Outline the development of the film image from a historical heritage of visual spectacles-Part I

Choose a film from the Week Two approved film list. Fill out the worksheet provided by appropriately responding to the questions.

Worksheet and film list will be uploaded below along with book chapters.

Part II

You are the director for a short film that is 2-3 minutes in length. The subject is a dog and a cat meeting for the first time. Choose how the short will appear to the viewer. Choose and explain your choice of:

Point of view
Camera distance
Camera angle
Contrast and color
Camera movement
Editing style
Sound
What meaning is created by your choices? Explain your short film in no fewer than 175 words.
PLEASE LABEL part I and part II

Format your assignment according to appropriate course-level APA guidelines.
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Stephen Vaughan/© Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection

PRINTED BY: apcampbell@email.phoenix.edu. Printing is for personal, private use only. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without publisher’s prior permission. Violators will be prosecuted.

chapter 3 Cinematography Framing What We See

In a revealing scene from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), the protagonist Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains the secrets of his trade — dream extraction — to new recruit Ariadne (Ellen Page) while the two are sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris. Suddenly the familiar scene turns uncanny as nearby fruit stands, a bookseller, and the façades of buildings explode around them, shattering into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle as they remain seated, unharmed. Ariadne realizes she’s entered a dream: “I guess I thought dreams were all about the visual, but it is more the feeling of it.” These lines take on some irony in the next few moments, when it is overwhelmingly the visual aspect of cinema that generates “feeling” in the viewer response. Paris is folded up like a piece of origami in just one of the film’s mind-blowing visual effects.

Working with Oscar-winning director of photography Wally Pfister, cinematographer on all his films since Memento (2000), Nolan chose high-resolution Vistavision film over digital cinematography for the film’s lush imagery and spectacular settings. Many of the film’s most impressive special effects were achieved without computer-generated imagery (CGI), instead relying on camera tricks. For a scene in which Cobb’s associate is trapped by a building’s ever- morphing “paradoxical architecture,” for example, the filmmakers constructed a rotating hallway with built-in camera tracks to create the illusion of a shifting building. Cues that we normally rely on to orient ourselves toward an unfolding story — optical points of view that tell us whose perspective guides a scene or camera placements and angles that imply spatial relationships — are not trustworthy in the world of Inception. Instead, consistent choices of color palette subtly guide us. Sense memories of the characters’ waking lives are built into small tokens that they carry with them to navigate dream levels. Viewers, however, must rely on untrustworthy images that can’t guarantee which level of movie illusion entraps us.

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isual stimuli determine a significant part of our experience of the world around us: we look left and right for cars before we cross a busy street, we watch sunsets in the distance, we focus on a face across the room.

The visual dynamics through which we encounter our world vary. Sometimes we are caught up in the close-ups of a crowded sidewalk; sometimes we watch from a window high above the street. Vision allows us to distinguish colors and light, to evaluate the sizes of things near and far, to track moving objects, or to invent shapes out of formless clouds. Vision also allows us to project ourselves into the world, to explore objects and places, and to transform them in our minds. In the cinema, we know the material world only as it is relayed to us through the filmed images and accompanying sounds that we process in our minds. The filming of those images is called cinematography, which means motion-picture photography or, literally, “writing in movement.”

This chapter describes the feature at the center of most individuals’ experiences of movies: film images. Although film images may sometimes seem like windows on the world, they are purposefully constructed and manipulated. Here we will detail the subtle ways cinematography composes individual movie images in order to communicate feelings, ideas, and other impressions.

KEY OBJECTIVES

▪ Outline the development of the film image from a historical heritage of visual spectacles. ▪ Describe how the frame of an image positions our point of view according to different distances and

angles. ▪ Explain how film shots use the depth of the image in various ways. ▪ Identify how the elements of cinematography — film stock, color, lighting, and compositional features

of the image — can be employed in a movie. ▪ Compare and contrast the effects of different patterns of movement on the film image. ▪ Introduce the array of techniques used to create visual effects. ▪ Describe prevailing concepts of the film image within different cinematic conventions.

We go to the movies to enjoy stimulating sights, share other people’s perspectives, and explore different worlds through the details contained in a film image. In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a woman’s tense and mysterious face suggests the complex depths of her personality. At the beginning of Saving Private Ryan (1998), we share the visceral experience of confused and wounded soldiers as bullets zip across the ocean surface during the D-Day invasion [Figure 3.1]. The Hurt Locker (2008) uses a different approach for a

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different combat context; brightly and starkly lit images capture not simply an arid desert landscape but also the brittle tension that seems to electrify the light [Figure 3.2].

3.1 Saving Private Ryan (1998). The film uses visceral camera work to bring viewers close to the dying on D-Day.

3.2 The Hurt Locker (2008). In a very different war, monochromatic cinematography conveys the tension that permeates the desert spaces.

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Vision occurs when light rays reflected from an object strike the retina of the eye and stimulate our perception of that object’s image in the mind. Photography, which means “light writing,” mimics vision in the way it registers light patterns onto film or codes them to be reproduced digitally. Yet whereas vision is continuous, photography is not; rather, it freezes a single moment in the form of an image. Movies connect a series of these single moments and project them above a particular rate of frames per second to create the illusion of movement. Humans process the incremental differences among sequential still images just as we process actual motion — this effect is called short-range apparent motion, and it explains our perception of movement when watching films.

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A Short History of the Cinematic Image The human fascination with creating illusions is an ancient one; in the Republic, Plato wrote of humans trapped in a cave who mistake the shadows on the wall for the actual world. Leonardo da Vinci described how a light source entering a hole in a camera obscura (literally, “dark room”) projected an upside-down image on the opposite wall, offering it as an analogy of human vision and anticipating the mechanism of the camera. One of the earliest technologies that used a light source to project images was the magic lantern. In the eighteenth century, showmen used these to develop elaborate spectacles called “phantasmagoria.” The most famous of these were Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s terrifying mobile projections of ghosts and skeletons on columns of smoke in an abandoned Paris crypt. These fanciful devices provided the basis for the technology that drives modern cinematography and the film image’s power to control, explain, and entertain. In this section, we will examine the historical development of some of the key features in the production and projection of the film image.

1820s–1880s: The Invention of Photography and the Prehistory of Cinema The components that would finally converge in cinema — photographic recording of reality and the animation of those images — were central to the visual culture of the nineteenth century. Combining amusement and science, the phenakistiscope (developed in 1832) and the zoetrope (developed in 1834), among other such pre- cinema contraptions, allowed a person to view a series of images through slits in a circular wheel, a view that creates the illusion of a moving image [Figure 3.3]. In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced the first still photograph, building on the work of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Photography’s mechanical ability to produce images of reality and make them readily available to the masses was among the most significant developments of nineteenth-century culture. Photography permeated everything from family albums to scientific study to private pornography collections. In the 1880s, both Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Englishman Eadweard Muybridge, working in the United States, conducted extensive studies of human and animal figures in motion using chronophotography, series of still images that recorded incremental movement and formed the basis of cinematography [Figure 3.4]. Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, introduced in 1879, enabled moving images to be projected for the first time.

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3.3 Zoetrope. An early pre-cinema device that permitted individuals to view a series of images through a circular wheel, creating the illusion of movement. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

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3.4 Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. Experimenting with still photographs of figures in motion, Muybridge laid the groundwork for cinematography. Copyright by Eadweard Muybridge. From: Animal locomotion/Eadweard Muybridge. Philadelphia: Photogravure Company of New York, 1887, pl. 636. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-102354.

1890s–1920s: The Emergence and Refinement of Cinematography The official birth date of the movies is widely accepted as December 28, 1895, when the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted their Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris, showing ten short films, including a famous scene of workers leaving the Lumière factory. The Lumières successfully joined two key elements: the ability to record a sequence of images on a flexible, transparent medium, and the capacity to project the sequence.

The very first movies consisted of a single moving image. The Lumières’ Niagara Falls (1897) simply shows the famous falls and a group of bystanders, but its compositional balance of a powerful natural phenomenon and the people on its edge draws on a long history of painting, infusing the film with remarkable energy and beauty that motion renders almost sublime [Figure 3.5]. In the United States, Thomas Edison patented his Kinetoscopic camera in 1891. The early Edison films were viewed by looking into a Kinetoscope or “peep show” machine; The Kiss (1896) titillated viewers by giving them a playfully analytical snapshot of an intimate moment [Figure 3.6].

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3.5 Niagara Falls (1897). One of the Lumière brothers’ actualities, or nonfiction moving snapshots, shows the wonder and balance of a single moving image.

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3.6 The Kiss (1896). From the Edison company, one of the most famous early films regards an intimate moment.

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In the early years of film history, technical innovations in the film medium and in camera and projection hardware were rapid and competitive. Eastman Kodak quickly established itself as the primary manufacturer of film stock, which consists of a flexible backing or base such as celluloid and a light-sensitive emulsion. The standard nitrate film base was highly flammable, and its pervasive use is one reason why so much of the world’s silent film heritage is lost. Nitrate film would not be replaced by safety film, less flammable acetate- based film stock, until 1952.

After early competition among technologies, the width of the strip of film, or film gauge, used for filming and exhibiting movies was standardized as 35mm in 1909. While 16mm was common among independent filmmakers, and higher resolution 70mm was experimented with for more spectacular effects, 35mm remained the industry standard for production and exhibition until challenged by digital formats at the end of the twentieth century [Figures 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9]. By the 1920s, the rate at which moving images were recorded and later projected increased from sixteen frames to twenty-four frames per second (fps), offering more clarity and definition to moving images.

