ARRIVAL: Weaponising Language

“Film and video programs are efforts at communicating and just like speaking English, tapping out Morse code, or waving semaphores, there is a whole language that can be learned including words, phrases, grammar, punctuation, rules, and common practices. And like any other language, the more thoroughly you master it, the more effectively you can communicate.” - Michael Wohl

When you first start to study film, you hear a phrase from everyone older and wiser than you, that given time all students and practitioners of film will  be told, and it almost sounds like a curse; “You’ll never be able to watch a film the same way again”. As many friends and  family members who sit and watch a film with you can attest to, it’s true. You will always catch yourself noticing that the colour palette is monochromatic, the camera is shaky deliberately for artistic effect, the actors are standing on different elevation levels to depict a shift in power and many would tell you it can ruin the viewing experience and ‘you just can’t watch a film anymore’.  However, what is being dissected is the film language and it’s something that every filmmaker needs to become fluent in if they are to make the right choices in the production of a film. But, this language is not just understood by the creators of film, tv and animation, it isn’t just the filmmakers who know it fluently, otherwise the audience would never understand the meaning behind the images on screen and these elements of film would be lost and achieve nothing. So in a way, we all know this secret language.

 The cinematic language is the most important tool for a filmmaker because it dictates how you craft the film, the scene, the shot. But the thing that has always fascinated me is how we all got here. How can an audience, who for the most part did not attend film school, or maybe watch films and tv rarely, or as a treat will every now and then go to the cinema, how can we all sit and watch the same film with different levels of understanding and yet all derive the same feelings, and understanding of the story?

Take this scene from Game of Thrones, how does every single person connect the same dots without any dialogue being said, in this one scene which, taken out of context, is simply a close up and slow zoom on a baby, and a cut to someone else with emotional music.

 The film didn’t *tell* you through dialogue. It used filmic language to present to you a way to interpret the answer, an answer the filmmakers guided you towards through film elements, through the camera works, the acting, editing, sound design, colour palette, through everything you see and hear on screen, because everything you perceive on screen has been deliberately crafted to guide you, the viewer, to the emotional conclusion the filmmakers want you to feel, at least when its done right. 

 It is through the understanding of the language that is presented to us on screen, that we are able to make these connections and contextualise what is happening. It has taken decades of trial and error and repetition of techniques for the culture of film to have solidified itself in the way it has, allowing us to sit down and understand what the film is trying to tell us. And it is because of how far we have come in both crafting and reading using this film language that more complex and unique storytelling has begun to unfold in recent years.

But there is one film that I believe illustrates this ability to use the cinematic language, with such proficiency, that it crafts a narrative by turning what we know about film upside down. A film that entirely relies on the audience interpreting the visuals on screen incorrectly, by following what has otherwise always been the correct interpretation.

In 2016, director Denis Villeneuve and Script Writer Eric Heisserer brought to theatres Sci-Fi/Thriller, Arrival, based upon the short novella “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. On a budget of 47 million dollars, the worldwide grossing of the film reached 203 million dollars, making back its money enough to solidify it as not only a film students gold mine but as a box office hit and critical darling. 

Arrival is perhaps one of the greatest examples of film language in recent times, reliant on the audience being so well versed in the techniques of cinema, that they trick themselves into assuming an incorrect timeline. More than that, it relies on the audience to falsely apply what they know about film language. The crux of the film is constructed around the apparent flashbacks the central character has throughout the film, but the most important one of all comes from the opening sequence; a montage of the protagonist's life specifically to do with the birth and subsequent premature death of her daughter. 

To view this objectively, as an audience member who has no context of the rest of the film, there are a number of ways in which this sequence could be viewed but the most immediate one is, exposition or backstory, using the first few opening minutes as montage to set up the emotional throughline of the narrative. A narrative device that everyone has seen before in various different ways. *Insert reference to Up’s opening sequence* *Lord of the Rings* *Treasure Planet*. This is a known way of opening a film, setting up a character's past, a history of the world, or the passing of time. 

