The Art of Blocking - Scene from Hitchcock's Vertigo

My response is toward your "If for no other reason than..." comment. Hitchcock always had a specific reason and he was concerned, as any good director is, that that reason would read.

How well he accomplished that would have a determining effect on how many interpretations you might get. But you're fooling yourself if you believe he didn't have a specific reason in mind.
 
I'm not disputing that Hitchcock had specific intentions. I'm disputing the value of analysis/interpretation of the blocking of a scene as done by nerdwriter. Nerdwriter says:

"...There are two ways to look at this scene. From the perspective of a first-time viewer, who has to take the information it presents at face value or from the perspective of someone who has already seen the film who knows the true intentions and outcomes of what's revealed here." Then he goes on to do his presentation from the latter.

Why do I have to have seen the whole film to interpret the blocking? That to me makes the analysis/interpretation invalid. If Hitchcock's intents are not known/felt/absorbed in the first viewing, then it isn't really there. Either Hitchcock failed or the viewer just didn't pick up on it. Basically I hear nerdwriter saying "I didn't see any of this the first time I saw it. But after studying it, I've come up with this analysis". That to me is nonsense. If he didn't see it the first time, it wasn't there for him. You shouldn't have to view it again and analyze it. It should just be. The vertigo camera move in the tower - you don't need to interpret that. It's there. It is obvious. You react to it.

But don't let my comments be mis-interpreted either. Of course, there is value in discussing blocking; just as a discussion of music or editing can be of great value.
 
Paul F said:
Why do I have to have seen the whole film to interpret the blocking?
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To try to understand more fully why specific choices were made. If you aren't interested in the craft, a visceral reaction is enough. If you are, the more you know about what you saw that prompted your reactions, the more you are able to speculate and maybe understand certain choices. The "vertigo camera move" doesn't need to be interpreted, because you already know the character suffers from vertigo. Once you know the payoff, you have a better chance of understanding how you've been set-up.
I agree that you shouldn't take anyone but the director's analysis as gospel, but if you want to gain a deeper understanding of anything, you analyze, not just experience.
 
What a terrific discussion :) Lighting and composition are both great fun, but blocking is my favourite part of the job (and, I think, the most important).
 
I thought I'd add a couple of points that have bearing on this discussion. First, this scene dominated all the scripts through all the versions. The screenplay took years to get right, and went through 4 writers, working closely with Hitchcock, and there obviously were a lot of changes from one version to the next - yet, this is one of a small number of scenes that were present more or less as filmed through all of them. It is a very important scene, and one that Hitchcock thought was very important. It was not a scene that Hitchcock would have simply shot any old way just to get through it. How can we be sure that the blocking in the scene was a result of deliberate choices, or mere accidents? Well, Hitchcock did extensive storyboarding on his scenes, and in this case we have access to those - they were so detailed that even how the bodies of the actors were held were duplicated in the film (whether slumping, or reclining back, or leaning forward etc.). These were very, very clearly planned. The office itself was virtually identical in the drawings (except flipped left to right - the window was on the left instead of on the right etc.). The scene was shot on a set, and obviously Hitchcock had complete control of the environment. The second important thing to remember, is that Hitchcock had final cut and a fairly unique way of shooting - he virtually never did "coverage", and shot as he planned to cut (what has been called Hitchcock's "cutting in the camera"). Once shot, you could only edit (really assemble) it one way. This is of course, quite atypical. The more frequent scenario is where the director shoots a lot and also shoots 'safety' footage, coverage - or simply other angles - just in case those may prove useful; and then, the film is puzzled together and "made again" during editing (the old saying - you make a film 3 times: when you write, when you film and when you edit). When you shoot a film that is then re-jiggered during the editing process, frequently changing the film dramatically, it can indeed be the case that the blocking can be almost a matter of accident and a lot less thought may go into it from the point of view of motivation - therefore, under those circumstances, it is hardly meaningful to draw far-going conclusions about "what motivated the directors artistically do block this way", because nothing much may have motivated him/her other than purely CYA (and back in the day, studios would insist on directors shooting tons of coverage, as the director rarely had final cut). This however, was not the case with Hitchcock - he shot very deliberately, and his blocking was absolutely pre-mediated. That rewards scrutiny; whether we guess right or wrong about what motivated him is a separate matter, but unquestionably these were carefully thought out and deliberate choices - which in my mind rewards scrutiny. Which is why I love watching Hitchcock movies and trying to guess what his choices meant from an artistic point of view.

