How to draw a circle in a line
[ by Charles Cameron — Robert Redford and Brad Pitt on a Berlin rooftop ]
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how do you draw a circle in an entirely linear medium?
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The movie is Spy Game, with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.
To my mind, it’s a brilliant piece of film making: director Tony Scott chose a terrific location for Nathan Muir (Redford)’s debrief reaming of Tom Bishop (Pitt), in the course of which Muir very pointedly tells Bishop:
Listen to this, because this is important. If you’d pulled a stunt there and got nabbed, I wouldn’t come after you. You go off the reservation, I will not come after you.
That’s the heart of the movie, right there, in negative — because the whole movie is about Bishop going off reservation in China, pulling a stunt there, and getting nabbed by the Chinese, and Muir coming after Bishop and rescuing him, with great shenanigans and flashbacks along the way.
Scott wants to draw a circle around that point, to drive it home — but this is a movie, a totally linear sequence frames, whether celluloid or digital, so how do you draw a circle in a linear medium?
Scott shoots the scene atop a circular roof, and before, during and after the conversation between the two men, has the camera circle the building:
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I know, I stretch the limits of this blog mercilessly — and I’m spending this post on a piece of cinema technique. Let’s just say that I take Adam Elkus‘ words seriously:
Clausewitz himself was heavily inspired by ideas from other fields and any aspiring Clausewitzian ought to mimic the dead Prussian’s habit of reading widely and promiscuously.
I’m being promiscuous.
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There are two other major points caught in Scott’s tight circle. One offers the essence of Spy Game, emphasis on the spy:
Bishop: Okay, help me understand this one. Nathan, what are we doing here? Don’t bullshit me about the greater good.
Muir: That’s exactly what it’s about. Because what we do is, unfortunately, very necessary.
The other gets to the other half of the name Spy Game — game:
Bishop: It’s not a fucking game!
Muir: Yes, it is. That’s exactly what it is. It’s no kid’s game, either, but a whole other game. And it’s serious, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not one you want to lose.
So, in the gospel according to Spy Game, espionage is a deadly and death-dealing game, played unfortunately but very necessarily for the greater good. All that in three short minutes, with a circle drawn around it for emphasis.
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Thus a problem in geometry is artfully transcended.
