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classic cinema’s structure and art cinema’s style to depict assault in hollywood, in the assistant

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In the conclusion of his essay, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, David Bordwell foregrounds the significance of classic cinema’s adoption of art cinema’s attributes, declaring, “if Hollywood is adopting traits of the art cinema, that process must be seen as not simple copying but complex transformation. (Bordwell 780)”





 

In the conclusion of his essay, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, David Bordwell foregrounds the significance of classic cinema’s adoption of art cinema’s attributes, declaring, “if Hollywood is adopting traits of the art cinema, that process must be seen as not simple copying but complex transformation. (Bordwell 780)” Over the last five years in Hollywood, accompanying the increasing appreciation of deviations from the predictability of classic cinema by mainstream audiences, a movement has emerged wherein filmmakers adapt an array of stylistic features associated with the art film. The Assistant (2019) directed by Kitty Green, could be counted into this novel canon of films – the hybrids of classic cinema’s formal structure and art cinema’s stylistic elements, that are aiming to achieve the intellectual and philosophical reflectivity the art cinema is occupied with.


The Assistant documents the daily routine of a young woman working as the personal assistant to a prodigious chairman of a film production company – the lens through which the world is viewed is restricted to her perspective, and the camera follows her exclusively as she attempts to complete the tasks demanded of her successfully. Her unflinching resolution to performing her responsibilities and surviving the day without emotional and psychological collapse is the first strand of narrative, and her mounting suspicions that the chairman is the perpetrator of successive sexual assaults – as well as the resultant want to disrupt his pattern of abuse – is the second strand. The structure of the film could be argued as episodic as Jane navigates through disparate tasks, but I would propose that it utilizes the classical technique of ‘parallelism’ to build a structure organized according to “several lines of action which are not causally related, but are similar in some significant way (Bordwell et al. 176)”. The Assistant employs a highly subjective viewpoint which maps out a visual landscape emulating the art film’s realism and ambiguity to restrict the knowledge and experience of reality to Jane’s, but, the overarching structure of the plot is classical, working to reveal the unseen and only hinted at story by presenting events which are not all causally connected, but each illustrate either the chairman’s misbehavior or the company’s unwillingness to acknowledge it. 


To introduce the formal structure of The Assistant, I will gesture to a quote by early film writer David Hulfish, defining the purpose of a classical Hollywood film, “there must be an end to be attained, a thought to be given, a truth to be set forth, a story to be told, and the story must be told by a skillful and systematic arrangement…of the means at hand subject to the author’s use. (174)” The Assistant’s plot does not unfold linearly, its momentum is not in successive progression – Jane executes menial tasks, from retrieving the chairman’s clients to filing his bank statements to cleaning up his office after meetings and in this regard, art cinema is evoked. The plot appears to be ‘real’; ‘dead time’ is not whittled down so as to create a succession of high points, but rather the plot is largely made up of intervals which would traditionally be cut in a classic film. However, there is a sinister vein to a multitude of the tasks she completes – most of the actions (or re-actions to the chairman’s actions) she makes imply the chairman’s assault of women, from transporting a young female from a meeting to a hotel, to processing an unidentified payment, to picking up an earring beneath his couch. The realistic routine of the first narrative strand connects to the second strand as Jane discovers with each responsibility, clues to her boss’ carefully classified behaviour; what appear to be ‘loosely strung together’ actions, are individual sub-narratives independently revealing his predation.


Unlike classic cinema, the “growing complexity (177)” of comprehending each of the sub-narratives as they accumulate over the course of the film is not remedied by their being presented clearly – it is intentional, that the viewer struggles with decoding/grasping the subtext of them all. Unlike classic cinema, there is no redundancy; instead, as Bordwell notes on his essay deconstructing the features of art cinema, The Assistant, “reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch….for the tale (and) the telling (780)”. That this predation is happening is equally significant to realize as that this predation is deliberately being concealed and the viewer can only become knowledgeable of it through close, critical examination.


