Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

  Eve Light Honthaner, The Complete Film Production Handbook (Boston: Focal Press, 1996).

  Steven D. Katz, Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen (Boston: Focal Press, 1991).

  Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

  Ken Russell, Directing Films: The Director’s Art from Script to Cutting Room (London: B. T.

  Batsford, 2000).

  55

  56

  Cinematography

  OBJECTIVES

  After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

  ■ describe the work of previsualization

  ■ explain why pictorial lighting designs work

  especially well for creating visual symbolism

  ■ describe what the cinematographer

  contributes to a film’s visual design

  ■ differentiate between hard and soft light and

  explain their expressive functions

  ■ explain how cinematographers work with film

  stock, lenses, and aspect ratios

  ■ explain the differences between high- and low-

  key lighting setups

  ■ differentiate between realist and pictorial

  lighting designs

  ■ explain the principles of lighting continuity

  ■ describe the creative challenges of light source

  ■ explain the differences between lighting for

  simulation

  color and lighting for black-and-white

  From Chapter 2 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.

  Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

  57

  Cinematography

  ■ describe how color design establishes

  ■ explain how visual conventions help establish

  symbolic meaning, narrative organization, and

  representational reality and how filmmakers

  psychological mood and tone

  may “quote” from other films

  ■ explain the relationship between

  cinematography and digital effects

  During production, a film’s visual design results from the way that filmmakers arrange elements before the camera—sets, costumes, actors, props, light, and color. Titanic (1997), for example, featured extremely detailed sets and costume design, and the film’s meticulous recreation of that vanished historical world held extraordinary fascination for audiences. Viewers responded to the romance at the center of the film’s narrative but also to the luxuriance of its imagery. The term mise-en-scène is sometimes used to designate a film’s overall visual design and to refer to all the elements placed before the camera to be photographed.

  Filmmakers also control the visual design of their work through editing, but this occurs during postproduction, after they have implemented the designs achieved through light, color, production design, and performance. Accordingly, we will examine editing after considering these other elements of production proper.

  Cinematography , examined in this chapter, pertains to the use of light and color.

  Production design involves the creation of sets, locations, costuming, and all visual environments that are depicted on screen. Performance style deals with the actor’s contribution to the film and how filmmakers incorporate actors as visual elements within the frame. A filmmaker’s use of actors can be quite realistic or extremely stylized and pictorial.

  COLLABORATION AND PRE-VISUALIZATION

  The director, cinematographer, and production designer work together in close collaboration to create an effective visual design. Production designers and cinematographers translate the director’s vision into the terms of their respective crafts, and in practice, they subordinate their own artistic inclinations to the director’s wishes.

  Production designer Mel Bourne, whose credits include Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) and Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal (1993), characterizes the creative partnership necessary to plan the visual design of a film by stressing that the production designer and cinematographer should be working on the same wavelength, which, in turn, comes from the director.

  During preproduction, the cinematographer and production designer con-

  sult with the director to discuss and define the film’s design. This work is called pre-visualization because it is an initial attempt to formulate the basic features of how the film will look. As aids to pre-visualization, the director, cinematographer, and production designer often will look for references in such visual fields as architecture, painting, and photography. On The Passion of the Christ (2004), cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and director Mel Gibson based the look of the film on Renaissance painting, especially the work of Caravaggio. The Romantic paintings of J. M. Turner helped establish the look of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of 58

  Cinematography

  AMERICAN BEAUTY (DREAMWORKS, 1999)

  The relationship between the director and cinematographer is a crucial one on any production, and it can vary considerably depending on their talents and personality. Many first-time directors lack the aptitude for strong visual design and depend on their cinematographer’s choices about lighting and camera placement. By contrast, Conrad Hall, the cinematographer for American Beauty , found first-time director Sam Mendes to be a strong visual stylist with very precise ideas about framing, lighting, and camera placement. Stimulated by Mendes’s ideas and cinematic talents, Hall produced work that won the 1999 Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Frame enlargement.

  Heaven (2005). To visualize J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the filmmakers of The Lord of the Rings studied the book covers and the watercolor paintings used to illustrate the novels and hired two of the illustrators to serve as conceptual artists on the films. To design L.A. Confidential (1997), director Curtis Hanson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti used photographer Robert Frank’s 1958 book,

  The Americans . This collection of Frank’s work showcased the visual elements they wanted in their film—high-intensity light that “burns out” in the photos, high contrast, and the incorporation of light sources within the photos—as well as a 1950s time period that coincided with the film’s narrative. Even comic books might supply inspiration, as Japanese manga did for the directors and cinematographer of The Matrix (1999).

