Production Design
ALIEN, ALIENS (20 TH
CENTURY FOX, 1979, 1986)
Production design of the space-
craft Nostromo evoked two
sharply contrasting environ-
ments. The sterile, antiseptic sci-
ence bays and computer rooms
showed the influence of Kubrick’s
2001 . But it was the dark, grimy
interior of the Nostromo, and
its low-key lighting, that helped
establish “future noir” in science
fiction films for years to come.
Frame enlargements.
BLADE RUNNER (THE
LADD COMPANY, 1982)
Blade Runner ’s influential
design concept followed the
social realities depicted in
script and novel. The visual
clutter evokes a ghettoized
urban future marked by
social breakdown. The film’s
production design brilliantly
embodies the novel’s themes
of entropy and decay.
The noirish, pessimistic mise-en-scène established by
styles in sci-fi noir, it was built on a grid pattern, like
Alien and Blade Runner predominated in science fiction
Manhattan, with vanishing single-point perspective. This
films for the next 15 years. Even fantasies such as the
design connects this futuristic cityscape with the recog-
Batman series visualize a noir environment. So prevalent
nizable metropolis of today. Innovative and startling in
had it become that when director Luc Besson and de-
its time, the future noir look had become conventional, a
signer Dan Weil were planning The Fifth Element (1997),
mise-en-scène to avoid for The Fifth Element ’s filmmakers,
they felt it imperative to break with this style and define
interested in creating new imagery. Like cinematogra-
an alternative. Accordingly, The Fifth Element ’s city is seen
phers, production designers study and borrow from the
mostly by day, and has a recognizable Manhattan skyline,
work of their peers, and really successful design concepts
and in place of the tangled and shadowy architectural
in time can become obstacles to fresh creation. ■
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Production Design
PRODUCTION DESIGN AND VISUAL EFFECTS
As with cinematography, production design in contemporary filmmaking overlaps with the creation of digital effects. Many special effects sequences in film blend miniature models with digital mattes or digital animation. In The Truman Show (1998), the tall buildings on the main street set of Seahaven, Truman’s home town, were only partially constructed as ground-level facades. The upper floors were digital creations, giving the sets greater mass and height than they actually possessed. The same strategy was used to create the huge Coliseum in Gladiator (1999). Audiences delight in these manipulations of place and setting and embrace the movie magic that makes them possible.
In some cases, sets, locations, and props may be entirely digital, with live actors inhabiting computer-designed environments. In this case, production design occurs within a digital realm, and films like Sin City (2005) and 300 (2006) illustrate this approach.
SUMMARY
The term mise-en-scène refers to the design and manipulation of all the objects placed in the frame in front of the camera. These typically include sets, costumes, light and color, and the actor’s performance. The three chief members of the filmmaking team who are responsible for mise-en-scène are the director, cinematographer, and the production designer. They form a close three-way partnership to arrive at the visual concepts that will underlie and guide the visual design of the film.
Both cinematographer and production designer have the responsibility of helping the director to realize his or her vision for the film. The cinematographer does this by planning lighting and camera setups and assisting in the coordination of color as it will appear in the scene, often by placing colored gelatins in front of the lights. The production designer assists the director, organizing a visual design for the environments of the film. Components of these environments include sets, costumes, mattes, and miniatures.
The production designer, in conference with the cinematographer, helps organize the film’s color design through the choices that are made about sets and costumes.
The importance of an organizing visual design for a film, agreed on by the director, cinematographer, and production designer, is to facilitate a unified mise-en-scène in which all of the elements—costumes, sets, lights, color, and performance—work together to advance the narrative and to represent mood and atmosphere on screen and to evoke appropriate interpretive and emotional responses by the viewer.
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
art director
photogrammetry
set decorator
camera mapping
pixels
snorkel lens
costumes
production design
supervising art director
costume designer
prop master
3D digital mattes
design concept
recces
translite
matte paintings
scenic artist
tromp l’oeil
miniatures
sets
unit art director
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Production Design
SUGGESTED READINGS
Sybil DelGaudio, Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992).
Peter Ettedgui, Production Design and Art Direction (Woburn, MA: Focal Press, 1999).
Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Beverly Heisner, Hollywood Art: Art Direction in the Days of the Great Studios (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990).
Andrew Horton, Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
Vincent LoBrutto, By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).
