May
14, 2002 | In Fox TV’s cult-hit series "24" (which has its penultimate
episode tonight and concludes next week), the screen serenely fractures
into two and three frames against a black background. It does this for
scene changes, for cellphone conversations, before and after commercial
breaks and sometimes just to be beautiful. In doing so, "24" has
quietly become the first prime-time dramatic series to employ multiple
screens as an active storytelling technique: Playing federal agent Jack
Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland drives through the San Fernando Valley, his
ex-lover on one phone in one panel, his wife on another. Far and wide,
close shot and medium shot, assassin and hero, mother and daughter; as
many as six simultaneous images, often locked by the visuals of a
ticking digital clock, keep the concurrent stories lines careering past
us.
Splitting up the screen has slipped into movies and TV shows so
deftly that almost no one has pointed out what a break it makes with
the past. Except for a brief, astonishing moment in the mid-to-late
’60s, with movies like John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix,” Richard
Fleischer’s “The Boston Strangler” and Norman Jewison’s original
version of “The Thomas Crown Affair” and, of course, “Woodstock,”
edited by the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker (among others, including a
then-unknown Martin Scorsese), the history of film has been a history
of the single screen: one image, one shared moment in time. An artist
once insisted to me that you couldn’t have it otherwise; the moment you
break up that screen, you destroy the illusion that allows you to carry
off your audience.
No longer. A new story form is here, where
the splintered frame is not an aberration, not a trick, but an integral
part of the story’s syntax. Take the three-channel Destiny’s Child
video, “Emotions,” directed by Francis Lawrence and released in August
of last year. Each panel follows the three singers simultaneously
through a triptych of frustrations and petty disappointments until they
join, in the end, to comfort each other. In “Timecode,” director Mike
Figgis’ four-quadrant take on Hollywood development hell, an ensemble
of actors improv their way through 90 uncut minutes, divided solely by
their placement in one of the four squares that are always on the
screen. “The Laramie Project,” a Sundance film (adapted from a New York
play) that premiered this spring on HBO, uses an array of divisions to
navigate through a complex series of flashbacks that tell the story of
Matthew Shepard’s death and its impact on the eponymous Wyoming city.
Director
Stephen Hopkins says he first got the idea for “24″ because “there were
so many phone calls in the script that these people would never share
any screen time together.” A great fan of “The Boston Strangler,”
Hopkins had just had a two-channel independent film felled when he was
approached by the producers of “24.” He immediately saw that the show
offered a unique opportunity to use the divided screen. “I loved the
idea of showing what people were saying on the phone but also what they
didn’t want other people to see,” he says.
A handful of
filmmakers have been trying to divide up the single screen almost since
film began. In 1927, Abel Gance made the three-screen silent classic
“Napoleon,” using a process he called “Polyvision.” To those whom
Polyvision confused, he wrote: “Do me the favor of believing that maybe
your eyes do not yet have the visual education necessary for the
reception of the first form of the music of light.”
The music of
light, he called it. Which is what you could call New York’s Times
Square, whose very buildings blink and shimmer. “It is the future of
the cinema which is at stake,” Gance continued. “It will become a
universal language if you make the effort to try to read the new
letters which, little by little, it adds to the alphabet of the eyes.”
Could
Gance have foreseen that the necessary visual education would come from
our contemporary glimpse culture: computer screens, channel-zapping,
video games, CNN crawls, JumboTrons, surveillance cameras, Web sites,
screens in our stores, on our desktops and in our nurseries? The
much-maligned shortened attention span is actually, as Gance predicted,
an ability to navigate through simultaneous images. It’s the alphabet
of our eyes.
When so many images flicker at you, you see
differently. You glance. You glimpse. Your eyes keep moving, and you
use your peripheral vision, the kind of sight connected to fight or
flight (and actually processed in a separate part of the brain than the
direct gaze). You don’t get the entire picture; you can’t, and you
learn to take this partial experience as being accurate enough.
