SHARP, 2004)
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
used himself as the guinea pig
in this documentary about the
health effects of eating fast
food. Spurlock spent a month
eating three meals a day at
McDonald’s and turned the
camera on himself, filming
the physical and psychological
changes that resulted. Made
for $65,000, the film grossed
nearly $30 million, and its pop-
ular impact led to McDonald’s
discontinuing its Super Size
portions. Frame enlargement.
344
Modes of Screen Reality
OUTFOXED: RUPERT
MURDOCH’S WAR ON
JOURNALISM (MOVEON.
ORG, 2004)
Distribution and sales of DVD
via the Internet enable film-
makers to take their work
directly to an audience,
bypassing traditional the-
atrical distribution. Robert
Greenwald used the Internet
and political lobbying group
MoveOn.org as primary
delivery systems for this cri-
tique of news reporting on
the Fox television network.
Nontraditional approaches to
production and distribution
hold great promise for docu-
mentary filmmakers today.
Frame enlargement.
MOCKUMENTARIES S uppose that a filmmaker deliberately uses a style of documentary filmmaking but in a wholly fictitious context. To the extent that documentary is a film practice —specifying a method of working as well as stylistic designs that are permissible and those that are not—there is nothing to prevent a filmmaker from imitating this practice, that is, from making a fake documentary, or mockumentary , such as The Blair Witch Project. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is a well-known example of a fake documentary. In the film, director Reiner plays fictitious director Marty DiBergi who is making a documentary film about British rock group Spinal Tap. No such group exists, of course, except in the pretend world of this film parody, which accurately skewers many of the conventions of rock documentaries.
The film opens with Reiner, as DiBergi, seated by a camera and lighting equipment as he tells viewers about his first meeting with Spinal Tap in 1966 and explains the genesis of what he calls a rockumentary, that is, a documentary about rock.
DiBergi talks directly into the camera with cinema equipment prominently displayed behind him. Because viewers think documentaries are more real than fiction films, shrewd filmmakers can emphasize this impression by displaying the cinema equipment used to create the images on screen. Such an on-screen display of camera equipment is unthinkable in the mode of ordinary fictional realism, but within documentary realism, it serves to authenticate the special nonfiction status of the film by communicating to the audience that the filmmaker is not trying to “fool” viewers into mistaking the film’s images for reality itself.
Other codes of rock documentaries that the film employs include people-on-the-street interviews with fans talking about what Tap means to them. These interviews are intercut with faked concert footage and faked behind-the-scenes glimpses of backstage preparation for concerts. Other faked documentary codes include a series of interviews with the band members (all of whom, of course, are actors) and even faked black-and-white kinescope 345
Modes of Screen Reality
THIS IS SPINAL TAP (EMBASSY PICTURES, 1984)
This Is Spinal Tap applies documentary techniques to completely fictitious events and characters. The film looks like a documentary but is really an elaborate hoax.
Representational reality may be unreliable or ironic. In the case of This Is Spinal Tap , the filmmaker expects the audience to recognize the irony. Frame enlargement.
footage, supposedly from 1965, dramatizing an early television appearance by Tap (like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan).
The popularity of This Is Spinal Tap has led to other films in the fake documentary mode. Among the best are three by Christopher Guest— Waiting for Guffman (1997), about a small-town theater troupe putting on a show; Best in Show (2000), about the nutty contestants in a prestigious dog show; and A Mighty Wind (2003), about competing styles of folk music. Like Spinal Tap , these films imitate many of the rules of documentary filmmaking, but much of their humor depends on the viewer getting the ironies and appreciating the elaborate fakery.
BEST IN SHOW (WARNER
BROS., 2000)
Filmmaker Christopher
Guest has specialized in fake
documentaries. This one is
a hilarious comedy about a
group of oddballs who’ve
entered their dogs in a pres-
tigious show. Fake interviews
and apparently impromptu
situations abound. Frame
enlargement.
346
Modes of Screen Reality
EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism is an extremely stylized mode of screen reality in which filmmakers use visual distortion to suggest emotional, social, or psychological disturbances or abnormalities. The distortions may be subtle, but most often they are manifest and explicit.
In this regard, expressionism is an antirealist mode that aims to move far from naturalism, emphasizing instead strange or bizarrely poetic designs using lighting, color, lenses, camera position, and set design. Expressionism in its pure form, as it characterized German cinema in the 1920s, is distinct from expressionism as it survives in contemporary cinema.
Classic German Expressionism
The expressionist mode in its purest form is found in 1920s German cinema.
Expressionism began in German painting and theater in 1908 and, by the 1920s, had spread to the cinema, where it characterized a series of classic films including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), an early version of Dracula, and the science fiction classic Metropolis (1926).