119
120
Acting
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
■ list the basic types of film performers
■ explain how performance elicits
interpretive and emotional responses from
■ differentiate between method and technical
viewers
approaches to performing
■ describe four ways in which performance
becomes an element of visual design
From Chapter 4 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
121
Acting
The actor is the human element in film. Many components of cinema involve machinery—
lights, camera, computers for editing and visual effects—but performance puts the reality of human emotion directly onto screen. Carl Dreyer, one of cinema’s greatest directors, felt that the human face was the most important element of cinema, and many filmmakers agree with him. Dreyer’s most emotionally intense film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is composed almost entirely of close-ups of faces.
Nearly all film acting derives from the tradition of naturalism established by Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), a Russian teacher, actor, and director who emphasized that performance should be anchored in the emotional reality of the script and story, the characters, and their situation. Good film actors aim to find these moments of emotional truth in a scene and to play these as honestly as they can using the
tools of their craft—their face, voice, and body.
Many of cinema’s greatest actors—Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Tom Hanks—are so honest that they don’t seem to be acting at all. Their performances become transparent, revealing the characters with exceptional clarity.
Actors have different methods of preparation, but the good ones all try to find the emotional arc in the story and to play that. They search for correspondences between their inner emotional life and the situation of the characters they are playing. A good actor is always “in the moment,”
speaking and moving in ways that honestly embody the drama at each moment in a scene.
Good film acting has an element of unpredictability, and that is why some directors are uncomfortable with actors. Directors have to turn actors loose in front of a camera, and to get good results, they can’t control actors with the mechanical precision that they can exercise over lighting or editing.
But this lack of control is where the artistry of acting resides, where the actor’s interpretation of the material arises. During a tender scene between actors Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront (he plays a tough dockworker and ex-boxer; she’s a proper young lady), Saint accidentally dropped her white glove on the ground. Brando picked it up, but instead of handing it back to her, he put it on and wore it for the remainder of the scene. Watching the scene, you can see that Saint expects him to give her back the glove.
She reaches for it, but Brando holds onto it, plays with it as they talk, and then wears it. It was a spontaneous, unscripted moment that is wonderful because it’s true to the scene. It conveys the tenderness in Brando’s tough character and the unspoken attraction he feels for her.
THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)
Director Carl Dreyer felt that the human
face was the most cinematic element of all,
and he composed this film, about the trial
and execution of Joan of Arc, almost entirely
as a series of facial close-ups. Most films are
not as stylistically radical as this, but Dreyer
was right about the special emotional truth
that the actor’s presence before the camera
uniquely conveys. Frame enlargement.
122
Acting
ON THE
WATERFRONT
(COLUMBIA
PICTURES, 1954)
Good acting conveys
the emotion of a scene
with truth and honesty.
Good actors can be
so “in the moment”
that they create new,
unscripted material in
their performance that
adds to and improves
the scene. Brando’s
brilliant gesture with the
glove reframes all the
scene’s dialogue with this
spontaneous expression
of his character’s
attraction to Edy (Eva
Marie Saint). In this
frame enlargement, Saint
clearly expects Brando to
give back her glove.
ACTING IN FILM AND THEATER
What are the basic characteristics of acting in the cinema, and how does performance style become an element of a film’s visual design? Acting in the cinema is a uniquely difficult challenge. While screen acting would seem to bear some similarity with performance in the theater, the differences between acting in the two mediums are significant. Only in live theatre can actors be said to own their performances. Film actors do not own their performances. In cinema, an actor’s performance is reconfigured by editing, sound design, music, and other elements of structure. Filmmakers use these elements to redesign performance. While this makes the actor’s contribution to the medium of cinema somewhat more ambiguous than it is in theatre, it remains true that narrative cinema is heavily reliant upon good acting. Five characteristics of the motion picture medium make the actor’s task different from what it is in theatre: lack of rehearsal; out-of-continuity shooting; the amplification of gesture and expression by the camera and sound recording equipment; the effects of lighting, lenses, and greenscreening; and the absence of an audience.
Lack of Rehearsal
In theater, rehearsal is an essential part of the production process. Actors do not go before a live audience until the play and their performance in it have been thoroughly rehearsed.
This enables actors to achieve the right nuances and timing in their performance and to work on, and hopefully resolve, problem areas in the production.
