The Cinematographer’s Art

Carol and Therese

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Carol-rScreenshot from trailer for Carol, directed by Todd Hayne.

The new Todd Hayne movie Carol has arrived and I can state that it’s a photographer’s film.

The story is a love affair between two women in early 1950s New York, a time when gay and lesbian romance was seen as a moral lapse, or worse. The implications in this for danger and secrecy, and the teasing development of their attraction, finds its visual expression in the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Ed Lachman.

In preparing for the film’s visual style Hayne and Lachman studied early 1950s still photography, looking for the right colour palette and focal qualities. They looked at women photographers of the time including Esther Bubley, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt and Ruth Orkin, but they found their principal reference in the work of Saul Leiter, an abstract painter and colleague of De Kooning, who had taken up photography and flourished.

Leiter’s beautiful Kodachromes captured the compression and layering of the Manhattan streetscape. He shot through shadows, blurs and reflections to capture the great cities ambiguity and mystery, and its poetry.

In the movie, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (both also Oscar-nominated for the film) are seen through a variety of obstacles, glimpsed in longshot, shrouded in shadow, and overlayed by reflections. It creates a rich visual texture which helps carry the film forward, rather like a writer’s literary style  creates the right atmosphere for the events in a novel. 

Lachman’s compositions as expert as Leiter’s, despite his assertion that he’s a cine photographer and not a still photographer. The movie was shot on film, in Super 16, not 35mm, to create “a certain emotional quality — you’re viewing the character through the texture of the grain but also feeling their emotions through the grain.”

One further pleasure for readers of blogs like this is that the character of Therese is a budding photographer herself, and we see her with cameras of the time and even in a picture conference at the New York Times where she works. Her interest in photography is not a casual plot point, it’s the perfect analogy for her character, discrete and watchful, her beautiful big eyes like camera lenses.

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Haskell Wexler cinematographer

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America America, America, 1963

Two of the great cinematographers died this week, Haskell Wexler and Vilmos Zsigmond. Both of these men had long and distinguished careers working in all areas of the profession, and both brought strong artistic powers to their films. 

Haskell Wexler has been a star of the profession since the mid-sixties when he won an Oscar for photographing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This was one of the big films of that period and starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Wexler shot it in unconventional ways, on black & white film and with a sort of documentary look, and he was nearly taken off the project. In the end, the gritty look he gave it matched the harshness of the story, a marital fight that lasts a whole night. I recently saw a new print at the Astor cinema – ideal circumstances – and it was astonishing. It was as if a Life Magazine photo-essay had sprung into action. The last shot in the film was a very slow dolly toward the two actors, then beyond them to reveal a hint of sunrise in the background – a glimmer of hope.

Wexler had a long and varied career including a stint as assistant cameraman on the 1950s TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He shot many advertisements including most of the famous Marlboro commercials featuring cowboys – obviously he now regrets that job. He made documentaries of social injustice, especially his fictional documentary Medium Cool about the riots at the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

These pictures show how he could light complex scenes while retaining the naturalistic feel. He made a lot of documentaries and it shows in his feature film work. It’s not surprising that he won two Oscars, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 and for Bound for Glory in 1976.

COeqkcwWEAApL1Z  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966

in-the-heat-of-the-night-blu-ray-rednecks  In the Heat of the Night, 1968

Hoodlum-Priest  The Hoodlum Priest, 1961

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Carol and Todd and Saul

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Todd Haynes’ new movie Carol is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel about a love affair between two women in 1950s New York. It’s played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara and is getting great reviews.

Haynes’ films always have a strong visual intelligence, think of the stylish look of I’m Not There or Far from Heaven. For Carol he said he was influenced by the still photography of Saul Leiter, the veteran New York photographer whose beautiful Kodachromes of the city in the 1950s have recently gained popularity.

Leiter wanted to be an abstract painter and this ambition gave his photography a distinctive style. He shot into mirrors and windows to catch reflections, used shadow, blur and negative space, or shot through obstacles, all to create a dense, layered vision of the city. His pictures are complex and ambiguous and have a lush painterly feel.

