FREE ESSAY ON FORMALIST CRITICISM OF SHINE

FORMALIST CRITICISM OF SHINE

Kelly Culbertson, Carnegie Mellon Univ, Pittsburgh
SHINE
Directed by Scott Hicks, the drama Shine is a formalist masterpiece. Writing the piece as
a fiction film gave the author license to alter the events in the story of David
Helfgott, a real musician who had a nervous breakdown on his way to magnificence.
Geoffrey Rush's portrayal gave life and believability to David, and Rush won an Academy
Award for his realistic method acting. He had not only to provide depth to the character,
but had additional physical demands placed upon him due to David's irregular speech and
his tendency to twitch. Both setting and costume are unobtrusive, allowing the audience
to focus on the characters rather than their adornments. The formalistic style allows for
manipulation of time, and the film begins in medias reas, jumping back and then foreward
as it progresses. The structure is highly fragmented, and much of the action is cyclical.
Every element of film composition is elegantly intertwined in this picture, mingling
together to form connections and patterns out of seemingly separated things.
The film opens with a close shot side-view of the protagonist's face as he smokes a
cigarette, smoke drifting up from his lips and into the surrounding darkness. He is
talking, but that soon is faded into the sound of rainwater. The rain becomes visible as
it replaces David's face in a fade technique, and David enters the frame and walks from
the right of the screen to its left, suggesting change and action. He arrives at a
restaurant window, peers in, and falls into a strange conversation with the employees.
This is now the chronological middle of the story, and, while common in Medieval
literature, is a highly unorthodox place to begin a picture. Though this film is more
easily classified as a formalist piece, it has outstanding avant garde elements
throughout.
The transition from the restaurant to the car is masked by the dialogue covering it.
Since the acting overrides editing as a way to convey meaning in Shine, Hicks employs
many sound motifs to ease editing transitions and make them seem more natural. As the
discussion fades and the rain again takes auditory prominence, the scene darkens and the
water becomes the clapping of many hands. In this way David eases into a flashback of his
childhood. He walks small and silent to the stage for his first competition, and a long
shot is used to emphasise the fright and anxiety of the boy. Other transitory devices
include David's glasses, his hands on the piano keys, and sometimes a change in his
costume, such as when he first plays the restaurant in rags. When he stands to receive
his applause, he is dressed much more nicely, now an employee of the establishment. 
Hicks also employs classical cutting techniques, which depend on the content curve (the
moment when the audience has had a chance to assimilate all information presented but not
analyse or become bored with it) to determine breaks in scenes. One example of this
technique is after David presents his professor with the Rack III and asks Am I mad
enough? The scene is cut before the professor answers, and the following scene is the
professor intensively training David on the very piece. Cutting for continuity is
commonly used to condense time while maintaining a sense of the actions taking place
between two major events. Preparations for one of David's concerts are edited in such a
manner, making a ritual out of the ordeal while not wasting too much time on it.
Besides editing, relationships can be suggested through film devices such as proxemic
ranges, angles, and reaction shots. After David loses his first competition, his father
stares at the ground while walking well ahead of the boy. His father is disappointed, and
David is rather unaware of any problem as he innocently plays hopscotch as he follows.
The reactions of David's father and his instructor are shown through parallel editing
when the announcement of the National Champion does not coincide with their hopes for
David. Both are displeased, but Mr. Helfgott simmers with barely restrained anger. Since
he was denied music as a child, he forces it upon David and demands greatness from him. 
Later in the film, David is filmed standing on the second floor of a library balcony as
his father calls to him from below. The low angle used when the scene is shot from the
father's point of view suggests his decrease in power and his growing respect for his
son. Moments before they walked down the hall to the room, the father's arm wrapped
protectively and proudly around David's shoulders.
This relationship reverts to its former, however, as David's father beats him for wanting
to leave the family and study in America. Though no oblique angles are used, the effect
of the handheld camera is enough to effectively portray the violence and confusion of the
scene. This feeling is reinforced by the overlapping dialogue of the family and the tight
framing. David is released and retreats into the pounding rain, but is unable to locate
his teacher and so returns home. 
David sits crouched in the bathtub as time stops due to a combination of the silence and
the slow motion of the scene. Water, as it drips from the faucet and David's hair, is the
only sound, until his father arrives and fills the air with his pointless talk. 
In the middle of David's biggest recital, all sound is blanked out and the scene slows
down, and only David's sweat-soaked hair and his fingers provide movement. This lack of
sound and action serves as a tension-building device, since an audience is unaccustomed
to and unsettled by silence. Further than that, however, is the fact that the silence
makes clear the distinction between David's art and his reality. He has put such a great
amount of time and effort into his playing that he no longer can even hear it; he has
lost all enjoyment. At the end of the beautiful and perfectly played piece, the tragedy
foreshadowed by the silence comes to pass and David falls to the floor from a nervous
breakdown. His glasses slide and rest away from him; the next scene opens with David in a
mental institution, lying on the floor, gazing at his glasses. They are photographed at
an oblique angle (completely perpendicular) in order to reveal David's perspective
through his eyes. 
