Emblematic Shots (examples: “Brokeback Mountain”, “Young Royals”, “Maestro”...)

One of the best shots in film history can be found at the very beginning of ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

It can be admired shortly after the one-minute mark; in fact, it is only the seventh or so shot of this well over two-hour-long feature film:

A cowboy climbs out of a truck by the side of the road early in the morning. He has apparently hitchhiked his way to some godforsaken, half-deserted town in the middle of nowhere. He walks over to some trailer, paper bag in hand. Then we see him leaning against the wall of said trailer, obviously waiting for the office inside to open for business on this day.

Gustavo Santaolalla’s famous (and Oscar-winning) guitar score has just strummed out its first motif, and we’re just hearing its echo linger on for a few more moments at this point.

The waiting cowboy in the frame has his hands stuffed in his pockets. He is looking down at his boots, brim of his hat hiding his face. The paper bag holding all of his belongings rests on the wooden steps leading up to the still-locked office door.

And that’s when we get the shot!

The film shot that instantly marks this movie out as a cinematic masterpiece:

A train speeds through the frame, obstructing our view of the cowboy for about eight seconds.

That’s the shot!

That’s it.

One of the most genius shots I’ve ever seen in my life.

I would like to ask you to watch these few seconds of sheer, utter brilliance now. Please try to work out why it is that I’m so in awe of it. (And I’m certainly not the only one at that; that’s, like, really cool film school lecture stuff right there, okay?)

I’m going to link you to the opening scene of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ now; you can decide for yourself if you want to watch the other seven or so minutes that come after this ‘train shot’ or not. (These are the moments in which the second cowboy arrives on the scene in his old, beat-up truck and the two men start to furtively check each other out.)

But for the purposes of today’s post, we’re only interested in that eight-second ‘train shot’, i.e. the shot in which the train speeds through the frame and obstructs the view of the cowboy leaning against the wall, smoking.

It happens right after the one-minute mark.

Here’s the link. Please watch the video now.

Going forward, I’m going to assume that you’ve watched the video. (And believe me: Nothing here will make any sense if you don’t click on that link and watch that scene – and specifically that one ‘train shot’! It’s only a few seconds long, after all. So, please make sure you really did check it out before reading on.)

So, why is this shot so noteworthy? And why do I keep raving about it?

If you’ve watched it carefully, you will have undoubtedly realized that, as the train speeds through the frame, we barely even see anything of the cowboy hidden by it, other than his feet, a stretch of gravel and the two bottom steps of the trailer. We don’t really see all that much of the lonely figure leaning against the wall, smoking, right?

Or do we?

Well, actually…we do get to see him a few times in those eight seconds. Just for a split second each time, and then it’s over in the blink of an eye every single time.

We do catch these flashes of him in those narrow gaps separating the train carriages!

And since the train is barrelling across the screen with considerable speed, the gaps between the carriages only show us the cowboy for a fraction of a second each time. Our brain barely has time to register his appearance before he disappears behind the next carriage again.

This happens seventeen times during that eight-second take (I think), but it all goes by so fast that it’s difficult to even keep track of these gaps between the carriages.

Now we see the cowboy…now we don’t…now we see him…now we don’t…

This is one of those rare times on this blog, dear reader, where my little doodles aren’t just self-indulgent mischief but actually serve a real purpose. Because these precious few moments in which the cowboy is visible in the gaps between the carriages flash by so quickly that it is pretty difficult to catch them. (Just trying to pause the movie at the right moment drove me half insane, believe me.)

This is the shot right before the train comes barrelling across the screen. The cowboy is leaning against the wall, inspecting his boots:

And this here is him in one of the first gaps between the carriages (you can see that this is another take because the camera angle is slightly different, but other than that…still pretty close, right?):

Oh, but look what happens then!

His pose actually starts to change going from one gap to the next. Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first and then a bit more dramatically later on. I.e. the way he holds himself is subtly different in each of those split-second ‘gap moments’ between the carriages: At first there’s just this tiny hint of a change as his right hand and arm change position ever so slightly…Eventually, towards the end, he actually has his hand raised to his mouth because he has just lifted the cigarette to his lips, taking a drag:

What’s important here, though, is the fact that we don’t ever see the change as it happens!

What we see is just the result.

We see the changed position he is in once the next gap between two carriages flashes by, but we don’t see him moving in between. We infer that it must have happened while our view of him was obstructed by that long black wall of train, train, train…We infer that he must have moved while we didn’t see him, but we never get to see the movement itself, right?