These individual sub-narratives – accompanying a young female newcomer to her hotel suite, ignoring an expense with no associated commodity, finding unknown women’s accessories in his office – connect to others’ – him being absent for hours at the aforementioned hotel; arranging for women to travel to visit him and stocks of pills; retrieving used syringes after a meeting with a woman. Through the paralleling of disparate tasks and the similar implications they point to, a web of causes; specific acts of predatory behaviour and sexual assault; and their effects; the systematic abuse of women whether a new, unqualified assistant, an actress or his children’s nanny; is developed. Upon the surface the formal structure of the plot appears as a “broken teleology…, an itinerary, (a)…survey of the film’s world (Bordwell 776)”, but it is ultimately, a construction of individual links of the chairman’s criminal behaviour (actions that function as causes) and serial revelations that the chairman is accomplishing ordered assaults of women without consequence (outcomes or ‘effects’ of the causes).


The links of causes (predatory actions) and their effects (‘condoned’ [overlooked to the point of acceptance] assaults of women) that build the formal structure, diversify from traditional classic cinema approaches to presentation – the viewer has to construct the web ourselves. Each sub-narrative, though similar to one or more of the others in a significant way, is not the same. To construct the web, the viewer has to interpret previous information in relation to newly given information; while each piece of information is important (each task and its subtext) and connects to a different piece of information (another task and its subtext) in classic film form, there is no time for either, the new nor the previous, to be isolated. Thus, the links of causes, their effects, and the web made out of the individual links of causes and effects, must be carved out manually. Through the film’s denial of conspicuous presentation, the message; that varying kinds of assaults committed by powerful men are omnipresent; and the vision; that it requires acute, analytical investigation to discern that reality; the ‘author’ (Green) sought to communicate, are foregrounded.  


Since the perspective of The Assistant is severely confined to the information Jane possesses, the lens through which she perceives reality and the events she experiences, the film forces the viewer into a state of ambiguity or obscurity, a condition of uncertainty. This state of uncertain observance is demanded by the opening sequence. A temporally long, longshot captures a young woman entering an unknown vehicle; as the driver drives off, the camera lingers on the residential building she has emerged from. The camera tracks the car as it faces the skyline of New York City, then it cuts to a languid shot of the woman resting against a headrest in the backseat – who is this woman, where is she going and why in the dark? Two shots – a straight-on long shot and a low-angled medium shot – elucidate that she is heading into Manhattan, but the close-up of her face beneath the cityscape’s gleam in the window and the successive frantically cut tracking shots of corporate buildings, reveal little else. The car disappears around a corner out of the camera’s sight, until it (the car) halts temporarily in front of a modernistic set of doors and windows, and she exits. Who she is, where she is and what she is doing has not been told, nor will they be.


Places, identities and actions are rarely unambiguous (for example, Jane’s name, the company she works for and the title of her role are all undisclosed in the text). The viewer learns about what is being presented to the extent that Jane gains knowledge about such; hence, why the opening sequence is thoroughly unexplained – she already possesses all of the answers to the queries it asks; – for instance, the reality of who each of the characters are and what they do, is confined to how she herself engages with them over the course of the day. Therefore, the focus of the film is not on what we learn visually or aurally, but what we figure out mentally. The Assistant’s formal structure is not purposed with revealing its links of causes and their effects; the second strand of the narrative (the assault story) lies beneath the first (the responsibilities plot), and the viewer relies on Jane’s analyses of the latter for the former to be revealed. Representing the chairman’s actions explicitly would not accomplish the objective of the film – to communicate the insidiousness of powerful men in Hollywood’s behaviour and the lengths at which their companies’ will go to to hide their actions, through the extremely limited field of knowledge of an ordinary (not belonging to the boss’ trusted ‘inner circle’) personal assistant.


The key element which is not ambiguous, and that which sharpens the formal structure of The Assistant into classic cinema’s, is Jane herself. Borrowing the terminology of a 1913 cinematic guidebook, Jane’s ambitiousness to persevere through the day and her motivation to affect (deconstruct, prevent or interrupt) the system of sexual assault, are the “steam of the dramatic engine (Bordwell et al. 180)” building the overarching structure. The causes are the chairman’s predatory actions, and the effects are the repeated violations of different women’s unconditional (genuine, not affected by exterior conditions like occupational opportunities) consent, but Jane is the agent through which the former is discerned and the latter is deduced. As the causes and effects are intelligible only through Jane’s analyses, the film’s causality – that which connects the causes to the effects, the discerned predation to the deduced violations – could be understood as Jane. Jane is not a ‘psychologically motivated character pursuing a goal’ within a formal structure, her pursuing her goals (succeeding in/surviving her responsibilities, challenging the chairman’s systematic abuse) according to her psychological motivations (bettering her career opportunities, protecting his current and future victims), builds the formal structure (examining her day’s tasks, reveals the individual links of causes, their effects, and the web made up of them).