By contrast, in cinema, rehearsal is a relative rarity. For a film production to accord its actors a two-week rehearsal period is a luxury. With thousands of dollars consumed by each day of a shoot, the great expense of film production works against 123
Acting
a lengthy rehearsal period. Moreover, the sad fact is that many film directors dislike working with actors and mistrust the actor’s contribution to a scene or shot and feel relatively insecure about collaborating with performers to secure the right nuance in a scene. Other directors who are skilled at working with actors, such as Sydney Pollack ( Out of Africa , 1985), prefer to avoid rehearsing because the time that is available is simply too short. Because of these factors, actors in film lack the elaborate prep time to develop a role and a performance that is standard in theater. Film actors have to hit the ground running, learn their lines, arrive on the set, and play their character for the camera. This is an extraordinary demand, but it is compensated by the fact that, in most cases, the performer is one element among many in the frame, and the filmmaker can use lighting, camerawork, editing, and sound to modulate and strengthen the actor’s performance.
Shooting Out of Continuity
Motion pictures are filmed out of continuity. The order in which scenes are filmed is very different from the order in which they appear in the finished film. The sequencing of scenes as they appear in the final finished film is achieved during the process of editing and does not occur during shooting. Economies of time and cost determine the order in which scenes are filmed, the goal being to do it in the most cost-efficient way possible. To save time and money, all scenes occurring in a given location or on a particular set may be filmed at one time, regardless of how they are distributed throughout the narrative. When the filming of all scenes occurring in a given location or set has been completed, the production company moves on to the next set or location to film the scenes that occur there.
The filming of each scene also fails to observe proper continuity. Typically, the master shot is filmed first, and the performers run through the entire action of the scene from the master shot camera position. This is generally a framing of the action in medium long shot that shows an overall view of the set and the actors in it. Then the actors recreate bits of the action for inserts and close-ups. These supply what is known as coverage , which the editor will intercut with the master shot to create the edited scene. When filming coverage, an actor typically will deliver all his or her dialogue that is recorded from a given camera position, regardless of when it may appear in the scene.
All of this can complicate the actor’s job. One of cinema’s great actors, Michael Caine, wrote a highly respected book, Acting in Film , in which he discussed how strange this way of working might seem to an actor. “If the last scene in a picture takes place outside, you can count on the fact that it will get shot first and then you will move to the studio to shoot all the scenes leading up to it. You might shoot the master in the morning, then rush out in the afternoon to shoot another scene because suddenly the sun came out. Then you have to come back some other time and continue with the morning scene, then perhaps do the medium shot and close-up a week later.” One of the most famous acting scenes in U.S. films, the so-called Brother Charlie scene from On the Waterfront (1954), dramatically illustrates these challenges. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando)
and his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) are part of the mob that controls the longshoremen’s union on the New York dockyards.
Sickened by its corruption, Terry wants to leave the mob, but his brother tries to persuade him to stay because he knows if Terry leaves and turns informant, as the state prosecutor wishes him to do, a mob contract will be issued on his life.
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Acting
ON THE WATERFRONT (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1954)
Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in two camera setups from On the Waterfront. In the two-shot, both actors are present, and each can build a performance by playing off the other.
In the close-up, however, Rod Steiger (pictured) had to deliver his lines while Brando was absent from the set. The angle of Steiger’s eyes makes it seem as if he is looking at Brando, but he had to create his character in the scene under highly artificial conditions.
Frame enlargements.
In the scene, a master shot of the two actors alternates with close-ups of each. In the close-ups, actor Rod Steiger had to deliver all his dialogue in the scene that was to be recorded from this camera position, regardless of when the dialogue occurred.
Complicating this task, Steiger later reported, was the fact that Brando left the set on the days Steiger had to deliver these lines. Steiger played his scene and projected his emotions to an actor who was not there.
These conditions of filming require that actors be able to recreate their character at any moment in the drama as required by the shooting schedule. By contrast, the performer in the theater has it a bit easier. He or she creates a character sequentially and chronologically in real time, from act one to the last act of the play.
Amplification of Gesture and Expression
On stage, the actor plays to an audience that is sitting some distance away in the auditorium. The actor’s gestures and vocal inflections must be large and loud enough to reach the most distant point in the auditorium. By contrast, the film camera and sound equipment act as magnifying instruments, amplifying even the tiniest of gestures and the smallest of vocal inflections. The film actor has to understand when a little is too much and has to know how to precisely calibrate the smallest degree of facial and vocal reaction with the knowledge of how that will play when magnified on the giant motion picture screen.
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 21
