Movies

Odds Against Tomorrow 4

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The 1959 movie Odds Against Tomorrow culminates in a heist of this bank in Hudson, upstate New York. That door and clock are significant in the holdup scene.

I noticed the similarity between the woman walking down the street and one of my favourite Harry Callahan photographs, ‘Chicago’, 1961, dated only two years later than the movie.

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Harry Callahan, ‘Chicago’, 1961

See my other posts on the photography in Odds Against Tomorrow:

Odds Against Tomorrow 1, Odds Against Tomorrow 2, and Odds Against Tomorrow 3.

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Lawrence and Freddie

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When you see the film Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen you realize how great its Director of Photography Freddie Young was. He won an Oscar for it.

But I’m not just talking about Young as a cinematographer, I’m referring to the composed shots that appear on the screen as beautiful still images, as photographs.

One of the greatest single shots in cinema, the three-minute mirage sequence in which a figure slowly emerges from the desert haze, is a wonderful three part composition – see that tiny speck on the horizon in the image above? It’s a great suspenseful moment in the film, but visually it also functions as an elegant still photograph. There are many throughout the film. As well as being a great movie, Lawrence is also a great portfolio of landscape photographs.

The desert is a character in Lawrence and you often gaze at it as if at a star. The film immerses you in it, it paints the desert across the screen. There are points in the film where it is such an astonishing sight the filmmakers just leave it there on the screen so you to take it in.

This seems close to the indexical nature of still photography, its role of pointing, as if it’s saying “look at that.” You could argue that there is a distinct genre of ‘still’ photography contained within movies, images that have some DNA of the still within them and could be lifted out and printed. Despite plot, character, sound and movement there is also that purely optical component, subordinated to story but staying in the mind anyway. It must leave some residue in photographic culture.

William H. Daniel’s Naked City

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Click on these images to see New York in 1948.

They show the city just after World War II, but just before the prosperity boom of the 1950s; it’s a hardworking city, energetic and unpretentious. The images are by William H. Daniels, whose work, you might agree, resembles that of Weegee and Berenice Abbott, both photographers of Gotham City at that time.

But Daniels was not a still photographer like Weegee and Abbott, he was a Hollywood cinematographer who received an Oscar for this work. These are stills from the 1948 movie The Naked City which was shot on location in New York.

In 1945 Weegee had published a book of his press photos of murderers, drunks and corpses and called it The Naked City. Hollywood producer Mark Hellinger, who had been a columnist in New York, bought the title from Weegee intending to make the movie with a similar degree of grittiness. He determined to shoot it on location in the city which was almost unknown at that time when most movies where made on the studio backlot in Hollywood. It gave the film a surprising sense of reality, like a documentary. The movie was a hit.

Compare William H. Daniels’ images with Weegee photographs here, and Berenice Abbott photographs here.

See my other posts on this subject, Berenice Abbot’s Changing City , Berenice Abbott’s Naked City and Those faces, those suits.

Kane enabled

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Last night I saw Citizen Kane again. Like many film lovers of my generation, it has a special place in the heart, a dream of perfect cinema. The thrill is always a little different and last night it was the electrifying originality, the daring, the showmanship that struck me. It’s a film of shocks: you are constantly surprised by each new transition and the rush of ideas.

Like all films it was made from a collaboration of talents. Welles was right when he shared the main credit with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland. Kane is a film for photographers.

Toland achieved unusually deep images, rare at that time and often commented upon in Citizen Kane. Depth-of-Field is the degree of sharpness in a photograph, near and far from the camera. To achieve this he needed a small lens aperture, down to f16, very difficult in the relative dimness of a studio set. How he managed that was due to a number of unique factors:

1. Using the highest speed film available, the new Eastman Super XX, rated by today’s standards as 250 ISO.

2. Use of the 35mm focal length lens instead of the more usual 50mm lens. A wide angle lens gives greater depth of field.

3. Having coated lenses, a new invention which cut down flare and gave much better light transmission, as much as one f stop.

4. Shooting with the new Mitchell BNC 35mm camera. Its internal sound dampening – instead of the external blimp which required shooting through a sheet of glass – meant the image was sharper and had 10% more light transmission.

5. The use of arc lights which, because of their near-Daylight colour temperature, exploited the full sensitivity of the film. The sets were lit very brightly, much brighter than normal, to get more light through the small aperture.

You can see from this the technological sophistication of film making in Hollywood and how innovations in the science of cinematography could enable a new aesthetic. Citizen Kane’s artistic innovations were enabled by technical ones.

These details were sourced from an excellent paper by Patrick Ogle, ‘Technological and Aesthetic Influences on the Development of Deep-Focus Cinematography in the United States’. It gives a lot of information about film-making in Hollywood at the time of Kane. You can read it by clicking here: Movies and Methods: an anthology.

