Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition
Page 54
A dissolve links the end of the credit sequence to a close-up of the eyes of the lawyer’s young daughter, viewed as a negative image. Here, Scorsese revived an expressionist technique from Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu. To suggest the phantom world, Murnau showed Dracula’s coach and horses as film negatives. Scorsese pulls viewers out of the expressionist title sequence and inserts them into the world of the 352
Modes of Screen Reality
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (UNITED ARTISTS, 1955)
For this story about a psychotic preacher (played by Robert Mitchum, right), director Charles Laughton used many visual elements drawn from silent cinema. These included the expressionist tradition of set design and chiaroscuro lighting. Note how Mitchum’s pose and raised arm harmonize with the sloping walls of the set, integrating character and architecture in the visual manner that expressionists preferred. In this scene, set design and lighting make the bedroom look like a chapel. The slashing blades of light mimic the knife that Preacher Harry will use to murder Willa Harper (Shelly Winters, on bed, right). Frame enlargement.
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (PARAMOUNT, 2004)
The set design of Count Olaf’s house recalls classic German expressionism in its use of diagonals and sloping graphic elements. The appearance is unsettling and disorderly, an effective visual portrait of this villain’s lair. Frame enlargement.
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Modes of Screen Reality
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
(DREAMWORKS, 2007)
Director Tim Burton often incorporates the expressionist mode into his films, such as Batman Returns (1992) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). For this set representing the room that Sweeney (Johnny Depp) rents from Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), Burton asked his production designer to incorporate the large slanting window because it would be reminiscent of classic German expressionism. Frame enlargement.
narrative proper by using negative imagery, suggesting, at a visual level what the narrative will establish, a world in which human behavior and values are dangerously inverted.
Used by filmmakers as diverse as Hitchcock, Burton, and Scorsese, expressionism constitutes a powerful mode of screen reality permitting a filmmaker to break with realism and skew images and characters in ways expressive of social or psychological abnormality. In this regard, the style has transcended the context (silent German cinema) in which it first flourished to become an essential and ongoing mode of screen reality.
FANTASY AND THE FANTASTIC
This mode of screen reality sometimes overlaps with expressionism (as, for example, in the case of Batman Returns , 1992). There are, however, important distinctions between them. Expressionism can be employed within a relatively naturalistic framework, as in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, where the expressionistic elements are of relatively brief duration and occur within scenes whose overall style is more naturalistic. By contrast, in films employing a fantasy or fantastic mode, settings and subjects, characters, and narrative time are often displaced from the viewer’s own realm into other realms, sometimes futuristic ones, where normal laws of time and space may not apply. Characters might have superpowers, like Superman, or advanced technology that lends them superpowers, 354
Modes of Screen Reality
A TRIP TO THE MOON
(1902)
One of the cinema’s fundamental
roots lies in fantasy. Since the
inception of the medium, film-
makers have used it to picture
the imagination. Early filmmaker
Georges Melies filmed a band of
intrepid astronomers traveling
to the moon and dreamed up
this memorable image, picturing
their spaceship landing in the eye
of the man in the moon. Frame
enlargement.
like Robocop. Adventurers can pilot starships to new galaxies as in Star Wars , and artificial beings, created by mad inventors, can become suburban hairdressers, like Edward Scissorhands. Angels can assume material form and fall in love with humans, as in City of Angels.
This mode is as old as cinema. One of the earliest films was Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), which took viewers on the titular journey and depicted the moon as inhabited by a species of lizard people who chase their visitors from Earth merrily about. A Trip to the Moon is a science fiction fantasy, but the mode of fantasy in cinema transcends genre. Fantasy is essential to science fiction but it also can characterize romance ( Always, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, City of Angels, Ghost ), drama ( Stairway to Heaven ), the war film ( A Guy Named Joe ), and Arthurian legend ( Excalibur, First Knight ).
The success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy has made fantasy into one of the currently most popular modes of filmmaking. Rings -style films about magical lands, sorcery, mythical creatures, and children embarking on epic adventures have proliferated in recent years. They include The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), Nim’s Island (2008), The Bridge to Terabithia (2007), The Golden Compass (2007), Beowulf (2007), and Eragon (2006).
Ways of Making Fantasy Credible
Viewers are willing, even eager, to suspend disbelief in order to enter an enchanting, amusing, or thrilling fantasy world. Filmmakers, though, have to work to sustain this willingness and make the unreal seem credible for the duration of the film. One way of doing this is to set the fantasy within recognizably real surroundings, as in City of Angels (1998), where well-known Los Angeles settings (and some in San Francisco) provide a convincing locale for the action. So intent were the City of Angels filmmakers on evoking the realities of an urban setting that they placed the actors (Nicolas 355
Modes of Screen Reality
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
(DISNEY, 2005)
The success of The Lord of the Rings films has led to many more productions in the mode of fantasy. Among the most successful have been adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia novels, about the adventures of four children in the magical, mythical kingdom of Narnia. Frame enlargement.