  Other motion pictures are a common source for pre-visualization. To plan the lighting for Insomnia (2002), cinematographer Wally Pfister studied modern film classics distinguished by their moody lighting, The Godfather, Part III (1990), Apocalypse Now (1979), Seven (1995). The film noir classic The Third Man (1949) influenced the lighting style of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). To pre-visualize the Mel Gibson Vietnam war film, We Were Soldiers , cinematographer Dean Semler studied the classic war films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Pork Chop Hill (1959).

  Cinematographer Robert Elswit and director Paul Thomas Anderson used The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as a visual model for There Will Be Blood (2007), and to achieve the look of an old film they also used old-fashioned, outdated lenses on the camera. Several crime films of the 1970s, including The French Connection (1971) and Serpico (1973) furnished the influence for Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007), a film set in that period.

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  Cinematography

  THE ESSENTIALS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY

  The cinematographer creates the images that viewers see on screen, manipulating their elements to establish a unified and memorable design. Memorable compositions result from the careful control of image elements and their balancing within the frame. Such compositions can vividly express a film or scene’s underlying emotional dynamics or themes.

  How does a cinematographer organize visual elements to produce such images?

  Working with the director, the cinematographer determines the film
stock on which the picture will be shot, the aspect ratio, the lenses and camera positions used in filming scenes, and the lighting and color design of the scenes.

  Film Stocks, Lenses, and Aspect Ratios

  Cinematographers work with a variety of film stocks , which are identified by their manufacturer and stock number (e.g., Kodak 5298). Selecting one or more stocks for a production enables the cinematographer to control a large number of image characteristics. Film stocks vary in terms of their sensitivity to light, color reproduction, tolerance for diverse lighting conditions, amount of grain (grain is visible as tiny specks or dots within the image), contrast levels, sharpness, and resolving power (the ability to discriminate fine detail). A cinematographer will select a given stock depending on how it handles these characteristics and its suitability for the design of a given production.

  Cinematographer Darius Khondji, for example, shot all the nighttime scenes for Seven (1995), a dark thriller about a serial killer, on Kodak 5287 because this stock gave him exceptionally dark blacks, suitable for the film’s mood and theme. To accentuate this effect even more, Khondji used ENR to restore silver to the negative, increasing the density of its blacks. To create the off-kilter visual style of Natural Born Killers (1994), Oliver Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson intermixed five 35-mm stocks, four 16-mm stocks, and three 8-mm stocks to create vivid changes in color, contrast, grain, and resolution. In U Turn (1998), during an argument and fight between two principal characters, Stone and Richardson switched film stocks in mid-scene to create glaring changes of color and grain. These were intended to visualize the scene’s volatile emotional swings. On Alexander (2004), Stone used color infrared stock to portray Alexander the Great’s mystical visions.

  Filmmakers often emulate the inspiring innovations of other directors and cinematographers. On Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995), cinematographer Malik Sayeed employed a stock never before used in a motion picture, Kodak 5239, which was manufactured for use by NASA and the Air Force. The grain structure of the stock made its images look extremely raw—suitable for this grim film about urban drugs and violence—and it vividly rendered primary colors, making reds and blues glow on screen and leap out of the frame. The unusual look of Clockers impressed Oliver Stone and Robert Richardson, who used the stock in U Turn to create selectively lurid color effects. Spike Lee again employed 5239 on Summer of Sam (1999). Since then, the “cross-processing” of a raw, grainy stock has come into general use. Recent examples include the dream sequences in From Hell (2001), the Hughes brothers’ film about Jack the Ripper, and the 1950s flashback scenes in Blow (2001), which starred Johnny Depp as a drug dealer.

  Cinematographers select their lenses to give images the visual properties that will express a film’s underlying themes or the dramatic requirements of given scenes. Pleasantville (1998) is a fantasy about a 1950s-style sitcom whose characters become progressively more 60

  Cinematography

  ATONEMENT (UNIVERSAL, 2007)

  Controlling a shot’s depth of field—the

  area in focus—can be a powerful way of

  achieving an effective composition. The

  shallow plane of focus makes all of the

  foreground objects a blur and thereby

  concentrates the viewer’s attention on one

  character (Keira Knightley), as her face is

  reflected in a mirror. Frame enlargement.

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1962)

  Great depth of field can also help

  create powerful compositions. In

  this famous shot—held by editor

  Ann V. Coates and director David

  Lean for a long time—Lawrence

  (Peter O’Toole, left) and his

  guide watch a mysterious figure

  ride toward them from the hori-

  zon. Positioning the foreground

  characters on each side of the wi-

  descreen frame and having them

  gaze at the approaching rider

  create a fulcrum that draws the

  viewer’s eye irresistibly toward

  the rider. The extreme depth of

  field and the way the shot is held

  on screen without cutting create

  remarkable tension about what

  in the story is going to happen

  next. Frame enlargement.

