One of the many felicities of Peeping Tom is that in the ways described it exposes the members of the audience with their private pleasures and solitary satisfaction. This is probably the reason why no film has been so almost[1] universally execrated on its first appearance, by the critics if not by its audiences. The critics' aloofness in their weighing and balancing was a kind of magic flying carpet which Michael Powell, the one living British director of unquestionably filmic sensibilities (except Hitchcock, now in Hollywood), rudely pulled out from under them in a universally embarrassing state of disarray. Michael Powell's reaction was Hitchcockian in its sardonic air of innocence: It was '[a] very tender film, a very nice one',[2] he said, a statement which applied to the treatment of Mark, Helen and her blind mother is transparently true, but of course only part of the picture. And when the viewers are made aware of the film's extensive use of actual extradiegetic material in constructing its reality, they cannot pass effortlessly through the cinema's exit from the Imaginary and be reconstituted in/by the Real and its actual correlates.

For the critics, Powell's offence amounted almost to treason as he was the man who had given them such dubiously inspirational films as A Matter of Life and Death (1964). This is literally true since everything happens after the hero's death at the beginning. Another one of his films is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which was a success despite Churchill's personal harassment of the film's making and, later, showing, since he could not see that the Blimp figure was an affectionate and admiring tribute to a certain sort of English gentleman and to his friend, his German counterpart in the 1956 film The Battle of the River Plate. In fact, if they had looked more closely at those films they might have perceived the recurrence of lone, dedicated figures who will pull the nation through.[3] More germane to our purposes, however, is The Thief of Baghdad (1924), an all-stops-out fantasy as Peeping Tom is unrestrained horror. It is a flying carpet in itself of, among other things, some of the finest special effects ever created. Like King Kong in another way it puts to shame the mechanical 'high tech' quality of recent horror/fantasy films, both technically and in the soaring quality of imagination at play.

But in order to get to the fictive, it is time to consider the other side of the coin, fantasy, rather than horror, despite their multiple encroachments each upon the other. Indeed, the nearest thing to a 'highbrow' approach to such films is Cinefantastique. This is an American film, despite the name, presumably chosen as a tribute to its French predecessor in order to encourage the fantasy that its enunciation be read literally and hence the cardinal importance of special effects. Or if we are Todorovian about it, we might say that The Thief of Baghdad (1924), being chiefly concerned with the uncanny, but producing magic, is to be classed as a film of the marvellous rather than the fantastic. Nor need one resort to reader response theory to claim the film as fantastic for some, since Todorov's Structuralism places fantasy within the text, not the work.

In deference to the politique des auteurs, whose a priorism blinded them to the merits of Peeping Tom on its first release in France, I will quote Powell on the subject of the required personal style: 'Take Hitchcock, for example, or Renoir,[4] these are directors who have found their own style in the cinema. I haven't. I live cinema.... I am the cinema'.[5] One might say that Powell has a metastyle which embraces all possibilities of technique. Certainly a list of his films, like those of John Hustons, would bear this out. They are not hacks, but on the contrary protean genuises, although Powell cannot match Huston's record of purely perfunctory films, only to come up with a masterpiece in his next one. Powell moreover is the more thematically homogeneous, despite surface differences.

Yet one cannot escape an unease which is the viewer's/reader's hesitation between the merely uncanny and the truly marvellous, since few texts could sustain this suspension of judgement for very long, or beyond the confines of the text. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw springs to mind, but generally speaking the subject will orient his/her readings one way or the other by the end of the tale - or perhaps at the sting of the tale, like Conrad Aikens' Mr Arcularis or Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in both of which the strangeness of certain descriptions and ascriptions is clear to see; yet most readers are sufficiently convinced of the surface versimilitude as to be taken by surprise by the stories' endings, which effectively command a rereading in this new light of the outcome.

But how does a text continue to be classified as fantastic when it must be either uncanny or marvellous and the answer is given in the text? Presumably by the duration of the uncertainty it produces in readers. But I find myself looking at the setting in place and careful omission of diegetic facts as dictating a certain kind of reception which it will take a particular kind of reader to realize. And once his/her uncertainty is resolved, is the text still fantastic for them, since they could never reread the stories 'virginally', as if one did not know whether it was marvellous or uncanny. And in constrast to those readings, marvellous or uncanny, the fantastic seems effervescent, or like a drawstring which will snap at the conclusion. 1961, directed by Jack Clayton is an exceptional case. And in fact Todorov himself contrasts fantasy with allegory in that only in the latter is it the case that 'double meaning is indicated in the work in an explicit fashion: it does not proceed from the reader's interpretation (whether abitrary or not)'. Or, 'otherwise, we shift to what is no more than a reader's interpretation', which, by implication, describes the fantastic.[6]

In fact, Todorov lets the structuralist cat out of the bag when he refers to the 'reaction in the implicit reader', a conveniently synchronic abstraction who must therefore be allocated only that portion of the text where there is ground for uncertainty between the uncanny and the marvellous: the rest of the text cannot be fantastic as this implied reader cannot be coterminous with any actual reader.[7] This can now be accepted, but as a full stretch account of the fantastic it is not very interesting, although certain texts will contain fantastic segments whether they ever occur in the works made out of them by real readers or not.