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Leiter

Leiter shot Kodachrome slide film but he wasn’t able to print it at the time. Transparency film was very expensive to print until the digital age so he mostly projected them to groups of artists – no way to gain wide recognition in the visual arts. Now that his early work is being digitally printed it is being seen widely and is gaining great admiration. There are numerous exhibitions and books in circulation and he is now seen as a significant photographer of mid-century Manhattan.

Director Todd Haynes and his cinematographer Ed Lachman researched the period setting of Highsmith’s novel and discovered that Leiter’s images were a perfect fit. Highsmith’s tense and ambiguous world found its analogue in Leiter’s shifting, dissolving vision of New York.

Haynes filmed scenes through
 car or shop windows to create a sense of dreaming
 and distortion. In one episode, Carol meets Therese
 for lunch for the first time. We watch Therese through
 the restaurant’s dirty window while Carol can be
 seen crossing the street in a reflection as pedestrians pass in front of her. (Harpers Bazaar)

In a BBC interview Hayne described how…

“the whole act of looking is foregrounded. We’re shooting through windows and frames and doorways, and doors that close and windows that have obstructions or refractions or reflections, separating us from what we’re seeing on the other side. So the very act, the predicament, of looking, is foregrounded in ways that draw special attention to who’s onside of the looking glass, and who’s on the other.”  (BBC The Film Programme)

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And Ed Lachman spoke about the visualising of the film in these terms…

In “Carol,” my latest film, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith book that takes place in the early ‘ 50s, I used a muted palate of colors, more in magenta and greens. I tried to reference the way film stocks responded to colors in the ‘40s and ‘50s and their grain structure. We shot in super 16, not in 35mm film, because film stocks have become almost grainless.  (Ed Lachman in Museemagazine)

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The movie Carol is in current release, but for a preview, look at the beautiful trailer.

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Self-powered camera

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self-camera

Scientists have invented a camera that generates its power using only the light it captures in the sensor. No battery or electric cable powers it. Instead …

the pixel’s photodiode can be used to not only measure the incident light level, but also to convert the incident light into electrical energy. A sensor architecture is proposed where, during each image capture cycle, the pixels are used first to record and read out the image and then used to harvest energy and charge the sensors’ power supply. (Towards Self-Powered Cameras).

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Petapixel describes it this way: “After each image capture, the sensor switches modes, harvests light, and stores that energy in order to power the next shot. By alternating between capture and charge modes in this way, the camera sensor can continually shoot images and video without having any kind of additional power source.”

 

 

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The prototype camera has only 30×40 diodes – pixels – hence the crudeness of the image. As a first experiment in a new technology, it’s reminiscent of the first movie tests made by Thomas Edison’s team in 1889, the very first motion picture.

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Edison’s first motion picture film test, 1889

 

Hitchcock’s Lodger

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The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, 1927

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger is regarded as the first true Hitchcock film, “the first time Hitchcock has revealed his psychological attraction to the association between sex and murder, between ecstasy and death.” It’s the story of an innocent man mistaken for a serial killer, a young woman who falls for him, her suspicious parents, a jealous lover and the police.

A new BFI restoration of this important film shows the cinematography by Baron Ventimiglia with its original colour tinting and it’s all startlingly beautiful.

Right back to the time of Méliés at the start of the 20th century, films were tinted by hand, sometimes frame-by-frame. This gave a beauty and warmth to the prosaic tones of black & white, but it was laborious and expensive, especially since every print of a film had to be tinted this way. But in 1921 a new product arrived that changed the situation. “Kodak introduced pre-tinted stocks, with stained cellulose base, rather than a dyed emulsion upon the base. The colours available originally were lavender, red, green, blue, pink, light amber, dark amber, yellow, and orange.” 

By the late twenties, the tinted film was phased out due to cost and other reasons, but this version of Hitchock’s film is a memorial to that era. Before sound, movies had a more direct emotional impact on audiences and coloured scenes played their part in setting the audience’s mood.

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Gregg Toland and the FSA

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Gregg Toland, still from The Grapes of Wrath, 1941

When you see John Ford’s 1940 film The Grapes of Wrath, you can’t miss the similarity to the Farm Security Administration photos of Dorothea Lange and others. The movie, which won Ford an Oscar for Best Director, was shot by the great, maybe the greatest, cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Toland’s research for the look he wanted to give the film naturally led to the FSA whose photographers, including Lange, Jack Delano, Russell Lee and others, had covered the same subject as the film, the Dust Bowl period of the South West US in the 1930s.