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3.7 16mm film gauge drawn to scale. The lightweight cameras and portable projectors used with this format have been effective for documentary, newsreel, and independent film as well as for prints of films shown in educational and home settings.

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3.8 35mm film gauge drawn to scale. The standard gauge for theatrically released films, introduced in 1892 by Edison and the dominant format for both production and exhibition until the end of the twentieth century.

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3.9 70mm film gauge drawn to scale. A wide, high-resolution gauge, in use since the early days of the film industry, but first used for feature films in the 1950s for spectacular effect. A horizontal variant of 70mm is used for IMAX formats.

The silent film era saw major innovations in lighting, mechanisms for moving the camera and varying the scale of shots, and the introduction of panchromatic stock, which responded to a full spectrum of colors and became the standard for black-and-white movies after 1926. Cinematographers like Billy Bitzer, working with D. W. Griffith in the United States, and Karl Freund, shooting such German expressionist classics as Metropolis (1927), brought cinematographic art to a pinnacle of visual creativity. These visual achievements were adversely affected by the introduction of sound in 1927, since bulky and sensitive sound recording equipment created restrictions on outdoor and mobile shooting.

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1930s–1940s: Developments in Color, Wide-Angle, and Small-Gauge Cinematography Technical innovations increased even as the aesthetic potential of the medium was explored. By the 1930s, color processes had evolved from the individually hand-painted frames or tinted sequences of silent films to colored stocks and, finally, the rich Technicolor process that would dominate color film production until the 1950s. The Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first to use Technicolor’s three-strip process, which recorded different colors separately, using a dye transfer process to create a single image with a full spectrum of color. The process offered new realism but was often used to highlight artifice and spectacle, notably in The Wizard of Oz (1939) [Figures 3.10a–3.10c].

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3.10a–3.10c The Wizard of Oz (1939). Viewers sometimes find the opening, sepia-tinted scenes of the film jarring (a), having vivid memories of the film in Technicolor. When Dorothy first opens the door to Munchkinland, the drab tints of Kansas are left behind (b). Technicolor’s saturated primary colors are so important in the film (c), the silver slippers of the book were changed to ruby slippers for the screen.

Meanwhile, the introduction of new camera lenses allowed cinematographers new possibilities. Wide-angle, telephoto, and zoom lenses use different focal lengths — the distance from the center of the lens to the point where light rays meet in sharp focus — that alter the perspective relations of an image. Wide-angle lenses have a short focal length, telephoto lenses have a long one, and a zoom is a variable focus lens. The range of perspectives offered by these advancements allowed for better resolution, wider angles, more variation in perspective, and more depth of field, the portion of the image that is in focus.

During the 1920s, filmmakers used gauzy fabrics and, later, special lenses to develop a so-called soft style, through which the main action or character could be highlighted. From the mid-1930s through the 1940s, the development of the wide-angle lens (commonly considered a lens of less than 35mm in focal length) allowed cinematographers to explore a greater depth of field that could show different visual planes simultaneously. Cinematographer Gregg Toland is most closely associated with refinements in using wide-angle lenses, characterized by the dramatic use of deep-focus cinematography in his work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) [Figure 3.11].

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3.11 The Heiress (1949). Gregg Toland’s cinematography made use of wide-angle lenses and faster film stocks to create images with greater depth of field. Both foreground and background are in sharp focus.

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Camera technology developed with the introduction of more lightweight handheld cameras that were widely used during World War II for newsreels and other purposes. Small-gauge production also expanded during this period, with the 8mm film developed in 1932 for the amateur filmmaker and the addition of sound and color to the 16mm format. The portability and affordability of 16mm film encouraged its use in educational films and other documentaries, as well as in low-budget independent and avant-garde productions.

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VIEWING CUE Think about the cinematography of your class’s most recent film screening in relation to the larger history of the image. Does the film include shots that seem like paintings, photographs, or other kinds of visual displays? Explain how a specific shot or series of shots affects your understanding or interpretation of those images or the entire film.

1950s–1960s: Widescreen, 3-D, and New Color Processes The early 1950s witnessed the arrival of several widescreen processes, which altered the size and shape of the image, dramatically widening it by changing the ratio of width to height, the aspect ratio. The larger image was introduced in part to distinguish the cinema from the new competition of television. One of the most popular of these processes in the 1950s, CinemaScope, used an anamorphic lens, which squeezed a wide-angle view onto a strip of 35mm film and then “unsqueezed” it during projection with another such lens. Other widescreen films, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), used a wider film gauge of 70mm [Figure 3.12]. This period, during which the popularity of television urged motion-picture producers to more spectacular displays, also saw a craze for 3- D movies such as House of Wax (1953). By now most movies were shot in color, facilitated by the introduction of Eastmancolor as an alternative to the proprietary Technicolor process. In the 1960s, Hollywood began to court the youth market, and cinematographers experimented more aggressively with ways to distort or call attention to the image by using one or more of the following tools:

3.12 Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The film’s 70mm widescreen format is suited to panoramic desert scenes and military maneuvers.

▪ filters or transparent sheets of glass or gels placed in front of the lens, ▪ flares, created by directing strong light at the

lens, ▪ telephoto lenses or lenses with a focal length of

at least 75mm that were capable of magnifying and flattening distant objects, and ▪ zooming or changing focal length and fast motion.

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1970s–1980s: Cinematography and Exhibition in the Age of the Blockbuster As we have seen, the history of film images is, to a great extent, that of developments in film stock, cameras, and other recording and projection equipment. In the 1970s, the flexibility of camera movement was greatly enhanced with the introduction of the Steadicam. This camera stabilization device allows the operator to follow action smoothly and rapidly and is responsible for the uncanny camera movements of The Shining (1980). Visual effects technology also developed rapidly in the era of the blockbuster ushered in by Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), movies in which expensive budgets meant shocking, stunning, or simply wondrous images [Figure 3.13].

3.13 Jaws (1975). This Steven Spielberg film ushered in the blockbuster era with surprisingly modest special effects; a full glimpse of the mechanical shark, known on set as “Bruce,” isn’t obtained until ninety minutes into the film.

The spectacular qualities of motion pictures are on display in the IMAX format and projection system developed in the 1970s. IMAX uses a much larger film frame by running film through the camera horizontally rather than vertically and at a much higher speed. The higher resolution is displayed in special venues featuring giant screens and stepped seating — though many theater chains have since adopted a digital version of IMAX that allows them to project in this format.

Television, documentary filmmakers, and artists in the 1970s first used video as an alternative medium to celluloid, and with the development of camcorders in the 1980s, the format spread widely among consumers. Evolving broadcast and consumer video technologies (including Portapak reel-to-reel, U-matic, Beta, and VHS) were analog formats (using a continuous signal to record on tape) that paved the way for the industrial and consumer embrace of digital video.

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1990s and Beyond: The Digital Era The shift to digital filmmaking is a critical transition in film history. Rather than being recorded on film or magnetic tape, digital images are generated by binary code and allow for flexibility, manipulation, and identical reproduction of the image. At first, the film industry developed digital technology for special effects and nonlinear editing systems. Digital cinematography eventually became a viable alternative to 35mm film. Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002) was the first high-profile film to be shot in high-definition (HD) digital video. Since the 1990s, digital technology, which does not use film stock and thus does not require processing in a laboratory, continues to transform cinematography in a number of ways from the amateur to the blockbuster level.

Technically, the digital image offers advantages and disadvantages. With the economic advantage of lightweight and mobile cameras, digital moviemaking can be more intimate than 35mm cinematography, which involves large cameras and more crew members. The sharpness of the digital image suggests a kind of immediacy that distinguishes it from traditional celluloid images. The tale of a family gathering that is shattered through the horrifying revelation of a grown son, The Celebration (1998) uses handheld images and intimate camera placement to dramatize interpersonal dynamics with edgy directness. In independent filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity (2002), cinematographer Ellen Kuras films three women’s stories with emotional texture using mini-DV. Steven Soderbergh adopted the high-resolution Red One camera for his feature films since the two-part Che (2008), and technological innovation continues to drive both low- and high-end production.

Digital image processing also has several disadvantages. While a cinematographer could predict how a particular film stock responds to light, shooting digitally depends more on familiarity with the camera’s capabilities. Digital images are recorded and displayed in pixels (densely packed dots), rather than the crystal array or grain produced by the celluloid emulsion used for film. When converted to a digital file, a 35mm film frame contains about ten million pixels. The first high-definition digital cameras developed to shoot 24 frames per second recorded about two million pixels (2K) for each of the primary colors. This difference may not make one kind of image better than the other, but the digital image has less range and lacks the grain and tones found in the film emulsion. Innovations within the film industry like the 12.4K Genesis camera, or Peter Jackson’s use of 48 frames per second in the Hobbit franchise, attempt to surpass the quality of 35mm cinematography. But both formats have their aesthetic champions, a debate explored in the 2012 documentary Side by Side.

Since Avatar (2009) ushered in a second era of 3-D spectaculars, now using digital technology, theaters have converted projection systems from 35mm to digital to accommodate these new films. This rapid change resulted in digital projection surpassing 35mm film in 2012. While the debate between shooting on film and shooting on digital continues to have aesthetic currency, economics has decided the question of exhibition in favor of digital.

