Joseph Stefano), for example, Marion Crane (Janet
Leigh) believes that the $40,000 she steals from
her employer will help her start a new life. Instead,
her flight with the money leads to the Bates Motel,
the resident psychopath, and Marion’s death. The
money plays no role in motivating her murderer; in
fact, the killer doesn’t seem to know it exists. Once
the murder has occurred, the money—a classic
MacGuffin—is of no real importance to the rest of
the movie. With the death of our assumed protago-
nist, Hitchcock sends our expectations in a new
and unanticipated direction. The question that
drew us into the narrative—Will Marion get away
with embezzlement?—suddenly switches to Who
will stop this murderously overprotective mother?
As anyone who has seen Psychoknows, this narra-
tive about-face isn’t the end of the director’s manip-
ulation of audience expectations.
Even as the narrative form of a movie is shaping
and sometimes confounding our expectations,
other formal qualities may perform similar func-
tions. Seemingly insignificant and abstract ele-
ments of film such as color schemes, sounds, the
length of shots, and the movement of the camera
often cooperate with dramatic elements to either
heighten or confuse our expectations. One way
they do this is by establishing patterns.
Patterns
Instinctively, we search for patterns and progres-
sions in all art forms. The more these meet our
expectations (or contradict them in interesting
ways), the more likely we are to enjoy, analyze, and
interpret the work.
The penultimate scene in D. W. Griffith’s Wa y
Down East(1920; scenario: Anthony Paul Kelly),
one of the most famous chase scenes in movie
history, illustrates how the movies depend on our
recognition of patterns. Banished from a “res -
pectable” family’s house because of her scandalous
past, Anna Moore (Lillian Gish) tries to walk
through a blizzard but quickly becomes disori-
ented and wanders onto a partially frozen river.
She faints on an ice floe and, after much suspense,
is rescued by David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess)
just as she is about to go over a huge waterfall to
what clearly would have been her death.
To heighten the drama of his characters’
predicament, Griffith employs parallel editing—a
technique that makes different lines of action
appear to be occurring simultaneously. Griffith
shows us Anna on the ice [1], Niagara Falls [2], and
David jumping from one floe to another as he tries
to catch up with her [4]. As we watch these three
lines of action edited together (in a general pattern
of ABCACBCABCACBC), they appear simultane-
ous. We assume that the river flows over Niagara
Falls and that the ice floe that Anna is on is heading
down that river. It doesn’t matter that the actors
weren’t literally in danger of going over a waterfall
or that David’s actions did not occur simultane-
ously with Anna’s progress downriver on the floe.
The form of the scene, established by the pattern of
parallel editing, has created an illusion of connec-
tions among these various shots, leaving us with an
impression of a continuous, anxiety-producing
drama.
The editing in one scene of Jonathan Demme’s
The Silence of the Lambs(1991; screenwriter: Ted
Tally) takes advantage of our natural interpretation
of parallel action to achieve a disorienting effect
(see page 44). Because earlier in the movie Demme
has already shown us countless versions of a formal
pattern in which two elements seen in separation
are alternated and related (ABABAB), we expect
that pattern to be repeated when shots of the serial
killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) arguing with his
intended victim in his basement are intercut with
shots of the FBI team preparing to storm a house.
We naturally assume that the FBI has targeted the
same house in which Buffalo Bill is going about his
grisly business. When the sequence eventually
reveals that the FBI is, in fact, attacking a different
house, the pattern is broken, thwarting our expecta-
tions and setting in motion the suspenseful scene
that follows.
Parallel editing is not the only means of creating
and exploiting patterns in movies, of course. Some
patterns are made to be broken. The six consecu-
tive underwater shots that open Terrence Malick’s
The New World(2005) establish a pattern of peace
and affinity (see page 45). Each shot conveys a42 CHAPTER 2PRINCIPLES OF FILM FORM