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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
1 It is not obvious that counting the number of words per second is the correct way to approach the problem of measuring the tempo of English speech. There is a longstanding tradition among prosodists that English is a stress-timed, as opposed to syllable-timed, language; that is, the time between stressed syllables is equal, however many unstressed syllables intervene (Couper-Kuhlen). Thus, it takes the same amount of time to say "I like American cheese," and "I like French cheese," because the sentences contain the same number of stressed syllables. Tempo, according to this view, is determined by the number of stressed syllables per second rather than the total number of syllables (or words) per second. Aside from the disagreements among linguists about how isochrony could be measured, I was faced with the practical problem that an analysis of the interlocking stresses in a 21 word phrase can run to a full page. Thus, there did not seem to be any way to make this kind of analysis compatible with the study of anything so long as a complete film, not to mention two. Here, I have made the assumption that when one is comparing relatively long stretches of speech the number of stressed syllables will be approximately proportional to the number of words, and hence the difference between measuring words or stressed syllables is less important. I have found that when measuring words per second for the duration of a scene, for example, I get results that accord with my intuitive perception of speaking tempo (scenes that seem "faster" to me, do turn out to be so when I count the words per second). At any rate, this technique does provide a rough way of comparing scenes, although measurements of stressed syllables if feasible might have enabled me to refine the analysis considerably. I have not attempted to measure speaking tempo for individual lines of dialogue.
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2 See note 1.
3 Mast claims that Bellamy's delivery is slow compared with Grant's, but as I will show, this is not really demonstrable with a stopwatch (214).
4 The term "catalytic" derives from Roland Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" which proposes two sons of units for breaking down the chain of narrative events: cardinal functions which constitute the "hinge points" of a narrative, the actions which have a decisive impact on the unfolding of the plot, and catalysers, which merely "fill in" the narrative space separating the hinge functions (93).
5 Although these terms are my own, Russell Merritt makes a similar argument about how some of Mary Pickford's gestures in Simple Charity have both an everyday logic and a symbolic function.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." Image-Music-Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. Glasgow: Collins, 1977.79-124.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. English Speech Rhythm: Form and Function in Everyday Verbal Interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993.