And so it goes: Dark wall of obstruction…Sudden flash of the cowboy leaning against the wall in a specific position…Another long black wall…Another flash of the cowboy, now in a slightly changed position…Another blackout…And yet another flash of the cowboy, who must have moved again while we couldn’t see him…

Go and re-watch it if you don’t believe me. This is exactly how this eight-second take with the train plays out: The train speeds across the frame, blocking our view of the cowboy. We never really see the cowboy move, but we know he must be moving in between those gaps because his body is in a subtly different position each time we catch sight of him.

This change also intensifies the longer the take goes on: At first the cowboy’s pose is almost identical from one gap to the next. Then there’s a sudden and drastic shift because his entire arm has suddenly moved up as he has raised his hand to his lips.

So, that’s the shot I want to talk about today: The ‘train shot’.

I want to tell you why this shot is brilliant and why there are whole film classes dedicated to it (and Ang Lee’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in general).

You see, what we don’t know at this point in the story yet is that the cowboy in question is called Ennis Del Mar and that he’s technically not even a real cowboy, but just a very poor, unemployed guy looking for a job in Signal, Wyoming – a ranch hand who will be tasked to herd sheep up on the eponymous Brokeback Mountain throughout this summer of 1963 within the next couple of minutes of screen time.

If you’ve ever watched ‘Brokeback Mountain’, then you know that its story time spans an incredible 20 years, give or take – two decades of two men torturing themselves (and each other) because they love each other yet cannot be together. Hard-hitting stuff.

The genius of this film lies in how exactly it manages to condense these 20 years into a discourse time of 2 hours and 14 minutes:

When we watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’, we don’t get to see a continuous narrative! We don’t get a gradual progression of the protagonists’ character development over time (the way we do in the movie ‘Titanic’, for instance).

What we do get instead are these leaps in time.

This is a narrative technique that’s called ellipsis: As viewers, we see a number of scenes set at a specific point in time (spanning a few minutes of screen time, i.e. discourse time), then we suddenly skip over a long period of time (often a few years in-universe), then we are dropped in a new situation and get a few more scenes set at a much later moment in time, then we skip over a few more years, etc.

I.e. our temporal progression through the narrative of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is not continuous and uninterrupted; it’s elliptical.

Now, technically almost every movie is elliptical to some extent, right? Unless you’re watching some niche experimental flick, you rarely get to see each and every second of a character’s life.

And no, I’m not just talking about the infamous missing bathroom breaks in movies here, people. What I mean is the way in which the editing process typically produces an elliptical progression of action by focusing on significant events and omitting insignificant details. Consider this example:

A character peers into an empty classroom through a glass door, wondering where everyone is. Cut. Now he’s already in the empty officers’ mess, looking around, searching for his guys. How did he get from A to B? Who cares! We never saw him walk from one room to the other because that’s not what’s important. What’s important here is that he’s looking for somebody. Another cut. Now he’s standing on an empty airfield, still looking for his trainee fighter pilots. How did he get from the building to the airfield? Well, that, too, was cut because it wasn’t really important. On screen, we typically don’t get to see everything. The editing makes sure we’re only seeing what’s important. (Also…see how it pays off to click on the links I give you here?! Because you wouldn’t have seen what’s really important about this scene if you hadn’t clicked on this one. Please imagine yours truly innocently whistling right now because what’s really important is obviously the…uhm…beach…yeah, the beach. M-hm. The sun, the sand, the water…yeah, that. Perhaps the absurd amount of oil in use here. Nothing else…ahem…Well, the camera certainly makes sure we know where to look. Consider this my little Easter egg for you, my friends.)

So, technically, every movie is elliptical to some extent. Editing choices mean the film doesn’t show us everything. (That’s why you always know that the second you’re shown a scene in which a character is shown to be walking home, something important is going to happen on that walk home. Most likely they’re going to get jumped or something.)

But ellipsis is employed in a much more radical manner in ‘Brokeback Mountain’; it’s a proper storytelling tool, an entire narrative strategy, not just an editing choice here:

We don’t get to see huge chunks of the protagonists’ lives.

