FILM ART AND FILMMAKING

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or35060_ch01.qxd 7/19/06 8:17 AM Page 44 44 CHAPTER 1 Film as Art: Creativity, Technology, and Business 1.49 Red Eye: Extreme close-ups of actors’ faces are common in modern cinema, due partly to the fact that most viewing takes place on video formats. 1.50 In Flowers of Shanghai, director Hou Hsiao-hsien builds every scene out of full shots of several characters. The result loses information on a small display and is best seen on a theater screen. shrank, filmmakers began to rely more on close-ups in the TV manner. This tendency has continued until today. Although modern multiplex screens can be fairly large, audiences have become accustomed to scenes that consist chiefly of big faces (1.49). Now that most films are viewed on video, and many will be watched on handheld devices, it seems likely that commercial films will continue to treat conversation scenes in tight close-ups. In this respect, technology and exhibition circumstances have created stylistic constraints. Yet some contemporary filmmakers have stuck to the older technique (1.50), in effect demanding that audiences view their films on a large theater screen. There’s also the matter of image proportions, and here again, television exhibition exercised some influence. Since the mid-1950s, virtually all theaters have shown films on screens that were wider than the traditional TV monitor. For decades, when movies were shown on television, they were cropped, with certain areas simply left out (1.51–1.53). In response, some filmmakers composed their shots to include a “safe area,” placing the key action in a spot that could fit snugly on the television screen. This created subtle differences in a shot’s visual effects (1.54, 1.55). Relying on the safe area often encouraged filmmakers to employ more singles, shots showing only one player. In a wide-screen frame, a single can compensate for the cropping that TV would demand (1.56). Today most cable and DVD versions of films are letterboxed. Dark bands at the top and bottom of the screen approximate the film’s theatrical proportions. The great majority of filmmakers approve of this, but Stanley Kubrick preferred that
or35060_ch01.qxd 7/19/06 8:17 AM Page 45 1.51 In Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent, a single shot in the original . . . 1.52 . . . becomes a pair of shots and . . . 1.53 . . . loses the sense of actors simultaneously reacting to each other. video versions of some of his films be shown “full frame.” This is why we’ve reproduced the shots from The Shining (1.12–1.13) full-frame, even though nobody who watched the movie in a theater saw so much headroom. Almost no commercial theaters can show films full-frame today, but Jean-Luc Godard usually composes his shots for that format; you couldn’t letterbox 1.57 without undermining the composition. In these instances, distribution and theatrical exhibition initially constrained the filmmakers’ choices, but video versions expanded them. Even product placement offers some artistic opportunities. We’re usually distracted when a Toyota truck or a box of Frosted Flakes pops up on the screen, but Back to the Future cleverly integrates brands into its story. Marty McFly is catapulted from 1985 to 1955. Trapped in a period when diet soda didn’t exist, he asks for a Pepsi Free at a soda fountain, but the counterman says that it’s not free—he’ll have to pay for it. Later, buying a bottle of Pepsi from a vending machine, Marty tries frantically to twist off the cap, but his father-to-be George McFly casually pops it off at the machine’s built-in opener. Pepsi soft drinks weave through the movie, reasserting Marty’s comic inability to adjust to his parents’ era—and perhaps stirring some nostalgia in viewers who remember how bits of everyday life have changed since their youth. Bringing the Film to the Audience: Distribution and Exhibition 45 “What about a mobile version of every film? Maybe in the future there will be four versions—film, TV, DVD, and mobile. No one knows yet.” — Arvind Ethan David, managing director of multimedia company Slingshot “Not until seeing [North by Northwest] again on the big screen did I realize conclusively what a gigantic difference screen size does make. . . . This may be yet another reason why younger people have a hard time with older pictures: They’ve only seen them on the tube, and that reduces films’ mystery and mythic impact.” — Peter Bogdanovich, director, The Last Picture Show and Mask
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FILM ART AND FILMMAKING

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