Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  (Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart) who were

  now-classic films. In Rear Window (1954), about a

  essential to Hitchcock’s films had retired or were

  wheelchair-bound photographer intent on proving

  now too old for the parts he needed to fill. The bru-

  one of his neighbors is a murderer, Hitchcock explored

  tality and cynicism of modern film, which Hitchcock

  the theme of voyeurism, applying it both to characters

  had helped inaugurate with Psycho , swept by him.

  in the narrative and to audiences watching the film.

  Hitchcock had relied for his best effects on sugges-

  To Catch a Thief (1955) was a classy, witty

  tion and implication and felt unable to relate to a

  Technicolor romp on the Riviera, and The Man Who

  world in which, and to a public for whom, extraor-

  Knew Too Much (1956) was a glossy, big-budget re-

  dinary acts of violence were becoming increasingly

  make of his 1934 British hit. Vertigo (1958), a com-

  commonplace.

  plex tale of detection, murder, and madness, was

  Hitchcock achieved a brief popular comeback

  Hitchcock’s most intensely personal, romantic, and

  with Frenzy (1972), a hit about a British serial killer.

  poetic creation. Widely regarded as his masterpiece,

  Movie censorship had fallen, and Hitchcock in-

  it is hypnotic, dreamlike, with a remarkable depth

  cluded horrific and distasteful scenes of explicit vio-

  of feeling and an uncompromisingly bleak ending.

  lence, inadvertently demonstrating how creatively

  Disappointed with Vertigo ’s commercial perfor-

  beneficial Hollywood censorship had been for him.

  mance, Hitchcock made North by Northwest (1959),

  His last film, Family Plot (1976), was an entertain-

  a fast, witty, hugely entertaining summation of the

  ing but unremarkable thriller. Hitchcock’s declining

  espionage and chase thrillers he had perfected in his

  health prevented completion of additional films, and

  1930s British career.

  he died on April 29, 1980.

  Hitchcock’s next film, Psycho (1960), proved to

  Hitchcock’s genius for self-promotion (realized

  be his most influential. This story of murder, mad-

  through his cameo appearances in films and his

  ness, and perversion at a seedy roadside motel was a

  witty introductions on his television show, which

  calculated exercise in audience manipulation in which

  ran from 1955–1965), and his brilliance at fright-

  Hitchcock wanted only to make his viewers scream.

  ening viewers made him one of the most popular

  He succeeded brilliantly. In its coldness, its savage bru-

  and famous directors in screen history. But he was

  tality and violence, and its merciless attitude toward

  also a serious and sophisticated artist who made

  the audience, Psycho anticipated, and introduced, the

  brilliant use of cinema as a vehicle for expressing

  essential characteristics of modern horror.

  the forces of darkness and chaos in human life. ■

  considerable suspense, and when the payoff finally comes at the end of the film—a close-up of the mother’s skeletal face—it is heart-stopping.

  Other Angles The canted angle , involving a tilted camera leaning to one side or the other, can be an effective way of making the world look off-kilter, often to express a character’s anxieties or disoriented, disorganized frame of mind. In Thirteen (2003), director Catharine Hardwicke uses a tilted camera to visualize the distress of a mother (Holly Hunter) who learns that her 13-year-old daughter is into drugs. In a similar fashion, the off-kilter angles visualize the disturbed world of Natural Born Killers 30

  Film Structure

  NATURAL BORN KILLERS

  (WARNER BROS., 1994)

  Unstable, tilted camera angles help

  to establish the nightmarish, off-

  kilter world of serial killers in Oliver

  Stone’s Natural Born Killers . Stone

  purposely created a wildly chaotic

  visual design to give the film a psy-

  chotic tone. Frame enlargement.

  (1994). Tilted camera angles are an excellent means of visualizing emotional or psychological instability.

  Angle in Context While camera angles are capable of eliciting some of the kinds of emotional responses from viewers described here, it is important to remember that all these responses are context-dependent. The information they convey depends on the emotional content and action of a given scene. They must be carefully matched by filmmakers to the material of the scene. In other contexts, other scenes, low, high, and canted angles may have other effects than those mentioned here.

  Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, for example, used low camera positions and

  angles extensively, but they are not correlated with any of the effects discussed here.

  To a large extent, they are motivated by the action of the films, which feature characters sitting on tatami mats while conversing (as is the custom in traditional Japanese homes). The camera gets closer to the ground to film them. One critic has suggested that these low positions and angles work to include the viewer in the world of the film, like a guest sitting on a tatami mat. To assess the function of camera position and angle, then, one must bear in mind their potential for structuring emotional response and also consider the expressive requirements of the scene. What are its dramatic, comedic, emotional, or cultural requirements, and how is their expression facilitated by camera position and angle?