Take this example from the beginning of the movie:

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist meet in 1963; they herd sheep up on Brokeback Mountain during the summer, falling in love with each other in the process. This cluster of 1963 scenes (which is the longest scene cluster in this movie overall) ends with them saying goodbye to each other in the most heartbreaking way you have ever seen on screen, and then…

…we jump ahead in time and are suddenly at Ennis’s wedding. He is standing at the altar, getting married to Alma – a character we haven’t even been introduced to properly at this point although Ennis had briefly mentioned her to Jack earlier on. We’re getting a cluster of Ennis-and-Alma scenes now (the 1963 wedding and a jolly sleigh ride, Ennis paving asphalt to earn a living; in the 1964 ‘drive-in movie theatre scene’, Alma is expecting already). We get a couple more brief scenes – scenes with Jack, too…And then there’s a huge leap in time:

Suddenly, it’s 1967! Ennis hasn’t seen Jack in four (!) years, and that’s when he receives that infamous postcard: Jack returns to his life. (And how!)

So, what we’re seeing of both of their lives are just these flashes, a cluster of scenes here, a cluster of scenes there, and in between, there are these…huge leaps in time where we just jump ahead and skip entire years of their lives that essentially remain terra incognita for us, vast, uncharted territories shrouded in darkness. It’s as if Ang Lee were switching on the spotlight for a fraction of a second, showing us a scene here, pointing out a little detail there…and then suddenly switching off the light again, hiding long stretches of time behind a thick, black veil.

A flash of light: it’s 1963. A leap in time, another flash of light: as it turns out, we’ve just skipped several months. Light off again, and we’re jumping straight ahead to 1964. Darkness. Then it’s 1966 already. Darkness again. It’s 1967. Jack and Ennis reunite. Darkness once more. It’s 1969…

And so on and so forth…

This is not a continuous narrative; it keeps getting interrupted as if the big, invisible storyteller behind the scenes were switching off the light again and again, giving us just the most essential, most vital information we need about our two beloved characters, bringing them back together, tearing them apart again, etc.

Spotlight on, spotlight off. We don’t really see the movement in between. We just see the result of said movement (Ennis comes off the mountain, now he is already marrying Alma; now she is suddenly pregnant already; now they have moved in together; now he reunites with Jack…). We aren’t shown the events in between; there’s no gradually progressing narrative. But we can infer what happened from what we see in the next cluster of scenes that might have moved the story ahead a few months or even several years at a time.

Remind you of anything?

This is exactly what happened during that ‘train shot’ we analyzed above, isn’t it?

And this is what marks Ang Lee out as such a subtle and wonderful filmmaker. He told us exactly what he was going to do in his movie: He told us…visually. He told us in one single shot!

The cowboy was leaning against the wall, smoking, as a train passed through the frame, obstructing our view of him. There were long stretches of time in which we couldn’t see the cowboy, but we did get to see him in the gaps between the carriages a few times. These were flashes, really just fractions of a second each time, and then our view of him was blocked again by the next incoming carriage. On and on and on the chain of carriages went as the whole train passed through the frame.

Each gap gave us an image of the cowboy. Sometimes his poses seemed slightly changed, but we never saw him move. His movements happened while we couldn’t see him. We only ever got to see the result and could infer what happened in between. At one point, towards the end of the train, his posture had changed more dramatically, as he had raised his cigarette to his lips. He never broke that pose, however; throughout the whole take he remained in that exact same spot, always leaning against the wall…

That’s the movie.

The whole movie.

We get brief flashes, clusters of scenes where we see something, and the years in between are big, black holes in time, where we don’t see the cowboy, so to speak.

We see what is going on in the two protagonists’ lives at the points where the spotlight is on, but we can only infer what happened in between, while the spotlight was off. What is not shown in this movie is just as important as what is shown, and the black holes between the sudden flashes of light allow us, i.e. the audience, to fill in the narrative gaps ourselves, to fill in the portions of the story we did not see.

And Ang Lee being Ang Lee, i.e. a phenomenal storyteller, means that he didn’t just throw us in at the deep end. No, he did actually tell us that this was exactly what he was going to do…in that ‘train shot’ at the very beginning of the movie.

He told us what storytelling technique he was going to pick for his movie: elliptical narration.

Film is a visual medium. And it doesn’t just use words to tell us things.

This ‘train shot’ is so incredible because it manages to communicate not just a mood or an emotion (in-universe), but the author’s intended storytelling technique. And it does so without uttering a single word!

We are shown, by means of visual symbolism, not just how the story is going to play out, but also…in what specific way the events in this story are going to be presented to us.

We aren’t told; we’re shown that this is going to be an elliptical narrative with many, many leaps in time – leaps in time which leave us in the dark as to what exactly is happening in between the brief clusters of scenes we actively get to see on screen. Those leaps in time are the story’s long, dark train carriages blocking out the full picture, so to speak.