Belonging to Jane’s subjectivity severely limits our access to knowledge, but it does not affect our ability to process the meager information we are provided. At the beginning of the film, as evidenced by the opening sequence, the viewer is in a state of uncertainty, but as we reside with Jane over the course of the plot’s events, seeing and thinking as her, how we think about what we see allows us to link individual narratives to others’ and build the web of what is occurring in reality. This approach to representing actions could be described as a “unified system (5)” of “bounded alternatives (5)”: what we see does not enable the viewer to know (as in traditional classic cinema), but as we (Jane) think(s) about what we see, we come to that same knowledge through a different course – a unified way of seeing, that presents information through a bounded alternative. This ‘bounded alternative’ adheres to its own, adapted principles of the classic film’s categorizable stylistic decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship and control of the viewer’s response (3-4).


The guiding principle of The Assistant’s representation of actions is the synthesis of the two spectrums of art cinema’s representation of its actions (or re-actions more aptly, as the former’s ‘actions’ are also mostly) that David Bordwell defines – “documentary factuality (Bordwell 777)” and “psychological subjectivity (777)”. Filtered through Jane’s psychological subjectivity, reality is presented with documentary factuality, in structures which honour the aforementioned principles of classic film style. Violations of classic cinema’s conceptions of reality’s representation are the consequential results of experiencing reality through her, but that experience of reality is ordered and regulated. Close-ups on objects (point of view shots) or Jane’s face will customarily be accompanied by a following medium shot to portray more comprehensively the event that is occurring, and this pattern of an obscure shot followed by an explanatory shot, creates a proportion of subjectivity and clarity. In between patterns like this, there are long still and tracking shots of/through the company’s office spaces either as Jane moves through them or is stationary, and medium-long shots to present characters’ reactions in comparison/contrast with Jane’s. All four types of shots described adhere to the rules of decorum – they do not trespass beyond expectancy, or ‘normalcy’. The less ‘expected/normal’ setup of shot within the film – medium-long/long shots shot through doors – is itself, formatted to appear straightforward (so as to follow decorum).


 Reconfiguring a quote by Bordwell on how the art film’s style operates, Jane’s representation of reality has “certain gaps and problems. But these…deviations are placed, resituated as (her) realism (779)” Birds-eye, sharply angled or from-behind views are how Jane is perceiving a situation. Muffled over-the-phone audio, unintelligibly quiet dialogue, speaking which’s speaker is not present and overlapping voices are similarly, how she is processing sounds. The representation of The Assistant, is a mimesis of Jane’s reality.


Ensuring precise comprehension of the events on-screen is not the purpose of the film’s representation, therefore its spatial and temporal continuity from shot to shot, or from scene to scene, is not necessarily consistent. Non-continuity editing and abrupt cuts between straight-on and angled (as in, subjects being shot from the side or at a diagonal, not the camera at an angle) shots are commonplace. As the viewer knows, sees and thinks like Jane, we also do what Jane does – as she navigates her day, we are given access to the visuals literally at her hand and the sounds which surround her; the ambiguousness of space and time are subordinate to how Jane navigates through space and the time it takes to do so, more or less. Ellipses occur when Jane has already done a specific action once (ex. going down in the elevator, driving to the Mark hotel, walking to the company’s second building) and therefore it can be spared to show it (or its directional inverse) again (as Jane’s perspective, we can imagine doing it and forgetting about it).


As discussed in the introduction, The Assistant resembles a novel canon of films which hybridize the classic and art films, and a categorizable feature – a ‘tradition’ – of that canon is an increased degree of representational (or what Bordwell refers to as ‘formal’) disharmony. The visual and aural disharmonies outlined thus far develop into an intelligible system of disharmonious images and sounds which is itself, harmonious. One example of a disharmonious attribute becoming part of a harmonious system, is the jarringly loud noises of the office’s operation – doors slamming, photocopies printing, paper jamming – which become predictable and rhythmic, almost musical. An autonomous kind of formal harmony; one which, to a viewer who is familiar with the works of the classic film/art film hybrid canon is not caught off guard by; is evident. These films aim to “pose problems for the spectator (778)” with their representations of reality, to emulate the “disorientat(ion),…shock, confus(ion) or confront(ation)” experienced by their perspective lenses – Jane’s, in this case – but once a viewer has become ‘fluent’ in this reworked formal harmony, viewing is no longer ‘problematic’. The prolonged periods of silence during a long take for instance, becomes one part of a balanced system of long, quiet, still scenes, and subsequent short, noisy, eruptive scenes.