So, if this is the most common and innate reading of the opening sequence, which the majority of spectators and first time viewers subconsciously assumed, then the genius behind it, is that the revelation that this ‘flash-back,’ is in fact a ‘flash-forward’ only works if the audience was versed in film language. It only works if the audience makes this connection, that the first scene we see  is attempting to get the backstory out the way and set up the emotional turmoil Dr. Banks faces. The audience has to somehow clue in to the language on screen to gain context of the situation, applying what has become ingrained, as the accepted filmic language that means ‘Flash-back’. Arrival essentially weaponises the viewers own understanding of the established cinematic language against them. 

But there is a lot more going on here and it requires an understanding of film techniques and psychological phenomenons to grasp how this was attained, and before I explain about the theoretics behind the editing effects in particular, there is one thing I need to clear up because it is a personal irritation of mine. And it is called the “Kuleshov Effect”. 

 Here are two definitions I found online about the Kuleshov effect.  

Kuleshov:

 Definition 1: The Kuleshov effect is a film effect invented by Soviet filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov. It is a mental phenomenon where the audience derives more meaning from the interaction of two back to back shots from one in isolation. 

Definition 2: The Kuleshov Effect was a film experiment conducted by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. It explores how audiences ascribed meaning to and understood shots depending on the order in which they were assembled.   

This is something I see all the time among film academics, whether that is other video essays, online resources or just general discussion on the topic but the issue here is with definition 1, which is used far too often and is incorrect. 

Kuleshov was a Soviet Filmmaker and academic active around the early 20th century, and founder of the film school of Moscow, one of the first educational institutions designed to learn the art of film. The effect in question is referring to an experiment that Kuleshov himself designed to demonstrate an already known and practiced editing effect. Kuleshov did neither “invent” nor “discover” this effect, he did however come up with a practical experiment that demonstrated it to his students,  and subsequently it has become known as the Kuleshov effect, but to credit him as either the inventor or the one to have discovered this effect, does a disservice to the editors of the time and before who already practiced this effect, not to mention Kuleshov himself never pressed a narrative that he came up with this psychological/editorial technique but he was an avid teacher of it and helped popularise it. It’s just a misunderstanding but something I wanted to try and clear up because you are hard pressed to find a common definition on this effect and it is important to have a cohesive understanding of terms otherwise our definitions will all slightly differ and that’s just a slippery slope of misinformation. 

So back to Arrival and the editing. The application of this editing effect is seen not from a shot by shot intercut, as demonstrated in the Kuleshov effect, but from the sequence in which the scenes are placed in front of us. Audiences are so internalised to this effect that they automatically attempt to make a connection to the current scene using the context of the previous scene, it’s standard film language that is essential to following a narrative. More than that,it is a natural cognitive reaction to apply meaning using the facial expressions in front of us, and this film technique is simply using that effect to gain the desired conclusion from the audience.

Arrival is a story based around the idea of linear and cyclical language and time as concepts. For this reason the opening is deliberately the ending, as to help grasp the concept of a non-linear timeline, that the plot tries to address later in the film. It makes no sense to our rational minds to see the opening sequence and place it at the end of a timeline, thereby the default is for us as spectators  to assume that the two scenes are in chronological order, that B follows on from A, we assume this in part because of the effect demonstrated by Kuleshov.

 When Amy Adams’ character (Dr. Louise Banks) turns up for work, the actor is a blank canvas, she shows little to no emotion but the audience is feeling emotional after the scene they just witnessed and is subconsciously placing this emotion on to the character and justifying her cold manner and lack of emotions as a coping mechanism, when in reality this woman is going about another day in her 9-5 profession.  Not only did we, as a collective, watch a distressing scene where a young girl grew up, became terminally ill, and finally lost her life to the condition, but we know this character Lousie, was grieving in those moments and a natural reaction to the grieving process is to shut down, become cold and numb. Therefore the chronological order of the scenes isn’t questioned because theoretically they match up, she’s not just having a bad day, or hates her job, this woman must be in grief and has shut the world out in order to cope with the loss of her child. Yet at no point do we have solid confirmation, or were we given a specific reason to connect these dots, it was the cinematic language that has historically supported these connections in all other media, that was used against the audience and in this instance sneakily supported by this editing effect in order to reinforce that belief. 