Mise en scene also can be used as an effective method of foreshadowing. When David goes
to the mailbox and receives the letter inviting him to America, he is caged in the
foreground by the fence as the family house ominously fills the background. Low, somber
classical music plays quietly, further reinforcing the reaction he will get from the
letter. Another example of layered frame construction is the first scene in which the
audience sees David at the college in America. Two professors discuss David's possible
talent as he flounders around after scattering papers far beneath them, separated not
only by the distance but by the pane of windowglass as well. Since he is several stories
beneath them, David is shot at an extremely high angle, making the disparaging and
doubtful remarks the first professor says about David all the more possible. The very
next shot has David standing above his peers on a stairway as they call up to him,
reversing the situation. The professors might have been superior to David (at least at
that particular moment), but he was far more advanced than any of his contemporaries. 
During the scene cementing Mr. Helfgott's admonition to disown David for leaving home he
burns the newspaper clippings he'd saved about the boy. This is one of the few
extreme-close ups in the film, and is repeated later when the same photograph is
reprinted in another paper and Mr. Helfgott sees it, deciding then to make amends. David
gave the same picture of himself to Katherine, his mentor, and receives it again in the
mail upon her death. The photograph serves as a connecting device and as a reminder of
the young man David once was, before stress set in and destroyed his love and passion. 
The young David is associated with the sound motif of the piano and the applauding
audiences he played before, while the adult David mostly is introduced by the melancholy
sound of rain against a windowpane. At the film's conclusion he is again able to hear the
music as he once did, and he is fairly healed. A piano, a violin, applause, and the voice
of an announcer melt together in a sound montage that creates tension as David, his
father, and his instructor await the decision on the National Champion. The sound is very
loud and powerful during scenes of change or major development, and understated in more
stagnant scenes or those dependent on audible dialogue.
However, the political standpoint of the film, or its ideology, is not quite so clear.
Hicks directed the film to be of implicit nature, wherein the protagonist and antagonist
represent opposing value systems. David's father is obviously a rightist in his beliefs,
since he places worth in religion, custom, competition, and, above all else, family.
While David believes in competition, he is not so set in religion and custom (he lives
for an amount of time in a Christian church, while he himself is Jewish), he places the
individual over the family. In search of his own fortune, David leaves after expressly
being told not to. This one difference is strong enough to tear the family apart and
create a conflict around which the story can revolve. The irony of the situation is that,
while trying desperately to preserve his family, David's father actually succeeds in
alienating his son and putting undue stress on his relationships with the other family
members. The music he counted on to bring David and himself together also split them
apart. Until his breakdown, David had all but adopted the old professor as his father
because he understood David well and was kind to him. 
The literary aspect of this film comes not from the fact that it was adapted from a novel
(since it was not), but from its strong basis in the literary convention. For example,
the motifs of rain and applause are a common technique of literature, as is the shifting
point of view. The story is told from first a third-person limited perspective, then goes
into personal flashbacks from David's memory, and the remainder of the film switches back
and forth between the two. Also, the film is rife with imagery and symbolism, both of
which are favourite literary devices.
Such symbols can be interpreted from the viewpoint of the theories of Structuralism and
Semiology. Water is the most obvious of these symbols, and traditionally means cleansing,
rebirth, and calmness. However, rain means bad weather and difficulties, and dirtied
water (such as that in the bath) is poison. Just before David's first adult recital, all
of his pages float in clear blue pool water as clouds drift by above them. This is
finally the foreshadowing of a rebirth. While not a universal symbol, the glasses signal
David's dependency on things outside himself. Such things eventually destroy him, since
he is not able to break through the multitude of walls and fences that fill the screen
and live for himself. A lion appears twice, first when David describes his father to
Katherine and later when he awakens at the base of a huge sculpture of one. Lions are
typically strong and powerful, the king of all they survey. The fact that David wakes up
with one behind him foreshadows his father's return and his support of his son. The medal
won for the recital of Rack III and the composition itself both become symbols of the
father that was so bent on having his child son play the impossible piece. The fact that
David chose that as his premiere work told of both his lasting devotion to his father and
his determination to please. When Mr. Helfgott returned the medal he was recognising the
accomplishment and forgiving his disowned son at once.
The closing shot is one of David and his wife as they leave his father's grave and the
cemetery, the camera pulling back on a crane as the two become lost in the vast stretch.
No longer is the audience involved; the story is over. The main themes of this film-
complications, deterioration, and loss- are expertly portrayed through the harmony of all
divisions of filmmaking. Both Hicks and Rush are excellent, and, despite herself, this
eclectic critic enjoyed the film.