Although cinematography will continue to develop, traces of its artistic past constantly resurface. Russian iconography permeates the images of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1969) [Figures 3.14a and 3.14b], and in Raoul Ruiz’s Time Regained (2000), rich color tones re-create the vibrancy of magic lanterns [Figures 3.15a and 3.15b]. In virtually every movie we see, our experience of its images is affected by the history of fine art, photography, and, of course, other movies.

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3.14 (a) Russian icon painting from the sixteenth century and (b) Andrei Rublev (1969). The composition and lighting of Tarkovsky’s film about the great Russian icon painter evokes Rublev’s medieval art. 3.14a: Icon of St. John the Baptist (tempera on panel) by Andrei Rublev (c.1370–1430), Andrei Rublev Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

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3.15 (a) Magic lantern slide (1905) and (b) Time Regained (2000). Raoul Ruiz’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s work evokes the past through lighting that recalls the rich color of magic lantern slides. 3.15a: Andy Kingsbury/Corbis

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VIEWING CUE Identify a subjective point-of-view shot from the movie you are watching for class. Describe what marks it as such.

The Elements of Cinematography The basic unit of cinematography is the shot. The shot is the visual heart of cinema: it is an uninterrupted view that runs continuously across a series of film frames. The camera may move forward or backward, up or down, but it does not cut to another point of view or image. A cinematographer shooting a high schooler’s home the morning after a wild party may depict the scene in different ways. One version might show the entire room with its broken window, a fallen chair, and a man slumped in the corner as a single shot that surveys the wreckage from a calm distance. Another version might show the same scene in a rapid succession of shots — the window, the chair, and the man — creating a visual disturbance missing in the first version. What viewers see onscreen depends on the cinematographer’s point of view, and a remarkable range of options exists for creating, representing, and conveying meaning to an audience: from framing and depth to color and movement. For the astute viewer, recognizing and analyzing how these options are used in a film can be one of the most precise ways to experience and understand that film.

Points of View In cinematographic terms, point of view refers to the position from which a person, an event, or an object is filmed. All shots have a point of view: a subjective point of view re-creates a character’s perspective as seen through the camera, whereas an objective point of view represents the more impersonal perspective of the camera.

A point of view may be discontinuous — for instance, in No Country for Old Men (2007) the perspective moves back and forth among three characters engaged in a game of cat and mouse: a psychotic killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem); the man he pursues, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin); and the sheriff attempting to capture Chigurh, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). During a tense scene toward the conclusion of the film, we share the perspective of the sheriff searching for the killer in a motel room. He shines his flashlight through the blown-out door lock, which becomes the focus of the shot, the point in the image that is most clearly and precisely outlined and defined by the lens of the camera. A quick shot from the other side of the door showing the light shining through suggests the killer’s perspective [Figures 3.16a–3.16d].

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3.16a–3.16d No Country for Old Men (2007). The Coen brothers’ film utilizes different points of view within the same sequence.

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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

Watch the clip from Touch of Evil (1958) and make a sketch or sketches of each shot. Describe how the framing contributes to the scene.

Four Attributes of the Shot Every shot orchestrates four important attributes: framing, depth of field, color, and movement. The framing of a shot contains, limits, and directs the point of view within the borders of the rectangular frame. Framing determines the size of what we are viewing, from extreme close-up to extreme long shot, as well as the angle. Film images also create a depth of field, the range or distance in front of and behind the object of focus within which objects remain relatively sharp and clear. Sometimes an image may create a short or shallow range and sometimes a long range or deep focus. From a viewing position in the bleachers behind the goalpost, for example, a film image may focus primarily on a penalty kick near midfield but create a depth of field that keeps both kicker and goalie, before and behind that action, in focus.

Elements of cinematography such as choice of film stock and lighting give an image a particular visual quality. None is as prominent as color, which conveys aesthetic impressions as well as visual cues. Finally, a film image or shot may depict or incorporate movement. When the camera or lens moves to follow an action or explore a space, it is called a mobile frame. For example, during the championship match in Bend It Like Beckham (2002), the mobile frame of the shot shows the protagonist as she darts down the field on her way to scoring the winning goal. The movement of the shot captures the strength and dexterity of her strides in a single motion [Figure 3.17].

Framing Although we may not be accustomed to attending to every individual image in a movie, its cinematography involves careful construction by filmmakers and rewards close observation by viewers. In an early experiment with the power of framing, Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) orchestrated multiple images to appear simultaneously side by side on different screens at the film’s rousing climax [Figure 3.18]. Since then, filmmakers have experimented with and refined ways to manipulate the film image. A canted frame is produced by tilting the camera to the side. Such unbalanced framing famously recurs in The Third Man (1949), to indicate that things aren’t always what they appear to be [Figure 3.19]. The three dimensions of the film image — the height and width of the frame, and the apparent depth of the image — offer endless opportunities for representing the world and how we see it. Here we will examine and detail the formal possibilities inherent in every frame of a film, possibilities that, when recognized, enrich our experience of the movies.

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3.17 Bend It Like Beckham (2002). A mobile camera increases the viewer’s excitement during the winning goal.

3.18 Napoléon (1927). The climax of Abel Gance’s historical tour-de-force juxtaposed images on three screens, creating a visual connection between Napoleon and thoughts of his wife Josephine as he presses his army to victory. The Kobal Collection/Art Resource, NY

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3.19 The Third Man (1949). Suspicions about Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime are reinforced by the canted framing.

Aspect Ratio. Like the frame of a painting, the basic shape of the film image on the screen determines the film composition. The aspect ratio describes the relation of width to height of the film frame as it appears on a movie screen or television monitor. Grand Illusion (1937), Citizen Kane, and other classic films employ the academy ratio of 1.33:1 standardized in 1932 by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and used by most films until the 1950s. These dimensions are closely approximated by the television screen and are rendered as 4:3 in digital formats. This almost square image draws on associations between the film frame and a window or picture frame. Widescreen ratios, which have largely replaced academy ratio since the 1950s, range from 1.66:1 to CinemaScope at 2.35:1; 1.85:1 is most prevalent and corresponds to the digital aspect ratio 16:9 — the shape of today’s widescreen television sets [Figure 3.20].

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3.20 Eat Pray Love (2010). When widescreen was introduced in the 1950s, one of its attractions was its ability to provide panoramic views of tourist destinations. That function is still served in the now-standard 1.85:1 widescreen ratio, as in this image of Julia Roberts bicycling in Bali.

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Aspect ratios often shape our experience to align with the themes and actions of the film. For example, CinemaScope, which uses an anamorphic (or compressed) lens to achieve a widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, was first used for religious epics and musicals. In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 drama of teenage frustration and fear, Rebel Without a Cause, the elongated horizontal CinemaScope frame depicts the loneliness and isolation of Jim Stark (played by James Dean) in a potentially violent showdown with a high school rival and bully [Figure 3.21]. Outside the planetarium, Ray’s cinematography conveys the city below as an unreachable place for these small- town youths who seem constantly overwhelmed by social and psychological spaces. Compared to the more confined frame of Citizen Kane, which depicts a man who is driven to control the world, the widescreen space in Rebel Without a Cause suits the fitful search of restless teens. Both films use carefully composed frames that highlight screen dimensions.

3.21 Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Nicholas Ray uses the exaggerated width of the CinemaScope frame to show Jim Stark (James Dean) cornered despite the expanse of Los Angeles below.

Although aspect ratio may not be such a crucial determinant in every movie, it does not escape the consideration of the filmmaker. For instance, Stanley Kubrick shot his war film Full Metal Jacket (1987) in academy ratio rather than widescreen, which had become standard by the time he shot the film [Figure 3.22]. With this choice, Kubrick emphasizes a central theme: that the Vietnam War entered world consciousness through the box-like screen of television.

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3.22 Full Metal Jacket (1987). Stanley Kubrick’s use of academy ratio emphasizes the role of television in transmitting the images of the Vietnam War to the American public.

The changes in film ratios over the years have presented interesting challenges when movies appear on television or are recorded to tape or disc. Many television

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VIEWING CUE Identify the native aspect ratio of the film you are studying in class. How is it appropriate or inappropriate to this film’s themes and aims? If the film is exhibited in a different ratio, explain how that process affects certain scenes.

broadcasts of movies announce that they have been “formatted to fit your screen,” and a DVD version of a film may appear in letterbox format, in which the top and bottom strips of the square frame are blacked out to accommodate the widescreen image, or digitally altered and offered in several formats.

In recent years, digital televisions themselves have taken on the horizontal proportions of widescreen cinema frames, and it may be difficult to tell whether one is viewing a film in its original, or native aspect ratio. Before these innovations, movies shown on television were altered through the pan-and-scan process, and some, particularly epic films using a screen wider than 1.85:1, still might be shown this way. This process chops off outer portions of the image that are not central to the action or reconstitutes a single widescreen image into two consecutive television images. Reframing the image in these ways causes loss of elements of the picture. By altering the composition, it may alter our perception of the film and its story.

