The Burnzo Diaries: film criticism

For my first semester of my junior year at BU, I took a class called “Cinema of Suspense” or “Suspense in Cinema” or something with the word “suspense” in it. Like most students, I thought this class would involve us watching films that were, on their face, full of suspense. Films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or, you know, some kind of thriller.

But this was not the case.

In fact, the class didn’t really involve watching any films except for one. And this was not done as a class as most film study classes were. Basically, what happened is we met as a class once and my professor assigned each student a film to do a shot-by-shot analysis of. He literally just walked from one desk to the next and assigned each student a random film that popped into his head; well, not a completely random film. It was a film that he considered to be a good film.

I think I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the classroom, so he got to me after he had assigned maybe 10 or 12 films to other students. I was nervous about what film I would be assigned because some of the other students had been assigned some films that sounded like real snooze-fests. A French film called Last Year at Marienbad comes to mind. I think one of my friends got that one assigned to him. I had seen the film at some point during my film school experience and it was one of the most boring films I had ever seen, even though it is considered to be a great film. I really didn’t want to do a shot-by-shot analysis of Last Year at Marienbad. That would have been torture.

Fortunately, my professor assigned the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey to me, which was a film I had already seen at least a couple of times and I was already a big Kubrick fan, so at least I knew this shot-by-shot exercise wouldn’t be completely boring for me.

As far as the analysis went, it had to at least be 50 pages long, which sounds long for a college paper, but this would be the only work we did for the entire semester. No more meetings as a class. No quizzes. No exams. No oral presentations. Just one paper: the 50-page shot-by-shot analysis.

In our analysis, we would have to analyze the film’s lighting, composition, color scheme, sound design, musical score, actor blocking, camera angle, camera movement, mise en scène, acting, dialogue and, of course, editing. Then, we would have to explain how these film elements helped to create “suspense.”

Now, as far as what the word “suspense” actually meant, that part was a little vague. Everyone thinks of suspense as being excitement, mystery, intrigue and thrill! But this was not necessarily how my professor defined suspense, although it could be all those things.

Instead, he saw suspense as essentially being “viewer engagement.” In simple terms, he basically wanted us to analyze how a given film kept audiences engaged and interested in what they were watching. Obviously, telling a great story (i.e. starting with a good screenplay) is a large part of this, but aside from the story, great filmmakers utilize a multitude of cinematic devices to keep people interested in what they are watching, whether that be through lighting, composition, sound design, editing, etc. So, our mission was to, not watch the film as a passive observer, but to consciously reverse-engineer each shot of our assigned films so we could see how the respective filmmakers (in my case, Kubrick) used various cinematic devices to keep the viewer watching and interested in what they were watching.

It seems kind of simple, right? Of course the point of a film is to keep the audience engaged, but the question was how do you use the film language to accomplish that goal. That was the overall point of our assignment, I suppose.

Now, we had all semester to work on this 50-page analysis, but of course most of the students in my class waited until very late into the semester to work on their paper. I was no different from the rest of my fellow classmates. I didn’t exactly wait until the last week of the semester like some other students did, but I don’t think I started working on my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey until maybe the last three weeks of the semester. And the reason for this wasn’t really procrastination. It was because I was busy with my other three classes I was taking at the time, one of which was a production course making films and that itself was almost as time-consuming as the other three classes combined.

When I did start my shot-by-shot analysis, I thought it was kind of awkward because some shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey had more suspenseful elements in them than others. And some shots simply had more of the same elements from the shots preceding them. I also didn’t know whether I should have been talking about my interpretations of the film at any point. I mean, was this simply a technical paper, only talking about cinematic devices, or should I have been talking about what the film was trying to say thematically and how the cinematic devices helped convey these themes?

Ultimately, I did mix in some of my thematical interpretations of the film but mostly stuck to the technical aspects. Unsurprisingly, the paper took much longer to write than I had anticipated and I remember trying to rush to get it all done a few days leading up to the deadline. In the end, I met the 50-page requirement, pretty much right in the nick of time, handed the paper in and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get that good of a grade on my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mean, it wasn’t THAT bad, but it wasn’t a grade I was happy with. Fine, I’ll just come right out and say it: I got a B-minus. And, since that one paper was the only assignment we had to do for that class, my grade for the entire semester ended up being—that’s right—a B-minus.