If the fantastic for Todorov is flanked on one side by allegory, it is also adjacent to poetry, and, according to Todorov, it must not succumb to 'poetic' reading - i.e., nonliteral - otherwise 'the fantastic could not appear'. But this seems to me unduly restrictive. Granted, poetry, unlike its neighbour, must adhere to at most a synecdochic boundary of literal readings; yet this must mean that despite its language, the fantastic can generate new perceptions of what it enounces, and these conjunctures may easily fall within the purview of metaphor and/or metonymy, since these are relations of signifieds, not signifiers. A fantastic diegesis can be regarded as an extended figure placed in paradigm, so that the structuring absence of a definite paradigmatic (or connotative) axis can lead the reader to narrative figures previously undreamed of. And I reiterate that this is a matter for reception aesthetics, not structuralism.

And if, as we have seen, metaphor can and always does refer to some truth world of signifieds, why in the (possible) world cannot fantasy? But here we run into another structural variant, science fiction, which as distinguished a practitioner of it as Samuel R. Delany, in About 5,750 Words,[9] locates science fiction as the very opposite of fantasy in what he calls 'subjunctivity': 'Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse ... the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened'[10] with an implied but didn't is a subclass of 'events that have not happened', which is to say that 'the level of subjunctivity of SF includes the level of subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction'.[11] Then Delaney clinches his point:

I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as natural~ism. Which then is the major and which the sub~category?

Consider: naturalistic fictions are parallel-world stories in which the divergence from the real is too slight for historical verification.[12]]

I will go even further: considering the connotative variations which riddle communications with indeterminacies, my autobiography, for example, is going to be set in a numerically identical but qualitively different possible world from mine. Yet both will be unimpeachably factual discourses, or so one would like to believe.

And while I may choose the modality in which to render the substance of my expression, I can only predispose, not dictate, the register(s) my work will be read in. A fact would seem to be a hard enough semantic nut to crack pragmatically, but the old opposition of fact and fiction (with fantasy as the 'fiction of fiction') has been visibly rocked by a number of phenomena, but most of all perhaps television, of which it is a clich‚ because so obviously true to say that it homogenizes everything it touches. Some side effects are that while programmers are more than ever eager to use factual material, the result merely reduces still further the gap between fact and fiction - and indeed creates 'factoids', or universally believed falsehoods - and a surface knowingness that hides a credulity the Western world hasn't seen since Herodotus wrote.

It is in such a context that the concept of the 'nonfiction novel' has appeared. There are Mailer's Armies of the Night and Capote's In Cold Blood (not the film) which look more pio~n~~eering than they really are, in that Dos Passos interpellated biographies of real people in the USA trilogy, and in the 50s Meyer Levin in Compulsion simply changed the names of his characters while rehashing the Leopold Loeb case of the 20s. With what degree of accuracy he did so I cannot say, although Nathan Leopold evidently could, since he successfully charged Levin with libel and won his case.

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's The Mythopoeic Reality is an interesting if not entirely convincing account of this supposedly new phenomenon. He comes up with a definition of the 'bio-referential novel' and procures a special subclass which he calls the fictual. He writes:

The bio-referential mode is the narrative form through which the consciousness, engulfed in fabulous reality and overwhelmed by the naked actuality, articulates its experience of an extreme situation. This area of reality, however, where the factual and the fictional converge in a state of unresolved tension, needs a special term of identification. I shall call this puzzling merging of the fictional and the factual the fictual: a zone of experience where the factual is not secure or unequivocal but seems preter~naturally strange and eerie, and where the fictional seems not all that fictitious, remote and alien, but bears an uncanny resemblance to daily experience.[13]

Certainly a new term is needed, but Zavarzadeh's seem to me too loose and lacking in explanatory power.

I would rather talk about the fictive, which is not a neologism and has the merit of placing the genre within some sort of tradition. By it I intend a certain balance of modality and register such that the former is indexical and the latter symbolic in a way that includes the Real. What it amounts to is a polysemic heightening of actual, or at least real, material, brought about either by extreme stylization or, in some odd cases, absolute incompetence. One might say that such films - and there is a reason why such texts are always in my experience filmic - are extensions of the privileged moments celebrated out of context by the Surrealists as pure excess or 'cognitive estrangement',[14] usually testifying to the presence of l'amour fou.