Masks. Besides the proportions determined by the aspect ratio, a film frame can be reshaped by various masks, attachments to the camera that cut off portions of the frame so that part of the image is black. Mostly associated with silent films like D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), a masked frame may open only a corner of the frame, create a circular effect, or leave just a strip in the center of the frame visible. An iris shot masks the frame so that only a small circular piece of the image is seen: in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925), a shot of a timid collegian first appears in an iris-in (opening the circle to reveal more of the image) to show his seemingly safe location surrounded by a crowd of hostile football players. Conversely, a full image may be reduced, as an iris-out (closing the circle), to isolate and emphasize a specific object or action in that image: a shot of a courtroom, for example, might iris-out to reveal the nervous hands of the defendant’s mother. In The Night of the Hunter (1955), an iris-out follows the demonic preacher as he walks toward the house of the children he threatens [Figure 3.23]. When such techniques are used in modern movies, it is often with self-conscious reference to an earlier filmmaking style [Figure 3.24]. Masks are also used in visual effects cinematography to leave part of the film unexposed; a second image is then filmed on that portion of the frame.

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3.23 The Night of the Hunter (1955). An iris-out emphasizes the threat of a figure of evil.

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3.24 The Sting (1973). Dated transitions like masking are used to evoke the 1930s setting through an older filmmaking style.

Onscreen space refers to the space visible within the frame of the image, whereas offscreen space is the implied space or world that exists outside the film frame. Onscreen space is often carefully framed for compositional effect, with the position, scale, and balance of objects or lines within the frame directing our attention or determining our attitude toward what is being represented.

The action in offscreen space is usually less important than the action in the frame, as when a close-up focuses on an intimate conversation and excludes other people in the room. Offscreen space

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does, however, sometimes contain important information that will be revealed in a subsequent image, as when one of the individuals engaged in conversation looks beyond the edge of the frame toward a glaring rival shown in the next shot. Offscreen spaces in horror films like Alien (1979) seethe with a menace that is all the more terrifying because it is not visible [Figure 3.25]. In Robert Bresson’s films, offscreen space suggests a spiritual world that exerts pressure on but eludes the fragmented and limited perspectives of the characters within the frame [Figure 3.26].

3.25 Alien (1979). The horror genre makes significant use of offscreen space to generate suspense: what is Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) going to see?

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3.26 L’Argent (1983). The agency of characters in Robert Bresson’s films often seems to be limited by external forces signified by the emphasis on offscreen space.

Camera Distance. Another significant aspect of framing is the distance of the camera from its subject, which determines the scale of the shot, signals point of view, and contributes greatly to how we understand or feel about what is being shown. Close-ups show details of a person or an object, such as the face or hands or a flowerpot on a windowsill, perhaps indicating nuances of the character’s feelings or thoughts or suggesting the special significance of the object. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is remembered for its striking use of close-ups to depict religious fervor through the heroine’s facial expressions [Figure 3.27]. An extreme close-up moves in even closer, singling out, for instance, a single flower or a hand, as in Figure 3.26. Wes Anderson often uses centered, symmetrical close shots of both objects and people to striking effect [Figure 3.28].

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3.27 The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Carl Theodor Dreyer captures the intensity of religious faith through frequent close-ups of actress Renée Falconetti’s portrayal of Joan of Arc.

3.28 The Darjeeling Limited (2007). The difference in framing distances is relative: this shot could be seen as a close- up, but it is an extreme close-up in a film with a wide a range of shot scales.

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VIEWING CUE Look for a pattern of framing distances in the next film you view for class. Do there seem to be a large number of long shots? Close- ups? Explain how this pattern reinforces themes of the film.

At the other end of the compositional spectrum, a long shot places considerable distance between the camera and the scene, object, or person filmed. A human figure remains recognizable but is defined by the large space and background that surrounds it. An extreme long shot creates an even greater distance between the camera and the person or object, so that the larger space of the image dwarfs objects or human figures, such as with distant vistas of cities or landscapes. Most films feature a combination of these long shots, sometimes to show distant action or objects, sometimes to establish a context for events, and sometimes, as with the introduction and conclusion of Shane (1953), to emphasize the isolation and mystery of a character as he arrives in the distance [Figures 3.29a and 3.29b].

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3.29a and 3.29b Shane (1953). Barely seen, Shane approaches through an extreme long shot. Then the mysterious figure becomes more recognizable in a long shot.

Between close-ups and long shots, a medium shot describes a middle ground in which we see some background detail in the frame. The human body is framed from the waist or hips up, as in a shot from The Wedding Singer (1998) that allows the guitar and hand gestures of the character to be visible [Figure 3.30]. A medium long shot slightly increases the distance between the camera and the subject, showing a three-quarter- length view of a character (from approximately the knees up), a framing often used in westerns when a cowboy’s weapon is an important element of the mise-en-scène [Figure 3.31].

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3.30 The Wedding Singer (1998). Physical comedy requires framing wide enough to allow for interaction between character and mise-en-scène. A medium shot captures the wedding singer’s performance while keeping the focus on him.

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3.31 Red River (1948). The medium long shot was often used in westerns to keep weapons in view. French critics dubbed it the plan américain or “American shot.”

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A very common framing because of its use in conversation scenes, the medium close-up shows a character’s head and shoulders. Melodramatic or romantic films about personal relationships may also feature a predominance of medium close-ups and medium shots to capture the facial expressions of the characters. In Ginger & Rosa (2012), which focuses on a young woman’s coming of age, the protagonist’s view of the behavior of the people around her is frequently captured in medium close-up [Figure 3.32]. Open-air adventures, such as The Seven Samurai (1954), the tale of a sixteenth-century Japanese village that hires warriors for protection, tend to use more long shots and extreme long shots in order to depict the battle scenes [Figure 3.33]. As these descriptions imply, framing is defined relatively; there is no absolute cut-off point between a medium and a medium long shot, for example. As we have seen, the most common reference point for the scale of the image is the size of the human figure within the frame, a measure that is not a universal element of the cinematic image.

3.32 Ginger & Rosa (2012). In this story of coming-of-age in the 1960s, the heroine’s perspective is emphasized by frequent medium close-ups of her taking in what’s happening around her.

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3.33 The Seven Samurai (1954). An extreme long shot better shows off the open-air battles in this epic.

Although many shots are taken from approximately eye level, the camera height can also vary to present a particular compositional element or evoke a character’s perspective. Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s signature camera level is low to the ground, an ideal position for filming Japanese interiors, where characters sit on the floor [Figure 3.34]. A camera might be placed higher to show larger-scale objects, such as tall buildings or landscapes. The opening shot of Far from Heaven (2002) takes a god’s-eye view of its New England village setting, mimicking the opening of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) in its vision of 1950s small- town repression [Figure 3.35]. Often the camera is mounted on a crane to achieve such height; the shot is thus referred to as a crane shot.

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3.34 Tokyo Story (1953). A camera placed low to the ground presents characters sitting on tatami mats.

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3.35 Far from Heaven (2002). The height of the opening crane shot establishes the setting and introduces a sense of distance.

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Camera Angles. Film shots are positioned according to a multitude of angles, from straight on to above or below. These are often correlated with camera height, as demonstrated by the series of shots presented below and on the following page from Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), a film about a mute Scottish woman who travels with her daughter to New Zealand to complete an arranged marriage. High angles present a point of view that looks at a downward angle from above a scene [Figure 3.36], while low angles are shot from below the scene, looking up [Figure 3.37]. In either case, the exact angle of the shot can vary from very steep to slight. An overhead shot depicts the action or subject from high above, sometimes looking directly down on it from a crane or helicopter [Figure 3.38]. In the Czech film The Shop on Main Street (1965), a clever opening crane shot looking down on the town reflects the point of view of a stork nesting on a chimney.

3.36 The Piano (1993). A high-angle long shot of the arrival on the beach.

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3.37 The Piano (1993). An extreme low-angle shot, slightly canted, shows the farmer/husband as he furiously descends toward his unfaithful wife.

3.38 The Piano (1993). With this overhead shot, the film depicts a rare moment of contentment and harmony at the piano.

Shots change their angle depending on the physical or geographical position or point of view, so that a shot from a tall adult’s perspective may be a high-angle shot, whereas a child’s view may be seen through low

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angles. Such shots are often point-of-view (POV) shots, which are defined as shots that re-create the perspective of a character and may incorporate camera movement or optical effects as well as camera height and angle in order to do so. Camera angles can sometimes indicate psychological, moral, or political meanings in a film, as when victims are seen from above and oppressors from below, but such interpretations must be made carefully in the context of the film’s own patterns because formal features like these do not automatically assume particular meanings.

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Shots can vary in terms of horizontal angles as well, with characters’ faces more often shown in three-quarter view than in profile or frontally. Filming at a right angle to the scene characterizes the compositions of Ozu’s films, producing a frontality that has had a strong influence on international art cinema directors from Chantal Akerman to Béla Tarr to Tsai Ming-liang.

Depth of Field In addition to the various ways an image can be framed to create perspectives and meanings, shots can be focused to create different depths that subtly shape our understanding of the image. As noted in the history section, technological advances in camera lenses, most notably in the 1930s, played a central role in allowing filmmakers to experiment with this element in a variety of ways. One of the most dramatic products of these developments, deep focus means that multiple planes in the image are all in focus.

A film about three physically and psychologically brutalized veterans returning home from World War II, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), shot by Gregg Toland, provides superior examples of how deep focus can create relationships within a single image. In one image, the two grown children in the foreground frame the happy reunion of their parents in the background, all in harmonious balance and focus, with just a hint of the theme of isolation that will be developed after the homecoming [Figure 3.39]. In another image from the same film [Figure 3.40], shallow focus, in which only a narrow range of the field is focused, is used. Here, too, the choice of a depth of field indicates what is significant in the image: the embracing lovers. With a rack focus (or pulled focus), the focus shifts rapidly from one object to another, such as refocusing from the face of a woman to the figure of a man approaching from behind her. During a dramatic scene in L.A. Confidential (1997), a young, self-righteous police detective, Ed Exley, assures his captain he can force a criminal suspect to confess, and the shot rack focuses from the captain to Exley to catch the latter’s determined expression as he turns toward the interrogation room [Figure 3.41].