In
his fascinating DVD commentary for “Timecode,” Figgis talks frankly
about how there are times when you just can’t take in what’s going on
in his four-screen film, even when, occasionally, he keeps one screen
on a subject long enough that you’re effectively only watching three,
as when a woman eavesdrops for several minutes on her lover. The point
is, you don’t need to. This very incompleteness, this partialness,
creates its own tension, which becomes part of the story, as it does in
“24,” where absence of information is a theme.
What starts as
necessity becomes a skill, even a pleasure: There’s an unnamed
satisfaction in stretching this newfound ability to navigate through
images. We’re actually hungry to use this ability, to feed it with
something more substantive than frenzied Web animations and stock
tickers. We crave stories. The single-channel film is the visual art
form of the gaze; multichannel is the art form of the glimpse.
It’s
an art form increasingly found in galleries and museums, where more
artists than I can possibly list here have been creating multiscreen
environments and multichannel works, many entirely narrative in nature.
The French artist Pierre Huyghe created a double-screen piece that
parallels excerpts from Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” with his own
film of the actual bank robber, now 30 years older, reenacting the
crime with actors on a set. Cecilia Dougherty’s “Gone” uses a double
screen to reinterpret the story of the gay son in the PBS
vérité series
“An American Family.”
The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat
frequently uses two screens facing each other to vividly convey the
rigid divisions in gender between Iranian men on one screen and Iranian
women on another. Doug Aitken used three rooms with multiple screens to
evoke a lonely man’s walk through a Los Angeles night. Sam
Taylor-Wood’s seven-screen piece “Party” peels away the dynamics of a
cocktail party by filming one with seven cameras in real time. Nam June
Paik, Bill Viola, Gary Hill and other video artists have long used
multiple monitors to fracture time and images.
The last time
people were chopping up images like this was way back in the ’60s, when
sex and drugs were good for you. In what came to be called “expanded
cinema,” underground filmmakers put projectors on light shows and threw
images around galleries. In 1957, Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs began
massive multiprojector shows on the ceiling of a San Francisco
planetarium. In 1959, Charles and Ray Eames (best known for the Eames
chair) put a seven-screen display called “Glimpses of the USA” together
to show America to Nikita Khrushchev, who loved its seven simultaneous
images of Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses. The Eameses made a six-screen
presentation called “House of Science” the next year, and then the
incredible 17-screen “Think” for the IBM pavilion at the New York
World’s Fair of 1964.
Superimposition became — and remains — the
quintessential way to show an LSD trip. Andy Warhol’s films began to
split in 1965; the most famous of these was “Chelsea Girls,” where he
paired up reels — some color, some black-and-white — he’d been shooting
of his friends in New York. That became the first commercially released
double-screen film.
This visual adventuring culminated in the
screen-drenched pavilions of another World’s Fair, Montreal’s Expo ‘67:
One pavilion had two 70-foot screens placed vertically facing each
other, Francis Thompson’s six-screen “We Are Young” played in another
and the Czechoslovak pavilion featured 130 continuously changing
images. Both Fleischer, a studio veteran by that time, and Jewison went
to Expo ‘67 and were inspired by the visual vocabulary they encountered
there. Which is why the two greatest split-screen movies — theirs —
came out in 1968. (And why the fracturing frames of “24″ can trace
their lineage from Hopkins’ love of “The Boston Strangler” straight
back to expanded cinema.)
Mysteriously, while video and film
artists continued to use multiple projectors and monitors from that
point on, in Hollywood, split screen went from cutting edge — in movies
like “Charley” and “The Andromeda Strain” — to passé in about
two
minutes. “Wicked, Wicked,” a 1973 film directed by Richard L. Bare,
used split screen — dubbed “Duovision” — in its entirety. Deemed a
bomb, it never made it to video. But despite its clumsy writing and
acting, “Wicked, Wicked” is well worth watching for its exploration of
reasons to divide a story’s screen: fantasy vs. reality, memory vs.
present, truth vs. lies, hope vs. fear and — since it’s the story of a
peeping Tom — watcher vs. watched, stalker vs. stalked.