This account has the virtues neither of simplicity nor clarity, but I believe it does pick out a kind of film, or a way of looking at certain films, that will be familiar, if somewhat enigmatic, to the reader. This is so especially as the fictive effect is often achieved inadvertently and thus instantly distantiates the viewer from the fiction. It is probably commonest in failed fantasy films, where, as in King Dinosaur, the footage of the beast looks as if it was showing a lizard on a tabletop, as in fact it was. Every film has some symbolic quality, since it has to assert the law of representation and enforce our acceptance of it, but here the imaginary element has been watered down too much, and the lizard is indeed only a symbolic dinosaur. Yet precisely because of its fictional incongruity, the lizard tends to imprint itself on the memory of the viewer so much more particularly. Consider what I have said about 'gating' out the enunciation, it is this very particular lizard that remains in the memory.

The fictive is to metonymy as allegory is to metaphor, and neither is chiefly concerned with fiction but rather with the meaning of the form of content (not in the usual sense) but in itself: the camera takes up the images in itself, and concentrates on it sufficiently long, in Godard's words, to 'mark [the images] deeply'. It is here that extremes meet: the makeshift dinosaur, the face of Victor Sjostrom in Wild Strawberries (1953), the hands of Michel in Bresson's ~Pickpocket (1959), so that everything becomes ground for these figures, a fading context in memory. Whatever their surroundings in the text, they will occur in our personal works made from these texts as placed in paradigm, the connotative axis which the viewer must supply.

I do not mention the reader in an analogous case for the literary fictive, since while it may occur, it is not as natural to the medium as it is to film. The latter makes its modalities, registers and figures out of a primary indexical relationship, and it is at the level of substance of content, register, that the fictive blocks access to the Imaginary, denying the largely imaginary pleasures of the work of art by proceeding directly to the Symbolic. If a viewer is paradigmatically impoverished, or if s/he resents the imaginary deprivation, Bresson's films more than any other single director's will leave him/her cold, while to those of us who are engaged in completing the films' discourse they are among the most moving and unforgettable of our experience. The fall at the end of his films from the Real leave us disoriented in an actual world, which seems too laborious, messy and just plain clumsy to be worth the trouble of reentering.

It is at this point that I should mention Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film[15] although I think little more of it than his films, aptly encapsulated in Sight and Sound as the 'transcendental exploitation' style in film. However, he has astutely brought together these three directors, and not only because of their religious sensibilities - Ozu a conservative Buddhist, one infers, and the other two Catholics - although that bit of knowledge should be borne in mind in viewing their oeuvres.

I have chosen to discuss in this chapter one film each by three artists, on the grounds that they all involve a kind of spiritual and thus fantastic, strict regeneration in a Christian context and more mundanely that they were all made within a five year period. Chronologically, then: Ordet (The Word) by Carl-Theodor Dreyer from 1954; Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957) and Robert Bresson's Pickpocket of 1959. There are other links, too: both The Word and The Wrong Man involve miracles, one genuine and the other more loosely 'miraculous' at the diegetic level. And on the other hand, both The Wrong Man and Pickpocket invoke crime, choice and chance, and Bresson used the non-actor who plays Michel the eponymous pickpocket because of his facial resemblance to the Henry Fonda of The Wrong Man.

Let us take the two 'pure' directors first. Hitchock's film, based on a true story is the more fictive for that: perhaps because of its true subject, Hitchcock eschews his more usual generation of suspense in the first half of the film by showing, simply and lucidly yet subtly, that a man can be stripped of his dignity, his personality and his individuality. This occurs in the long sequence from where the police question him as 'Mr Balestrero' to where he is only 'Manny', an incarcerated nobody.[16] Rohmer and Chabrol, in their Hitchcock: The First Forty-four Films, praise Hitchcock for 'manipulating the seemingly contradictory strengths of the allegorical and the documentary forms', adding that 'this veristic detail only helps to buttress the strength of the symbol'. I would replace 'allegorical' with 'fictive', since there is nothing here, on either axis of discourse, to warrant a likeness of Manny's situation with anyone else, except of course in the fact that any of us, at any time, can be dehumanized in a thousand ways in the duration of a glance.

Early in the film, Manny's wife complains of a toothache, just like Manny's of a few weeks before; and in the second half it is she who occupies what Rohmer and Chabrol call the Stations of the Cross and is driven literally to madness while Manny seems comparatively calm. Much has been made of the authors' 'transference of guilt' theme, and it is nowhere more evident than here: his wife does literally take on the burden of Manny's persecution. It is as if nothing has prepared her for being associated with crime or disorderliness in a general sense, nor for the fact that none of us is without guilt.