 If this film had come out 70 - 60 or maybe even 50 years ago, I feel certain it would have had a lesser effect because the cinematic language would have been that much younger and the techniques used may not  have been established enough in the average movie goer. In order for us to have developed this schema and rhetoric of what certain shots, music cues, acting choices, and camera angles mean, it has required time and experimentation for the language to develop and the culture of movies to have firmly found its footing. 

 So with that in mind I want to revisit and talk about flashbacks in film. 

Throughout the history of cinema, flashbacks have been used to great and not so great effect. But a flashback isn’t a common or frequent thing to happen in a normal person's day to day life or at least not how they are typically shown on film, and so to physically convey, through the lens, that a scene is happening at a different time in the narrative, is inherently difficult to do.  

There is a misguided belief in film that you should avoid flashbacks, that they are cheesy or lazy writing. However, you would be hard pressed to find a film that doesn’t use flashbacks at some point in the narrative. Even looking at the top 10 films according to IMDB 9 out of the 10 not only use flashbacks but most of them play a large narrative role. The only exception in that list is 12 Angry Men and that film almost exclusively takes place in one room in real time. The outlier is the film that doesn’t use the flashback. 

So actually, flashbacks are a huge part of story telling and it’s not difficult to understand why. Without flashbacks we are unable to visit the past and if we can’t do that we cannot establish needed context; or the ability to visualise what is being explained to us. Without flashbacks, Forrest Gump is an audible podcast and not a visual medium. We are told how the murder took place but do not get to visualise what, endearing accented Daniel Craige is explaining. One of the most famous reveals in fantasy film and literature comes from an entire 5 minute backstory scene of Harry Potter dunking his face into magical water and reliving specific contextualised memories of a “Morally Grey” character. And the raw emotional impact and clarity of character development is ruined if we don’t use flashback in StarWars to understand the context of Rey’s parents - well we can cover that one another time. 

Flashbacks are not bad. But they do have to serve a purpose as screenwriter Syd Field says;

“The purpose of the flashback is simple: it is a technique that bridges time, place and action to reveal information about the character, or move the story forward.”  Syd Field 

But how do we as an audience register a flashback? There has to be techniques involved, specific to showing that a flashback has or is taking place otherwise Arrival doesn’t even work in theory let alone trick you in practice. 

The most common use of identifying a flashback is something that is so overused and so on the nose that it has become a joke in and of itself. Visually rippling, or dissolving with an audio cue that is light and gives a tingling feeling as if something else is being unveiled, these days is usually only found in TV and comedies as a form of meta comedy. However this cannot work in Arrival for the simple fact that you cannot open a film with this effect, this kind of flashback only takes place when a character has alluded to the past and we as the audience visit it with them. In other words, this kind of flashback is only presented once we have established the present timeline in a film, so it is obvious we are jumping back in time.

Forrest Gump supports the effect of the flashback audibly and with narration, physically explaining to the audience that he is telling the story of his life and as such what we are seeing is clearly in the past and his memory. The voice is separate from the visuals, two different timelines. Forrest guides us through his story with a voice older and looking backwards, as a narrator of  a story would.

Some flashbacks, particularly ones that involve past trauma, can deliberately strike out from the visuals of the present. Either the past is slightly over exposed, or perhaps the visuals themselves change frame rate, blurred senses representing distortion, almost always because we are seeing the flashback in the context of a particular character, seeing it through the eyes of a memory, one that has clearly been impacted heavily by the event. The cue here is cognitive and visual dissonance, you’ll often find this one used for PTSD and war flashbacks, often with a reduced frame rate to show it like an older memory, one where the details aren’t all painted except key elements that haunt a character.  

And the important thing to note here is that as we get older and as films develop and become more sophisticated, filmmakers no longer have to spell it out to their audience. You have consumed enough media, you have seen flashbacks being used your entire media consuming life that you now subconsciously register that the techniques and cues of the language in front of you are telling you that the scene is not the present time of the story. And that is the genius behind Arrival’s opening. You know you are not seeing the present timeline that the story is going to follow, and in the context of almost any other film you have seen, that has always meant you are seeing the past, a flashback.