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3.39 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The deep focus and balanced composition indicate restored family harmony at a soldier’s homecoming.

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3.40 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The focused foreground of embracing lovers leaves the blurred background of the veteran’s artificial arms barely visible.

3.41 L.A. Confidential (1997). The shot refocuses to highlight the detective’s expression against a blurry background.

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Contrast and Color Color profoundly affects our experience and understanding of a film shot; even black-and-white films use contrast and gradations to create atmosphere or emphasize certain motifs. In F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), black and white and tones of gray create an ominous world where evil lives, not in darkness but in shading [Figure 3.42]. No longer a necessity, the black-and-white format is used self-consciously in Pleasantville (1998), in which it parodies the superficial and simplistic world of 1950s television, a world suddenly confused when emotional colors enter the characters’ lives [Figure 3.43]. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, well known for his work with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, shifts between black-and-white and color cinematography in less predictable ways, highlighting the surface of the image, the exposure, and the grain of the different stocks. Filmmakers may choose to shoot entirely in black and white to evoke a “lo-fi” or improvised aesthetic: Frances Ha (2012) uses a digital camera that recalls the look of black-and-white films from the French New Wave that it emulates, and Computer Chess (2013) goes so far as to use a vintage black- and-white tube camera to produce the soft look of analog video footage from the early 1980s [Figure 3.44].

3.42 Nosferatu (1922). Diffuse shadows and shades of gray create an atmosphere of dread.

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3.43 Pleasantville (1998). This film makes the shift from black-and-white to color cinematography a metaphor for the characters’ emotional awakening.

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3.44 Computer Chess (2013). Director Andrew Bujalski, whose previous features were all shot with a handheld 16mm camera, uses an outdated video technology for this film to evoke the milieu of early 1980s computing culture and the existential edge of machine intelligence.

Beginning with the locations, set decoration, and actors’ costumes, color describes the spectrum of hues used by a film, while tone refers to the shading, intensification, or saturation used to sharpen, mute, or balance the effects of the scenes. For example, when used effectively, metallic blues, soft greens, or deep reds can elicit very different emotions from viewers [Figure 3.45]. Color film stocks allow a full range of colors to be recorded to film. Once colors are recorded on film stocks, that film can be manipulated to create color balances that range from realistic to more extreme or unrealistic palettes: these may appear as either noncontrasting balances (sometimes called a monochromatic color scheme), which can create a more realistic or flat background against which a single color becomes more meaningful, or contrasting balances, which can create dramatic oppositions and tensions through color.

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3.45 Pariah (2011). Cinematographer Bradford Young and director Dec Rees designed their film’s palette to reflect the heroine’s search for identity.

Color is a key element in the composition of the image. The spectacular nature of the Technicolor process was used for heightened emotional effect by masters of cinematography like Jack Cardiff in The Red Shoes (1948), in which a dancer’s experience takes on the vividness of her red shoes. When color itself ceased to be a novelty, certain films became justly famous for the expressive use of color. For example, Néstor Almendros filmed Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) at the “magic hour” just before sunset to capture a particular quality of light for the historical setting in the Great Plains.

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Selection of film gauge and stock, which can vary in speed (a measure of a stock’s sensitivity to light), manipulation of exposure, and choices in printing can all affect the color and tone of a particular film. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto used different stocks and cameras to achieve the looks of the three interconnected stories in Babel (2006). Lighting, which is crucial to a film’s palette and color effects, comes under the direction of the cinematographer during the production process. See Chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of lighting in mise-en-scène.

Movement Movement in movies re-creates a part of the human experience that could be represented only with the advent of film technology. In our daily lives, we anticipate these movements of a shot: when, for instance, we focus on a friend at a table and then refocus beyond that friend and toward another at the door; when we stand still and turn our head from our left shoulder to our right; or when we watch from a moving car as buildings pass. Like these adjustments within our field of vision, the camera can move by panning, tilting, or tracking and refocus through adjusting the lens in a zoom.

Reframing refers to the movement of the frame from one position to another within a single continuous shot. One extreme and memorable example of reframing occurs in the flashback to the protagonist’s childhood in Citizen Kane. Here the camera pulls back from the boy in the yard to reframe the shot to include his mother observing him from inside the window; it then continues backward to reframe the mother as she walks past her husband and seats herself at a table next to the banker Thatcher, who will take charge of their son [Figures 3.47a–3.47c]. Often such reframings are much more subtle, such as when the camera moves slightly upward to keep centered in the frame a character who is rising from a chair.

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(c)

3.47a–3.47c Citizen Kane (1941). The camera movement reframes three planes of the image and four characters to condense a traumatic moment in Kane’s lost childhood.

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FORM IN ACTION bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

To watch a clip about color in The Master, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.

Color and Contrast in Film The expressive use of color in film has evolved through artistic vision and technical innovation — from hand- tinting to Technicolor experiments to faster stocks and digital processing. Early silent films like King Lear (1910) created an impression of color film by hand-tinting each frame [Figure 3.46a], but because of the time and labor involved, this practice never

became a widespread phenomenon. When Walt Disney released Flowers and Trees (1932), part of the Silly Symphonies series of short subjects, its full-color visuals, compliments of the new three-strip Technicolor process, were a sensation [Figure 3.46b], followed in 1935 by the first Technicolor feature. DeLuxe color and CinemaScope were advertised along with the stars of The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), a Jayne Mansfield rock-and-roll farce, to attract audiences to the movie spectacle [Figure 3.46c]. The advent of digital technology in the 1990s made possible the saturated visuals of computer-generated imagery in animated films like Up (2009) [Figure 3.46d], as well as the ability to alter color in postproduction. Yet some filmmakers still favor the depth and richness of film, as in the 65mm format used to film most of The Master (2012) [Figure 3.46e].

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Pan and Tilts. In these mobile frames, the camera mount remains stationary. A pan, short for panorama, moves the frame from side to side without changing the placement of the camera. In other words, the camera pivots on its vertical axis, as if a character were turning his or her head. For example, the long shot that scans the rooftops of San Francisco for a fugitive at the beginning of Vertigo (1958) is a pan, as are many similar establishing shots of a skyline. During the last scene of Death in Venice (1970), a slow pan leaves the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach, as he walks onto the beach, and then swings past a jetty to settle the shot on the turbulent ocean and the glowing horizon. The movement of this pan suggests the romantic yearning and searching that characterize the entire film and that now culminate in von Aschenbach’s death [Figure 3.48].

3.48 Death in Venice (1970). A pan starts from the protagonist, crosses the beach, and scans the horizon, suggesting his state of mind as he calmly embraces suicide.

Less common, tilts move the frame up or down as the camera moves on a horizontal axis, as when the frame swings upward to re-create the point of view of someone following a skyscraper from the street into the clouds. In Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), a story about a father and son searching for the boy’s mother, repeated tilt shots become a rhetorical action, moving the frame up a flagpole with an American flag, along the sides of Houston skyscrapers, and into the sky to view a passing plane. In this case, vertical tilts seem to suggest an ambiguous hope to escape or find comfort from the long quest across Texas.

Tracking Shots. A tracking shot changes the position of the point of view by moving the camera forward or backward or around the subject on tracks or on a wheeled dolly that follows a determined course; thus it may also be called a dolly shot. Elaborate camera movements that involve intricate planning can be achieved in this way. Max Ophüls was famous for using lengthy, fluid tracking shots in his films — for example, following a waltzing couple in The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953); this feature distinguishes the films he made in four different countries over the course of his career. In the remarkable first shot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), a camera on tracks moves forward into the foreground of the image, following a woman reading. When it reaches the foreground, the camera turns and aims its lens directly at us, the audience. When moving camera shots follow an individual, they are sometimes called following shots. In The 400 Blows (1959), a single following shot tracks the boy, Antoine Doinel, for eighty seconds as he runs from the reformatory school toward

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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

the edge of the sea. Cameras can be raised on cranes, mounted on moving vehicles, or carried in helicopters to follow a movie’s action.

Handheld and Steadicam Shots. Even greater mobility is afforded when the camera is carried by the camera operator. Encouraged first by the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras and later by the use of video formats, handheld shots are frequently used in news reporting and documentary cinematography or to create an unsteady frame that suggests the movements of an individual point of view. Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998) was the first film to follow the rules of Dogme 95, a manifesto issued by several Danish filmmakers calling for the use of handheld cameras among other ways of fostering immediacy in filmmaking. In this film, the handheld camera expresses the tension, anger, and confusion at a family gathering. The restless energy of the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Fish Tank (2009) as she faces the limited options of her upbringing and class position are palpably conveyed by the rushing handheld shots [Figure 3.49]. In both of these cases, the handheld point of view involves the audience more immediately and concretely in the action.

3.49 Fish Tank (2009). The film uses a handheld camera to capture the protagonist’s frustrated energy and, when she films herself within the film, her isolation.

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Examine this clip from Rear Window (1954) and describe the moving camera (tracks, pans) and/or mobile framings (zooms) that are used. Why is a moving frame used here instead of a series of shots?