By 1979,
split screens were being used in “More American Graffiti,” another
bomb, to convey a dated ’60s look. When I interviewed Fleischer,
director of “The Boston Strangler,” in 1998, he said, “I think what
happened when directors got into that stuff was, it was too difficult,
you had to plan it, and they didn’t want to take the trouble.”
In
the days of optical printing, a huge amount of trouble, time and
expense went into those multiple on-screen images. Each image in each
box had to be resized and refilmed on an optical printer using a matte
screen. Pablo Ferra, who designed the multiple boxes for the original
“Thomas Crown Affair,” says the process took months. (The lowly status
of split-screen movies is reflected in the fact that “The Boston
Strangler” is also unavailable on video. AMC airs it occasionally,
along with an interesting back-story documentary, which is the only way
you’ll see it until Fox sees fit to release it. Fleischer is still
alive, as is star Tony Curtis; they could make a great audio
commentary. The original “Thomas Crown Affair,” however, is available
in a new DVD, on which Jewison discusses the influence of Expo ‘67 and
describes the design of the multiple boxes in detail.)
None of
the greatest directors working in the ’60s, such as Alfred Hitchcock or
David Lean, ever ventured near a split screen, and among name American
filmmakers only Brian De Palma has continued, Quixote-like, to use
split screen as part of his arsenal: in “Sisters,” “Carrie,” “Dressed
to Kill” and even 1998’s “Snake Eyes.”
The arrival of nonlinear —
that is, computer-based — editing systems like Avid, the low-priced
Final Cut Pro and After Effects is perhaps the biggest reason why
divided frames are back. For the first time, it’s easy. Even the
lowest-end computers can juggle several images with tremendous
precision, if not always speed. (Peter Greenaway had Avid make up a
special software program just for his 1996 multiscreen film “The Pillow
Book.”)
The Avid has been the mother of multichannel work in
another sense: When you edit on the Avid, two images appear in
side-by-side rectangles at the same time in a function called “Trim
Edit.” Figgis shot his film of the Strindberg play “Miss Julie” on two
cameras and thus found himself looking at these side-by-side images in
the editing room all day long. He found the effect so pleasing that he
decided to make the film’s crucial central love scene in two channels.
He made the leap to “Timecode,” an entire movie split into four
sections, from there.
Moisés Kaufman, director of “The Laramie
Project,” was also inspired by Trim Edit mode as he and his editors
struggled to put together hundreds of hours of footage. “The
playfulness of the ’60s split screens has ideology behind it,” says
“Laramie” editor Brian Kates. “Now it’s more because the Avid lets me
do it.”
The single biggest question when the screen divides is:
where is now? Which panel is the single shared moment in time that
heretofore defined single-channel movies? And when are the other panels
happening: earlier, later or at the same time? Cutting up the screen
unmoors the images in time. Clearly the simplest answer is to say that
the frames are all now, all the same moment. You’ve divided up the
screen but not the time. In “Timecode,” we’re always at the exact same
time on all four screens. “24″ uses cuts and shifting angles, but the
screens depict the same moment, often showing the precise seconds
ticking by. Music videos like “Emotions” or Semisonic’s “Closing Time”
do the same thing: The joy is in simultaneity, disparate events and
angles divided in place but not in time.
But “The Laramie
Project” uses multiple screens to navigate several simultaneous strands
of time. There is the “now” of the New York actors visiting Laramie
juxtaposed with the “then” of their earlier visits to the town. There’s
the “now” of the town’s inhabitants — a Laramie bartender, say, talking
to the visitors — and the “then” of his remembering Matthew Shepard at
a table with his tormentors. You might call this “speaker and subject”;
it’s one of the basic multichannel divisions, and you see it every
night on the TV news. Jewison’s “Thomas Crown Affair” has one wonderful
moment near the end when Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen stare pensively
into their bonfire on the beach, while — in another panel — the second
bank robbery that will destroy their relationship begins the next day.