As Bordwell explains of the art film’s representation of events, in The Assistant, “the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? how is this story being told? why is this story being told this way? (778-779)” Jane is telling this story (story, as Bordwell uses it to mean ‘account’, not the definition of ‘story’ which is differentiated from ‘plot’); it is being told through her subjective perspective; and it is being told this way, to emphasize the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of the chairman’s systematic sexual violations of women, and to foreground the production company’s naturalized procedures of concealment which allow for that paradox to exist. One element of the film’s representation which highlights this message is the respective temperaments of the women and the men portrayed: the former, each act as if they are to a degree lifeless (with the new, unqualified assistant at the closest end of the spectrum and the tanned, blonde actress at the furthest), while each of the latter, act as if they are to a degree aggressive (with the production assistant who invites Jane for drinks at the closest end and the chairman at the furthest). The settings depicted – the assistants’ cramped, suffocating office, the production executives’ mazelike office, and the chairman’s familial, welcoming office (all of which are in a lifeless, unfeeling palette of greys and muted, unsaturated shades) – demonstrate this objective as well.


However, despite its largely art cinema style, the film is concerned with grounding its representation in coherence, thus it, as Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson word of classic cinema’s representation, “unif(ies its) extensive series of disparate spatial and temporal elements in the plot in such a way that the spectator could grasp the…events (Bordwell et al. 175)” In moments where the author (director, Green) is seeking to present information pertaining to the story (the systematic sexual assaults and their concealment) patently to Jane and to the viewer, this preserving of classic cinema’s coherence, shifts into the exact replication of classic cinema’s representation. In the climax of the film for (an ultimate) example, when Jane approaches the company’s human resources manager to report her suspicions about the chairman’s predatory behaviour, this classic cinema mode of representation comes to the fore. 


The space of the human resources manager’s office is displayed unambiguously, with one half of the space occupied by the manager, and the other half by Jane. The manager invites Jane to strip away excess clothing, before beckoning her to present her anxieties. In a continuous pattern of static, medium shots edited together by conventional cuts in shot-reverse-shot format, the two discourse about the arrival of the new, young, unqualified assistant. Spatiality and temporality remain consistent, as Jane attempts to voice her awareness of the chairman’s systematic sexual assaults. This is the most vocal Jane is about her disturbance and reciprocally, this is the most palpable the company’s disregard for the chairman’s behaviours is. The manager intentionally misunderstands and distorts her observations, reframing the conversation to paint Jane as a liar, and the company as be the body needing protection. The film presents information clearly: the assaults are occurring, and nothing will be done to stop them.


While The Assistant crafts its own reworking of the ‘classical stylistic norm’, it does not violate this reworked classical stylistic norm. The film’s style is not self-reflexive – it does not signal to its own artifice to emphasize its existence as a form; it’s divergence from the ‘classical stylistic norm’ is to bound the perspective to Jane and offer authorial commentary on what it means to be the personal assistant to a chairman abusing his power to assault women (and it not being acknowledged). One attribute which clues to this point – that the representation of The Assistant is not meant to be self-reflexive, but to anchor the perspective to Jane/the lens of a personal assistant in her situation – is the costumes of the female characters the chairman assaults. The author could have exaggerated the outfits (extremely revealing or totally covered up) each of the women; the blonde actress, the new assistant, the nanny and the red-headed actress; were wearing to achieve self-reflexivity, perspective and commentary, but she does not, opting to have them each wear an outfit which falls between the spectrum, and preserve self-effacing style to the detriment of her message being enhanced. In the terms of David Bordwell, the style is governed clearly by the intertwinement of “realistic motivation (Bordwell 777)”, “character’s vision (777)” and “life’s untidiness (777)”, and the intentional “uncertainties which persist (777)” are the “obvious uncertainties (777)” associated with her (low-ranking) position at the company and (non-‘trusted insider’) relationship with her boss.