In these and other films of the early German cinema, the expressionist style was overtly opposed to realism; it emphasized elaborate distortions in the mise-en-scène.
Lighting designs employed a prevalence of shadows and violent visual contrast. Decor and set design used aberrant architectural forms to create dwellings whose off-kilter, skewed designs embodied decentered, anxiety-ridden screen worlds. Normal, rectilinear architectural forms (dwellings where walls, floor, and ceiling are at right angles to each other and in parallel planes) were replaced with skewed structures built with diagonals and nonparallel planes.
These filmmakers integrated the actors’ physical appearance and move-
ments with the architectural forms. In the accompanying illustration from F. W.
Murnau’s Nosferatu , the vampire’s thin, elongated body is linked at a visual level NOSFERATU (1922)
Expressionistic integration of
character and decor in Nosferatu .
Expressionist distortions included
architectural design as well as
the human figure. Note how the
vampire’s elongated body fits
within the arched doorway. The
expressionist style linked people
and settings to form a uniquely
stylized screen reality. Frame
enlargement.
347
Modes of Screen Reality
with the arched door frame in which he lingers before pouncing on his victim.
Expressionist acting frequently employed a distorted physical appearance, and as the image from Nosferatu illustrates, these strange body types functioned as expressive forms and were integrated seamlessly with the shapes and textures of the set design.
Expressionist filmmakers often used odd camera angles to enhance the decentering of the screen world. The camera’s positioni
ng, the lighting design, and the decor all work together to achieve maximum distortion in expressionist mise-en-scène. These distortions often were correlated with a particular kind of subject matter. Characters might be grotesques, as in the vampires of Nosferatu or the mad doctor in Metropolis.
They inhabited fantasy realms of myth, as in Fritz Lang’s Seigfried , or futuristic worlds, as in Lang’s Metropolis. Correlated with these extrahuman or subhuman characters were their extreme and sometimes deranged emotional states. The terror of the victim of the sleepwalking killer in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the killer’s own anxiety-laden flight across the rooftops are expressively conveyed in the wild decor pictured on the next page illustration.
German expressionism entered the United States via a wave of émigré German
filmmakers working in Hollywood, and the style was popularized in the series of horror films produced in the 1930s at Universal Studios. James Whale’s 1931 production of Frankenstein features the grotesque characters and diagonal visual forms that link it closely with the German horror and fantasy films that flourished in the 1920s. In the opening scene, Dr. Frankenstein and his evil assistant Fritz hide in a graveyard, waiting until the gravediggers have finished burying a body. They plan to dig it up and steal the corpse for use in their gruesome medical experiments. Visual designs emphasizing extreme antirealism and distortion effectively convey the film’s horror content.
METROPOLIS (1926)
(UFA, 1926)
Multiple in-camera expo-
sures helped to produce this
startling image of a crowd of
excited spectators at a futur-
istic nightclub. Expressionism
favors optical distortions,
dream-like imagery, and visual
poetry instead of realist de-
signs. Frame enlargement.
348
Modes of Screen Reality
THE CABINET OF DR.
CALIGARI (1919)
Expressionist set design created
a bizarre, strange, off-kilter world
in the classic The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari , the first expressionist
film. Note the disturbing diago-
nal lines suggesting disorder and
instability throughout the set in
place of normal rectilinear archi-
tecture. Frame enlargement.
Contemporary Expressionism
While the pure expressionism characterizing German cinema of the 1920s is rarely found in contemporary filmmaking, modern directors often employ the visual distortions of expressionist style.
OTHER RECENT CASES More recent productions have drawn on the expressionist heritage. Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) features a 20-minute sequence shot with uncorrected anamorphic perspective—making the characters and settings look thin and elongated—to visualize a city girl’s disorientation at living in the suburbs. One of the chief villains in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is the industrialist
FRANKENSTEIN (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, 1931)
Expressionist set design—note the sloping diagonals—in the Universal horror genre.
Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) digs up a fresh corpse for his experiments. Subsequently, his monster rages against confinement in a castle cell. Frame enlargements.
349
Modes of Screen Reality
Case Study ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Alfred Hitchcock was probably the best-known filmmaker
lobster hands, dehumanizing him in a poetic manner
to use expressionism as an ongoing feature of his work.
(in the film’s first scene, he wears a vulgar, lobster-print
In Psycho (1960), a striking low-angle shot of Norman
necktie).
