Cinematography PDF: Film Techniques and Analysis

Seeing film: mise-en-scène 25 interrelated in this way, thereby affirming the coherence of the film-world. Or do pro-filmic elements jar against each other? Instabilities of this sort may sometimes be attributed to the continuity person’s doziness (...

Seeing film: mise-en-scène 25 interrelated in this way, thereby affirming the coherence of the film-world. Or do pro-filmic elements jar against each other? Instabilities of this sort may sometimes be attributed to the continuity person’s doziness (Roman gladiators wear- ing watches; jet vapour trails hanging in the sky above nine- teenth-century cowboys): consider, however, whether there may be deliberate disarray among pro-filmic features, and explore the effects of this. Cinematography The spectator has little choice but to witness the pro-filmic f­ eatures itemised above. Unless we are watching through our fingers or from behind a cloth – the latter a viewing practice adopted, in pursuit of novel aesthetic experience, by the Surrealist Man Ray – our eyes cannot avoid falling upon all these components of a film’s visual field. However, spectators vary considerably in the extent to which they also register the numerous cinematographic processes that endow props, costumes and so on – infinite in their possible implications prior to the camera’s activity – with certain meanings rather than others. Acknowledgement of the camera’s material presence may ­initially be alien or disquieting. In mainstream cinema, evidence of the means of image capture itself is generally withheld from the spectator (other than in inadvertent sightings of, say, a camera operator’s shadow). A moment in Mel Brooks’s Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety (1977) is suggestive here. When the camera, prowl- ing towards a window in thriller fashion, goes too far and crashes through the glass, the effect is to make visible technical operations that are usually unadvertised and, as it were, ‘naturalised’ in film. The demystification of the image-making process that this affords may, of course, have been forgotten the next time we encounter a thriller’s tracking shots (given the power of such techniques to enthral). Yet the aim of this part of the chapter is to preserve the self-conscious, High Anxiety moment – though not in killjoy style – and to offer some essential terms for recognising and evaluating cinematographic strategies. ‘Cinematography’ describes the host of decisions taken during 26 Beginning film studies the recording and processing of the film image (whether that image is imprinted on celluloid or encrypted in digital videotape). Some of these technical options are relatively distinct from those bound up with the functioning of the camera itself. Filmmakers may, to begin with, choose between different types of film stock that generate images of strikingly contrasting kinds. The director and cinematographer of Three Kings (1999), set during the First Gulf War, selected a stock more customarily used in still cameras so as to yield bizarre, highly saturated colours for a sequence showing the protagonists’ hallucinatory journey through alien Iraqi desert. However, another section of the film – where visual approximation of war documentary footage was wanted – exemplifies the many laboratory (or, latterly, computer) manipulations that are available during post-production. This time the effect was created by ‘bleach bypass’ (omitting bleach during developing so as to give an antique silver tint to the image). Without discounting the creative importance of such decisions taken either side of filming, we concentrate in this section on major properties and operations of the camera itself. As Aldous Huxley, English novelist and occasional Hollywood screenwriter, remarked in 1926: ‘A good subject to talk about, cinematography’ (Clark, 1987: 17). Distance With exceptions such as wildlife documentaries and abstract experi- ments, film tends to be a human-centred medium; it is unsurprising, therefore, that camera distances are generally tabulated according to the relative smallness or largeness of the human figure as it appears on screen. The most distant perspective – common in westerns, say, but rare in romcoms – is afforded by the extreme long shot, in which the figure is barely visible in an overpowering setting (hence the industry’s alternative term, ‘the geography shot’). Background is still significant in the long shot (or full shot), also, although here the figure is close enough to allow the spectator to make confident judgements about its identity. From this point on, however, shots do not disclose the entire human body, but cut it instead into suc- cessively smaller portions: the medium long shot frames the subject from below the knee upwards; the medium shot from the waist up; Seeing film: mise-en-scène 27 the medium close-up from roughly chest height; while the close-up isolates the head and