  Camera Lens

  Besides position and angle, a third factor defines the relationship between the camera and what it photographs. This is the type of lens used in each shot. The lens is the device that gathers light and brings it into the camera to a focused point on the film, thereby creating an image that is recorded on the light-sensitive surface of the film, called the emulsion . A filmmaker’s choice of lens can drastically affect the look of the image in terms of (1) the apparent size of objects on screen and (2) the apparent relationships of depth and distance between near and far objects. Camera positions generally are defined by the amount of distance between the camera and what it is photographing, but without knowing something about the lenses employed, a viewer is liable to misjudge the camera’s position. Certain lenses, for example, can make the camera seem much closer to what it is photographing than it really is.

  31

  Film Structure

  INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 2009)

  Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) admires his handiwork, having just carved a swastika on the forehead of a Nazi colonel. The low camera angle shows Raine from the colonel’s pont of view, lying on the ground. Although the camera itself is not tilted, the extreme wide angle lens creates parallax distortion, making the characters seem tilted and the tree behind them to lurch at an angle. The tilted composition is achieved with the lens rather than the camera’s position. Frame enlargement.

  FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT

  Yasujiro Ozu

  Most movies resemble one another because

  calmly views the transient nature of life and the

  filmmakers use standard methods of setting their

  disappointments that living inevitably brings. He

  cameras, lighting a scene, and editing the shots.

  frequently collaborated with screenwriter Kogo

  Interesting variations on the standard pattern are

  Noda and relied on a stock company of actors that

  possible, but it is rare for a filmmaker to define a

 
included Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko

  unique, singular visual style, essentially inventing a

  Sugimura.

  novel method of scenic construction.

  He disliked melodrama and avoided the heated

  Yasujiro Ozu did just this in a career that lasted

  emotions that movies often portray. He gave his ac-

  from 1927–1963. He made most of his films for

  tors meticulous directions about how to hold a pair

  Shochiku Studio, and almost all of his films are

  of chopsticks, how to lift a glass of sake, the angle

  family dramas that focus on transitional events—

  at which to look right, then left and then down.

  children drift away from their parents or marry and

  And he often wanted them to do this without pro-

  start new lives, aging relatives pass away. Ozu was

  jecting strong emotions. The paradox, though, is

  so committed to these portraits of family life that

  that watching an Ozu film can be a very emotional

  he rarely strayed from the topic, and the titles of his

  experience. His emphasis on minimalism pays great

  films demonstrate the regularity of the pattern—

  dividends. Less is more.

  Early Spring (1956), Late Spring (1949), Early Summer

  Most famously, Ozu’s visual style was rigorous and

  (1951), The End of Summer (1961), Late Autumn

  almost unvarying. He set his camera about three feet

  (1960), An Autumn Afternoon (1962), I Graduated,

  off the ground, which for many scenes corresponded

  But. . . (1929), I Flunked, But. . . (1930), I Was Born, with the seated position on tatami matting in a tra-But. . . (1932).

  ditional Japanese home. But even in outdoor scenes

  Ozu’s films are often very funny, but they are

  where characters are standing or walking, Ozu’s cam-

  also serene and at times quite melancholy, as he

  era often stayed close to the ground.

  32

  Film Structure

  EARLY SUMMER (SHOCHIKU, 1951); LATE SPRING (SHOCHIKU, 1949) Ozu placed his camera a few feet off the ground, which corresponded with the traditional seating in a Japanese home, but he maintained this practice even with outdoor scenes in which characters are not seated on tatami matting. Frame enlargements.

  LATE SPRING (SHOCHIKU, 1949); EQUINOX FLOWER (SHOCHIKU, 1958)

  Ozu did not use over-the-shoulder framings in dialogue scenes. He preferred the frontal compositions seen here in which characters look almost into the camera lens. The set-ups draw the viewer into the scenes in a singular fashion. Frame enlargements.

  He didn’t use fades or dissolves but preferred the

  a restaurant, a lotus flower in bloom. The still-life

  straight cut to join shots. He rarely moved the cam-

  imagery provided moments of transition within the

  era, and he often cut away from a scene’s action

  narrative and also a space in which the viewer might

  to shots of inanimate objects—an umbrella lean-

  contemplate character behavior and conflict and

  ing against a doorway, a glowing lantern outside

  reach a calm understanding of these.

  ( continued)

  33

  Film Structure

  Ozu’s camera set-ups did not follow the stan-

  each shot offered a reverse-field view of the scene’s

  dard over-the-shoulder style of framing that be-

  playing area.

  came so universally accepted among filmmakers.

  These stylistic traits emerged early in Ozu’s career

  He often filmed his characters in a head-on, frontal

  and he sustained the pattern across the body of his

  fashion, and had them look back at the camera

  work. They give Ozu’s films an unmistakable profile.

  in a way that was just slightly off-angle of its lens.

