Part II: Streets of Fire
At any given moment, a film has a pulse; over the course of its running time, it has more than one. They can be dramatic, sonic, visual, cinematic. They can interact synchronously; they can also work contrapuntally. Rock n’ roll also has a pulse; in a film it can also work synchronously or in counterpoint to the pulse of the visuals elements.
Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire is a film that pulses almost non-stop. Some of this pulsing comes simply from the pulsing neon tubes that populate most of the film’s locations and, therefore, dominate its visuals. It comes also from the pulsing rock n’ roll beat that is its soundtrack, whether in on-screen performance or as background; this pulsation also helps define the editing rhythm of the sound effects and images. More sophisticatedly, it comes from the design of the images and their arrangement by Hill and his visual team, Andrew Laszlo, Freeman Davies, and Michael Ripp, cinematographer and editors respectively.
Take the opening sequence, whose duration is hard to define as it is an aggregate of smaller mini-sequences, all arranged around certain action elements and a vibrating but variable music track. This being a rock n’ roll film, the music track functions like the base line of a conventional rock n’ roll arrangement. It is the thread that keeps everything anchored as the visual and sonic elements pull away, express themselves and surge back so that the next thread can react and extend the theme. All often accompanying dramatic violence.
Let’s take the kidnapping sequence at the concert which starts the film. The music track as a single entity (rather than as an amalgam of instruments, etc.) is the constant from the opening credits, through the song’s performance, culminating with the kidnapping, ending with the rhythmic change, musically and visually, as a typewriter in close-up reaches out to the hero.
There is the overture, in which we see the audience primping and gathering. Visually, the pumping of the music is complimented by the pulsing neon in various shots defining these shots as the anchors. The shots without the visual pulsing move the energy forward through the shots of people, individually presented, thereby giving the audience new visual data to be engaged with. The action swirls across cuts when a character swings into a head scarf at the end of one shot which movement continues and climaxes at the head of the next.
These are the rhythmic movements which Eisenstein and the others discovered in the early years of film and which they and their successors further explored over the years. It was a way of making the form of the film enhance, and sometimes even define, the dramatic content of the film so that it became a singular entity telling a singular but multi-media’d story. It also made it a unique and distinctive narrative art form,[1] as well as a multi-layered sensual one.
But now we are talking about how film was made for rock n’ roll. And vice versa.
It doesn’t matter if you are pounding a drum, pounding an electric bass, or pounding a face. That is rock n’ roll. That is what Streets of Fire is about, the energy at the roots of rock n’ roll . This is not the civilized energy of Gary Busey’s Buddy Holly, the sexual release of Angela Bassett’s Tina Turner, or the growing neuroses of Kurt Russell’s Elvis Pressley. This is the pent-up frustration of Chuck Berry’s “…motorvating over the hill…” when he saw Maybelline’s Coupe de Ville. This is concurrent with Little Richard’s “Long, Tall Sally,” Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.[2]” We should not miss the hyper-sexuality of the stories the songs tell, nor what moves Streets of Fire forward.
We look back then at this and see the opening of Streets of Fire in a different context. Where is the sex?
It is in the rock part of the rock n’ roll cliché: sex, drugs[3], rock n’ roll. Ellen Aim’s performance (and Diane Lane’s performance as Ellen) of the opening number is charged with energy; the song lyrics, the costume, her body language are all sexually charged. So is the pulsing beat, which starts before Ellen runs on to the stage.
Hill has Ellen direct the personal energy. This allows him to create the rhythm of her performance and by extension the entire sequence, in the music and the editing. She becomes the song; the song becomes her; the film becomes them. They become the film.
Once Hill has established his rhythm, he interrupts it twice: once, with the arrival of the motorcycles; once with the arrival of Willem Defoe’s Raven on the screen.
The motorcycles, as would be cliché-expected, burst into the sequence with no introduction. Standard Hollywood entrance of the bad guy, or the generic antagonistic force. Everything Hill has established through and about Ellen’s performance with the images, sound, and editing is broken by the motorcycles, the riders’ air horns and drab images. It is almost crude, but so is the gang. So they are characterized immediately as not the threat they would like to be while still serving as a disruptive force. This allows Hill to easily return to Ellen on stage, which is the comfort zone that has been created for us by the sounds and the images, so the second, more critical interruption of her performance can be achieved.
