1917 (Sam Mendes, UK/USA, 2019)

'Montage interdit' is the title of two essays from the French film critic André Bazin (1918-1958), first published in the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953 and 1957 and merged and reprinted  as a single essay in the 1975 collection of his essays Qu'est-ce-que le Cinéma?. Bazin, a great admiror of the Italian neo-realism, argued that since it was cinema's vocation to produce a faithful reproduction of reality, the unity of space and time should be preserved as much as possible: editing was to be avoided whenever and wherever possible. His favorite stylistic devices were therefore the deep-focus shot (that allows a clear vision of the scene from the front plane all the way to the background) and the so-called plan-sequence that continuously - that is, without interruptions - follows the movements of the characters. However, Bazin was enough of a realist to realize that following the logic of this argument the ideal film would be a complete reproduction of the existing world and that this ideal of a 'total cinema' is nothing but an illusion. He therefore concluded another of his essays, Ontologie de l'Image Photographique' with the resignation: "D'autre part le cinéma est un langage," acknowledging that film, in order to be able to tell something about the world, needs to abstract from it to a certain extent.

Film as an integral reproduction of reality, and film as a medium that selects and re-arranges parts of that reality (whether as it is or artificially created) to create a virtual  world, tell a story, or even build an argument, those are the two main conceptions of film that have dominated allmost all of its history, from its early beginnings with the completely opposite approaches of the medium by the Lumière brothers on the one hand and Méliès on the other. In these digital time and days Bazin's 'Mythe du Cinéma Total' (the title of another one of his essays) has migrated to immersive 3D Virtual Reality (where, for the time being, it still remains a myth), and the plan-sequence has become an obligatory staple of FPS and other kinds of computer games. At the same time digital technologies have made film loose it's innocence of objectivity and have at least  made film's 'ontological vocation' to faithfully reproduce reality highly problematic. Digital technologies have severed the 'ontological' bond (Bazin) between photographic and filmic images and the reality in front of the camera lens, making any digitally produced photograph or film image suspect of manipulation and outright forgery. In these circumstances, the deep-focus shot and the plan-sequence have lost much of their attractiveness even for 'realist' filmmakers.

Given this contemporary context, Sam Mendes' 1917 (UK/USA, 2019) is a remarkable attempt to re-animate the realistic aspirations of a 'total cinema' by reconquering the plan-sequence from VR and videogames and using it to allow cinema-goers to immersive themselves in the realities of the First World War (WWI) front by following two British soldiers, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) who have to cross a no-man's land between the allied and German troops in order to deliver an urgent message to Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) in (what seems to be) a single, uninterrupted shot. Mendes is certainly not the first director who attempted to create the illusion that a full-length feature film was recorded in just one shot. Already in 1948, Alfred Hitchcock undertook such an endeavour in his film THE ROPE (USA, 1948). In order to circumvent the technical limitations of that time, that allowed only for takes of ten minutes at the max, he had his camera land on a dark surface - such as the back of a black jacket - every ten minutes in order to conceal the necessary cut. Digital technologies have, of course, delivered cinema from such constraints and make it theoretically, if not in practice, possible to continuously film characters or real people for in principle infinite stretches of time.

However, as perhaps Bazin already surmised, and as Mendes' film probably unwillingly demonstrates, the film aesthetic issue of an integral, continuous and realistic 'total' rendering of a narrative world is not a technological, but a conceptual and experimential one. A comparison with Hitchcock's THE ROPE makes this clear already. In THE ROPE the suggested duration of the single shot (or presented as such) matched the about eighty minutes of the presented story: the length of screen time, the time the presented story took, and the time of recording/showing the story (or, in more technical narratological terms, the times of story, plot and discourse) were identical. In 1917, however, the length of the seemingly single shot and the length of screen time are - or at least meant to seem - identical and take about two hours time but the story time is about twenty-four hours and thus largely exceeds both shot and screen time. The challenge Mendes and his camera man Roger Deakins set themselves is not primarily a technological one - although, of course, the project raised many technological challenges as well - but a dramaturgical and narrative one: how to compress a story that unfolds in about twenty-four hours into a two-hour movie and at the same time creating the illusion of an uninterrupted continuity? 