Which is another way of saying that the importance of blocking probably depends a bit on your shooting style. In the case of this scene - and Vertigo in general, and Hitchcock even more generally - blocking was very important indeed.
 
Grug said:
What a terrific discussion :) Lighting and composition are both great fun, but blocking is my favourite part of the job (and, I think, the most important).
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There are exceptions to this depending on the individuals and approach to filmmaking, but generally speaking lighting and composition is the DP's responsibility and blocking falls to the director. Not to say that each won't have opinions and suggestions.
 
paulears said:
I found this topic interesting, but I'm not sure about the content. In 1994, I went into a college for an afternoon to do a workshop, and left again 1o years later. I spent a lot of time with students from 16-24, and over the period became involved with examining and creating qualifications. Media studies, which I got out of quickly, worried me, because unlike music/music technology/some of Performing Arts, there was little science but lots of 'reading' what was going on. The Hitchcock breakdown is based on conclusions drawn from watching it - reading the scene, so to speak. Where a director is complex, like Hitchcock, most of the conclusions are probably valid, but I don't believe that you can produce rules from observation. Maybe you can develop guidelines, but we don't know that Hitchcock really thought like this. Sure, there are recurring themes, but over the years I've read all sorts of university material produced to support qualifications, that took somebodies personal opinions and b beliefs and turned them in to hard facts, or sadly fiction. Dissertations on crazy things as well as sensible things but It's so easy for an enthusiast to produce what appear to be hard facts from something they're passionate about. I read one wonderful dissertation on a popular comedian, breaking down his style of comedy, isolating examples and giving really complex facts about how X would always follow Y, when Z happened. This did indeed appear valid, as I've worked with the guy dozens of times, and I mentioned this to him. He looked stunned. All the conclusions were based on numerous logging of the content, but they were all simply accidents - things that happened, and repeated. No planning in that area at all, just habit. Indeed, some choices were simply practical or technology based reasons - X had to be done after Y because that was the way an outsider produced the original clip list, and the comedian didn't have the computer skills to change it - so ran with it.

I'd love to think that Hitchcock did his blocking in this way - it sounds so sensible and common sense. The sceptic in me just doubts it really happened like that. I don;t like movies much, so frequently watch them with the director's commentary to add a bit of interest, and I'm surprised fairly often by their comments.

I have a deep distrust of subjects that have 'studies' after the title - Media, Theatre, Literature etc, because there's too m much opinion and not enough verifiable fact.
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I agree with this post very much so. Granted Hitchcock was brilliant, he's been my favorite AD/Director for a very long time, I have a collection of his early silent films that I've watched to death. We all know that at times the set dictates the blocking. Like acting at times dictates the editing, depending on the take, which can change the dynamic of the scene in an instant. I'm not sold this video is all that accurate, it appears to be a case study, subjective at that. I think he's reading into the scene way to much. Or over thinking it. Hitchcock was a natural, that we can all agree on I'm sure. Please don't take that as someone that didn't work hard to become one of the greats, he did. What I'm saying is he did it with finesse and nuances you can't learn from reading a book. This is what I mean by him being a natural at film direction. With that said, I'm going to speculate he did things the way he did because it felt right at that time. I don't think he had these elaborate breakdowns of every little aspect of the scene. He did what made sense for the given time based on the location, set design, script, and the talent delivering the lines. All though I could be completely wrong in my analysis, it's speculative until we have evidence of the scene blocking being completely written and blocked before hand. Either way, we can certainly learn a lot from watching these analytical breakdowns. plus their very entertaining at the very least.
 
CharlesPapert said:
There are exceptions to this depending on the individuals and approach to filmmaking, but generally speaking lighting and composition is the DP's responsibility and blocking falls to the director. Not to say that each won't have opinions and suggestions.
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Is that both on TV and features in the US Charles? And for blocking of both the actors and camera?

Perhaps it's just the directors I've worked with, but blocking has been a huge component of most of my work as a DoP (in concert with my directors of course).
 
It does depend, mostly on their experience level. And how much prep time we have. I've sat with directors and broken down scenes together and worked out the actor's blocking, and certainly the camera angles. For much of the low budget stuff I shot over the years, this was the case.

That said: at a pro level (I'd define that as working under a DGA contract, but I feel that it is true for other high level non-DGA jobs), I feel that blocking the actors is absolutely the director's responsibility. Showing up for a day of work without having a game plan of how a scene should fall in and relying on the DP to put it on its feet would be...well...considering scale is between $10 and $25K/week for DGA directors, c'mon now!