“The research library at FOX studios has all the visual research archived for Toland and John Ford’s work with GRAPES OF WRATH – including original glossy prints of FSA field photographers like Dorthea Lange, Russell Lee, etc. slapped into rough binders, gathering dust.” – Jean Dodge 2009

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Gregg Toland, still from The Grapes of Wrath, 1941

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Gregg Toland, still from The Grapes of Wrath, 1941

The images above are frames from the movie.

Now have a look at these Dorothea Lange photographs from a few years earlier. They were taken for the Farm Security Administration to document the tough conditions during the Depression, and might have been in the archive that Toland consulted.

Hollywood is often accused of being the “dream factory”, always making glamorous but empty entertainment, but ‘Grapes’ is one example where this isn’t true (there are thousands of others).

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Dorothea Lange, Jobless on the Edge of a Peafield, Imperial Valley, California, 1937

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Dorothea Lange, Tom Collins, manager of Kern migrant camp, with drought refugee family. California, 1936 

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Dorothea Lange, Pea pickers camp, 1936

Composing Lawrence of Arabia

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Lawrence of Arabia is playing at the Astor cinema for a limited season and if you see it there you will never forget the experience. It’s probably lookimg better than on its release in 1962 because after its restoration and digital transfer this year, there are no scratches or dust or colour mis-matches. The image is so clean you can see that Anthony Quinn’s false nose does not quite match the colour of his face!

As a visual artist (still photographer, painter) you can learn from movies to see how problems of composition, colour, scale etc are solved. One of the challenges faced by cinematographer Freddie Young and director David Lean was how to fill the extreme Super-Panavision film format.

At a ratio of 1:2.2 it’s the longest screen format of all and presented extreme compositional challenges, and opportunities. Despite the long horizontal span of the format, the filmmakers were able to create taut compositions in the huge scale of the landscape.

The focal point is on both the vertical and horizontal centres.

No shot in his entire career aroused so much comment as the scene when Omar Sharif emerged from a mirage – achieved with a unique 430mm telephoto lens he had had the foresight to bring with him from Panavision in America. (www.cinematographers.nl)

Linkage between left, right and middle.

The minimalism of the desert shots was partly determined by the subject. As the Prince Feisal character states, ” There is nothing in the desert.”  The insistent horizon line and flat blue skies created a ready made design, but the filmmakers embraced it, creating a new, painterly image of the desert.

Symmetrical composition

The film looks so modern it was seemingly inspired by contemporary abstract art. The indulgence in pure flat colour and graphic compositions is noticeable, especially in comparison to other comparable films. Another British desert film made only four years earlier, Ice Cold in Alex, has none of the geometric starkness of Lawrence. Lean and his cinematographer Freddie Young imbued their film with a very modern, even modernist, visual sense.

Geometric abstract composition

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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.

The Limitless zoom

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The amazing new movie Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper, has a lot of jaw-dropping visuals. Boiled down, the story is about the consequences of suddenly becoming very, very intelligent, through taking a pill. The feverish excitement and stimulation of this condition is brilliantly conveyed through the so-called “fractal zooms” which are seen at various points in the film. Basically, it’s an infinite zoom down Manhattan streets, as Cooper’s character powers through the night. It baffled me how this could be done.

As you scroll down these screen grabs, watch for the visual links. Then read below or go to the fxguide siteto see it happen in motion.

Look Effects visual effects supervisor Dan Schrecker describes the process:

The ‘infinite zooms’ that were shot at 4K using a three-camera RED rig with short, medium and long lenses. One major zoom, for example, follows Eddie as he runs across New York, parties at a nightclub and ends up on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The camera’s not moving through this space so much as it’s a zoom … As you push into the first one we begin to bring in the second one and it goes on and on and on, without losing the resolution because we used these long lenses.”

“It was a light rig on a tripod,” says Schrecker, “so we could literally drive around to find our spot, hop out of the van, shoot some stuff and go to the next one.” Look artists then used After Effects to control the speed and scale of the final zooms create appropriate seams.

See www.fxguide.com for the complete article, and especially to see the above zoom in real time. You won’t regret it.

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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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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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