadays, so I don’t know how relevant it is, but I thought I’d just mention this as a possible factor.
I was watching Minnelli’s UNDERCURRENT, a noir in the REBECCA/SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR/GASLIGHT vein, last weekend. At first I was stunned by Freund’s cinematography (such resplendent grays) and the way Minnelli can make 4:3 look like it’s widescreen, but ultimately I came away agreeing with the critics who say that noir just wasn’t for Minnelli. However, there was this one utterly brilliant dissolve. Katherine Hepburn and Robert Taylor kiss as Taylor ominously warns Hepburn that she’d better never forget “who [she] belongs to.” We dissolve from the black of Taylor’s hair into what looks like a black, ghostly apparition, slowly teetering/floating away from the camera with arms splayed out. It turns out to be the back of a model, trying on clothes for Hepburn in an expensive store as part of her makeover as the new society wife. It’s a rather haunting image.
A not-so-recent fave from LOST HIGHWAY
Well, that link didn’t work. So here’s the raw URL: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v102/rynhauld/LH_lap_stairs.png
The guy who runs the film blog Moon in the Gutter seems to be obsessed with dissolves. He posts great screenshots, and his “images from my favorite films” series almost always includes some dissolve stills. Check it: http://mooninthegutter.blogspot.com/search/label/Images%20From%20My%20All%20Time%20Favorite%20Films
Buster Keaton does a nice dissolve in Go West, where a bread roll gets shorter, to illustrate passage of time on a train journey.
Similarly, I seem to recall a nice dissolve on the bartop in The Lost Weekend, showing the number of damp rings left by Ray Milland’s drink increasing.
I always liked the mix from a crashing wave, which abruptly turns red, to a blazing bonfire in Witchfinder General.
And speaking of Kane, I’ve yet to see a home video version that captures the moment we dissolve from Thatcher’s memoirs to the falling snow, the effect of snow drifting across the white page, only visible when it cuts across the letters of Thatcher’s handwriting, always seems to get lost on a TV screen.
Probably my favorite dissolve of the last 20 years or so is this one (http://soundsimages.blogspot.com/2010/04/dissolve-from-hoodlum-bill-duke-1997.html), from HOODLUM, which happens to be a vastly underrated (and often beautifully edited) movie.
Part of the reason I think the dissolve is “a lost art” (and sorry if this has already been brought up in the discussion) is a tendency to dissolve at a moment of “inaction” (the scene ends, then you dissolve), whereas I think the best dissolves occur at moments of heightened action / emotion (the reason that WRONG MAN dissolve works so well). Duke definitely follows the “classical style,” using dissolves to link actions / moments of acting instead of merely “solving the problem” of a transition between scenes.
One thing going on in that KANE dissolve that I only heard for the first time recently – in both apartments, Susan is singing the aria “Una Voce Poco Fa” from THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. But in the first one, she is singing the lyrics in an English translation; in the latter, she is singing them in Rossini’s original Italian. It’s one of, like, 20 subtle ways that Susan is portrayed as a social climber. Since the late 19th century (in the Anglophone world anyway), translating operas has been considered, where not downright sacrilege, to be at best a necessary accommodation to the plebes and the proles.
@ Victor Morton: Indeed. God really IS in the details here; I’m also reminded of Henry James’ remark, that a true artist is someone on whom NOTHING is lost. Your example is another reason why I insist that people who dismiss or discount “Citizen Kane” are doing so out of, among other things, rather profound cultural ignorance and incuriosity.
And stubbornness. Generalizing here, of course, but it’s not uncommon (especially when young) to approach acclaimed art with a chip on your shoulder–“Best ever, eh? I’LL be the judge of that!” Then you sit there and nitpick for two hours. A friend of mine told me of a university screening of KANE after which most the students seemed underwhelmed–“After all that, it’s a damn sled? Sheesh.” Okay, maybe no one actually said “Sheesh.”
@Glenn: “…I insist that people who dismiss or discount “Citizen Kane” are doing so out of, among other things, rather profound cultural ignorance and incuriosity.”
Oh how I love you for that. And for showing the shockingly underrated George Stevens some love.
Splendid post, splendid comments. I’m just savoring.
Teaching KANE is always an interesting experience. Students initially react with their best Peggy Lee impersonation, but as I teach the movie over the next week they seem genuinely startled all the things they didn’t notice when they were too busy shrugging, and when it comes time to write their paper, when they have the option of writing about any movie we’ve screened, about half choose to write about KANE.
Great post. Loved the SHANE and SEVEN CHANCES examples, which were unfamiliar to me. But with respect to the Keaton, why a dissolve and not a match-cut, do you think? Or was the use of match-cuts rare at that time?
Well, match dissolves were fairly uncommon too. But since a dissolve usually signified passage of time, and a cut usually suggested something following absolutely immediately after the previous image, Keaton was following the language of the time.
But, in a very special sequence of Sherlcok Jnr, Keaton executes a very large number of absolutely extraordinary match cuts.
Thanks, D Cairns. I watched all the classic Keatons when I was a kid, as they used to show them all the time on Channel Four (in the UK). Those were the days. Going to buy them all up on DVD right now.
I know that Anthony Minghella and Walter Murch were probably responsible for many memorable transitions, but in the dissolves department my favorite of theirs is likely the one in The English Patient which goes from an aerial shot flying over sand dunes to the wrinkled bed sheet where the title character is emerging from his morphine-induced recollection of the desert. It’s a transition between two textures that visually are similar to legitimize the memory trigger but sensually poles apart so as to highlight the contrast between the two times and places.
Also, in the comments below Glenn’s previous “dissolve” post someone mentioned Kubrick’s heavy reliance on them later in his career, and there are so many great ones worth mentioning in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. One of the best for me is a dissolve in the latter which starts on what looks like an intentionally drab medium shot of Nicole Kidman in the most mundane setting imaginable: sitting at the kitchen table with cookies and milk, in a bathrobe and glasses with her hair up, alternating between reading a newspaper and watching some movie (a cheesy European romance?) on a little television (providing the only audible sound). This dissolves to a very tight two-shot in profile of Tom Cruise and Vinessa Shaw’s prostitute, who bobs around slightly before moving in to give him a lingering kiss, the sole background element a pair of diffused and out-of-focus christmas lights, with some seductive piano jazz playing over it. The disparity between these two scenes is so jarring, and the phone call from Kidman that interrupts the latter, pulling Cruise out of realizing his urban fantasy, creates a link back to remind us before we get caught up in it ourselves.
I should clarify about the Kubrick thing above that one could certainly have cut between those two scenes, but something in the way that he allows one boring moment to melt into such an erotic, promising one stood out for me the first time I saw EWS in the theatre, and is what I think of first whenever the film is mentioned.
It seems to make little sense to be against any cinematic device in and of itself, across the board. Stanley Cavell has a good passage in The World Viewed that is relevant: “…integrating a device is not the artistic issue, because integration can itself be a device…There is no substitute for integrity. And it is to show that only the integrity of a given work can make out the significance of a given possibility. If the device is integral to what makes a work convincing, it has full importance; without the conviction it has any and none.”
Lazarus,
Isn’t Kidman watching Mazursky’s Blume in Love? I think I remember George Segal in a piazza. A discussion of that movie probably belongs in the Leone / insensitive-rape-scene thread.
Re: those shots above in Taxi Driver, I’ve always thought of them as having the opposite effect of the shots from Shane – Jack Palance is conquering and dominating his cinematic space, but Travis Bickle is walking and walking and not really going anywhere.
Just thought I’d mention that one of my favorite things about that dissolve in The Wrong Man, is how unabashedly Joss Whedon stole it in Serenity.