ON THE FERRIS BUELLER GALLERY SEQUENCE
I used to enjoy posting 3 frame sequences from film or TV over at tumblr as a little exercise in understanding good montage/editing. Often three to five angles are as many as are meaning fully shown in a scene to communicate a concept or change.
The art gallery scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off goes well beyond this. I was habitually tempted to cut off the preceding montage at 4 or even 5 frames but that montage would have a very different meaning. It would have been easy for Hughes to end this sequence on Sloan and Ferris making out in the “chapel”. Other directors would. That would make the scene about Ferris “winning”. The possible lesson: his larger deception is rewarded with hedonism.
This sequence marks the turning point in the film. The trio have a fun day together. The couple slip away and the would-be third wheel is left to contemplate some art alone. But Cameron is never really a third wheel; they’re pretty cohesive as a trio of friends. I love this good relationship modelling.
Hughes commits to this sequence to the point of audience discomfort. The painted face becomes almost horrific, certainly abstracted, as we punch further in. We get so close that we see large grain in the image, as big as the painting’s impressionist brush strokes were just a few cuts prior. The grain is that of Cameron’s reality, like the impressionists revealed the limits of the fidelity of their medium. The fourth wall is broken now, not by a character, by the form of film itself.
When we break convention, we gain a lightness. Possibilities are revealed as having always been there. This is not an art lesson; this is introspection.
Cameron looks at the child. Cameron is also a child.
Cameron looks closer at the child’s face. It is clarified as no face.
Cameron looks at his life. It is clarified as no life. He has “grown up” without meaningful agency or connections with family. He is denied even simple physical connections to objects in his home!
Was Cameron’s crisis planned by his friend? Maybe. Probably not to this degree of specificity.
It might be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but it’s Cameron Frye’s Day Of Transformation.
#film #anaylsis #montage