The first thing to register in our minds is the score - On the Nature of Daylight - by Max Richter starts to play. It's a haunting strings in the blackness of the image, we are not starting in a happy place. This is our first sign of a flashback. Melancholy openings are often the prelude to a tragic event. A tragic event structurally is something that has already happened to a character and this is the films way of catching us up, providing context to the persona we are about to meet. 

Narration. Dr. Banks breaks the silence by speaking in the past tense. Narration of memories and stories is almost always used in a past tense because they are explaining to someone else something that has happened to them. Much like Forrest Gump, a voice that sounds aged and burdened with experience begins to explain the context to us. 

But then our first clue that the timeline is not what it seems comes in the first few lines of dialogue. It so clearly laughs at the audience for missing it. Something that only sticks out on a second watch.  Alluding to time and its ability to present itself non-linearly, in the opening lines of dialogue the film is spelling out that what you're seeing is not necessarily the timeline you think it is. Like lyrics to a song you’ve known for years but never internalised the meaning of, we hear the words, to some degree we understand the feeling being conveyed through the words but a battle of content of words spoken vs context of visuals portrayed briefly fight and context wins out, this must be a flashback. 

Next comes a very small montage of this baby girl, growing up and being diagnosed with cancer. Clearly we are advancing through time, and at this point it dawns on the audience why we are seeing this. This is a traumatic event, a character defining moment and something that will play a huge part in the narrative of the film. This beautiful young girl is going to die and her mother has to suffer the consequences of watching it happen and being alone. So from then on we watch the rest of the film through the lens of tragedy. A very culturally famous film that does the exact same thing? Infamous for its flashback that follows the life of two people, from the beginning to solitary end? Disney Pixar’s UP. This kind of opening is well established in the psyche and is designed to place the character and audience in an emotionally vulnerable state. 

So we have a scene that completely ticks all the boxes of an opening flashback. It plays with time, through montage, jumping and stopping at select moments in a life. It has a narration, clearly Dr. Banks is speaking from a perspective of having experienced the visuals we are seeing, her tone implies an emotional understanding of the events on screen. In relation to Syd Field’s definition; this is bridging time and the action on screen is furthering the development of the character, giving context to the mother figure. 

And in that moment, there is little reason to believe what we have just witnessed is in fact, a flashforward not a flashback. It does not go against the rhetoric we understand to mean flashback. There are very few examples of a flashforward for our minds to consciously suggest this could be anything other than the past traumatic experience of the central character. And the filmmakers know it. They understand that they have a 100 years of shared film experience dictating to the audience that what they are seeing, is in fact the past in this story. They understand that their use of film language points towards a flashback. And they are counting on the following scene, using the effect demonstrated by Kuleshov to solidify in the minds of the audience that this character of Dr. Banks has suffered this traumatic backstory, and it has affected her as a character to behave in the manner we see her in. 

What makes Arrival so impactful to me, is the revelation. There are multiple times the film hints at the timeline of the story, and it’s not uncommon to work out the twist before the central protagonist does. Many people make the connection that the events in the flashbacks haven’t happened yet because of the *Zero Sum Gain Scene*  and make the connection between the father, a mysterious scientist and Ian. Yet, that’s not the emotional climax, the narrative keeps going because there are messages and themes in the film about communication, language and time, it all circles back to the beginning. 

We know the ending from the very first moments of the film and that has been the journey of the audience, it all comes down to a choice that comes before the protagonist Louise. But the film extends past that, what decision would you make?

If you knew the ending, would you still make the journey?  Could you go through your life knowing the ending, knowing the tragedy that will inevitably befall a loved one? And that’s why those opening moments matter so much in this film, because the story stops mattering, the idea of language and the questions behind the aliens' arrival leave us. In those opening and closing moments it becomes a profound question of right and wrong and you can’t help but insert yourself in and ask “what I would do?”