And if you want, you could even add the not exactly insignificant fact that Jack and Ennis’s rare meetups, those few and far between secret rendezvous when they go ‘fishing’, are following that same pattern, too: They see each other for a day or two, then go back to their normal lives with their wives and children for another year, without so much as a word from each other. A brief flash of light and a lot of darkness in between. Just like the train with the carriages and the far-too-narrow gaps in between.

In fact, take another look at that ‘train shot’! What do you see?

Ennis does move a little in between those gaps. His pose changes ever-so-slightly. But ultimately, he never breaks the pose completely. He never moves in a more substantial way. There is the little detail of his raised hand, sure. But he never walks away, for example. He remains standing there, leaning against that wall, throughout the whole take.

This is exactly what makes ‘Brokeback Mountain’ so hard to watch, isn’t it? Ennis never changes course throughout the entire movie. He might get divorced and leave his wife, but he never, ever, ever decides to give it a go with Jack. He is too traumatized by the murder he witnessed in his childhood; he simply cannot fathom turning his life around and ‘walking away’ (i.e. breaking the heterosexual constraints that keep suffocating him). He can’t. He literally never breaks that pose.

All of that adds a layer of foreshadowing to the ‘train shot’, too. But this shot isn’t just foreshadowing what is going to happen. It’s not just about the ‘what’; it’s about the ‘how’. Because most importantly…essentially, this shot exists to tell us what kind of storytelling technique the creator of this movie has chosen: It’s the visualization of an ellipsis.

Which makes this moment with the ‘train shot’ one of the greatest and cleverest film shots in movie history.

Seriously, if you’re hesitating to watch (or re-watch) ‘Brokeback Mountain’ right now because of its infamous tragic ending, please reconsider that decision: I do understand why people always clamour for happy endings (especially, in the gay movie genre, which is after all plagued with themes of heartbreak, illness, death and disaster, showing us tragedies over and over and over again). But if you love movies as movies, movies for their own sake…please, for the love of God, watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’! A happy ending isn’t the be all and end all of a good movie. And this one isn’t just a good movie; it’s a phenomenal movie – cinematography- and visual-storytelling-wise. An absolutely indispensable masterpiece.

Look, I understand that the desire for a happy ending sometimes just overrides all other considerations. But sad endings can have their own, quiet and sublime beauty sometimes, wouldn’t you agree? They do something to our brains that happy endings typically cannot achieve. (And now you know one of the many reasons why Francis Poulenc is one of my favourite composers.)

We might ask ourselves, “If we have to watch a tragedy at all, does it have to be one as gut-wrenchingly depressing as ‘Brokeback Mountain’?”

Because…if we absolutely have to watch one, then we usually prefer something à la ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Tragic? Yes. But it spans about a week of story time, in which all the characters simply collide, clashing into each other, sparks flying everywhere, and then it ends with a big kaboom. It’s a downright cathartic experience, an explosion on stage. That’s the kind of tragedy we would like to see if we were forced to watch one at all, gun to our head. Not a film in which a character like Ennis Del Mar slowly keeps on trudging through the painfully realistic quagmire of his wrong life for a depressing twenty years. I get it.

And I understand that sometimes we all crave ourselves a fluffy, warm-hearted (gay-themed) flick. We all need our creature comforts from time to time. Sometimes you just want to park your derrière on the sofa, sip your steaming cup of tea and enjoy a cuddly, lovely evening, watching some happy ending that gives you warm and fuzzy feelings.

But the void you’re filling there, the need you’re satisfying is most certainly not an intellectual one; it’s not a deep desire for good film making; it’s one for…well…warm and fuzzy feelings, right? (Which is okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all feel that from time to time.) Just know that many of the recent and semi-recent warm-and-cuddly gay-themed films and TV shows (think: ‘Heartstopper’, ‘Handsome Devil’ or ‘The Way He Looks’) are far inferior works.

There’s simply a huge quality gap, nay, chasm between those types of shows and movies…and ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

It’s okay to need some cinematic comfort food from time to time (who doesn’t? we all do!), but if you ever feel the need to confront yourself with an actual work of art, with something that’s profound and deep, incredibly clever, phenomenally filmed, yet subtle, unpretentious and honest at the same time…if you ever feel that need, an aesthetic and cinematic need, then ‘Brokeback Mountain’ will satisfy it and then some. There is a reason why this film became such a classic and why critics laud it so much. There’s a reason why this film is taught in film schools. There is a reason why professional and amateur cinéastes (yes, even the straights!) go nuts about this one. It’s just a very, very good movie.