perhaps neck. Finally, the camera is most intimate (or intrusive) in the extreme close-up, which breaks up the unity of the face by showing only particular features such as the eyes or mouth. This terminology has been subject to historical adjustment. David Bordwell notes that ‘close-up’ – a term entering English around 1912 – originally referred to a shot which included a sig- nificant amount of background, rather than, as now, one tending to focus upon the human face in isolation (1997: 122–4). To point this out is not, for Bordwell, mere semantic quibbling, since grasping the precise definition of shot-types in particular periods allows the scholar to make more informed assessments of the evolution of film style. It is also important that we offer specific and nuanced – rather than absolute – judgements on the significance of various shot dis- tances. Here brief discussion of a single example – the extreme close-up – may be helpful. One practical guide to cinematography asserts that this shot ‘lacks dignity’; it ‘makes nearly any subject sinister, aggressive and nasty’, and therefore should not be used in narrative film but restricted instead to such specialised forms as medical documentary (Thompson, 1998: 84). Leaving to one side the dubious proposition that cinema should always aim to confer ‘dignity’ upon its subjects – what about satirical or polemical films? – Thompson also unduly narrows here the semantic range of the extreme close-up. A shot of a character’s eyes may evoke grief or love or religious fervour as easily as it does brutishness. Even where the extreme close-up is used on morally questionable figures, its effects can vary. When the film noir Force of Evil (1948) cuts from a close-up of a telephone now understood as bugged by the police to an extreme close-up of the criminal protagonist’s eyes, the result is a more striking repre- sentation of panic than would be achieved by a more discreet camera distance. Yet when eyes appear in extreme close-up in the climactic gunfight of Leone’s ‘spaghetti’ western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), the shot is no longer principally informative about character (though it does disclose the relative coolness of the three protagonists); rather, as shown in Figure 4, the extreme close-up has become playful, even exuberant, one of many tactics utilised 28 Beginning film studies 4 Extreme close-up: Clint Eastwood’s eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) by the director in his reworking of the scenic choreography of the western. Similar shot distances may thus signify very differently according to the particular contexts in which they are utilised. Height, angle and level The first of these categories refers to the degree of elevation in the camera’s positioning. As with disparate meanings of the same shot distance, variable effects can be generated by a seemingly identi- cal choice of camera height. In Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), for example, placing the camera strikingly low during one early interior scene amounts to a critique of postwar American suburbia by suggesting, depressingly, that a dull-coloured carpet stretches to infinity. In the Henry James adaptation What Maisie Knew (2013), however, the camera’s low positioning is more sus- tained and functions to approximate the perspective on the world of its child protagonist (this option sometimes results in adults’ heads being cropped, further emphasising the partiality of Maisie’s knowledge of events occurring around her). With respect to camera angle, three basic options are available: high angle, straight-on angle and low angle. If the straight-on angle is presented as neutral and devoid of emphasis, the other two permu- tations have often been correlated with specific meanings: broadly speaking, the high angle shot from above is taken to diminish the power of its subject, and the low angle shot from below, conversely, to enhance it. Yet, as with camera distances, such claims about Seeing film: mise-en-scène 29 the fixed significance of types of camera angle are suspect. Again, our reading of particular film sequences needs to be contextually sensitive: after all, low angle shots of a baby held up in the air by its parent scarcely impress as an image of power. Barthes argues similarly that ‘the analogical relationship between “high angle shot” and “domination” strikes us as naïve’ (Hillier, 1986: 279). Evidence for the greater semantic range of high angles can be found in the credits sequence of the Blaxploitation film Shaft (1971). When the camera zooms out from above its African American protagonist as he crosses a busy Manhattan street, he might be expected to appear ever more vulnerable, an insignificant figure in the metropolis; how- ever, the use of high angle allows us better to recognise the cool with which he weaves through traffic – an early judgement about his mastery of urban space that is quickly confirmed