Odds Against Tomorrow 3

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For a Hollywood genre film Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959, was experimental and arty. The story hinges on the racial conflict between white man Ryan and black man Harry Belafonte. The opening shot was filmed on infra red film which bleached the skin of the racist character, played by Robert Ryan above. A moment after this shot he racially mocks a little black girl.

The movie’s director Robert Wise said this: I did something in Odds Against Tomorrow I’d been wanting to do in some pictures but hadn’t had the chance. I wanted a certain kind of mood in some sequences, such as the opening when Robert Ryan is walking down West Side Street…I used infra-red film. You have to be very careful with that because it turns green things white, and you can’t get too close on people’s faces. It does distort them but gives that wonderful quality—black skies with white clouds—and it changes the feeling and look of the scenes. -Robert Wise, from wikipedia.

See my other posts on the photography in in this film: Odds Against Tomorrow 1, Odds Against Tomorrow 2, and Odds Against Tomorrow 4

Odds Against Tomorrow 2

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The 1959 heist movie Odds Against Tomorrow was mostly shot on location in New York city and upstate New York. The locations were carefully chosen, each scene plays out in very distinctive place. It gives the film a sense of reality, as if the events could be happening right next to you. In these shots the skyscrapers are composed in relation to the actors. They become like characters in the film, echoing the toughness of the bank robbers. The bottom two images could almost be still photographs, like portraits in Life Magazine.

See my other posts on the photography in this movie: Odds Against Tomorrow 1,  Odds Against Tomorrow 3 and Odds Against Tomorrow 4


Odds Against Tomorrow 1

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Odds Against Tomorrow is a 1959 film noir, a combination heist-movie and message-film (is that three genres?). It was directed by the great Robert Wise and starred Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan, whose shadows you can see in these photos.

The climax is a chase through an oil refinery at night. Harry Belafonte is chasing down the racist Robert Ryan, to their mutual destruction. The sequence was lit – or perhaps sculpted is a better word – by powerful spot lights. The shots function as tightly composed still photographs. The cinematographer Joseph C. Brun had been nominated for an Oscar in 1953, and seeing these images, you can understand why.

See my other posts on the photography in this movie: Odds Against Tomorrow 2,  Odds Against Tomorrow 3 and Odds Against Tomorrow 4

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Magnificent. Obsession.

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What could be a more perfect challenge for a cinematographer than depicting blindness?

In Douglas Sirk’s 1953 film Magnificent Obsession, the subjective experience of the blind Jane Wyman character is one of the main drivers of the plot. The film is a lush, over ripe melodrama where Wyman unknowingly falls in love the man who accidentally caused her blindness, and the earlier death of her husband. The man is Rock Hudson. I did say it was a melodrama.

The film was shot by Russell Metty, one of the great cinematographers, who worked with Sirk in ten movies, and also with Welles, Kubrick, Vidor and everyone else.  Metty created an astounding visual scheme for Obsession. For many of Wyman’s scenes he used darkened sets punctuated by pinpricks of light or patches of single colour against black (see above). The lighting and mise-en-scene are very calculated. Several scenes are staged as tableaux and look almost like paintings; they make beautiful still photographs as you can see here. The film is worth studying for the way lighting and colour in photography can be used to convey ideas about narrative and character. Here are some examples, and you can click on the images for a closer look.

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Entering an eye clinic, Wyman passes through sunlit buildings like a ghost, a streetscape reflected in the glass doors.

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In the eye clinic, the doctors are assembled as if in a Rembrandt group portrait. As they inspect her eyes with a torch, the screen darkens, and only the eye itself is lit, an eye that doesn’t see light.

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This image is a POV shot (point of view) from a blind person’s position, a strange idea when you think about it. The transparent curtain and half light suggest her experience of hearing someone enter a room without knowing who it is.

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As Wyman rises from a table into the light, a shadow momentarily crosses her face: a bad memory briefly returning to her thoughts.

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A blind person can’t see flowers or their colour. If you are a cinematographer, how do you get around that?

The website cinematographers.nl describes Metty’s “highly distinctive use of light and shadow … such that, as characters move around a room, they shift in and out of shadowed areas. The effect is of constantly changing patterns of lighting, shading and silhouetting on faces and bodies which runs through the mise-en-scène like a rippling ‘painting with light’.

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Lullaby of Broadway

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This arresting image (click on it) is the beginning of the Lullaby of Broadway sequence in Gold Diggers of 1935, a Busby Berkeley movie.  It’s one of the grand song and dance set pieces that Berkeley is famous for; a short film in itself, lasting for 13 minutes.

It starts with a distant close up of the singer Wini Shaw singing the Oscar-winning theme song which describes the sophisticated, decadent night life of Broadway, the lifestyle of sugar-daddies and nightclubs…

When a Broadway baby says “Good night,” it’s early in the morning. Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight, until the dawn.