Bates, the psychopathic killer, dehumanizes his face. By
In Notorious (1946), about a woman who is coerced
emphasizing the working of his gullet as he chews on
into spying for the U.S. government, an early scene
some candy, it transforms him visually into a birdlike
shows her waking up with a hangover. She looks up and
creature. This is appropriate because Norman is a taxider-
sees a government agent hovering in the doorway of
mist by hobby and keeps his office stuffed with birds of
her bedroom. Hitchcock employs a subjective expres-
prey, which he has mounted on the walls. Hitchcock said
sionistic shot to represent her point of view and to make
that these birds are perfect symbols of Norman himself.
the agent seem very threatening and sinister. The agent
They are birds of the night—predators—and he sees his
appears as a silhouette. As he walks toward her and she
own guilt mirrored in their eyes.
turns her head to look up at him, tracking his move-
In Strangers on a Train (1951), a demented fan of a
ments, his figure pirouettes upside down across her field
famous tennis player kills the athlete’s greedy and self-
of vision.
ish wife, believing that he is doing the celebrity a favor.
In Vertigo (1958), to suggest the approaching
Hitchcock films the killing from a memorably distorted
despair and madness of the detective hero (James
perspective, in an image refracted by the wife’s eye-
Stewart), Hitchcock included a completely artificial
glasses, which have fallen to the ground in her strug-
sequence. The detective’s nightmare hallucination is
gles with the killer. After she is dead, the killer reaches
represented, in part, through animation. A bouquet
for the glasses, and the refracted image gives him giant
of flowers, held by a ghostly character in the film,
PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1960)
This strange, low-angle shot of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho turns him into a bird. This adds a symbolic dimension to the narrative because Norman is a taxidermist specializing in stuffing predatory birds. The bizarre image suggests that Norman, too, is a predator, a creature of the night, like his birds. Hitchcock appreciated the special power of expressionistically distorted images to transform normal visual reality. Frame enlargement.
( continued)
350
Modes of Screen Reality
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (WARNER BROS.,1951)
Hitchcock shows a murder as the distorted reflection in the lens of a pair of discarded eyeglasses. Having finished with his victim, the killer then reaches for the glasses, and the optical distortion turns his hand into a giant lobster claw. Frame enlargements.
suddenly splits apart and the petals fly menacingly
As these examples from Hitchcock’s cinema illus-
toward the viewer. Hitchcock departs from realism
trate, the director learned from the expressionists about
here so thoroughly that it sometimes confuses mod-
the power of a distorted visual image and employed
ern viewers, uncertain whether they are seeing an
such designs systematically throughout his career when
example of inferior visual effects or a genuinely radical
he needed to suggest intensified states of emotional
visual design.
disturbance. ■
NOTORIOUS (RKO, 1946)
In Notorious , Cary Grant, as an
American government agent,
appears in this bizarre, upside-
down perspective. The angular
distortion represents the anxious
point of view of a character
reclining on a bed. In this re-
spect, the visually unstable point
of view replicates the original
aims of German expressionism,
/>
which were to visually represent
subjective states of mind. Frame
enlargement.
351
Modes of Screen Reality
NOTORIOUS (RKO, 1946)
With a subtle expressionistic touch,
Hitchcock designs this shot from
Notorious so that the cup of poison (fore-
ground) looms gigantically beside the
woman who is being poisoned (Ingrid
Bergman, background ). To get the shot,
Hitchcock instructed his prop crew to
construct an enormous cup and then
placed the camera in this low-angle
position to emphasize its size. Frame
enlargement.
Max Schreck (Christopher Walken). In name and appearance, he evokes the 1920s German classics. “Max Schreck” was the name of the actor who played the vampire in Nosferatu , and as the character appears in Burton’s film, he sports a flamboyant shock of white hair that makes him look like the mad scientist Rotwang in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In other respects as well, Burton’s film evokes classic expressionist mise-en-scène. The huge fireplace in Bruce Wayne’s mansion strongly resembles the giant fireplace used in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). These details of design and character are explicit homages to the German cinema, used to explicitly evoke some of its best-known stylistic features.
Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1992) employs a number of striking expressionistic motifs in the opening title design. The film deals with a vengeful psychopath, newly released from prison, who wreaks a terrible plan of destruction on the family of the lawyer he blames for his conviction. The film’s title is derived from the river in North Carolina where the climax occurs. The title also evokes, in a poetic and symbolic manner, the climate of terror and anxiety that is established in the story when the psychopath begins stalking and tormenting the lawyer’s family.
During the opening credits, the waters of the Cape Fear River reflect several distorted expressionistic forms. A predatory bird swoops down near the surface of the water, its shadow extended and disturbed by the river’s rippling surface.
Superimposed over the water is a terror-stricken eye, glancing about with extreme agitation. Later in the sequence, a screaming mouth appears, the teeth fearsomely exposed. Next looms a dark, ominous figure of a man, skewed on a diagonal. Finally, a drop of blood drips from the top to the bottom of the screen, bringing with it a wave of red color.
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 53