as the film cuts to a straight-on, much closer shot of him giving an irate white motorist the finger. As with angle, the spectator tends to become aware of level in cinematic framing only when there is significant variation from the norm. While the frame is generally balanced in mainstream cinema, filmmakers can alter it from the horizontal so as to produce a canted shot (sometimes referred to as an ‘oblique shot’ or ‘Dutch angle’). A signature use of this technique occurs in The Third Man (1949), where a gathering sense of crisis in a noirish postwar Vienna is visu- ally marked by canted shots that increase in obliqueness during the film (see Figure 5). However, the device survives into contemporary cinema, not least for its economy in evoking a world out of joint. In The Constant Gardener (2005), concerned with shady pharmaceuti- cal testing in Africa, the lopsidedness of the frame in one sequence fulfils initially the low-grade function of showing the view from a truck that has crashed; more profoundly, however, the framing also hints at the region’s unbalancing by dark forces. Masking While the canted shot skews the film image, other cinematographic practices offer alternatives to the image’s rectangular format itself. In masked shots, variously shaped attachments to the camera lens block out some of the available light, leaving portions of the frame black or obscured. This device is most frequently used to mimic the 30 Beginning film studies 5 Canted angle in The Third Man (1949). Note also the scene’s use of low- key lighting effect of other optical devices such as a telescope or microscope or, as in countless war films, binoculars: very common is the cut from one army’s general raising a pair of binoculars to an extreme long shot of the opposing forces, masked in the shape of the binocular lenses. Another variation in masking is the iris shot, whereby the usual rec- tangular image either contracts towards or opens out from a small circular point on the screen (respectively, irising-out and irising-in). Given that the heyday of the iris was in silent cinema and immedi- ately afterwards, its use in contemporary film tends to be nostalgic or stylised (as with Michael Winterbottom’s irising to advance the sense of self-conscious performance in A Cock and Bull Story (2005)). Movement None of the many cinematographic options discussed above implies or requires that the camera is moving. Yet cinema is a dynamic art not only because the projection of a series of discrete celluloid or digital images generates a sense of motion, but because the appara- tus involved in recording them is itself often mobile. An accurate Seeing film: mise-en-scène 31 account of the camera’s movement, however, should d ­ istinguish between practices involving shifts in its entire body and those where there is only modification of a peripheral component. In this latter category would be placed, first of all, the pan and the tilt shot (respec- tively, rotations of the camera in the horizontal and the vertical planes, achieved not by its bodily relocation but by activation of a pivoting device attached to it). It is striking that some textbooks in professional cinematography argue against the use – or, at least, overuse – of pans and tilts. For Bruce Mamer, the pan is actu- ally ‘unnatural’ since its systematic lateral movement falsifies the rapid, impressionistic, often reversible scanning of the visual field which is carried out during our extra-cinematic lives (2014: 11). Dangerously proffering certain techniques as the essence of cinema, while discounting others, this argument binds film aesthetics too closely to the properties of the human eye. Such biologically based reasoning has sometimes been used to counter another common way of achieving on-screen mobility without repositioning the camera itself: namely, the zoom (utilising a lens of variable focal length so as to produce a sensation of progressively moving towards or away from the subject – respectively, zooming-in and zooming-out). For Roy Thompson, wedded like Mamer to a realist approach that would effectively outlaw much distinctive filmmaking, the zoom is alien because it is ‘a highly artificial way of recording a picture’ (1998: 54). Categorically distinct from zooms and pans and tilts are those techniques that do involve moving the camera itself. A basic dis- tinction should be made here between horizontal and vertical manoeuvres. Horizontal camera motions commonly take the form of tracking shots (this term, deriving from tracks laid down to enable the movement of bulky film cameras, is still current, even though the balanced, lightweight equipment available now may not require such infrastructural support). A tracking shot can be varied in speed, rhythm and direction so as to generate diverse effects: if a slow, stalking motion of the camera is apt for enhancing the sus- pense of a horror film or thriller, it would be undesirably eerie in a costume