In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar David Bordwell makes fun of a standard procedure in discussing film. Let us take shot/reverse shot cutting, proposes Bordwell. Critics like to say: if we see, as part of the same scene, one person alone in a shot, and then another person alone in another shot, it means that the film intends us to see them as emotionally far apart, separated, disconnected. But (Bordwell continues) it can also be taken to mean the exact opposite: the rhythm of the cutting, the similarity of the positioning of the figures in the frame – all that signals a union, a oneness, a deep connection between these two people! Bordwell repeats the same mock-demonstration with camera movement: if a panning or tracking shot takes us from one character, past an expanse of space, to another character, critics will unfailingly say either that this means they are secretly connected, or (on the contrary) that there is a gulf between them.

It is not hard, like Bordwell, to find this two-headed rhetorical figure everywhere, in the best as in the most mediocre writing about film: in just a matter of days, I recently encountered three very different accounts, written within the past year, of a similar mise en scène from the 1950s. First, Fred Camper on Douglas Sirk: “Throughout Sirk´s films, compositions fall into fragments. Cuts seem to split the space; camera movements alienate rather than connect”. And then, Andrew Klevan on Vincente Minnelli: “The relationships between performer, furniture and the room are maintained and the film refuses to separate, or isolate, the elements by cutting.” Finally, a newspaper journalist in Australia on a Visconti retrospective: “The camera joins and separates the characters, tracking from one to another, or zooming in on facial expressions to suggest a world fractured by incompatible points of view”. In the first case, the continuous, expansive space of the scene fragments, alienates and disconnects; in the second case, it eschews fragmentation and insists on unity; while in the third, the camera joins characters by tracking and separates them by zooming! Who’s right, who’s wrong?

Maybe we are not asking the right question. It might be enough to answer Bordwell by pointing out that such meanings, of interconnectedness or disconnectedness, are not just the handy hallucination of the critic; and that each film, in creating its own dramatic context, will subtly or unsubtly instruct us on how to read the emotional and thematic significance of its stylistic devices. OK, argument settled – at least within the framework of an essentially classical, organic aesthetic. But there is another way to attack this matter, and it is more philosophical. Let us turn to Gilles Deleuze’s meditation on the films of Kenji Mizoguchi in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: ” … this seems to us to be the essential element in what have been called the extravagant camera-movements in Mizoguchi: the sequence-shot ensures a sort of parallelism of vectors with different orientations and thus constitutes a connexion of heterogeneous fragments of space, thus giving a very special homogeneity to the space thus constituted. (…) It is not the line which unites into a whole, but the one which connects or links up the heterogenous elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. (…) Lines of the universe have both a physics – which reaches its peak in the sequence-shot and the tracking-shot – and a metaphysics, constituted by Mizoguchi’s themes”.

What a concept to boggle Bordwell’s mind: the camera movement which is (to paraphrase Deleuze) a line which connects what is disconnected, while keeping it disconnected! Yet this is precisely the complexity of what we are given to see, as spectators, in a film by Mizoguchi or so many other filmmakers: this ambiguous or ambivalent interplay of what connects or disconnects, links or unlinks, the people and objects and elements of the world.