Surrounded by inky blackness and singing straight to the camera, Shaw gradually gets bigger and bigger until she fills the screen in a giant close up. Picture yourself in a big movie theatre – her face is three storeys high and she’s singing to you…

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It’s a technically daring tracking shot done in a darkened studio, with the camera slowly dollying in to the singer. The camera crew had to keep the face in the same place in the frame as it comes closer. Berkeley is famous for the technical bravado of his dance scenes which often used large numbers of dancers in elaborate geometric formations. This one is special in being so simple, just a face in the dark.

When the beautiful singer finishes her song, she turns her head which is then shown upside-down. As the music changes mood, her face dissolves into a view of the Manhattan…

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You can see the whole sequence on You Tube here.

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Criss Cross

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Criss Cross is a 1949 film noir directed by the great Robert Siodmak. Set in postwar L.A. it has that German look that caught on in Hollywood after the cream of European talent found a haven from Nazism there. Those expratiate artists injected a mood of pessimism and dread into American film, using stark black and white contrasts and Expressionist lighting. It suited the new genre of crime movies in the 1940s that we now call film noir. Siodmak’s cinematographer was another expat, Franz Planer, and Criss Cross is unequalled for its ravishing velvety shadows and sparkling highlights.

These three shots from the last scene of Criss Cross show the Manichean undertone of the story in which a good man (Burt Lancaster) encounters a bad man (Dan Duryea) over the affections of a good/bad woman (Yvonne de Carlo). All film noir, in fact almost all Hollywood film, is in some way a debate about good and evil, innocence and guilt, and redemption. It’s a very Judaeo-Christian thing.

Note the Jesus-like expression on Lancaster’s face; the satanic expression in Duryea’s eyes, and the Pieta pose of the lovers he’s just murdered.

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Paper Moon

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Watching the 1973 movie Paper Moon is like seeing Walker Evans photographs come to life. Set in Kansas in 1935, it’s a road movie that follows its two characters across a series of marvellous landscapes and towns. It was shot by Laszlo Kovacs, a cinematographer celebrated for his location work (Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show) which always conjures up memories of how particular places feel. You suspect that Kovacs, director Peter Bogdanovich, and production designer Polly Platt, were looking at Farm Security photographs, work by Evans, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange and others. The compositions in the movie look like still photographs.

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There is a particular period look to the movie, a combination of carefully chosen locations in Kansas and Missouri, wide angle lenses, deep focus and filters. “Orson Welles and Peter were very close friends” Kovacs said, “and I got to meet my ‘god’ while we were preparing our film. I’d been testing black & white film with various filters but still hadn’t found the right look. Orson said, ‘Use red filters, my boy.’ And I did, because although the filters reduced the film speed and meant I had to use big arc-lights to achieve the deep-focus look Peter wanted, the red filters created incredibly beautiful, dramatic skies and gave us exactly the expressionistic look we were after.”


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DEEP FOCUS

Kovacs and Bogdanovich wanted to evoke the look of a certain American cinema of around 1940, films like Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane. “We wanted to evoke the classic black & white Hollywood tradition pioneered by cinematographers like Arthur Miller, John Alton and Gregg Toland. ‘Citizen Kane’ was our biggest influence.”


Production still from Citizen Kane, 1941

Bogdanovich wanted deep focus throughout the film to give it a greater sense of reality. This decision, combined with Kovacs’ use of red filters, meant that each scene needed vast amounts of light. Deep focus requires the smallest aperture to achieve maximum depth of field in the scene. But a red filter could cut down three stops of light meaning an effective ISO of 30 with the Kodak Double X film that they used. Huge arc lights were needed to replace the light lost through the filters and to provide enough exposure for the small apertures. The co-star Ryan O’Neal complained to Kovacs about the heat they generated.

Deep focus was used as a narrative tool in these two reverse-angle shots. The stillness and isolation of the main character, the nine year old girl played by Tatum O’Neal, is contrasted with two happily playing girls seen through the back window in the second shot.

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The elegance of the filmmaking can be seen in the café confrontation scene, between Addie and Moses (Tatum and Ryan O’Neal). Three master shots progress from …

an exterior view through the window of the café, showing the two characters at a table. (Note the reflections of the street and a cinema opposite – showing a John Ford film!) …

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…to an interior reverse angle of the two, tracking in…

 

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…to a further reverse angle, a viewpoint into the café interior. The point of view, between the window and the table, is impossible but it doesn’t seem to matter.

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Paper Moon is an example of a film that has has been heavily influenced in its visual style, by the history of (still) photography, in this case Walker Evans and the FSA photographers of the 1930s. A further example of a photography-influenced film is Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas which looks like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore photographs come to life. This idea is worth further research.

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