Again: there are always exceptions. And I have jumped in and suggested many things over the years. But that's just part of the collaborative process. I rarely work with directors who are so specific as to regiment focal length and placement of camera without my input, but they exist (Spielberg I believe works this way).

To me, a director that doesn't have a strong blocking plan is like a DP who relies on his gaffer to light the scene however he sees fit. I don't get it.
 
Blocking is the director's responsibility. I imagine most directors hash it out with the actors mostly. Conferring with the cinematographer about blocking strikes me as odd, at least for Hollywood, unless it's just about hitting a certain mark so that the light strikes the face a certain way, or the bokeh turns out a certain way, or they're framed in a certain way in the window, stuff like that.

The kind of directing I like has done a 180. In my own little school projects where I was the director, I was very much like Hitchcock, not so much in quality but in how much I planned and molded the actors' --- my friends' --- performances. I was into camera angles, and I liked Hitchcock and Spielberg and other directors with these wild visual styles, but whose acting was somewhere between mediocre and downright awkward. I don't think I could really tell good acting from bad, back then. But since I hit my twenties, more and more I pay attention to that. Acting where you can tell it was forced by the director becomes more and more apparent to me. Maybe as an overreaction I'm now into the totally opposite end, directors whose camerawork is rather mundane but the acting is top notch: directors like Mike Nichols and Alan J. Pakula. Actually, even they many times had striking visuals, but they were a totally different kind of director than Hitchcock. Hitchcock shot the whole film in his mind and storyboarded everything. In contrast, here's what Roman Polanski said about choosing a camera angle: "I put the camera where I stand. I stand and watch the action. And then I'm just trying to film it the way I saw it. It's simple."
 
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In episodic television, the times I will intercede into blocking is when I can see a more efficient way to shoot the scene, eliminating setups. If we've established the directions of coverage and a new character enters the scene, the hope is that they will fall into one of those directions, and sometimes I need to nudge it that direction if the director doesn't jump in and do it themselves (again, the more experienced they are, the more this is likely to happen).
 
Just what is it that nerdwriter is saying about the blocking of this scene that some people are finding objectionable? Every specific point about the blocking he makes is standard conventional wisdom in theater.
 
Maybe as an overreaction I'm now into the totally opposite end, directors whose camerawork is rather mundane but the acting is top notch: directors like Mike Nichols and Alan J. Pakula.
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I had the same experience with not distinguishing good acting from bad. But I came around to the opposite view. Purely in cinematic terms, the actors are only another component of the film. The lead should be likable and competent, but not too deep. In Vertigo, Scotty's subconscious is deep and troubled, but he is not smart enough to realize how damaged he is. The turning point of the film is when we realize that our identification with him is misplaced - he really is not a good guy. Hitchcock pulls this trick in several films, as with Richard Todd in Stage Fright. Hitchcock worked with great actors (Bob Cummings is the exception), but successfully subordinated them to the needs of the film.
In good actor-driven films, it is hard to imagine anyone else playing the lead, as in Far From Heaven. In mediocre actor-driven films, such as Ned Kelly, the lead's performance is so deep that it calls attention to itself, and the audience must work to determine what is going on. I realize that it is fashionable to deliberately confuse the audience at this juncture, but it is annoying to see all that talent wasted.
 
This has been a fascinating thread! I think the objections about over-analyzing, and thinking that if this analysis only works if you've already seen the film (otherwise the director failed), are somewhat missing the point of the argument. The analysis that this thread is about is not saying "This scene works if you understand all of what's behind it." Rather, it's saying "This scene works. Let's explore why." If a film is written, directed, acted, edited, and scored well, it is going to have the filmmakers' desired effect on the viewer with the viewer being (ideally) unaware of the mechanics behind it.

Think of The Sixth Sense. (No spoilers here.) At the end, the viewer is given quite a surprise. And that's because the scenes leading up to it worked. The viewer doesn't know why those scenes work as they are playing out. But if the scenes are analyzed after the fact, one can see how the filmmakers did certain things in order to have the desired effect on the viewer without the viewer knowing what was going on--as it was going on.
 