To achieve the stability of a tripod mount, the fluidity of a tracking shot, and the flexibility of a handheld camera, cinematographers may wear the camera on a special stabilizing mount often referred to by the trademarked name Steadicam. In Goodfellas (1990), a film about mobster Henry Hill, a famous Steadicam shot, lasting several minutes, twists and turns with Hill and his entourage through a back door, a kitchen, and into the main room of a nightclub, suggesting the bravura and power of a man who can go anywhere, who is both onstage and backstage [Figure 3.50]. In the restaurant scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Quentin Tarantino goes even further, incorporating a crane in a virtuosic Steadicam sequence.

3.50 Goodfellas (1990). The long and winding trail of power behind the scenes is depicted in a three-minute Steadicam shot.

Zooms. A zoom is not the result of a moving camera, but rather of adjustments to the camera lens during filming that magnify portions of the image. Zoom lenses, which employ a variable focal length of 75mm or higher, thus accomplish a different kind of compositional reframing and apparent movement than the moving camera used during a tracking shot. During a zoom-in, the camera remains stationary as the zoom lens changes focal length to narrow the field of view on a distant object, bringing it into clear view and reframing it in a medium shot or close-up. Less noticeable in films, a zoom-out reverses this action, so that objects that appear close initially are then distanced from the camera and reframed as small figures. One of the significant side

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effects of a zoom-in is that the image tends to flatten and lose its depth of field, whereas a track calls attention to the spatial depth that it moves through. Although camera movements — such as tracking or Steadicam shots — and changes in the lens’s focal length — zooms — may serve the same function of bringing the focus of a shot closer or relegating it to the distance, there are perceptible differences in the images. Moreover, these technologies and practices developed differently historically and can vary in their significance. For example, the use of zooms can mimic the long lenses first introduced in photojournalism in the 1940s. The Battle of Algiers (1966) attempts to reproduce the immediacy of events as they unfold by using techniques borrowed from newsreels. Quentin Tarantino’s stylized zoom-ins pay homage to 1970s genres including blaxploitation, in which the technique drew attention to itself. Sometimes these techniques are used together. In Vertigo, Hitchcock used a track-in while zooming out to suggest his main character’s feeling of vertigo — the effect changes the focus of the image while the image stays the same size.

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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

Examine this clip from The Battle of Algiers (1967) and describe the techniques it uses that are reminiscent of newsreels. How does this contribute to the movie’s effects?

Animation and Visual Effects Our visual experience is not just naturalistic; it is also fantastical, composed of pictures from our dreams and imaginations. These kinds of images can be re-created in film through two important manipulations of the image, animation and visual effects, which can be used to make film seem even more realistic or completely unreal. Both practices have been employed since the earliest days of cinema, but the growing popularity of digital technologies since the 1990s has profoundly transformed both animation and visual effects.

Animation traditionally refers to moving images drawn or painted on transparent sheets of celluloid known as cels, which are then photographed onto single frames of film. Films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Little Mermaid (1989) create graphic cartoon narratives through traditional frame-by-frame drawings, colorizing, and filming. Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki is celebrated for continuing the use of 2-D animation in films like Ponyo (2008). Another traditional animation technique is stop-motion photography, used in Henry Selick’s 3-D Coraline (2009) [Figure 3.51], a specific form of which is claymation, revived by Aardman Studios’ Nick Park in films like Chicken Run (2000). Stop-motion photography records, as separate frames in incrementally changed action, inanimate objects or actual human figures that are then synthesized on film to create the illusion of motion and action: claymation accomplishes this effect with clay or plasticine figures, while pixilation employs this technique to transform the movement of real human figures and objects into rapid, jerky gestures. Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988) combines live action, pixilation, and puppets to re-create the dizzying events of Lewis Carroll’s story.

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3.51 Coraline (2009). Henry Selick’s distinctive stop-motion animation blurs the line between the heroine’s real world and the alternative world where the characters have button eyes.

Today animation is accomplished predominantly through computer graphics. In 1995, Pixar produced Toy Story, the first feature-length film composed entirely of computer-generated imagery (CGI) [Figure 3.52]. Since then, striking technological advances have contributed to the resurgence of animation as a genre. While Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) was the first film to use performance capture, a technique for generating computer models from data gathered from an actor’s performance, its human figures were not as convincing as other photorealistic detail. Renewed appreciation for the medium was reflected in the introduction in 2002 of a new Academy Award category: feature-length animated films.

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3.52 Toy Story (1995). Pixar’s first feature and the first computer-animated feature film to be released. The exaggerated crayon colors leap from the more balanced, natural tones of the realistic background.

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While Pixar and DreamWorks continue to produce CGI blockbusters for all ages, independent filmmakers have also engaged with animation. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) recorded real figures and action on video as a basis for painting individual animation frames digitally in a technique known as rotoscoping [Figure 3.53]. Persepolis (2007), an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels about growing up in Iran, was a successful art-house release, and Waltz with Bashir (2008), an Israeli film about the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon war, extended animation to documentary.

3.53 A Scanner Darkly (2006). For this Philip K. Dick adaptation, Richard Linklater had his actors filmed digitally and then animated using a rotoscope technique.

With the advent of CGI, the technologies and artistry of animation and visual effects overlap more and more. Visual effects is a term generally used to denote a subset of special effects. While the latter term encompasses many practices, such as pyrotechnics and other mechanical effects produced on set that do not involve the camera or image processing, the former focuses on alterations to the image that would be impossible or too costly to film. Since early cinema, filmmakers have employed such basic manipulations as slow motion or fast motion by filming the action faster or slower than normal and then projecting it at normal speeds; color filters that change the tones of the recorded image with different tinted lenses; and miniatures or other scaled models used to create fantastic landscapes and machines of the kind seen in the X-Men series (2000–2014), which combines the use of models with CGI.

Another common visual effect, one that combines more than one shot into a single image, is a process shot, a term that describes the different ways that an image can be set up and manipulated during filming and printing. A process shot might project a different background for the action on a screen such as the image through the rear window of characters traveling in a car. Or a process shot may be used to compose an abstract image that juxtaposes two or more competing realities. In an example of the use of special effects in a serious experimental film, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s epic Our Hitler (1977) shows Hitler quietly eating dinner while, in

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rear projection, Jews arrive at concentration camps; at other times, the film reduces Hitler to a puppet onstage [Figure 3.54].

3.54 Our Hitler (1977). Puppets and process shots are a few of the special effects used in this epic film to jar our perceptions and unravel the illusion of a fascist dictator.

A matte shot combines two or more pieces of film — generally one with the central action or object and the other with the additional background, figures, or action that would be difficult to create physically for the shot. Elaborate matte paintings are used to create atmosphere, background, and a sense of scale in films such as King Kong (1933). Traveling mattes are required when a figure moves in the foreground [Figure 3.55].

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3.55 King Kong (1933). The jungle matte painting provides a mysterious background for the stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien.

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Some visual effects use a combination of cinematography and computer techniques, such as the celebrated “bullet time” used to great effect in The Matrix (1999), in which images taken by a set of still cameras surrounding a subject are put together to create an effect of suspension or extreme slow motion. In Inception, recognizable images of cityscapes and mountain fortresses are remade as the fragile and malleable virtual shapes of a dreamscape through CGI [Figure 3.56]. Current blockbusters are driven more and more by these kinds of spectacular visual effects, additional sequences and explanations of which often fill their DVDs. The fantasy world of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) was created through a range of special effects from the use of simple forced perspective to put hobbit, elven, and human characters in proper scale, to the imaginative work of the New Zealand–based Weta Digital, the company that innovated performance capture technology to incorporate actor Andy Serkis’s physical performance into the character Gollum. Weta and Serkis later collaborated to create Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) [Figure 3.57], and Weta Digital also did visual effects for James Cameron’s Avatar, whose 3-D presentation required the conversion of theaters to digital formats. The success of this film is partly responsible for the fact that by 2012 digital projection surpassed film exhibition in movie theaters.

3.56 Inception (2010). Images of real and virtual worlds merge in the production process and in the plot of a drama that takes place in the layers of a dream.

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3.57 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). The increasing sophistication of performance capture technology, including Andy Serkis’s work as Caesar, the leader of the ape rebellion, allowed for this remake to use no actual apes in filming.

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Making Sense of the Film Image From the desert expanses of Lawrence of Arabia to the dreamscapes of Inception, movie images have been valued for their beauty, realism, or ability to inspire wonder. Often these qualities are found in their production values because of the skill and money invested to generate such experiences. But film images carry other values in what they preserve and say about the world. French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s remark that film is truth at twenty-four frames per second is one way to describe the power and importance of the film image. Yet as Godard’s many films themselves demonstrate, this “truth” is not just the truth of presentation but also the truth of representation. In short, film images are prized both for their accuracy in showing or presenting us with facts and for how they interpret or represent them.

Defining Our Relationship to the Cinematic Image Images hold a remarkable power to capture a moment. Flipping through a photo album provides glimpses of past events. The morning newspaper collapses a day of war into a single poignant image. However, images can do far more than preserve the facts of a moment. They can also interpret those facts in ways that give them new meanings. A painting by Norman Rockwell evokes feelings of warmth and nostalgia, while the stained-glass windows lining a cathedral aim to draw our spiritual passions. Add motion, and the power of images to both show and interpret information magnifies exponentially. A film image may be designed to present — to show the visual truth of the subject matter realistically and reliably — and to represent — to color that truth with shades of meaning.