Eventually Manny's mother gets him to pray not for help, but for strength. And a closeup of Manny in prayer is gradually superimposed over a shot of the 'right man', the literal criminal, walking towards the camera so that for a moment their faces are confined in an effect earlier when Manny's face was seen in a broken mirror, 'like a Picasso' as Hitchcock put it.[17] When the two men pass in the police station, dressed alike, there is curiosity and a kind of wonder on Manny's face as they look at each other. Id and timorous ego? In the early scene set in a subway, we have seen Manny picking out horses in the newspaper and making imaginary bets on them; one doubts that this flirtation with the unpredictable will continue to occur. And one is brought to think of the fact - incomprehensible to Raymond Chandler when he wrote the screenplay for Strangers on a Train - that guilt is a state of mind, not a rational consequence of evil deeds, and that it is contagious.

[ It is peculiar that Hitchcock insisted that there was no causal connection between the shot of Manny praying and the approach of the man who will be caught this time robbing a shop, that it was simply a fact that a man of Italian descent would have a picture of Christ behind his head at the time. True enough, but the text compels the causal connection of divine intervention rather than chance, after Manny's choice to pray for strength. Here is an author deliberately denying the evidence of his text, or claiming it to be unconscious. Perhaps the reader is best advised to refer to Jean-Luc Godard's superlative review of the film in which the motif of the double is everywhere.[18]

Godard in his usual manner refers to other arts and artists, and a propos of The Wrong Man, writes 'Insulted and Injured: this might be the Dostoyevskian subtitle to the Second and Third Acts'. The shade of Dostoyevsky is never more apparent than in Bresson's work, among which are two adaptations A Gentle Creature (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) and Pickpocket. The last of these deftly relieves Dostoyevsky of his themes from Crime and Punishment, if one thinks in particular of the relationship between policeman and suspect or of the role of Michel's elitist beliefs. It is remarkable that two such strongly opposed attitudes, Dostoyevsky's excesses compared with the quiet, private life of Bresson, might gell across time like this. It is astounding that Bresson - a miniaturist in comparison with Dostoyevsky, with his small output of short films, and an artist who seduces his audience with crystalline indicative images while Dostoyevsky ravishes us, like it or not - should be drawn to the novelist, while excising his psychologism. It is well-nigh impossible that Bresson's austere metonymies placed in paradigm should serve to articulate themes that owed their previous existence to a style employing metaphor placed in syntagm. And yet it works, gloriously and unforgettably, qualified only by the fact that those of his characters to achieve a state of grace - 'the wind that bloweth where it listeth', the original title of A Man Escaped - ended with Joan of Arc and that since his next film, A Gentle Creature, no Bressonian character can unequivocally be said to do so.

Obviously, I am not alone in recognizing this, as witness the bibliography of articles. In his book The Ambiguous Image, Roy Armes writes,

What is striking about Dostoyevsky's note [to 'A Gentle Creature', filmed in 1969 by Bresson] ... is his realization that there is something fantastic in the idea of a narration that probes the mind and consciousness of its hero and posits, so to speak, an imaginary stenographer to record the man's private thoughts and self-questioning at this moment of crisis. One of the profoundest affinities linking Dostoyevsky and Bresson is just such a recognition that the recounting of the most realistic happenings may be essentially fantastic.... [Bresson's] particular brand of realism, like that of Franz Kafka, employs intensely realistic detail, but only in a framework of fantasy. No prison escape could be shown in more meticulous detail than that of Lieutenant Fontaine in Un Condamn‚ … mort s'est ‚chapp‚ (A Man Escaped, 1956) - yet for Bresson the film would fail if spectators could not sense the fantastic element, the hand of God over the prison directing everything.[20]

More specifically Bresson shows us the working of Grace, as the film's initial title shows: The Wind That Bloweth Where it Listeth. In its secular form it is present not only in that Fontaine escapes, but in his decision to trust rather than to kill a new cellmate. Once their purpose is abstracted, the many hands of Pickpocket share in it too. Not only hands but feet also throughout Bresson's work reverberate not merely as Christian iconography but as the instruments of all action, that may grasp at the earth or at things but that also follow rituals and paths which are never entirely simply literal. 'To let the camera rest on things and faces long enough to mark them deeply': Godard's adjuration is nowhere more honoured than in the films of Bresson and Dreyer; Hitchcock most often lets his characters define themselves through their behaviour. Thus Michel the pickpocket steals not out of financial necessity or greed, but as an act of choice, perhaps as Richard Roud suggests in an article quoted below to 'snatch' grace from the winnings of the favoured.