And I’m not just saying this because it was in many ways groundbreaking as the first gay-themed ‘blockbuster’-type movie with a broad audience appeal. I’m not just saying it because of its famous vivid setting and the breathtaking scenery shown in its exterior shots (which weren’t filmed in Wyoming, by the way, but in the Canadian Rockies in Alberta). I’m not just saying this because of its phenomenal cast, in which every single actor and actress shines, but the late Heath Ledger just towers above them all in the performance of his far-too-short career. I’m not just saying this because this movie about an impossible love confined by societal constraints is defined by emotional depth and complexity.

I’m saying this because the artistic craftsmanship here is spectacular.

And no wonder, Ang Lee took home a Best Director Oscar for it. (The fact that the two screenwriters and the composer of the original score won in their respective categories, too, is unsurprising. The fact that ‘Brokeback Mountain’ lost Best Picture to the overly preachy and heavy-handed morality tale that was ‘Crash’, on the other hand, came as a huge surprise to anyone who likes movies. But if what one hears is true, older Academy members weren’t thinking with their movie brains; they were thinking with their homophobia brains. Such were the times…)

So, yes, please…Please re-watch it (or watch it for the first time if you’ve never seen it before). And try to look out for the various, subtle ways in which Ang Lee manages to seduce any true movie lover’s eye. The ‘train shot’ is one such example, but it isn’t by far the only treat you get. This film is just dripping with subtle symbolism, frame after frame, scene after scene.

I mean, just because we’ve briefly touched upon this scene above already…

Look at the scene in which Jack and Ennis say goodbye to each other for the first time, after initially falling in love with each other up on that mountain:

Ennis is shown to have what amounts to a panic attack when he thinks he will never see Jack again. He is shown to be kneeling in an alleyway, retching and dry heaving, punching a wall, and essentially having a full-on breakdown.

Well, what’s interesting here is that, as we see and hear him retch and wail, we get what is called a J-cut!

A J-cut happens when the sound of the following scene can already be heard over the image of the preceding scene. (You all know this phenomenon, right?) So, what we get here is the image of Ennis retching and punching the wall while the J-cut already gives us the sound of the following scene: the wedding of Ennis and Alma!

We literally see Ennis trying to throw up, hurting himself as he punches the wall, ultimately sagging against the wall in deep resignation and despair, while we already hear the words from the Lord’s Prayer spoken by the pastor at the altar, “...forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...”

And as the line, “...and lead us not into temptation…” rings out, we cut to Ennis in his Sunday best, meekly repeating the words during his wedding.

The message here is clear: Retching, raging, despairing and sagging against an unrelenting wall in deep resignation…all of that we see as we already hear the words spoken at the wedding. That retching and raging and resigning yourself to your fate…that’s that whole cursed marriage in a nutshell. And the fact that Ennis is having his breakdown while visually trapped between two walls in the frame should be more than enough to tell you how he will feel stuck in the heterosexual marriage and family life that’s to come.

And obviously, it’s very telling that the cut from Ennis despairing (because he had to leave the man he made love to the entire summer)…to Ennis’s meek face on his wedding day overlaps with the words ‘lead us not into temptation’.

A J-cut. Simple and effective editing. And very well executed.

There are many, many more interesting scenes, lots of subtle symbolism and wonderful subtext to be found in this movie, and I simply cannot go into all of this here because today, we are interested in one thing and one thing only:

That ‘train shot’ at the very beginning of the movie.

The shot foreshadowing not just what story we will get to see in this film, but what storytelling tool the filmmaker is going to use in order to tell his story.

One clever eight-second take that tells us all we need to know about a two-hour-long movie’s basic storytelling technique!

This is what is called an emblematic shot.

And emblematic shots is what I want to talk about today.

Under the cut, we will ask ourselves what emblematic shots are exactly. We will then first look at the simplest forms of these shots, move on to the more complex ones and ultimately talk about the ones that operate on a completely different plane altogether. In order to do so, we will examine a whole number of different films and shows…Final destination: ‘Young Royals’ and a shot from that little Swedish show that’s been living in my mind rent-free ever since I first saw it.

I hope your cinematic-artistic-intellectual cravings are particularly strong today (as opposed to, say, the fluffy-cuddly-happy cravings that we all experience sometimes) because this, dear friends, is going to be a post about cinematic language 101.