The
world of Hollywood and prime-time TV seldom overlaps with experimental
film or art installations, but remarkably, wherever multichannel is
tried, its users invariably rely on the same vocabulary. There’s the
technique we might call “close and closer”; no matter how pragmatic the
reason for dividing the screen may be, sooner or later everyone simply
puts two lenses on the same thing at the same time just for sheer
visual pleasure. You can see this at work in “24,” in the ads for
Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio” and in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1979
“Numero Deux,” a film made from video that includes a beautiful scene
of a couple arguing while the dishes are being washed, shot from two
angles, one in silhouette.
“In effect, you do your own editing,
as you look from one [image] to the other,” says Fleischer, and this is
as true of Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” as it is of “The Boston Strangler.”
At Expo ‘67, Fleischer says, he saw a full figure next to a close-up:
“It opened a whole new vista; this is very interesting, to see things
from more than one point of view simultaneously.” The contrast can be
between locations, between film stocks — “Laramie” pairs actual news
footage with filmed scenes — or between film speeds, as in Dougherty’s
“Gone,” which pairs (among other combinations) the sped-up rectangular
fracturing of digital fast-forward on one side of the screen and
regular time on another.
Sometimes a split screen tells us more
than we could know with just one, something at which “The Boston
Strangler” excels. A camera waits, poised, over the foot of a murdered
woman while, in another panel, her roommates chat about her as they
climb the stairs. We wait for the door to open and the two screens to
become one, front and back of the same horrific moment, as they
invariably do.
There’s also simultaneous montage: The elegance
of “Thomas Crown” is in the title character’s brilliant planning — five
men who never meet will pull off a bank heist, and we watch all five at
once. Sound is crucial in telling us where we are: What you see is what
you hear. Both “The Laramie Project” and “The Boston Strangler” use
multiple images to convey a sense of a city as a character in the movie
(Boston and Laramie themselves being multichannel experiences).
“Laramie” also interweaves news footage with its fictional filmed
scenes to capture a sense of the media frenzy surrounding the Shepard
case.
Once you put the lens on this particular focal length, you
not only have a new vocabulary for telling stories, you start to see
multichannel everywhere. The Oscars telecast was relentlessly
multichannel this year; nearly every category had some kind of divided
imagery, not least on the five screens behind the podium. On MTV, a
group of guys in one frame comment on their favorite sexy videos, which
are shown at the same time on another. (”If Tupac was a white woman,
he’d be Madonna,” comments one guy. “Of course, we’re talking about a
pretty big if.”) A VH1 multichannel show plays a Janet Jackson video
while fans talk about why they love it or sing along. “Dismissed”
interrupts its blind dates to have little instant replays and
commentary play at the same time.
Acura has multiple angles on
cars; Fidelity Investments has two and three screens of broker and
confused client, and Microsoft has a four-channel commercial that is a
study of close and closer. Interstitial material (the promotional
material that plays between ads) — for South Park or MTV’s music awards
or the Cartoon Network — are almost invariably multichannel.
Other
recent movies dip into and out of split-screen moments without missing
a beat. Watching my nieces’ and nephews’ favorite movies over the
holidays, I noticed random split-screen moments in movies from
“Remember the Titans” to “Selena” and “The Princess Diaries.” Darren
Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” opens with the split screen of a
mother locked in a closet by her drug addict son, and has some
compelling six-panel sections in its deleted scenes on its DVD (and an
awesome menu, by the way). In Alison Maclean’s “Jesus’ Son,” two
junkies overdose on the same heroin in split screens: One is discovered
and saved, the other dies. The French import “Amélie” features a
Fotomat-style picture with all four images speaking at once — and
saying different things. The climactic scene of Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola
Run” splits three ways, with one image the second hand of a clock.
There
will only be more. Actor and director Alan Cummings’ talk show, due
soon on Oxygen, will often use four simultaneous cameras on his
interviews (the first is with Gwyneth Paltrow). Figgis has already made
a second multiscreen film, “Hotel.” “24″ has taken prime-time TV far
beyond the convention of splitting the screen for a telephone
conversation (a tradition that actually goes back to a 1913 silent film
by pioneer Lois Weber). We are destined to watch more than one image at
a time, to connect them and have them connected for us, spelling out
stories with the alphabet of our eyes.