Like most innovative artists, Bresson was misunderstood by the majority of critical opinion of his time at the advent of Pickpocket. In an article, 'Novel novel; Fable fable',[21] Richard Roud pointed out to humanistic detractors like Eric Rhode (who had previously reviewed the films in Sight and Sound) that the modern cinema could not be understood by the deployment of ideas appropriate to the 19th century novelist. The fabulation he describes belongs in my mind to a larger category that I have called the fictive, and which embraces at one end the nonfiction novel (so-called) and at the other fantasy. It is metonymic in kind, not metaphoric like allegory, but its figures are usually placed in paradigm, as syntagmatic metonymy begins to look too much like simple literalism. But in any case extremes meet: the fantastic ballet of hands in pickpocket, the astronaut's last journey in S. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, his accelerating consciousness given with documentary meticulousness. Like Keir Dullea, Bresson's non-actors are not to act but to 'be', a subject on which he argues spiritedly against Jean-Luc Godard in a Cahiers du Cinema interview referred to elsewhere, and he, like Dreyer, must surely cast with 'mental resemblances' in mind (in Dreyer's phrase), although in Pickpocket there just happened to be Martin Lassalle's fortuitous resemblance to Henry Fonda. Whichever the case, a base act is raised above particular attentions to become sublime.

As intent is Dreyer on the faces of his characters that he has disowned one of his five sound films in a thirty-two year period (Tva Mannistsor [Two Beings: Two People], 1944) because 'the producer decided to choose the actors himself ... the actors in question represented the exact opposite of what I would have wanted ... it was a film that was doomed from the start, completely'.[22] And no greater salute from one film artist to another has ever been made than Godard's quotation from La Passion de Jean d'Arc (1928) in his own Vivre sa Vie (1962) in which Godard gives us a shot of Falconetti's face (as Joan of Arc) showing a single tear forming and then in a reverse shot Nana (played by Godard's then wife, Anna Karina, whose mother had in fact worked with Dreyer), his prostitute heroine, caught in an exactly similar shot of her tear-streaked face as she watches Dreyer's film. For the remainder of Vivre sa Vie, one might say that in its fragmentation and isolation of the essential it is Godard's most Bressonian film. And it is in that same film that Godard has Nana's schoolteacher and exlover Paul quote from one of his girl pupil's essays, on the subject of chickens (poules), 'If you take away the outside, there's the inside. And if you take away the inside, there's the soul'. Nothing characterises Dreyer's - or Bresson's - films so exactly as the project of observing the workings of his characters' deepest selves. And nothing calls for more spontaneity, balanced by directorial discipline, from a film's actors.

Yet the methods of Bresson and Dreyer could not be more opposed. Bresson's characters are still centres which he defines through metonymy placed in paradigm as felt absences, while Dreyer expects a virtual self-realization on the part of his actors that it is hard to imagine them in other roles (which is also true of Bresson's). Thus Dreyer's 'impurity'; he allows his characters some felt life as it were between the shots, even outside the film's denotative diegesis, so rich in connotation are they. And no more convenient fortuity could exist for the critic than that both directors make a film of the trial and burning of Joan of Arc, the difference between them already apparent in their titles: Dreyer's is a passion, Bresson's a process.[23]

However, Ordet[24] contains a bona fide miracle, an intervention of the supernatural that cannot be rationalized away as metaphor or whatever, and in that is, with Vampyr, unique in the work of either director. Yet if this makes the film 'marvellous' by Todorov's criterion, it would scarcely be more sober - though not, as we shall see, more literal, if we oppose Ordet with a national documentary on the same subject. In order to understand what is meant it is necessary to divagate to the analysis of film promulgated by Noel Burch in Theory of Film Practice. In his first chapter, Burch elaborates five types of temporal articulation and three types of spatial articulation, giving a total of fifteen possible combinations. Burch clarifies the notion of a 'match-cut' as follows.

When, between 1905 and 1920, filmmakers started bringing their cameras up close to the actors and fragmenting the 'proscenium space' that early cinema had left intact, they noticed that, if they wanted to maintain the illusion of theatrical space, a 'real' space in which the viewer has an immediate and constant sense of orientation ... certain rules had to be respected if the viewer was not to lose his footing.... This was the source of the concepts of eyeline match, matching screen direction and matching screen position.