Cage and Dennis Franz) high atop a real skyscraper construction site for a dialogue scene that has the characters sitting on a girder overlooking the city. Having evoked place in this detailed manner, the film shifts easily into its moments of explicit fantasy—angels defying time and space to move with lightning speed, angels guiding the dying into a transcendent realm of light, an angel’s hand unharmed by a knife that has sliced through his finger.
Another effective way to establish the credibility of a fantasy world is through the sheer accumulation of narrative detail. The more thoroughly a filmmaker can render the fantasy world, the richer its tapestry of detail— characters, places, events—the more convincing it will come to seem to viewers. George Lucas is a master at working in this manner. The hugeness of his Star Wars project— encompassing to date six films produced over more than two decades—and the expanse and wealth of story information that he gave to his mythopoetic world are quite unprecedented in modern cinema. By beginning his saga in the middle of the story ( Star Wars is “Episode IV”), Lucas abruptly plunged his viewers into a well-defined fantasy universe, and each subsequent film elaborated on the intricate network of characters and locations that the films were constructing, installment by installment. By the end of Return of the Jedi , this imaginative universe contained a galaxy of uniquely differentiated and vividly rendered planets where critical episodes of the story line occur. The Empire Strikes Back opens on the ice world of Hoth and a deadly clash between the Empire and the rebel forces, which have gone into hiding after launching (from the planet of Yavin 4) their assault on the first Death Star in Star Wars. The heroes, Luke, Han, and Princess Leia, escape the battle, with Luke journeying to the jungle world of Dagobah, where he encounters the Zen-like but diminutive Yoda. Han and Leia seek refuge on Bespin
in the Cloud City run by Lando Calrissian. Darth Vader, though, sets a trap, freeze-dries Han, and sends him to Tatooine, the desert world where Luke grew up and where the toad-like gangster Jabba the Hut has his headquarters. The climax of the Empire–rebel struggle occurs in Return of the Jedi on Endor, a forest planet that is 356
Modes of Screen Reality
home to the Ewok, a race of furry, cute, but fierce rebel allies. Filling out this remarkably detailed gallery of places and characters are bounty hunters (Boba Fett, Greedo), monsters (the sand-dwelling Sarlacc), and Wild West cantinas (Mos Eisley). The elaborate effects that Lucas and his artists created for the films are certainly a major part of their appeal. But the intricately layered narrative details extending across six films arguably have done more to establish the fantasy and make it convincing.
A third way of establishing credibility in this mode is by using production design to make unreal settings seem tangible and convincing. Consider the work of Tim Burton, one of the most popular filmmakers currently working in fantasy. His films include Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Mars Attacks! (1996), and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999) and, as producer, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Batman features a brilliant production design by Anton Furst that evokes Gotham City as a dark, congested metropolis rife with crime. As in other films about dark cities of the future— Blade Runner (1982), Dark City (1998), and The Matrix (1999)—the metropolis of Batman is one of the stars of the film, taking a commanding visual presence alongside the major characters. Rendered with sets, mattes, and miniature models, Gotham is a wholly imaginary creation, but its visual design is so powerful that it comes convincingly to life.
In Edward Scissorhands , production designer Bo Welch daringly drops Edward’s medieval castle into the middle of suburbia, even showing it perched ominously at the end of a street of trim houses with manicured lawns. It’s an ostentatious design concept, almost daring the audience to react with disbelief. Yet, when a saleswoman (Dianne Wiest) calls on its occupant, the castle proves to be adorned with so much Gothic detail that it becomes unquestionably real.
In fantasy, the real is limited only by a filmmaker’s imagination, and whatever an audience can be persuaded to believe in becomes real for this mode. In this regard, fantasy offers filmmakers tremendous flexibility of style and freedom of invention EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1990)
All things are possible in fantasy, even a gothic castle perched in the middle of suburbia.
Frame enlargement.
357
Modes of Screen Reality
because audiences do not require plausibility in the way that they ask it from a filmmaker working in the realist mode. An enduring cliché of science fiction films demonstrates the freedom to invent that fantasy offers its filmmakers. Except mainly for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which showed spacecraft gliding silently through space, most science fiction spacecraft emit loud, powerful rumblings from their engines. In Star Wars’ first scene, for example, a series of spaceships approaches the camera, and then, in a reverse angle cut, the group flies away. The roar of the engines gives these visual-effects creations an impressive physicality. Multichannel sound, with the dedicated bass channel, has accentuated this cliché because now spacecraft can emit wall-shaking low-frequency sound as they pass by. Doppler effects are routinely employed to create the changes in pitch (higher pitch for approaching objects, lower for receding ones) correlated with movement.