Mendes solves this conumdrum, maybe quite predictably, by stretching and compressing time in ways that seem quite natural and therefore are almost unnoticeable. A good example of this strategy can be found already at the beginning of the film. The film opens with a low shot of flowers in a meadow in which, as the camera reveals when it pulls back, Blake and Schofield are taking a rest. They are disturbed by an officer who summons them to General Erinmore's (Colin Firth) headquarters and the camera then follows them on their way over the meadow and into the trenches to the place where Erinmore resides. During the first part of this walk, Blake and Schofield exchange stories and jokes, and together with the continuity of the shot this suggests that story, plot and discourse time are identical, and this impression is only corroborated by the walk through the narrow trenches where they constantly stumble on and exchange scoldings and greetings with other soldiers. What could be a more natural continuity than that of an uninterrupted conversation between two soldiers? But the distance between their initial position and the entrance of the trenches would presumably longer in the story world and take more time to cover than the distance covered by the two soldiers during their conversation. Story time, that is, is longer than the plot and discourse time, or the story time is longer than the shot and screening time. 

The same trick is used later in the film when Schofield gets a lift in the back of a military lorrie in which his fellow soldiers kill the time by impersonating a not very beloved officer. Again, the continuity of the conversational exchanges together with the continuity of the shot suggests a convergence of shot and story time, but in the story world the ride is likely to have lasted hours rather than minutes: the continuity of human interaction, that is, is used to conceal a divergence of story time and shot/screening time. Another, quite obvious example occurs when Schofield is temporarily unconscious after having been hit by a German sniper. When the camera slowly approaches Schofield he (also slowly) regains consciousness, but again, his state of unconsciousness has in all likelihood taken much longer than the few minutes the camera uses to approach and find him. It is probably no coincidence that Schofield then tries to consult his wrist watch only to find out that it doesn't work anymore: time keeping is paradoxically almost impossible in this supposedly single-shot movie.

 There are other means by which the film attempts to make the spectator feel that she is permanently in the position of a direct wittness of the events that unfold in front of the camera. The film, for instance, seems to start in media res: the main characters Blake and Schofield are from the first minute summoned into action without there being any introduction of the characters or the circumstances in which they find themselves, of the place where the action develops, of the state in which the war is: the spectator is thrown into the characters' world as if she had dropped from the sky and simply has to go along with the characters and events without asking too many questions. But this is not too hard a condition because the movie itself doesn't raise too many questions itself either. The film tells a very classical and straightforward story along the well known pattern of a journey with a well defined goal (a message has to be delivered at the other side of the no-man's territory) and on the way the hero(s) has/have (they don't make it both of them) overcome obstacles and difficulties, none of them beingvery surprising for spectators who are a bit familiar with the genre (the Brits are the good guys, the Germans are the bad guys, the hero is resilient, persistent and determined, human and compassionate as demonstrated when he gives away his food to a French woman and a baby, and will prevail in the end). It is probably no coincidence that most reviews are rather brief in the narrative department of this movie.

The critical question, then, is whether or not the attempt to immerse the spectator into the reality of this WWI movie and make her share the experiences of the main characters has succeeded? Maybe because of the witholding of background information on the characters - in order to create that in medias res feeling - and the lack of any psychological deepening of their personalities on the one hand, and the meticulous but also rather sanitized recreation of the war zone and its props, it is hard not to constantly have the impression of being a tourist in an open space museum where WWI is being re-enacted. It is maybe also because of the familiarity of the narrative pattern itself - probably deliberately chosen so the spectator will have no problem identifying herself with the hero - that most of the attention is drawn to the backdrops and, not in the least, the technical audacity of the movie. The movie gives the feeling of being taken on a tour of which the main character is - indeed - the main character and the camera is the guide ('come, now I'll show you this, and now look there, and please, see how astonished our main character is', etc.). Instead of becoming immersed, a spectator will probably rather have the feeling of being an outsider or a guest in a world that remains alien to him or her. When it comes to immersion in the realities of WWI, Peter Jackson's THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (UK/New Zealand, 2018) did a much better job with it's colorized film footage and added sound track. 

By attempting to overcome the paradox of filming a twenty-four hour adventure in a two-hour single shot and thus creating a greater sense of immersion into the story world and proximity to the characters of this world, Mendes actually has achieved the inverse. Instead of immersing the spectators into the story world, the film constantly invites them to scrutinize the movie for cuts or traces of editing, and instead of focusing on the endeavours of the hero, the film draws attention to the technical virtuosity and brilliance of the camera work. Maybe the story has been kept deliberately as shallow as it is: instead of making the spectators forget that they are watching a movie - the holy grale of transparency of all media - the film prowdly displays the craftsmanship of it's makers, from director to camera man, sound engineers and set designers. And it is probably a characteristic of this digital age that even or may especially films made with a realistic intention are being scrutinized for traces of technological manipulation. In that sense, 1917 is a kiss of death.