The Image as Presentation The image as presentation reflects our belief that film communicates the details of the world realistically, even while showing us unrealistic situations. We prize the stunning images of the ancient Forbidden City in The Last Emperor (1987) [Figure 3.58] as well as the dynamic close-ups of a boxing match in The Fighter (2010) for their veracity and authenticity in depicting realities or perspectives. In pursuing this goal, cinematography may document either subjective images, which reflect the points of view of a person experiencing the events, or objective images, which assume a more general accuracy or truth. In Little Big Man (1970), images from the perspective of a 101-year-old pioneer raised by Native Americans succeed, for many, in both ways: they become remarkably convincing displays of known historical characters and events — such as General George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn — and they poignantly re-create the perspective of the pioneer as he lived through and now remembers those events.

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3.58 The Last Emperor (1987). The sumptuous cinematography gives access to the Forbidden City, illustrating the power of the cinema to “authenticate” through the image.

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The Image as Representation

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The image also has an instrumental power to influence or even determine the meaning of the events or people it portrays by re-presenting reality through the interpretive power of cinematography. The image as representation is an exercise in the power of visual stimuli. The way in which we depict individuals or actions implies a kind of control over them, knowledge of them, or power to determine what they mean. When we frame a subject, we capture and contain that subject within a particular point of view that gives it definition beyond its literal meaning. This desire to represent through control over an image permeates the drama of Vertigo, in which the main character, Scottie, tries so desperately to define Madeleine through appearances — and the cinematography aids him by framing her as a painting. Representation as power over images can be found at the heart of films as diverse as Blonde Venus (1932) and Pan’s Labyrinth, which in different ways show the ability of the film image to capture and manipulate a person or reality in the service of a point of view. In Blonde Venus, as in many of the films directed by Josef von Sternberg starring Marlene Dietrich, the heroine is depicted as a self-consciously erotic figure, whether in an outrageous costume as a showgirl or as a housewife and mother at home. In Pan’s Labyrinth, a young girl escapes the frightening reality of her father’s brutality during the Spanish Civil War in a fantasy world rendered real for the spectator as well through artful cinematography and special effects [Figure 3.59].

3.59 Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). A lonely child’s fantasy world is represented as real to the viewer.

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VIEWING CUE In the most recent film shown for class, look for shots that aim to present certain experiences objectively and two or three shots that seem to represent or interpret different realities. Analyze one shot of each type carefully, and relate them to the film’s themes.

Part of the art of film is that these two primary imagistic values — presentation and representation — are interconnected and can be mobilized in intricate and ambiguous ways in a movie. When Harry Potter speaks in the language of snakes in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), the cinematography highlights the fear and confusion among Harry’s classmates. Is the image an objective presentation of the perspective of the Hogwarts students, or is it an interpretive representation on the part of the film itself, trying to make the viewer think Harry is deserving of fear? A perceptive viewer must consider the most appropriate meanings for the shot — whether it reflects the students’ position or the film’s position. Watching closely how images carry and mobilize values, we encounter the complexity of making meaning in a film and the importance of our own activity as viewers.

Interpretive Contexts for the Cinematic Image Our encounters with the values embedded in the images we experience shape our expectations of subsequent films. For some kinds of movies, like documentaries and historical fiction films, we have learned to see the film frame as a window on the world, seeking accuracy. For others, such as avant-garde or art films, we learn to approach the images as puzzles, perhaps revealing secrets of life and society. Here we will designate two conventions in the history of the film image: the convention of image as presence, and the convention of image as text. In the first case, we identify with the image; in the second, we read it.

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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

To watch a clip illustrating the cinematography of Vertigo, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.

From Angles to Animation in Vertigo (1958)

See also: Performance (1970); Run Lola Run (1998); Amélie (2001)

In Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense film Vertigo, a wealthy businessman named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) hires Scottie (James Stewart), a retired police detective who suffers from acrophobia (fear of heights), to watch his wife. Madeleine (Kim Novak), Elster claims, is troubled by her obsession with Carlotta, a woman from the past. After Scottie rescues Madeleine during an apparent suicide attempt, he falls in love with her, and when his acrophobia prevents him from stopping her as she leaps from a mission tower, her death sends Scottie into a spiral of guilt. Later he believes he sees his lost love on the streets of San Francisco, and his pursuit of the look-alike woman, Judy, entangles him in another twist to this psychological murder mystery in which the central crisis involves distinguishing reality from fictive images of it.

Employing a particular brand of widescreen projection called VistaVision, the aspect ratio of Vertigo is one of its immediately recognizable and significant formal features: the widescreen frame becomes a fitting environment for Scottie and his anxious searches through the vistas of San Francisco and its environs.

Although Vertigo does not mask frames for emphasis in the artificially obvious way of older films, at times Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Berks cleverly create masking effects by using natural objects within the frame. For instance, the film uses doors or other parts of the mise-en-scène to create masking effects that isolate and dramatize Scottie’s intense gazing at Madeleine [Figure 3.60].

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3.60 Vertigo (1958). In this striking composition, Scottie’s previously masked point of view becomes graphically juxtaposed with the mirror image of the woman he pursues.

Like many other Hitchcock films, Vertigo continually exploits the edges of the frame to tease and mislead us with what we (and Scottie) cannot see. In Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine, she frequently evades his point of view, disappearing like a ghost beyond the frame’s borders. The mystery of Madeleine’s fall to her death is especially shocking because it occurs offscreen, revealed only as her blurred body flashes by the tower window, which acts as a second frame limiting Scottie’s perception of what has happened [Figure 3.61].

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3.61 Vertigo (1958). The window frames Scottie’s uncertain view of a falling body.

The angles of shots are crucial in Vertigo. The hilly San Francisco setting naturally accentuates high and low angles as Scottie follows Madeleine through the streets, and the film’s recurring motif about terror of heights informs even the most commonplace scenes, as high angles and overhead shots ignite Scottie’s panic. Especially when these sharp angles reflect Scottie’s point of view, they suggest complex psychological and moral concerns about power and control as well as about desire and guilt, dramatizing those moments when Scottie’s desires leave him in positions where he is most out of control and threatened.

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Certainly among the more striking dimensions of Vertigo is its moving frame. One casual scene demonstrates how common shot movements not only describe events in a complex way but also subtly invest those events with nuance and meaning. In an early scene set in Elster’s office, the wealthy man enlists Scottie’s help to follow his wife. The scene begins with Elster sitting in his chair, but Scottie soon sits and Elster stands and moves around the room: a pan of Elster walking to a higher position in the room is followed by a low-angle shot of him and a complementing high-angle shot of Scottie; a backward track then depicts the more aggressive Elster as he moves to the front of the image toward the stationary Scottie [Figure 3.62]. As the moving frame continues to focus on Elster trying to convince Scottie to help him track his wife, the framing and its movement indicate that this is not quite a conversation between equals: the moving frame makes clear that Elster directs the image and controls the perspective.

3.62 Vertigo (1958). A low-angle, backward tracking shot emphasizes the aggressive Gavin Elster.

A more clearly central series of camera movements takes place when Scottie finds Madeleine standing before a portrait of Carlotta in an art museum. Here the camera executes several complex moves that simulate Scottie’s perspective: it simultaneously zooms in and tracks first on the swirl in Madeleine’s hair and then reframes by tracking and zooming out on the same hair design in the painting of Carlotta [Figure 3.63]. Indeed, these reframings in the museum resemble the opening sequence in which Scottie hangs from the gutter and his frightened glances at the street below are depicted through a quick, distorting combination of zooming-in and tracking-out that describes his intense panic and spatial disorientation. Entirely through these camera movements, the film connects Scottie’s original trauma and guilt with his mysterious attachment to Madeleine.

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3.63 Vertigo (1958). Restless camera movement combining zooms and tracking shots traces Scottie’s gaze at the portrait.

Although Vertigo seems to be a realistic thriller, it employs — dramatically and disconcertingly — both animation and special effects as a part of its story and description of Scottie’s state of mind. An eerie matte shot re-creates a tower that is missing from the actual church at San Juan Bautista; its goal is largely to add a crucial element to the setting where Scottie’s fear of heights will be exploited. Yet along with the nightmarish significance of that tower, in the final scene the matted image appears as an eerily glowing surface and color as the surreal tower looms over yet another dead body. More obvious examples of special effects include the rear projections and animation when Scottie begins to lose his grip on one reality and become engulfed in another. In one scene, Scottie and Judy’s kiss spins free of the background of the room; earlier, during a nightmare triggered by his psychotic depression, an eruption of animation depicts the scattering of the mythical Carlotta’s bouquet of flowers and a black abstract form of Scottie’s body falling onto the roof of the church [Figure 3.64]. This “special sequence” credited to John Ferren echoes the spiraling animated shapes of the memorable title design by Saul Bass.

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3.64 Vertigo (1958). Scottie’s animated nightmare sequence ends with a matte shot in which an abstracted black figure appears against the roof onto which another body had fallen.

Rather than mimicking or supplementing reality, these instances of animation and special effects in Vertigo point out how fragile the photographic realism of the film shot can be. Vertigo describes the obsessions of a man in love with the image of a woman — Madeleine, who appears to revive Carlotta, and then is seemingly reincarnated in Judy. The film contains inordinately long periods without any dialogue, almost as a way to insist that Scottie’s (and Hitchcock’s) interest is primarily in images — in all their forms from paintings to memories, and from many angles (high, low, moving, stationary, onscreen, and offscreen).