Eyeline match and matching screen direction concern two shots that are spatially discontinuous but in close proximity. When two shots show two different persons supposedly looking at each other, person A must look screen right and person B screen left, or vice versa, for if both look in the same direction in two successive shots, the viewer will inevitably have the impression that they are not looking at each other and will suddenly feel that he has completely lost his orientation in screen space.... What this really implied [was] that the only film space is screen space, that screen space can be manipulated through the use of an infinite variety of possible real spaces, and that disorienting the viewer is one of a filmmaker's most valuable tools.[25]

The elimination of this uncertainty and the advent of sound led to what Burch, following Barthes, calls the 'zero degree of cinematic style', thus dismissing the tradition of Hollywood 'realism' championed by V.F. Perkins in Film as Film. We must also understand that there are two different kinds of screen space,

that included within the frame and that outside the frame.... Off-screen space is complex however. It is divided into six 'segments': The immediate confines of the first four of these areas are determined by the four borders of the frame.... A fifth segment cannot be defined with the same seeming geometric precision, yet no-one will deny that there is an off-screen space 'behind the camera' [reached by] the characters in the film ... passing just to the right or left of the camera.

And Burch insists on a sixth segment,

encompassing the space existing behind the set or some object in it: A character reaches it by going out a door ... or performing some similar act. The outer limit of this sixth segment of space is just beyond the horizon.[26]

In effecting this zero degree of film style, it was discovered quite empirically that there were two rules which an 'illusionist'/Hollywood 'realist' must observe. The first is that 'any new angle on the same camera subject must differ from the previous example by at least thirty degrees'. Any departures from this thirty-degree rule makes the spectator 'vaguely uncomfortable. This feeling of malaise is doubtless due to the tenuous, ill defined character of such an act; the new shot is not sufficiently distinct from the preceeding one' for the viewer to rationalize it. The most successful breaking of this rule I know of occurs at the climax of Andre Delraux's tyro film The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (1966), when various revelations are buffeting the eponymous character and the jumpcuts in closeup affect the viewer like so many blows to the face. And as Burch notes, 'many of Sam Fuller's films, which abound in jumpcuts, usually occurring at moments of extreme violence'.[27] Violence enacted upon the ideas is indeed the tactic of such 'structures of aggression'.[28]

Complementary to the thirty-degree rule is the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rule, which forbids cuts of any greater magnitude for the same reason of allowing the viewer to seem to pass from one screen space to another without change of orientation, thus allowing the smooth flow of the illusion of reality. In both cases, the rules are observed so as to present the viewer with a 'natural' diegesis whose ideology will appear similarly inevitable. Thus, for instance, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in 'Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu',[29] claim the director is a modernist despite the apparently reactionary quality of his verbalizable themes on the ground that he systematically breaks both rules as well as holding 'empty' frames or cutting in apparently diegetically unmotivated shots. And indeed all these elements are present in Ozu, but as Robert Cohen points out in 'Mizoguchi and Modernism', Ozu is merely observing a Japanese 'realism' whose conventions are simply different from the West's. 'It employs an editing system of 90 and 180 degrees utilizing a 360 degree rule rather than Hollywood's 180; and the Japanese system tends to use a moving camera with the long take ... instead of the shot/reaction shot preferred in the West'.[30] This conclusion resounds not just on Thompson and Bordwell, but on Burch also in mistaking conventions for 'empirical discoveries'. Such are the perils of formalism. This is not to dismiss Bordwell and Thompson tout court, nor Noel Burch, who wrote his history of Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer because he so respected the play of 'empty' i.e., ideologically undetermined signs in that body of work. The question now becomes: is it, in fact, so ideologically free? It certainly is not.

To return to Ordet, the first thing one notices is its unusually long takes combined with relative paucity of incident. 'The primary function', Bordwell suggests, 'of these long takes ... is to foreground the shot itself as a component of cinematic perception'.[31] What follows is a typical example of Bordwell's 'neoformalism' and displays the strength and weaknesses of such an approach. It is a description of how Dreyer achieves the miraculous resurrection of Inge in Ordet (1954). He has already produced a long take style with the camera following a character so that, in comparison with Hitchcock's Rope (1948) which is all long takes, no shot contains any dramatically meaningless information. 'Like the music of an opera, the shots in Ordet "accompany" the narrative, developing alongside the unfolding action'. Sometimes motivated narratively, or '"Wagnerian", ... more often ... "Schoenbergian", in that the shots concern themselves only with the cool working out of their own internal laws, thus constituting parallel systems relatively independent of narrative demands'.[32]

It is only in the context of the process of theatricalization and the strategy of the sparse style that the function of Ordet's last scene can be estimated. From a narrative standpoint, the miracle unifies the film, ... [and] also accomplishes an important representational unification. Whereas theatricalization and sparseness have foregrounded spatiotemporal form as such, the resurrection of Inge reintegrates space and time, realigns them with structures of causality. Here, cinematic form returns to a stable articulation of narrative form and helps motivate the miracle.[33]