maranfilms said:
[...]With that said, I'm going to speculate he did things the way he did because it felt right at that time. I don't think he had these elaborate breakdowns of every little aspect of the scene. He did what made sense for the given time based on the location, set design, script, and the talent delivering the lines. All though I could be completely wrong in my analysis, it's speculative until we have evidence of the scene blocking being completely written and blocked before hand. Either way, we can certainly learn a lot from watching these analytical breakdowns. plus their very entertaining at the very least.
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When it comes to many directors, that is true, but it's more wrong than right when it comes to Hitchcock specifically. Undoubtedly Hitchcock sometimes changed things around, when for example an elaborate shot he planned simply wasn't being executed right despite many days and multiple takes (in Vertigo: one of the shots in the Scottie's apartment when Madeleine was there). But those were more exceptions, as he tried really, really hard to keep to how he pre-planned things, particularly when it came to blocking. He really did sketch things out very carefully. There are extensive storyboards for Vertigo, and it's astounding just how closely he hewed to the original vision. And to defend the Nerdwriter a bit - I am pretty sure he read and absorbed the very detailed book on the making of Vertigo ("Vertigo: The Making of A Hitchcock Classic" - by Dan Auiler), a book which has tons of the original storyboards and extensive notes on specific takes by the production assistant; regarding his "reading" into what Hitchcock intended to do in this scene, there is very specific information about how he helped depict the conversational game between the two characters, mentioning how the entirely separate section of the set was built precisely because of the actor he had in mind (Tom Helmore) - the actor was much shorter than Stewart, so Hitchcock requested that a separate section be built with a higher floor so that Tom Helmore could "tower over" Stewart (page 96 hardcover edition 1998, ISBN0-312-16915-9). So it's not as if the Nerdwriter is completely speculating out of nothing about how the characters take low vs higher ground at various points in the conversation and how the blocking reflects their conversation. Now, maybe he's reaching too far with his conclusions, but it's not as if it's completely unhinged - I mean, think about it, Hitchcock going as far as extending and changing the design of a very elaborate set just so that one actor can tower over another... that's some pretty far going planning.

Again, a lot A LOT of planning went into the blocking - it's not outrageous to try to discern what was behind it. At least in the case of Hitchcock, especially when we have access to extensive documentation.
 
Thanks, OldCorpse! Even though I don't agree with everything Nerdwriter said, I wish that on DVXUser there were more threads like this.
 
On the aspect of relative heights for actors and camera: fascinating to hear that Hitch built different versions of the sets to enlarge an actor! I've done this with platforms, runways and apple boxes but a whole separate set--man.

There is often a discussion about camera height when shooting actors facing each other. The dogmatic thought that a dominant character should be shot from below, while the submissive should be shot from above works to a degree but I think it is somewhat pat and "easy" now as a choice in today's visual vocabulary. The actors should be able to create the dynamic without the camera indicating it. I worked for a DP once who felt that you should never see the blacks of nostrils, so we shot everyone from slightly above eyeline, which played havoc with the over-the-shoulder shots (I myself don't care for the look of those when the foreground head is all hair; not seeing some shoulder makes it feel like a furry blob on the side of frame). And some schools of thought (classic Japanese cinema) prefer a lower vantage point for camera. I'll try it all if I'm requested to. One thing I do get specific about is when we are close to architectural details on a wide lens--not a fan of obvious keystoning, so I'll try to get the camera at a good height to minimize that.
 
CharlesPapert said:
The dogmatic thought that a dominant character should be shot from below, while the submissive should be shot from above works to a degree but I think it is somewhat pat and "easy" now as a choice in today's visual vocabulary. The actors should be able to create the dynamic without the camera indicating it.
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Tell you what - I'd settle for way - WAY - less than that. If only when we go to a reverse shot and back, it looks like it came from the same shot, I'd be happy. Instead, I so often see when we come back, the actor is in a completely different position (head angle, expression, even lighting!) so it is 100% crystal clear that these are *totally* different takes, and no continuity between them - throws me out of the movie every single time. If you can't effing match your cuts, don't bother! Nuff said. It makes it completely unbelievable that the conversation actually took place, instead it looks obvious that these are utterly different takes taken at different times. The lack of understanding - or caring - about what the audience will accept in "fudging" and what they will not, is frankly offensive. I hate such filmmakers who don't even try.
 
Ok, now we are getting into something I can appreciate. Peculiar camera angles that work and don't work. As Corpse said, some of these shots with the camera high looking down and then low looking up and then they go back to a two shot and I see that the difference in height is nothing close to what they showed in the low/high shots just takes me out as well. But then there are creative shots I would never do; for example, Maltese Falcon - the Fatman and Bogart are talking in Fatman's apartment. There are some shots from the floor in that scene that work well for me. They don't take me out of the film. I need to study this. I don't understand why something like that works for me while other odd angles don't.
 
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