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Presence The compositional practices of the film image that we call the conventions of presence imply a close identification with the image’s point of view; a primarily emotional response to that image; and an experience of the image as if it were a lived reality. Images in this tradition are able to fascinate us with a visual activity we participate in, overwhelm us with their beauty or horror, or comfort us with their familiarity. While not entirely separable from the story and other elements of the film form, imagistic presence can be seen as what principally entertains us at the movies, what elicits our tears and shrieks. A shot of horses and riders dashing toward a finish line or of a woman embracing a dear friend communicates an immediacy or truth that engages us and leads us through subsequent images. Two variations on this convention are the phenomenological image and the psychological image.

The Phenomenological Image. The phenomenological image refers to filmmaking styles that approximate physical activity as we would experience it in the world — such as a shot that re-creates the dizzying perspectives from a mountaintop. As old as film history itself, this tradition appears in vastly different movies: from the wonder with which we gaze upon Munchkinland in the first color shot of The Wizard of Oz to the painful suspense of 127 Hours (2010), about a mountain climber trapped alone in the wilderness, phenomenological shots convey a sensual vitality in the image itself.

The Psychological Image. The psychological image, in contrast, reflects the state of mind of the viewer or a more general emotional atmosphere: in 10 (1979), a middle-aged man fantasizes the image of his dreams coming true as a beautiful woman running toward him in slow motion; in Midnight Cowboy (1969), disorienting, blurry images at a party re-create Joe’s mental and perceptual experience after taking drugs [Figure 3.65]. Both kinds of images appear across film history and culture, but certain film movements emphasize one over the other. Westerns — such as 3:10 to Yuma (2007) — tend to rely on phenomenological images to imbue movement and conflict with energy [Figure 3.66]. Movies that concentrate on personal crises — such as the melodramatic Written on the Wind (1956), a tale of wealth and unhappiness in which overwrought emotions and mental stress are everywhere — often employ psychological images to reflect the states of mind of the characters [Figure 3.67].

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3.65 Midnight Cowboy (1969). Special effects and blurred, colored contrasts create a psychological representation of the cowboy’s drug experience.

3.66 3:10 to Yuma (2007). The phenomenological presence of bodies in motion and in pain is dynamically rendered through cinematography.

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3.67 Written on the Wind (1956). Color, angles, composition, and deep focus contribute to the image’s depiction of the character’s emotional extremes in Douglas Sirk’s melodrama of the unhappy rich.

Textuality Textuality refers to a different kind of film image, one that demands emotional and analytical distancing from the image, which is experienced as artifice or a construction to be interpreted.

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We stand back to look at textual images from an intellectual distance. They seem loaded with signs and symbols for us to decipher. They impress us more for how they show the world than for what they show. So- called difficult, abstract, or experimental films — from Germaine Dulac’s surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) to Pi (1998) — obviously enlist viewers in this way, but many films integrate images that test our abilities to read and decipher. A canted framing of an isolated house or a family reunion shot through a yellow filter may stand out in an otherwise realistic movie as a puzzle image that asks for more reflection: How do we read this image? Why is this unusual composition included? In The Seashell and the Clergyman, apparently about a priest in love with a beautiful woman, images resemble the cryptic language of a strange dream, requiring viewers to struggle to decipher them as a way of understanding the film’s complex drama of repression and desire [Figure 3.68].

3.68 The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). Extreme angles, shadows, and highlighted patterns in the pavement suggest a complex dream image in this surrealist collaboration between playwright Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac.

Recognizing the dominance of images either of presence or of textuality within a film is one way to begin to appreciate and understand it. A romance like Eat Pray Love exudes the presence of location shooting in Italy, India, and Bali and invites audiences to share the heroine’s emotional adventure through its exotic locales. A more dense and complex film about an underground gang of Nazi “werewolves,” Lars von Trier’s Zentropa

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(1991) asks us to decipher images constructed with special effects and mixed media, but part of its success lies in how it engages the complexities of a tradition of textuality.

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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience

To watch a video about the cinematography of M, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.

Meaning through Images in M (1931) See also: The Blue Angel (1930); Black Swan (2010)

Set in Germany around 1930, Fritz Lang’s M shows how a movie can present both objective and subjective experiences. M tells the gruesome tale of a child murderer, Franz Becker, whom both police and criminals pursue in an attempt to regain each group’s stable, if corrupt, social situation. The film was shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, cinematographer on Nosferatu and other masterpieces of German expressionism. Throughout the film, objective images alternate with subjective ones: images seem at some points to describe the facts of a dark and anxious German society in 1930; at other points, they reproduce that world through the perspective of individual characters. Even in a fiction film such as this one, the images document a history of facial expressions, cultural products, and social activities, such as the uniforms of the German police and raucous criminal dens. At still other points in this film, the images present personal perspectives, such as the anxiety of a mother as she waits for her daughter, glances at the clock several times, and stares at an empty seat before a table setting [Figure 3.69].

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3.69 M (1931). A seemingly benign shot of a child’s place setting becomes ominous when it conveys the point of view of a mother whose daughter is missing.

Due to shifts between objective and subjective perspective, the film occasionally leaves unclear whether the images are a factual record of German street life or descriptions of anxious or even deranged minds. Early in the film, an extreme high-angle shot presents an apparently objective view of children playing in a courtyard, but the angle of the shot also suggests the uneasy and oppressive feeling that suffuses the atmosphere. Soon afterward, a medium shot tracks laterally left to right as it follows the young girl, Elsie Beckmann, as she walks home bouncing a ball, straightforwardly depicting her carefree journey but also suggesting that someone might be following and watching her. Later a tracking shot of a man walking with a young girl is transformed into a scene of chaos, fear, and anger when the shot unexpectedly merges into the subjective perspective of a crowd that sees the man as the murderer.

The power of the image to represent individuals by assigning them meanings and values is on full display in M. Lang’s representations are sometimes the common kind one finds in many films: a dark low- angle shot defines a criminal as dangerous, whereas a close-up of a mother emphasizes her internalized sorrow and pain. At other times, the structure of an image suggests more elaborate commentary: the detective Karl Lohmann is shot from an extreme low angle that not only describes him sitting in a chair but also depicts him as a grotesque, slovenly, and comical caricature. Sometimes other, darker judgments and meanings appear through the image.

As part of a complex maneuver in that early tracking shot of Elsie, the image shifts subtly from being a description of her perspective to an ominously threatening point of view. When Elsie stops and bounces her ball off a poster warning of the murderer, the low camera angle assumes her point of view. When, suddenly,

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the dark shadow of a man drifts across the poster and her perspective, the image acquires a darker and more threatening point of view that literally takes over Elsie’s perspective with its own [Figure 3.70].

3.70 M (1931). A poster offering a reward for information on a child murderer becomes infused with horror when an anonymous shadow falls over it.

In a more diabolical way than in most films, vision is equated with control, and here the power of the unseen

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man’s perspective over Elsie anticipates her murder. When, at the conclusion of the film, Becker stumbles into a vacant warehouse, he ironically finds himself the object of the same representational power in the image, the source of the perspective now being a large crowd rather than a troubled individual. He suddenly finds himself literally captured by the gaze of a mob of street thieves and criminals prepared to judge him as the target of their eyes, just as he had done to Elsie.

M appears at the end of what is commonly called the “golden age” of German cinema, generally identified with two specific movie traditions: German “street films” and German expressionist films. In street films, the movie image documents the tough and unglamorous social realities of criminals, prostitutes, or other desperate individuals. In German expressionism, film images often investigate emotional, psychological, and subconscious realities. M engages both these German film movements: while its documentary-like shots of criminals, tools, and weapons suggest the realism of street films, the expressionistic tradition allows Lang to use the textuality of the image to explore a different kind of presence, one associated with desires and fears.

A tradition of textual images that can be linked to German expressionism is conveyed both in the film, in which characters are often preoccupied with scrutinizing images for the mysteries they hold, and by it, as viewers detect the secrets within the film’s own images. At one point, Becker examines his close-up reflection in a mirror, pulling his mouth down in a distorted frown, perhaps as a bizarre attempt to see and comprehend the madman inside himself. At another, the police examine a note from Becker in close-up in order to analyze “the very particular shape of the letters,” and several times they assemble images of fingerprints and maps to try to identify and locate the killer. In both cases, images become explicit instruments for investigating the crime and thus, the police hope, instruments with which to capture Becker. Finally, the plot turns dramatically when the criminals trailing Becker surreptitiously mark the back of his jacket with the letter M, thereby identifying this anonymous figure of a man on the street as the killer by making his image a legible text. Less directly, the film creates complex visual metaphors that ask viewers to decipher their significance: a balloon purchased by Becker for Elsie later appears in a medium shot tangled in telephone wires to suggest her death and perhaps the twisted person of Becker, whose body resembles the balloon figure [Figure 3.71].

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3.71 M (1931). A balloon tangled in the telephone wires suggests an ominous ending for Elsie Beckmann — and for the murderer, Franz Becker. The image communicates through textuality rather than presence.

The cinematography in M draws on both realist and expressionist traditions to create a mixture of documentary-style images and more symbolic representations that engage the viewer’s powers of detection even as the crimes in the film are investigated. The exploration of the powers and limitations of the image in M link looking and seeing to matters of life and death.

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