  Ozu’s films look like nobody else’s movies. But the

  This compositional style draws the viewer inside

  style was not gratuitous or a meaningless exercise to

  the scene by making it seem as if the characters

  establish authorship. Ozu was a great artist, and his

  are addressing themselves to the camera and the

  visual style is precisely calculated. It defines a cinema

  viewer. And he often cut between shots in ways

  of great poetry and delicacy and uncommon emo-

  that shifted the line-of-sight by 180 degrees, as

  tional sensitivity. ■

  FOCAL LENGTH AND DEPTH OF FIELD When the lens is focused on a distant object, the distance between the film inside the camera and the optical center of the lens is known as the focal length . The properties of different lenses are understood in relation to their respective focal lengths. A focal length of 50 mm conventionally designates a normal lens for 35-mm film, which is the film format used in commercial theaters.

  Lenses with focal lengths greater than the normal range are telephoto lenses , or long-focal-length lenses. Those with focal lengths less than normal are wide-angle lenses , or short-focal-length lenses.

  FINDING NEVERLAND

  (MIRAMAX, 2004)

  Changing the lens’s fo-

  cal plane within a shot

  (a technique called rack

  focusing) can make a

  dynamic contribution

  to the composition. It

  creates a kind of edit-

  ing within the frame

  as the filmmaker racks

  focus instead of cut-

  ting to a new shot. In

  a long, uninterrupted

  shot, Sylvia Davies (Kate

  Winslet) and James

  Barrie (Johnny Depp)

  talk about her children,

  and the changes in focal

  plane bring first one and

  then the other charac-

  ter into focus. Frame

  enlargements.

  34

  Film Structure

  The focal length of a lens is directly related to how much it sees, termed the angle of view . At a shorter focal length, the angle of view increases, allowing filmmakers to film a wider area. At longer focal lengths, the angle of view decreases, limiting filmmakers to photographing a more narrow area.

  Also varying with the focal length of the lens is the depth of field , the amount of area from near to far that will remain in focus. A wide-angle lens can capture much greater depth of field than a telephoto lens. With a wide-angle lens, the distance between near objects in focus and distant objects in focus can be very great. By contrast, a telephoto lens will tend to give filmmakers a shallow depth of field, an inability to hold near and far points in focus.

  These issues of depth of field are connected to important aesthetic traditions in cinema. Using deep focus , filmmakers like Orson Welles ( Citizen Kane ) and Jacques Tati ( Playtime , 1967) created complex compositions featuring a rich interplay of foreground and background detail. By shooting in deep focus and extending the duration of their shots, these filmmakers work with an aesthetic that respects the wholeness of time and space; that is, the playing area of each shot is extended in time (the shot’s long duration) and space (depth of field). This is a distinct stylistic alternative to the use of editing to carve up space into many brief shots.

  Yet another characteristic differentiating wide-angle from telephoto lenses is the ability of telephoto lenses to make distant objects appear much closer than they really are. In this respect, the effects of the telephoto lens can overwhelm the impression of THE UNTOUCHABLES

  (PARAMOUNT, 1987)

  The wide-angle lens gives

  filmmakers an expansive

  depth
of field. It also can

  exaggerate depth per-

  spective. Sean Connery

  and Kevin Costner’s

  hands appear very large,

  relative to the apparent

  size of their heads—this

  is a distortion of depth

  perspective created by

  the wide angle lens.

  In the closer framing,

  note how close Costner

  is to the camera, while

  Connery in the middle

  distance remains in fo-

  cus. Wide angle depth of

  field enables filmmakers

  to put things right into

  the face of the camera

  while retaining the abil-

  ity to focus on the mid-

  ground or background.

  Frame enlargements.

  35

  Film Structure

  Two portraits of the same subject, one taken a few yards away with a normal (55-mm) lens and the other at a much greater distance using a telephoto (205-mm) lens. Which composition is a function of camera position, and which is a function of lens focal length?

  true camera position. What might appear to be a close-up can, in fact, be shot using a telephoto lens with the camera in a long-shot position. In the two portraits of the wooden bridge, the bridge is the same size in each photo, but in one case the size is due to a close camera position, whereas in the other it is due to the magnifying effects of a telephoto lens. Viewers will have developed a sophisticated eye for cinema if they can tell when object size on screen is due more to camera position or to the choice of lens.

  In sum, wide-angle lenses have a greater angle of view and depth of field than telephoto lenses. Unlike wide-angle lenses, telephoto lenses will magnify distant objects and make them seem closer than they are.

  Zoom Lenses In addition to normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses, a fourth category of lens is important in the cinema. This is the zoom lens . The zoom is a lens with a variable focal length. It can shift from wide-angle to telephoto settings within a single shot. This can create the appearance of camera movement, making it seem as if the camera is moving closer to or farther from its subject. In fact, however, the camera in a zoom shot remains stationary. Viewers with a sophisticated cinematic eye can discriminate zoom shots from true moving-camera shots. In a moving-camera shot, perspective changes; that is, the spatial relationship of the camera to the objects around it shifts because the camera is moving through three-dimensional space.