Again, a B-minus wasn’t that bad of a grade, but I was used to getting mostly A’s and B-pluses. That B-minus was actually the worst grade I ever got in any class during my time at BU. At least I think it was? I also took a very tough Physiological Psychology class where I may have also gotten a B-minus, but, now that I think about it, I think even in that class I got a straight B.

It wasn’t that I had done a bad job doing the shot-by-shot analysis. My professor appreciated my thematic interpretations of Kubrick’s film, a film, by the way, that is rather ambiguous and open to many different interpretations. The main problem with my paper was that I didn’t do a great job proofreading it (mainly because I ran out of time) and I also had a good number of grammatical errors that I didn’t realize would be factored into my grade.

Ok, screw it, let me just be frank here: if you want to know the real truth, the problem was that the paper was graded by a TA (i.e. teacher’s assistant). You know how it goes with TA’s. They grade papers “by the book” and they’re sticklers for every single grammatical error. They’re basically trying to prove themselves and show off to the professor. Yeah, you know how it is with TA’s—I don’t have to tell you.

By the way, a similar thing happened to me in one of my British literature classes at BU. A TA graded this really clever paper I wrote about Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay A Modest Proposal. Initially, I got a C on this paper or something ridiculous like that, because the TA found all these little nitpicky grammatical errors and basically didn’t even pay attention to what the paper was saying. All she cared about was the paper’s mechanics and, yes, every single possible grammatical error she could find, whether it be a violation of the Chicago style, MLA style or some other ancient writing style from, like, Old English times. Fortunately, the professor read the paper after the TA went over it and changed my grade all the way from a C to an A-minus. The professor not only appreciated how clever my paper was, but she also saw how ridiculously stringent the TA had been when she was grading the paper’s grammar.

This, however, did not happen in my “Cinema of Suspense” class. My professor did “check over” the papers after my TA graded them, but he did not change my grade, even though he wrote comments on my paper indicating that he appreciated my interpretations of the film. I’m sure this must have been because he didn’t want to make the TA feel bad. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself. No, I will go out on a limb here and say my professor almost certainly would have given me a better grade had it been only he who had graded my paper.

Either way, I was pretty bummed about getting such a bad grade (or at least what-I-considered-to-be a bad grade). At the time, I thought doing the paper was a big waste of energy that only ended up damaging my GPA. I was wondering if I should have just taken another class, a class where I would have had more than one shot at getting a good grade for the semester.

I also was upset with the professor. I thought he was lazy, that he purposely designed a class where he could do the least amount of work, not really teach anything, and only have to read over maybe a couple dozen of papers at the end of the semester that had already been meticulously graded by a TA. That’s right: he didn’t even have to do the toughest part of grading a student paper, all the editing and marking up. All he had to do was read over what the TA had already read over and write in a few comments to make it look like he cared. What a hustle, I thought.

And, honestly, maybe it WAS a hustle. Maybe my professor was, in fact, lazy.

As time went on, however, I gradually began to realize that the shot-by-shot analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey was not a fruitless effort. As I made more of my student films and made more short films after I graduated college, I consciously became aware of the fact that I was applying a lot of what I learned from doing the 2001 analysis to my filmmaking.

A few years after graduating, I started doing wedding videography and I noticed that I was even applying what I learned from 2001 while editing wedding videos as well.

And it didn’t just stop there.

Even when I started making corporate videos (mostly videos used for marketing), I often became aware of the fact that I was applying much of what I learned from Kubrick while shooting or editing those videos.

Anyway, here are some examples of the “suspenseful elements” I identified when analyzing the shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1. The titles at the beginning of the film are not always in perfect synch with the musical score. I’m talking about the opening titles, where the sun rises above the earth and there is the Zarathustra score. If you watch carefully, the titles always pop onscreen just slightly before you would think they would if they were being timed perfectly with the music. Knowing how big of a perfectionist Stanley Kubrick was, I’m assuming this was done on purpose, I think because it’s more visually and audibly interesting than having both titles and music in perfect synch with each other.

