Paul Thomas Anderon's The Master (2012)

     The most striking aspect of the four-shot sequence from The Master above is the confluence of a musical structure; the elegant interweaving of the movement of figures, objects, and camera; and an elliptical and evocative form of montage that hovers on the borderline between contextual clarity and tantalizing enigma. 
     The whole sequence registers as spatiotemporally coherent because of a series of spatial matches and variations, with the right-to-left movement of camera, dolly, and figure in the second shot matched by the left-to-right movement in the third, the shift from lateral to tunnel space in the first shot echoed in the third, and the fourth shot combining and reorienting all of these micro-movements. The initially disorienting sense of space in the final shot, where we briefly lose the ability to distinguish camera and object, figure and ground, gives added resonance to the play with point-of-view in the third shot, where what seems to be a straightforward, over-the-shoulder setup becomes, in motion, something rather different. The repeatedly racked focus in that shot serves as a psychological correlate to what the protagonist seems to be experiencing, a yearning for clarity and stability that sets the terms for the shot/countershot exchanges that dominate the remainder of the film (below).
     The sequence also strongly evokes the work of the most visually eloquent and iconographically consistent of American filmmakers, John Ford, with the first shot concluding with a dolly through a doorway much like the one that both opens and closes The Searchers (1956). Other filmmakers have referenced this imagery to deepen the sentiment associated with wartime loss or as an ironic comment on outsider violence, but Anderson seems to be more fully in dialogue with Ford’s visual language. Ford was the cinema’s great poet of passageways, liminal spaces, and transitions, and he gave a strong cinematic inflection to a visual tradition that, extending back through both American painters like William Sidney Mount and the 19th century prints of Currier and Ives, was rooted in the conventions of Northern European genre painting epitomized by artist such as Pieter de Hooch (below). 
     The paradigmatic American auteur, Ford also understood better than most the expressive power of spatial repetition and variation. In this way, the same formations in Monument Valley that evoked refuge from the “virtues of civilization” in 1939’s Stagecoach could, in Ford’s first postwar Western, My Darling Clementine, be made to participate in a very contemporary sort of mourning for those who, like the protagonist’s 18-year-old-brother James Earp, died before their time. 
     In My Darling Clementine, these visual tropes are brought together in a beautiful, if tentative, synthesis connecting the constitutive elements of social life (the entering Marshal with his “lady fair” and the community dance) with emblems (the paired flags and the open-air church steeple) of a nation that, in both 1882 and in 1946, was undergoing tumultuous change. Anderson encourages a complementary meditation on national construction in The Master by having his flag pass at twilight underneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a different but equally charged sort of national icon in our technologically saturated age. As with Ford, Anderson links depictions of the past, here 1946 as seen from the perspective of 2012, to anxieties about the present, as if trying to locate the roots of our contemporary malaise.