This second interruption, though, is not so conventional as that of the motorcycles. Here Hill sets up a structure in which he intercuts Ellen on the stage with shots of the adoring individual audience members which in turn are intercut with wider shots of the audience. These wider shots come to be focused on the rear of the auditorium. Through these doors pass a mass of figures, all silhouetted by the light behind them and the smoke in front of them. As the intercutting between performance and auditorium continues, a face slowly emerges from a dark, grey smoke-filled field, first to a silhouette, finally to the face in the light. Raven. All grease-rigid hair and black leather with finely chiseled features.
And demonic smile. The face, and the smile, give a visual identity and a personality to the beat that has dominated since the gang arrived.
This intercutting of the shots of Ellen and Raven is a variation by Hill on what Hollywood has seen as A–B reversal close-ups. In A – B reversal two (or more) people in a scene are having some form of interaction; the characters are proximate to and usually opposite each other. In honor of clichés all through time, let’s say A is a man and B is a woman. Their dialogue will start with a two-shot of them; this will be followed by a series of intercut close-ups of each; this will climax with a return to the two-shot. This is the A–B reversal convention that Hollywood, and most of the world can execute in its sleep. This is a technical matter of structuring the shooting of an exchange to maximize the coverage of the actor’s moments and to make the editor’s job easier.
To remove this discussion from the purely mechanical and focus it more on the emotional and/or thematic interaction of the specific characters in a scene, I will call it separation. Separation[4] suggests a deeper engagement by the characters in the emotional context of the exchange, thereby enhancing the narrative and moving the plot forward on more than a solitary level. It elevates the storytelling to a higher level of artistry.
So the brief introduction of Raven intercut with Ellen’s performance creates an emotional connection between them that will be a major motif throughout the film, establishing one of the emotional trajectories that power the film. This connection is also underlined by the pounding beat that has been the pulse all the way though to this point. This suggests an inevitability about the entire Ellen/Raven thrust of the film.
In the opening this continues until Raven bursts into Ellen’s shot and drives her across the stage. Dramatically, this act of aggression climaxes the opening and sets up the rest of the film. Cinematically, this ends the separation, as they are literally no longer separate. On both levels the film is now ready for the next parts.
Underlying all this has been the persistent beat of the soundtrack. This has amplified the emotional component of the separation. As the abduction plays out, the music continues but becomes more chaotic. This also suggests the end of a section of the film.
It also segues to the rhythmic clicking of the keys on a typewriter, calling the hero back to town.
This creates a new rhythm. And the film moves on. On all its multi-layered components.
Can these structures be found in films not about rock n’ roll? Of course! This is just an argument for how compatible rock n’ roll, and music per se, are to the inherent structure of film. Both are rhythmic constructs, independent of any other linguistic or narrative construct they may support.
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Viva Ukraine!
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Rest in Peace: Madeleine Albright; Rae Allen; Michel Bouquet; Marvin Chomsky; Tommy Davis; Walter Dellinger; Lars Eighner; Thich Nhat Hanh; Sally Kellerman; John Korty; Hardy Kruger; Alan Ladd, Jr.; Sid Mark; Robert Morse; Bobbie Nelson; Jacques Perrin; Nehemiah Persoff; Bobby Rydell; Gene Shue; Douglas Trumbull; Monica Vitti.
In Memoriam: Raymond Durgnat; George W. Hunt, S.J.; Samson Raphaelson; Andrew Sarris; Stefan Sharff.
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Willow Entertainment Media Staff: Melissa Bilecky; Selma Jasarevic.
At the end of February, Mel and Selma left Willow Entertainment LLC, which publishes this blog among other online enterprises, to move on to greener pastures. We are inexpressibly indebted to them for their invaluable help. We wish them good health and great success.
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[1] Somewhere down the line in another posting, I’ll discuss how Jean Renoir used the camera in his masterful Grand Illusion, his film about POWs, to help the viewer understand viscerally the difference between freedom and imprisonment.
[2] These are the connectors that connect this film to other rock n’ roll films like American Hot Wax.
[3] These, however, don’t factor in the film.
[4] This is a term and a concept initiated and addressed by Prof. Stefan Sharff of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Sharff employed this concept this concept in his writing, including The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’ Rear Window and The Elements of Cinema.
Gonna Say it Now 