Psycho. #14

Did you notice?

Hi - is there a term for when a film pushes in a little filigree when particular titles appear in the credits? Animated films will allude to people’s jobs (see the opening credits of 101 Dalmatians, where the background artist credits don’t feature any dogs); sometimes the Cinematographer credit drops just as the camera switches focuses or the composer is listed right as some brass jumps into the score. What is this called? Or - what should it be called?

Hi there! I love this question, because it reminds me how totally different all of our experiences of cinema-going are. I have never, not once, in no way, ever noticed the phenomenon to which you allude. I don’t doubt that it does happen, and your description makes it sound like a delightful thing indeed — perhaps I will now keep an eye out for it, and take pleasure in seeing these little in-jokes. Having never even picked up on this as a thing, I’m not best placed to tell you what it’s called, but let me see if I can come up with a name, or names, for it.

1. Cr-edits

2. Eastereggdits

3. Tightles

4. Listomania

5. Whoa-whoa-whoapening credits

6. Steve…………………………Jobs 

[Note to Animus: can we double my pay?] [Editor’s note: puns were never part of the deal!]

Going back to your question, and the thought it inspires in me, that we all watch films in such different ways to one another. I realised a few years ago that my way of watching films privileges acting and writing to a heavy degree, and that this is not the universal way of watching films — indeed, that there isn’t a universal way to watch films. I suppose I tend to remark on performances and screenwriting more than any other elements of a film because I used to act and am now a writer — that feels like a very basic, even stupid approach to cinema, but it is how I am inclined. 

I love to pick up on the merest of facial expressions: Emma Thompson’s beautiful, quizzical fraction of a frown in Merchant-Ivory, for instance, or love almost invisibly encroaching on Buster Keaton’s deadpan. I have a hunger to see actors DOING stuff in films — the transformative magic of activity and bustle: Jack Lemmon sieving spaghetti in The Apartment; Katharine Hepburn getting a hole in one in Bringing Up Baby; Alden Ehrenreich making a spaghetti lasso in Hail Caesar!; Tony Leung smoking in anything. Seeing that physicality in an actor, their ease and assurance in front of the camera, is what I yearn for and what I naturally tend towards. I look to fine writing, particularly in dialogue — and what I consider to be bad dialogue (idiotic verbiage, repetition, cliché, infelicities of syntax, overreliance on swearing, yadda yadda yadda) can sink a film for me. For some reason Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel comes to mind here, because while I perceived the ambition of the storytelling, and thought the performances had real depth of feeling to them on occasion, I got stuck on the clunky lines, which did a particular disservice to an era and world where beautiful speaking was a prized quality in courtly life — as when Carrouges is described as “insouciant”, when the writers clearly meant impertinent.