If the ‘disequilibrium’ (adapted in this film as the web of parallel chains of causes and their effects) is Jane’s analyses of and discovering the truths about, her re-actions (her tasks linked) to her boss’ actions – and the initial equilibrium is taken to be her not yet arriving at those conclusions – then the new equilibrium would be what she intends to do about the reality she has become aware of. The Assistant engages with three of the tenets David Bordwell proposes as belonging to the art film – “pronounc(ement of) judgement on ‘modern life’ (Bordwell 776)”, “social situations impinging upon the…sensitive individual (776)” and “that life is more complex than art (779)” – but Jane is not goalless, passive nor helpless like the characters the aforementioned tenets are respectively, conventionally associated with. She seeks to dismantle (one of) Hollywood’s systems of sexual abuse, she becomes involved in the fight against such a socially-normalized phenomenon and her internal and external criticisms of true-to-life scenarios of predation demonstrate how art can challenge reality. While it could be argued that the new equilibrium is simply the return of the initial equilibrium – that Jane will not do anything further about the knowledge she has gained, but rather will accept it as standard and not something she can substantially affect – her disappearing from the camera’s sight as she walks in the opposite direction of the company’s buildings as the final scene, signifies a changed state of affairs – her leaving (spatially and formally) the company.


To strengthen this final action as a new equilibrium, it should be positioned within the events which lead up to it. The final sequence of the film depicts Jane alone in a nauseatingly lit deli seated between two poles of a window frame; in a straight-on, medium length shot, she calls her father. The camera is still for an uncomfortably lengthy period of time as her father praises her for bravely persevering in her role despite its hardships, and her expression morphs from fatigued to grateful to regretful. The camera closes in to Jane’s face as a burden of guilt wearies her expression. Then, following her gaze, the view shifts abruptly to the chairman’s office where, through his window’s blinds, the outline of a woman raising herself up and down atop a man is intelligible. The camera returns to Jane in close-up – definitive evidence of her boss’ predatory behaviour registers in her eyes and she heaves a deep sigh, her final act of connection-making. Though Jane’s exiting the deli and her disappearing from the camera’s eye as she walks away from it – in the opposite direction of the building she works in – could be viewed as “open (780)” or “arbitrary (780)” to suggest that “life lacks the neatness of art (780)”, the symbolism of her leaving as her final act in juxtaposition with her first act being ‘going’ is significant. As well, up until this point (through the initial equilibrium and disequilibrium) her movement has been primarily controlled by the production company; one of her few autonomous movements being walking away from the company’s buildings, and it being her final action, signifies that she is at last, taking back her agency, and quitting.


The Assistant, authored by Kitty Green, is a film which’s structure ultimately adheres to the principles guiding classic film’s structure, but which reorders its causes and effects into a web made up of different chains of causes and effects, layers this web beneath the surface of the plot, and introduces its new equilibrium through symbolism not explicit commentary. The tool of ‘parallelism’, presenting disparate events that are similar in some significant way, documents the various suspicious behaviours of a film production company’s secretive chairman to force the viewer to draw connections between them, and discover the truths about his exploits. The representation of events is delivered through the dual perspectives of ‘documentary factuality’ and ‘psychological subjectivity’ – through the lens of the film’s main character, Jane (who is unnamed within the text), the viewer is given access to a limited yet accurately-relayed amount of visual and aural information. From the tasks we watch her complete, the reality of his serial, systematically-organized sexual assaults of (four, we can infer as occurring on the one day the film takes place over), and overall predatory behaviour towards, women, are revealed; as Jane connects the subtexts of her various tasks, the different forms of his abuse are detectable.


The film’s style works to restrict the awareness of the reality of the chairman’s actions to Jane’s – a melding of realism and ambiguity (accurate re-presentations of an obscured point of view) governs how the plot is communicated. Through the presentation of the film’s world in this style, the reality of the intentional concealing of the chairman’s actions by the company’s ‘in the know’ employees (trusted production executives and a human resources team) is articulated. The techniques contributing to this style closely resemble art cinema’s, but through a self-curated form of order and type of regulation, the representation of the world still acquiesces to the tenets of classic cinema’s approach to representation. This representation in collaboration with the film’s structure presents the author’s contribution to a prominent societal discussion – the issue of naturalized sexual abuse in Hollywood’s, and other production sites’, film (/entertainment) industry. Powerful men like the chairman are able to exert their power to obtain sex; the corporations they operate work to protect this information from being known; women are mandated to ‘pay the price’ for career opportunities; and young, female personal assistants are kept ignorant, impelled to discover the truth themselves.



 

Works Cited:

Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”. Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 774-782.

Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

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