Wes Anderson’s “the Grand Budapest Hotel” is famous as a typical Anderson film, marked by the obsession over symmetry and beautiful pastel colors. Although well-known for the stunning mis-en-scene, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is about the murder of Madam D. and her will that bequeath all of her fortune to Hotel Concierge and her lover Gustave. Throughout the whole film, M. Gustave and his assistant bell boy Zero restlessly run away from the killer Dimitri hired by M. Gustave’s enraged sons and police custody that suspect Gustave as the murderer. Just as other films with the theme of escape, the film is filled with suspenseful chase scenes. Nonetheless, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” employs static scenes largely and frequently throughout the film. Likewise, the film defies the norm of storytelling of films, to the extent where it seems to protest how others films narrate the plots.
In the film, the scenes often seem to pause for a few seconds. These static scenes, more interestingly, often appear before the chase scenes begin. To illustrate, in Figment 1, the family and relatives of Madam D., who gathered in hope of acquiring deceased Madam D.’s fortune, discover that the most valuable asset, “Boy with Apple” is bequeathed to Gustave. The whole crowd turns around to see who Gustave is, and this happens just before enraged son of Madam D. and the killer Dimitri begin chasing Gustave and Zero. In this scene, the whole crowd is acquiescent for a few seconds, and the background music likewise turns off. Everyone quietly stares at M. Gustave. This scene is peculiar because to create suspense of chase scene, often the speed and large actions are required. Anderson rather creates extremely calm, quiet, and static scene.
In fact, stillness has played essential role in defying and protesting the norm of society, especially in the history of non-violent protests. Danielle Goldman and Susan Foster, in their essays, suggest how stillness functions in the scenes of protest. Susa Foster, in “Choreographies of Protest,” an essay on major tactics of modern non-violent protests, discusses the 1960 lunch counter sit-in protests of North Carolina, where African-American college students protested the white-only counter policies of supermarkets by calmly sitting in the counters set apart for white customers. Foster describes the lunch counter sit-in as following:
“Then, they would sit and eat while a row of mostly black bodies looked on. Sometimes protestors defied the plan and slipped under the rope to sit at the counter. More often, they stood, ‘utterly motionless,’ their request etched in somber clarity by their stillness”
Here, it is clear that the key element of the lunch counter sit-in is stillness. By staying “utterly motionless,” the will of the protestors becomes evident and clear, because stillness has the effect of “somber clarity”. (Foster 400) Foster further explains how and why stillness possesses such power of clarity and willfulness later in the essay:
“The stillness of the protestors’ bodies seemed to some to reinforce the stereotype of the passive Negro waiting expectantly for consideration, and this prompted some to defy the pact of nonviolence by taking up a more aggressive and retaliatory plan of action. Yet stillness also gave them a powerful position from which to exert a sense of agency”
Stillness is an action that involves effort to stop the natural desire to fight back the injustice and violence of the society represented by the opponents. This effort signifies that stillness entails agency because to stay still is to take “a powerful position from which to exert a sense of agency”. (Foster 402)
Like Foster, Danielle Goldman expresses similar opinion on the agency of stillness. Danielle Goldman’s essay “Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest” mainly discusses where the contact improvisation, a type of modern choreography, and nonviolent protests intersect. One of the major intersection is the co-presence of mobility and immobility, in other words, movement and stillness.
“King concludes in his essay by issuing a challenge to absolute notion of falling and stillness. King suggests that one can find pride, and perhaps a kind of power, in the act of falling. He also suggests that wilful mobility can exist within stillness.”
Goldman in “Bodies on the Line” suggests how stillness entails movements in both choreography and modern dances. The key concept is the co-presence of mobility and immobility in choreography. Contact improvisation overlaps non-violence—they both illustrate how stillness entails movement and vice versa. Goldman complicates the idea that the stillness entails agency by suggesting the two aspects of the statement. That is, in the literal sense, just as in the contact improvisation dances, the movements in the moments of stillness reinforce the idea of the agency. Goldman states that “while the dancers’ vertical stillness contrasts the previous swirl of motion, one nevertheless can detect a slight swaying motion as the dancers over through and around their vertical axes.”
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” illustrates how immobility provides the space for the audience. Foster in her essays “Choreographies of Protest” suggests that the act of staying stillness creates specific effect in the non-protests. Stillness is an intended action of protestors who practice non-violent direct action. Stillness is a carefully planned action that resists protestors’ desire to fight back the violence and symbolizes the passivity of the group of people they represent—i.e. the black population or AIDS patients. Foster underscores how the stillness is a carefully crafted choreography: “all three implemented a tactics of non-violent direct action for which bodies rehearsed procedures of non-cooperation.” Stillness is a “rehearsed procedure” that involves the practitioners’ determination and will, thereby granting the practitioners the superior positions than the aggressive opponents. Stillness provides the practitioners with agency in that sense: practitioners gain third-person perspective by maintaining their movements calm and still, an act that is planned on the prediction of the opponents’ actions.
By posing as the pages of picture book not as the scenes of film, the seemingly paused scenes grant the audience a sense of agency. The scenes of stillness provide the audience with some sense of “agency” to keep distance from the situation and observe it before getting hurled into the chaotic chase scenes.
What adds on to this sense of distance is that the film’s use of distinctive shots. First of all, Anderson employs the full shots that include every character of the scene in one shot. In figment 2, for instance, is the scene where M. Gustave and Zero are just about to be arrested by the police for as the suspect of the murder case. Unlike other films, where the audience is in the position of one of the characters, in this it is evident that the audience views the scene in the third-person perspective. The perspective changes in that the audience directly faces the main characters. Unlike in other films, the audience see the whole set of characters in one scene, as if an observer, not as some participant in the film. That is, Wes Anderson distances the audience from the scene in a way that the film feels more like a picture book less a film. The film seems like the books that have pictures and paintings that guide the readers.
Another distinct shot is that the main characters face the audience directly, as in figment 3. The characters are appeared as if the characters of book: M. Gustave always faces directly at the audience and seem to create eye-contacts often. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” employs symmetry and full shots to instill stillness into the film. The static scenes function according to and above what Foster and Goldman suggest in their essays, adding on to the conversation of stillness and movement. Stillness in the film provides the audience with agency.
To further the conversation of stillness, in the second notion of literal sense of mobility and immobility, we can witness how the concept of mobility and immobility functions in the film. In “the Grand Budapest Hotel,” such moments of static scenes, the moment of immobility. In the film, during the seemingly paused scenes, we can detect small movements—some characters nodding heads, moving hands, etc. Stillness that come before and after fast-pace chase scenes rather increases tension and speed. That is, when the static scenes indicate stillness through the picturesque scenes. Whenever Anderson creates static scenes that seemingly lack movements, the symmetry and full shots appear.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the protest against the traditional storytelling that involves the audience but withdraw their reality as soon as the film ends. By posing as a true story yet told in a way that it is fictional explicitly, film continues to stay in the reality of people, at least as some glimpse of the fantasy of hospitality because the audience maintains the stance of observer. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” continues the illusion of the world where fear is not interpreted as offense, the world where people are not kicked out because they are immigrants. Indeed, this idea is also what the two texts talk about, a world without boundary between AIDS/HIV patients and others, queers and other, black populations and others. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” embodies the conversation of stillness and agency, both in literal and symbolic sense. By creating static scenes, the chase scenes rather gain speed and suspense. By keeping distance from the audience, the film protests the world with boundaries.