The reader may proceed to Bordwell's detailed breakdown of how the sequence works, but I think I have sufficiently exemplified his method and line of approach. Not that formalist critics uniformly praise Ordet: for Noel Burch it represents Dreyer 'remembering who he was, rediscovering the meaning of form and paving the way for Gertrud (1964)'[34] rather than that latter film's 'staggering contribution to the second generation of major postwar filmmaking (Godard, Hanoun, Resnais, Straub)'.[35]

All formalist accounts, however instructive, tend not to free the enounced but to dessicate it and to forget that intension and extension are after all the very subjects of intentionality worked through form. A more hermeneutic account, utilising Dreyer's own very lucid thoughts on his 'craft', Vladimir Petric's 'Dreyer's Concept of Abstraction',[36] is of great value. Dreyer is quoted: 'I can see only one way [of resolving the problem of the concrete and the abstract in film]: abstraction. In order not to be misunderstood, I must at once define abstraction as something that demands of the artist to abstract himself from reality in order to strengthen the spiritual content of his work'.[37] And of Kaj Munk whose play the film was based on: 'If a Kaj Munk is to be converted into film, then the goal must be to transform the work into a wholly cinematic entity. And my approach to working with Kaj Munk's The Word has, therefore, always been and still is: first to possess oneself of Kaj Munk and then forget him'.[38] As a result of Dreyer's replacing 'objective reality with his own subjective interpretation', [39] 'the audience accepts the cinematic vision as "another reality" and overlooks the existing illogical details' [i.e., Dreyer's 'mistakes' with the 30 degree and 180 degree rules]; under the 'hypnotic impact of the whole, the audience experiences the screened vision in the same way we experience a dream while it takes place in one's mind.'

Stylistically [the first shot of the finale] is 'purified' on the visual level, while the sound component (i.e. the singing from another room and the distant neighing of the horses) acts as a strong connection between the abstraction of the image and the recognisable reality. The prevailing whole tone of the shot is the dominant visual factor whenever the 'dead side' (the room with the coffin) is shown on the screen, in contrast to the 'living side' (the room with the mourners) which is depicted in a black tone with the people scattered. A similar division between a mood of death and a mood of life is indicated in the lighting of the room with the coffin....

There is, also, a difference in the texture of the photo~graphy presenting these two diverse worlds. The shots with the dead woman are photographically extremely purified, 'clean', geometrically arranged, slightly diffused, with overexposed light reflected on the white walls and coming through the windows like two bright, sunny halos, glaring on both sides of the bier on which the coffin and Inge's corpse are placed; the shots with the living people are photographed roughly, with prevailing black areas. From the point of view of 'rhythmic pulse', these two worlds are dialectically counterpoised ...[40]

Petric goes on in detail, reaching the conclusion that the 'viewer could not experience such a "strange" feeling [of empathy with the white shots of the coffin] without the unique cinematic impact ("overtone") produced by the amalgamation of components, transmuting their sequence into cinematic abstraction' which Eisenstein refers to as 'the fourth dimension'.[41]

I believe Petric's medium specific hermeneutics convey to the reader something of the experience of actually seeing the film, although perhaps in ideal conditions. He is not 'scientific', but he is not yet subjective: his is a description that reevokes the film for me as I realized it but in the context of shared experience. Nonetheless, it is a description of an artistic text that could be nothing but a film, which unfortunately is not the case with the 'thematic' readings of Robin Wood[42] and Tom Milne,[43] the former admiring but for the wrong reasons, the latter close to 'my' Dreyer.

And all film criticism, of course, labours under the dual curse of unquotability and the fact that the critic must rely on his own work, constructed from the meaning of the text, like dream analysis. It is nothing to wonder at then that Thierry Kuntzel's The Film-Work (Parts 1 and 2) and Raymond Bellour's lengthy reading of Hitchcock's North by Northwest and like work had to await the technological facilities of the 70s.[44] What is missing still, then, is the artistic 'presence' of Dreyer, and to supply that I may be forgiven for turning to the unabashedly impressionistic but astute writing of Tom Milne. It is worth remembering that in Ordet, the most unequivocally pious work by this supposed master of spiritual values, the bereaved husband who is consoled with the thought that his wife's soul is now safe in Heaven, answers with a cry that echoes not only through the film but through all of Dreyer's work: 'But I loved her body too!'[45] It is also Milne who points out that the mad Johannes, believing he is Jesus Christ but failing to resurrect Inge, regains his senses and says that he will try to effect the resurrection, and only then succeeds. This thematic point takes us full circle back to Manny's prayer for strength in The Wrong Man, as no formalist analysis could.