The Opening Title Sequence in 2001

2. The very first shots of the film after the titles, showing the African landscapes, are rather static. Since there is no movement in these shots (they were actual still photographs done by a second unit[i]), I notice Kubrick edited them in a way so that they were more engaging. In one shot, the horizon is near the bottom of the frame, then in another shot the horizon is near the top of the frame. When cut together, there is a jarring enough change in the image so that the shots become much more interesting. If there wasn’t enough of a change in the shots, like if the horizon was always center-frame, the sequence would have been much more static. In other words, it’s the cutting and varying compositions that give the sequence more movement and make them more visually interesting.

The African landscape shots

3. Kubrick uses colors very effectively. There are some shots early in the film where the apes are eating some meat that they obtained after figuring out how to use bones as weapons. The color of the meat is a striking blood-red that we can’t help but fixate our eyes upon. The red is almost appealing to the bloodlust within our DNA. The same thing happens, by the way, in a later part of the film where Dr. Heywood Floyd and some Russian scientists are sitting in blood-red chairs within the International Space Station, which is otherwise bright but subdued as far as the color scheme goes. The scene with these scientists talking is rather calm, but we can’t help but fixate on the red chairs and it gives the scene an unsettling undertone. Although the actors are conversing like civilized human beings—the complete opposite from how the apes behaved—it’s almost like Kubrick is hinting that there is something sinister lurking beneath the civility. Millennial man still has a primal violence, but we learned how to keep it under a face of benevolence. Instead of using bones as weapons, we use nuclear warheads, which, by the way, is the first thing we see floating in space after the famous cut from the ape’s bone spinning in the air.

The red chairs in the space station.

4. Kubrick is also brilliant with his use of sound. A lot of the film is quiet, mainly since space is so quiet (it’s not like what you experience in movies like Star Wars), but most of the early African sequences are quiet, too. One exception, however, is about three-quarters of the way through the first act with the apes. There is a quiet sequence of shots with nothing but peaceful cricket sounds and then there is an abrupt cut to the apes suddenly in a battle with a rival tribe, shrieking at each other, fighting over a watering hole. The transition is jarring and unexpected. It is suspense.

The apes shrieking at their rival tribe.

5. Much later in the film when HAL has malfunctioned and Frank Poole is trying to replace the AE-35 antenna outside the spaceship, there is a striking four-cut zoom that I think is one of the most overtly suspenseful devices used in the film. Basically, what Kubrick does is use four static shots to create a zoom-like effect. He starts with a quick wide shot of HAL’s eye on the space pod, then quickly jumps to a medium shot of the eye, then quickly jumps to a close-up of the eye and then finally cuts to an extreme close-up. I’ve used this same kind of static “zoom” effect in a couple of my short films. It always left an impression on me. It’s a great way to do a zoom if you don’t have a zoom lens and even if you do have a zoom lens or a zoom-capable video camera, it is tough to do one without being shaky or choppy, especially on a video camera where the zoom rocker is not always as precise as you would like it to be.

HAL kills Frank Poole

There are, of course, many more examples of “suspense” in 2001: A Space Odyssey that I could discuss, but those are five rather small examples that make a big difference, and when you add all those elements of suspense together, you constantly keep the audience engaged. The moral of the story is that there should always be something visually or audially interesting happening, however small the element of suspense may be. And you should cut out any frame of film that lacks suspense.

Of course, the paradox here is that sometimes even nothing can be interesting. Sometimes, there may even be nothing going on in a shot, but it’s being used to add to the rhythm of the editing, maybe give the viewer a breather after something too exciting, after too much suspense. Am I making any sense here? I guess I’m saying that there are exceptions to these rules, that even “nothing” can be suspenseful.

What’s ironic about all this is that the class I thought I had learned the least from at the time ended up being one of the classes that ended up having the longest impression on me. It was one film. One paper. That one exercise could have potentially been all I needed to learn about making an interesting piece of film or video. I thought my professor was “phoning it in” at the time, doing the least amount of work to get paid as a college professor, but maybe he really knew what he was doing.

Or maybe he just got lucky.

…

MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, Lymey Bastard, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses and Bostonwood. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.