FILM ART AND FILMMAKING

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or35060_ch01.qxd 7/19/06 8:16 AM Page 42 42 CHAPTER 1 Film as Art: Creativity, Technology, and Business them on the family television monitor. But then the movie theater would be even more jeopardized. Artistic Implications of Distribution and Exhibition Grosses, synergy, ticket prices, and movies on video game consoles might seem very remote from issues of film as an art. Yet film is a technological medium usually aimed at a broad public, so the ways in which movies are circulated and shown can affect viewers’ experiences. Home video turns viewing into a small-group or individual activity, but seeing a film in a packed theater yields a different response. Comedies, most people feel, seem funnier in a theater, where infectious laughter can ripple through a crowd. Filmmakers are aware of this difference, and they try to pace comedies slowly enough that crowd laughter doesn’t drown out a key line. Video distribution and exhibition have created new choices in the realm of storytelling. Until the 1980s, people couldn’t rewatch a movie whenever they wished. With videotape, and especially DVD, viewers can pore over a film. Bonus materials encourage them to rerun the movie to spot things they missed. Some filmmakers have taken advantage of this opportunity by creating puzzle films like Memento and Donnie Darko, which fans scrutinize for clues to plot enigmas (1.44, 1.45). Video versions can complicate the theatrical release version, as the extra ending of The Butterfly Effect does. Some interactive DVD movies permit the viewers to choose how the plot develops. The DVD of Greg Marks’s 11:14 allows you to enter parallel story lines at various points, in effect recasting the film’s overall form. 1.44 In Magnolia, the extraordinary meterological event at the climax is predicted by the recurring numerals 2, referring to the biblical book of Exodus. 1.45 In Magnolia, the figure 82 appears as coils in the rooftop hose.
or35060_ch01.qxd 7/19/06 8:16 AM Page 43 As the Internet becomes a platform for distribution, we should expect variations in narrative form. Short-form storytelling is already at home online, in cartoons and comedy. We’re likely to find movies designed specifically for mobile phones; television series like 24 are already creating “mobisodes” branching off the broadcast story line. The web is the logical place for interactive films that use hyperlinks to amplify or detour a story line. Marketing and merchandising can extend a theatrical film’s story in intriguing ways. The Star Wars novels and video games give the characters more adventures and expand spectators’ engagement with the movies. The Memento website hinted at ways to interpret the film. The Matrix video games supplied key information for the films’ plots, while the second movie in the trilogy sneaked in hints for winning the games. As a story world shifts from platform to platform, a multimedia saga is created, and viewers’ experiences will shift accordingly. Matrix viewers who’ve never played the games understand the story somewhat differently from those who have. Style can be affected by distribution and exhibition, as is evident in image size. From the 1920s through the 1950s, films were designed to be shown in large venues (1.46). A typical urban movie house seated 1500 viewers and boasted a screen fifty feet wide. This scale gave the image great presence, and it allowed details to be seen easily. Directors could stage dialogue scenes showing several characters in the frame, all of whom would be visible (1.47). In a theater of that time, the tight close-up of Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1.7) would have had a powerful impact. When television became popular in the 1950s, its image was rather unclear and very small, in some cases only 10 inches diagonally. Early TV shows tended to rely on close shots (1.48), which could read easily on the small monitor. In the 1960s and 1970s, movie attendance dropped and theaters became smaller. As screens 1.46 The interior of the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon, built in 1928. Capacity was 3000 seats, at a time when the city population was about 300,000. Note the elaborate decoration on the walls and ceilings, typical of the “picture palaces” of the era. Bringing the Film to the Audience: Distribution and Exhibition 43 1.47 On the large screen of a picture palace, all the figures and faces in this shot from The Thin Man (1934) would have been quite visible. 1.48 Dragnet (1953): Early television relied heavily on close-ups because of the small screen size.
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FILM ART AND FILMMAKING

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