The Cinematic Moment: Exploring Film Images as Moments of Action

Other movie moments readily leap into my mind’s eye. I can see Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen driving a horse-driven hearse toward a graveyard in The Magnificent Seven. I can envision Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia dressed in flowing white robes leading a horde of Arab horsemen down a sand dune. Remembering When Harry Met Sally, I assume Billy Crystal’s POV across from Meg Ryan as she enacts an astounding lunchtime orgasm. Whew!

As a working screenwriter, I analyze memorable sensory images to find out if and how they become cinematic moments.

Images also show up in movie dialogue. In Some Like It Hot, Jerry (Jack Lemmon) says about Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), “Look at that! Look how she moves! That’s just like Jello on springs.” Or, one of Forrest Gump’s (Tom Hanks) most memorable lines: “My momma always used to say that life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” As a working screenwriter, I analyze memorable sensory images to find out if and how they become cinematic moments.

The poet Ezra Pound writes that “an ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” [1] Such a complex provides us with “that sense of sudden liberation from limits of time and space, that sense of sudden growth which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” In the art of filmmaking, significant images become cinematic moments that serve as every film’s foundation.

Moment

A moment is a short, undetermined period when something is happening. In medieval times a moment meant a unit of time amounting to 1/40th of an hour or 1.5 minutes. That still makes sense. But Einstein’s definition of moment is perhaps best: “A moment is long or short. It depends on whether your are sitting on a hot stove or on a park bench with a beautiful girl.” Compared to visual images and considered as a structural unit in a film, a moment lasts longer than an image. It’s more imaginatively suggestive and often carries more meaning. For the screenwriter, a series of images leads up to a significant moment, a moment of climax. Such moments provide insight or change. As in life, every film contains moments of all sorts, short and long, inconsequential or momentous, practical or ethical.

In films as in life there are four types of moments of change — accidents, discoveries, decisions, and deeds. All four types of moments fulfill Aristotle’s axiom that identifies the materials of drama as suffering, discovery, and reversal. An accident is an unexpected event that changes one or more lives. It most affects a focal character, and the driving force of the incident is beyond that person’s control. For example, in the midst of a war, a woman hurries down a crowded street and runs into a lover she thought dead. Or, two older women on a hike discover a young Mexican immigrant lying comatose beside an Arizona railroad track. Such accidents have moments that begin or complicate stories. In Woody Allen’s movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona, two young American women happen to meet a Spanish painter, and the entire plot spins out of that accident.

Page 4 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 View All

REFERENCES

  1. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Poetry, Volume 1, March 1913, page 200

Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com

Permalink URL: https://www.cerisepress.com/01/01/the-cinematic-moment-exploring-film-images-as-moments-of-action

Page 4 of 6 was printed. Select View All pagination to print all pages.