B0041VYHGW EBOK (92 page)

The history of the technique has teased film theorists into speculating about whether the subjective shot evokes identification from the audience. Do we think we
are
Philip Marlowe? The problem of audience identification with a point-of-view shot remains a difficult one in film theory. A useful discussion is Edward Branigan’s
Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film
(New York: Mouton, 1984).

When the camera is running, does it record real time? If so, what artistic implications follow from that?

André Bazin argued that cinema is an art that depends on actual duration. Like photography, Bazin claimed, cinema is a
recording process.
The camera registers, photochemically, the light reflected from the object. Like the still camera, the movie camera records space. But unlike the still camera, the movie camera can also record
time.
“The cinema is objectivity in time…. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were” (
What Is Cinema?
vol. 1 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966],
pp. 14
–15). On this basis, Bazin saw editing as an intrusive interruption of the natural continuity of duration. He thus praised long-take directors such as Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, William Wyler, and Roberto Rossellini as artists whose styles respected concrete moment-to-moment life.

Bazin should be credited with calling our attention to the possibilities latent in the long take at a time when other film theorists considered it theatrical and uncinematic. Yet the problem of real time in film seems more complicated than Bazin thought. For one thing, in the digital age, an apparent long take can be built up out of separate elements joined by special effects. In
The War of the Worlds,
for example, a shot of the hero and his children fleeing along a highway in a minivan lasts for 2 minutes and 22 seconds. As the family talks, screams, and shouts at each other about the attack they have just escaped, the camera circles the van, filming them through the windows. Yet in reality, the actors were performing in a studio against a bluescreen. The landscapes, people, and vehicles that whiz past them in the background were made with eight cameras mounted on a Jeep that drove along a stretch of highway. The circling camera filming the van on that same highway was mounted at times on the side of the vehicle and at other times on another vehicle that could pull quickly backward for long-shot views. All these elements were joined by animators into a single shot, using the upright frames of the windows as transition points where elements could be joined unnoticeably. To top it all off, the glass of the windows, which reflects the vehicles and lampposts whizzing by, were added digitally. (See Joe Fordham’s “Alien Apocalypse,”
Cinefex
103 [October 2005]: 76.)

Bazin’s claims about real time are also undermined by the fact that screen time does not always equal story time. For example, a five-minute long take may not present five minutes in the story. The shot that tracks the protagonist of
Notting Hill
through changing seasons lasts about 100 seconds on the screen, but it covers about a year of story time (
p. 213
). The 91-minute shot that constitutes
Russian Ark
shifts the viewer backward and forward through Russian history. Mise-en-scene cues can override the camera’s recording of real duration, giving the film a flexible time frame. As usual, a film’s overall formal context assigns concrete functions to particular stylistic elements.

www.theasc.com/
The official site of the American Society of Cinematographers, tied to this association’s activities and its journal,
American Cinematographer.
Includes some online articles.

www.soc.org/magazine.html/
The official site of the Society of Operating Cameramen, with an archive of many articles. Especially good are Rick Meyer’s essays on the history of widescreen processes.

www.cinematography.net/
An extensive discussion site about professional cinematography.

www.widescreenmuseum.com/
A vast site (950 pages, 3000 images) devoted to widescreen processes, past and present, as well as color and sound technology.

The 1993 documentary
Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography,
which includes numerous interviews with cinematographers and brief clips from a wide variety of films, is available on DVD (Image Entertainment). In “Painting with Light,” cinematographer Jack Cardiff talks about his use of Technicolor in
Black Narcissus.
Raoul Coutard discusses anamorphic widescreen and color processes in an interview on the
Contempt
DVD (which also includes a “Widescreen vs. Full-Frame Demonstration”).
Oklahoma!
’s disc contains a very good comparison featurette, “CinemaScope vs. Todd-AO,” as well as a short originally shown in theaters before
Oklahoma!
to introduce the new widescreen process, “The Miracle of Todd-AO.”

A rare demonstration of laboratory work comes in “Day 66: Journey of a Roll of Film,” in
King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries,
which includes the use of a Telecine machine to make a digital intermediate. The process of selective digital grading, which we discuss on
page 185
, is explained in “Digital Grading,” on the
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
supplements.

Discussions of perspective and depth cues are equally rare, but they receive fascinating coverage in “Little People, Big Effects,” a supplement to the
Darby O’Gill and the Little People
DVD. It includes excellent footage of matte paintings for this film and for
Treasure Island.
There is a section on forced perspective, where actors are made to appear small by placing them farther away from the people they appear to be facing (the same technique used in many shots of
The Lord of the Rings
40 years later). The importance of matching eye-lines and of achieving deep focus is explained.

The “Outward Bound” chapter on the
Alien
disc provides a clear demonstration of how models were shot to look realistic in the pre-CGI, pre-green-screen era.
Speed
’s “Visual Effects” track covers motion control, the digital matte work and other tricks showing the bus jumping the freeway gap, and a huge miniature used for the final train crash. The “Special Effects Vignettes” for
Cast Away
do a particularly good job of tracing through the various layers that build up as CGI shots are created. “Visual FX: MTA Train” gives a brief but informative look at green-screen work in
Collateral
’s train scene; it shows how effects can be used not only for flashy action but also for such subtle purposes as varying the colors and lights seen through the windows as the mood of the scene shifts. “Designing the Enemy: Tripods and Aliens” (
War of the Worlds
) reveals how computers can be used to design digital figures. Each of the
Lord of the Rings
DVD sets contains extensive special-effects descriptions, and
The Return of the King
supplements include a segment on one of the most complex CGI scenes ever created: “Visual Effects Demonstration: ‘The Mûmakil Battle.’”

“No Feat But What We Make,” a
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
supplement, offers an excellent history of the early development of digital special effects in
The Abyss
and
Terminator 2,
and includes director James Cameron discussing perspective. “The Making of
Jurassic Park
” covers some of the same material and moves forward to the transitions from animation of shiny surfaces to the creation of realistic dinosaurs.

More recent developments in computer effects are dealt with in “Meet Davy Jones,” a supplement on the
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
DVD; it demonstrates important advances in motion-capture technology. Good making-ofs for other effects-heavy films are “Wired: The Visual Effects of
Iron Man
” and “Daemons” and “Armoured Bears” in the
Golden Compass
supplements. The use of CGI to create less noticeable effects, like realistic settings and erasure of unwanted elements, is demonstrated in “The Visual Effects of
Zodiac
”; the “New York, New Zealand” section of
King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries
; and “In Camera:
The Dark Knight.
”

The Dark Knight
was the first fiction feature to shoot some sequences using Imax cameras, as is explained in the supplement “Shooting Outside the Box.”

With the recent increase in multiple-camera shooting in epic films, DVD supplements sometimes include sequences juxtaposing the views from those cameras shown in splitscreen. These tend not to provide much information about the process, but the “Interactive Multi-Angle Battle Scene Studies” for
Master and Commander
helpfully give readouts of lens length and shooting speed (revealing how common it has become for shots of violent action to be done with varying degrees of slow motion). Similarly,
Speed
’s “Action Sequences: Multi-angle Stunts,” provides a frames-per-second readout in its demonstration.
Dancer in the Dark
’s extreme use of multiple-camera shooting for the music numbers is explained in “100 Cameras: Capturing Lars von Trier’s Vision.”

The ultimate supplement dealing with long takes is “In One Breath,” which documents the filming of the single elaborate shot that makes up
Russian Ark.

“Editing is the basic creative force, by power of which the soulless photographs (the separate shots) are engineered into living, cinematographic form.”

— V. I. Pudovkin, director