And I believe all of these films, in their different ways, do exemplify the fictive, a necessary condition of and primary evidence for naturalistic implausibility. In The Wrong Man the process is impeded by the fact that we know what we are seeing to be true, even to the identical spelling error which draws the musician and the criminal together like unsevered umbilical cords; the fantastic occurs not in the narrative, then, uncanny as that is, but in the 'miracle' of the two mens' needs coming together, the prayer and the abortive robbery superimposed one an the other. In Pickpocket it is present in such details as the fact that every time Michel takes the subway it is peopled by the same extras. And in Ordet what could be more implausible than an event which is by definition physically impossible, although Dreyer's genius may be said to have almost naturalized it in a diegesis which belongs solely to that film? To amplify a bit: while each fiction represents a world alternative to that both of everyday life and of other fictions, the fictive always disturbs by taking place in our world. Thus even Ordet involves us here and now; so concretely has Dreyer, and we, realized his abstraction that it becomes a challenge of faith even before it is a work of art. In order for me to accept it fictively, as intended, I have to accept the event of Inge's resurrection, marvellous as it is by any known physical law, if not the miraculous 'explanation'. And this is precisely the trouble with supernatural explanations, as Hume knew: they are still more implausible than that which they were given to explain.

One of the fictive films which has been badly misread is Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), a proletarian opera such as the cinema had not seen since Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960), another fictive film, to be praised and cursed with that vehemence that usually accompanies the wilfully misunderstood, and for equally bad reasons. Now that the fervour has died down a little, it is perhaps time to admit that the story is implausible and the characters of course iconic, larger than life and symbolic too. Did Cimino seriously think we would believe that the three young men from the same small town (itself fictive, made up of eight real towns) and armaments factory - all ironies open - would all meet up again in Vietnam? That Nick could play Russian roulette for months only to blow his brains out when Michael comes back to Saigon for him? Hardly, but as in other forms we willingly suspend disbelief because it is irrelevant to the film's virtual purging of American guilt, its confession of incomprehension that gripped a nation watching the first war to be fought on television. As a welcome relief, some of the more literate of film critics have picked out the facts that it is Nick, not Michael, who is the bestman not only at the wedding; that physically (or in fictive terms, 'literally') he is larger than Michael; and that in his behaviour - as well as his beauty and his destiny - is intended to recall Billy Budd, an 'angel'. This is, of course, 'Just Too Good to be True' as the song mocks him even as it prospectively mourns him. In Cimino's original script it was to have been Nick who returned (almost) whole, not Michael, but he came to choose for immediate survival, so to speak, Hemingway[46] over Melville, and this means pinning down dreams of manifest destiny (as Nick's sweater is reduced for Michael) in the interests of community survival. Some viewers admired the film enormously on condition that they see the group singing of 'God Bless America' as an ironic end to the film. In my dialogue with the film, it is a heartbreaking prayer, and a requiem for the majority of common people sent on a cloud of unknowing to Vietnam, who fought their war there under the shortlived impression that what they were doing was right, only to be returned to a 'home' that now despised them. No common soldier in history has known why he was fighting, but he deserves better than contempt for his false ideals.

It is impossible to tell from the wreckage of Heaven's Gate - magnificent in an Ozumandian way - whether it would have succeeded. The first half certainly sets its sights on an epic grandeur that now never appears - especially in Australia, where inexplicably the epilogue, in which three of the four remaining characters are killed, has been removed from the film. Suffice it to say here that an excess such as the protracted riddling with bullets of Nathan Champion (played by Christopher Walken, also Cimino's superb Nick) goes on just too long and finally becomes ludicrous. Perhaps we shall one day see the whole of Heaven's Gate. Certainly The Deer Hunter, in its indexical symbolism, will be there to remind us how great fictive art can be.

In conclusion, there is another use of 'paradigm' that occurs in philosophy rather than linguistics, and that is of the standard or representative case, which may be chosen quite arbitrarily. Thus a good example of its type, which therefore performs as well as can be expected of any sample, can be singled out and used as a paradigm case.

The fictive may often be identified by its guiltless offering of a particular figure or story as a paradigm case for a symbolic reading, and perhaps it is true that most bad art founders on metaphors that collapse into arbitrary paradigms. But if the paradigm object is held in such and such a way, to be 'marked deeply' once more, what the phenomenologists call epoch‚ takes place and the object is decontextualized. Seen anew and in a paradigmatic possible frame or frames, it becomes possible for a new extensional context to form around it. Hence the familiarity and strangeness of dreams, or of surrealism, or some films so preposterously bad as to satisfy Cocteau in astonishing us. But this is treacherous ground, and I will feel safer if we approach it in the comparatively new light of another chapter.