drama, where tracking shots might instead trace nimble, circular patterns around participants in a formal dance. Movements in the vertical plane – the camera rising or descending on a mechan- ically operated mount of variable length – are referred to as crane 32 Beginning film studies shots. While horizontal and vertical camera motions are typically kept separate in shot design, they may sometimes be combined to ­striking effect. Here a bravura example is the three-minute opening shot of Orson Welles’s film noir Touch of Evil (1958). After begin- ning at ground level, in a Mexican border town, the camera cranes upwards and then moves laterally for a rooftop perspective before descending and resuming a tracking motion along several streets. The same unbroken shot is extended so as to incorporate most con- ceivable directions of camera movement (up, down, left, right, for- wards, backwards), as well as multiple rhythms (rapid approaches, slower advances, stately aerial sweeps) and variable distances (from the extreme close-up of a bomb attached to a car to extreme long shots of the cityscape). Besides advertising itself as a grand stylistic flourish, the shot also encompasses multiple individuals whose laby- rinthine relationships will be disclosed as the film unfolds. When a cut finally occurs in Touch of Evil, it signals a switch of cinematographic style. The measured movements of the camera give way, for a while, to a jerky motion as people run towards the site of the bomb explosion. This hectic, staccato effect is achieved by use of handheld equipment – quite innovatory at the time of Welles’s work, but widespread, even institutionalised since in genres such as war and disaster films (Cloverfield (2008), set on a panicky night when New York is under monstrous attack, is a notably sustained venture in the handheld aesthetic). One hugely important piece of portable apparatus in this respect is the Steadicam, invented in the early 1970s by US cinematographer Garrett Brown. This incorpo- rates a stabilising mount for the camera that is attached to the opera- tor, thus reproducing the handheld camera’s intimacy and extensive territorial range but without repeating its unsteady, even queasy locomotion. Discussion in Chapter 2 of Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002) will consider how the Steadicam has modified not only mise-en-scène but also editing. Focus All of those camera movements so far described potentially affect one further property of the film image: its quality of focus. Here the filmmaker’s selection from lenses that range from wide-angle through medium focal lengths to the telephoto will also be sig- Seeing film: mise-en-scène 33 nificant. Options include shallow focus, where the foremost plane of the image is sharply outlined in contrast to fuzzier middle and rear portions; deep focus, where all of the planes are defined clearly; and racking or pulling focus, where focal sharpness is redistributed in the course of a shot from foreground to background, or vice versa. As with all other cinematographic choices, these are more than merely technical matters. Deep focus, for example, first prominent in such geographically dispersed films as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy (1936) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), has figured in film studies as a topic of ideological and philosophical debate. Bazin argues in What Is Cinema? that, mimicking our natural habits of vision, deep focus is the most humane of film modes. ‘Every technique relates to a meta- physic’, he writes elsewhere (Hillier, 1985: 78); and, for Bazin, the philosophical significance of deep focus consists in its implying the unbrokenness of space and time, since such shot composition pre- sents with perfect clarity multiple events that are occurring simul- taneously on different planes. Yet it has been a key argument of this chapter that it is dangerous to derive fixed meanings from a par- ticular technical choice. If deep focus in some films seems indeed to have harmonious, humane connotations, its occurrence elsewhere may be more ambiguous (as, for example, where it is combined with a canted camera angle). As with all other aspects of mise-en-scène, then, locally sensitive interpretation is necessary in order to assess the meaning or value of deep focus in a given context. STOP and THINK Returning to the film sequence that you surveyed earlier for pro-filmic elements, unpack now its cinematography. Identify precisely choices of camera distance; heights, angles and levels of the camera; uses, if any, of masking the lens; varieties of camera movement; and focal selections. What meanings are produced, singly and collectively, by the cinematographic options taken in the sequence? Is there ­coherence – or per- haps dissonance – among the techniques used? Narrowing your focus still further, select just a few shots from the sequence (remembering that a shot is a segment of