While the Doppler effects are accurate for Earth-bound experience, in the
outer-space context they are impossible. In space there is no sound because there is no medium, such as the air or atmosphere on earth, to transport sound waves.
Consequently, spaceships should make no perceivable noise at all. But this would be dramatically flat and uninteresting. Thus the cliché has developed—which viewers happily endorse—that spaceships traveling through a void make noise.
Fantasy and Cinema Technology
The fantasy mode is tremendously popular throughout the world. The Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings , Spider-Man, and Star Wars series have generated billions of dollars in global markets. To take advantage of this popularity, fantasy films now showcase the industry’s most important technological advances. Digital multichannel sound debuted in three high-profile fantasy films. Dolby Digital premiered its system in Batman Returns (1992). Digital Theater Systems (DTS) unveiled its CD-playback system with Jurassic Park (1993). Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) came online in The Last Action Hero (1993).
George Lucas is a major figure in modern movie fantasy and in pushing the industry to develop the next generation of effects technology. These two attributes are interconnected. In 1975, he created Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which became the industry’s premiere effects house, creating effects for dozens of major productions—
the Star Trek series, the Indiana Jones series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and Jurassic Park (1993)—and doing research on the next generation of effects tools, those that would be supplied by digital imaging and digital methods of production. By the mid-eighties, Lucasfilm had a computer-assisted electronic editor (EditDroid) online and an all-digital sound editor (SoundDroid) used to mix and create effects for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. To achieve cutting-edge sound in the films that he produced, Lucas constructed the industry’s state-of-the-art postproduction sound facility, the Technical Building at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s corporate headquarters in Marin, California.
As with sound, the revolution in digital imaging developed in cinema for films in the fantasy mode. Computer-animated sequences first appeared in Future World (1976), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), but the box-office failure of the first three pictures delayed the widespread application of digital imaging for several years. But, by the late eighties and early nineties, digital imaging had attained new levels of sophistication, and the next generation of digital effects films created tremendous interest in the technology 358
Modes of Screen Reality
WHO FRAMED ROGER
RABBIT (DISNEY,
1988); THE MASK
(NEW LINE, 1994)
Fantasy has been on the
cutting edge for new
developments in cinema
technology. Traditional
(nondigital) methods of
compositing visual effects
images reached their
zenith in Who Framed
Roger Rabbit , an expert
blend of live action with
animated characters. The
widespread application
of digital imaging in the
years following Roger
Rabbit took the visual
potential of cinema into
new dimensions. Fantasy
films showcased these
breakthroughs. Frame
enlargements.
throughout the industry and excited audiences with fantasy creatures that seemed impossibly real: the slithery water alien in The Abyss (1989), the gleaming, shape-shifting Terminator 2 (1991), and the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997, 2001).
The vividness of Spielberg’s dinosaurs—created by ILM—convinced George
Lucas to return to his Star Wars series since digital effects offered a new arsenal of powerful tools for envisioning anything a filmmaker could imagine. Lucas had long wanted to shift the industry toward all-digital methods of filmmaking, and he pursued this ambition with the new Star Wars films. Attack of the Clones (2002) was shot on digital cameras that were custom-built for Lucas by Sony, and the film was exhibited theatrically in digital format at selected locations around the country. Lucas’s ambitions are big ones, and the industry is transforming itself to meet them. The long-term result will be comparable with the coming of sound in the late 1920s; that is, it will change everything. It will cut the industry o
ff from 359
Modes of Screen Reality
the photomechanical technology to which it has been wedded since its inception and take it into an all-electronic realm.
The fantasy mode has been a key player in this drama. It is now synonymous
with state-of-the-art cinema technology. In this regard, fantasy is tremendously important for contemporary cinema. It generates huge box office success and is propelling the industry into its all-digital future.
CLOSE-UP
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Fantasy constructs alternative worlds to our own.
stepfather and her mother’s husband, is hunting
What is the relationship between the two? What role
guerillas that are fighting against the country’s mili-
or purpose does fantasy fulfill? Pan’s Labyrinth, an in-
tary dictatorship.
ternational award-winning film written and directed
Vidal is a cruel man who delights in murder and
by Guillermo del Toro, examines these questions by
torture, and he values Ofelia’s mother only for the
creating a parable about a young girl’s encounters
son she will bear him. At the post, Ofelia encoun-
with a mysterious faun that lives inside an old maze
ters the faun who tells her she is the reincarnation
or labyrinth.
of a princess who lived with her parents in the
The story takes place in Spain during the fascist
Underground Realm. Princess Moanna grew curi-
era of World War II, and Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)
ous about the human world, left her parents, and
travels with her mother, Carmen, to a military
went above, where she grew old, forgot her past,
post where Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez I Ayats), her
and died, and all traces of her vanished from the