  THE MATRIX (WARNER

  BROS., 1999)

  When Neo (Keanu Reeves)

  learns the truth about the

  Matrix from Morpheus

  (Laurence Fishburne), he

  appears as a reflection on

  Morpheus’ eye-glasses. By

  making Morpheus the domi-

  nant visual element in the

  shot, it stresses his power

  and wisdom compared with

  Neo’s lack of knowledge

  about the world he has en-

  tered. Frame enlargement.

  61

  Cinematography

  THERE WILL BE BLOOD (PARAMOUNT, 2007)

  Composition can visualize a scene’s emotional content through a careful arrangement of objects in the frame. Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor, left) claims to be the long-lost brother of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, left). Plainview is skeptical, and the composition depicts the emotional gulf between the men by placing them on opposite sides of the widescreen frame. The visual distance between them corresponds to their emotional state. Frame enlargement.

  A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

  (NEW LINE CINEMA, 1984)

  Horror films regularly make use of

  disturbing compositional styles. His

  knife-like claws make the killer, Freddy

  Kreuger (Robert Englund), look mon-

  strous, but so does the composition.

  Kreuger is back-lit, making him a silhou-

  ette. His face is lit from below, reversing

  the normal way that shadows are dis-

  tributed on a human face. The camera

  angle is low, making him into a looming

  figure. And he looks directly, and threat-

  eningly, at the camera and therefore at

  us, the viewers. Frame enlargement.

  modern in their outlook. To suggest this change at a visual level, the cinematographer began shooting with shorter lenses that corresponded with those used in 1950s films and then, as the story progressed, began moving to the longer focal lengths characteristic of contemporary filmmaking. In a subliminal fashion, this gave the images an evolving historical look and context. To suggest a world in which everything was for sale, the cinematographer of The Truman Show (1998) used the extreme wide-angle perspectives often seen in television advertising. To capture a 1970s look for scenes in The Velvet Goldmine (1998) occurring in that time period, the cinematographer used zoom lenses rather than camera movement. Zooms were featured prominently in films of that era, and the cinematographer liked the way the zoom emphasized surfaces (because it merely magnifies an image) rather than depth and perspective, as true camera movement does.

  When choosing an aspect ratio (the dimensions of the screen image), cinematographers must balance several considerations. Which of the available ratios is best 62

  Cinematography

  CLOSE-UP

  What Are Light and Color?

  Light and color are the tools of the cinematogra-

  pher’s art. In addition to planning camera setups

  and movements, the cinematographer organizes

  the lighting design of scenes and the placement of

  color gels to augment or enhance certain colors on

  screen.

  Light is a form of radiant energy, a part of the

  White Sunlight

  total electromagnetic spectrum. Light is visible

  Prism

  only at its source or as it is reflected off another

  object. Colors are visible when white light is
<
br />   broken down into its component wavelengths .

  Red Yellow

  Colored objects reflect or transmit their color

  Red-

  values depending on whether they are solid ob-

  Yellow

  jects or translucent. A rose appears red because it

  Green

  absorbs all visible wavelengths with the exception

  of red light, which it reflects. A bottle of green

  Blue

  dishwashing liquid looks green because the liquid

  Purple

  transmits only green light and acts as a filter to

  block out all other colors.

  In the cinema, colors can be created on the set

  by using these processes of reflectance and trans-

  mission. Lighting a blue object on the set will in-

  crease its ability to reflect blue to the camera. Using

  FIGURE 1

  a red gel or filter over a white light source will cause

  Prism.

  that source to transmit only red light.

  The Gray Scale

  Properties of Color

  Until the 1960s, black-and-white was a common

  Three properties of color are important. Hue refers to

  film format. Since the 1960s, by contrast, black-and-

  the color itself. Red, blue, green, and yellow are hues.

  white has been used rarely but with powerful artistic

  These four hues are unique. They do not resemble

  effect. Steven Spielberg shot his film about the

  one another. By contrast, pink, a derivative of red, is

  Holocaust, Schindler’s List (1993), in black-and-white

  not a unique hue. Saturation refers to the strength of

  because it would give his film a harsher, stark look

  a color. Red is more highly saturated than pink.

  appropriate to its grim subject matter.

  Intensity , or brightness, refers to how much

  Black-and-white film and television cameras see

  light a given colored object reflects. In respect of

  only degrees of brightness, ranging from white to

  this property, the viewer makes certain assumptions

  black through intermediate shades of gray. This