Shooting Movies

The grim litany of murders committed in America with guns that Jill Lepore reports in her article in the magazine this week brings to mind the prominence of guns in the cinema, almost from the start. It’s not true, of course, that “The Great Train Robbery,” from 1903, was the first narrative film—Georges Méliès had already constructed some elaborate stories in films from before the turn of the century—but it makes distinctive use of guns and, in the process, suggests much about why guns are themselves such distinctively cinematic objects.

While promoting “Band of Outsiders,” from 1964, Jean-Luc Godard wrote an ad for the film claiming that, according to D. W. Griffith, all one needs to make a movie is “a girl and a gun.” Besides being evidence that there weren’t enough women, or girls, making movies in Griffith’s primordial times, the aphorism hints at a greater truth (putting aside, of course, the fact that one single take in a film is called a shot). The gun provides action at a distance, and the action it causes—the flight of a bullet—is invisible apart from its deadly strike. Gunplay suggests discontinuity of space, whether because, in a single sequence (as in several scenes in “The Great Train Robbery”—notably, the killings at 5:43 and 10:08), there’s a virtually instantaneous event happening on two sides of the frame at once, or because a shooting is filmed in successive shots. Thus the discontinuity of space is also one of time. A knife fight or a sword fight is in its element in the theatre—with its choreography, its proximity, and its classicism of impassioned and flagrant gesture. The gunshot is an act of stillness, a frozen aim and a little, almost invisible squeeze that provokes, with its infinitesimal movement, vastly disproportionate results. The mechanical agency of the gun coincides with the mechanical agency of the cinema—and of the camera—to make for an aesthetic experience of an exemplary, chilly modernity.

Godard later offered, as a paradigm for the cinema, “seeing the invisible.” In one of his preliminary outlines for the film “Passion,” from 1982—a version in which he imagined the film as something of a blend of Jean Renoir’s “Toni” and an American film noir such as “Fallen Angel” or “Criss Cross”—he planned to show a Polish immigrant being killed by a stray police bullet. He intended to use a special camera to film the trajectory of the bullet crossing the space of a train station, and to film the routine of a troupe of clowns to illustrate the idea of a bullet flying in slow motion. He didn’t do it, but it remained, so to speak, the vanishing point for the film’s suggestion of action at a distance and violence from afar.

Yet there’s something to the idea that this very cinematic quality of gun violence makes its depiction dangerous in movies. The very magic of it, as captured on film, aestheticizes the horror and renders it alluring, above and beyond the familiar, quasi-pornographic thrill that many get from the spectacle of violence of any sort. I’m reminded of Norman Mailer’s distinction between the bearer of a knife and the bearer of a gun (the former, having to kill up close and with his hands, has more courage and therefore should charge the latter); with the nearly inescapable though fabricated cool factor, the cinema tilts the balance.

Photograph from Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.” Everett Collection.