Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  ality cast by film or play, these techniques point to the

  is being violated. In this case the norm is that camera-

  enormous differences between life and the constructed

  work is subordinated to the action of a scene rather

  spectacles on stage or screen.

  than vice versa.

  The scene culminates in a moment of horror. Roland

  drives away Brontë’s companion and then sets her on

  Imaginary Characters and Performance

  fire. As the poet burns and cries, a shaken Corinne says

  Self-Disclosure

  that this is bad, that they shouldn’t have torched her,

  Weekend is filled with imaginary storybook characters.

  prompting Roland to remark that is doesn’t matter be-

  These establish a third area of self-reflexive technique.

  cause they are imaginary characters.

  During one episode in the middle of the film, the vaca-

  Brontë’s fiery destruction by Roland illuminates the

  tioning couple, Corinne and Roland, encounter poet Emily

  emotional paradox of cinema. Though the film pres-

  Brontë and a companion dressed in storybook costumes.

  ents Brontë as a storybook character dressed in a fairy-

  Corinne and Roland ask for directions to their des-

  tale costume, her violent death strikes the viewer as a

  tination, Oinville, but Brontë and her companion reply

  terrible crime. Despite her obviously fictional status,

  with metaphysical riddles. When Roland asks for the

  her death is disturbing. This paradox—a film’s ability to

  directions, Brontë inquires if he is interested in poetical

  compel emotion and belief from the viewer despite the

  or physical information. When Roland tells her that they

  fictional artifice of its characters—is the phenomenon

  only want to know how to get to Oinville, Brontë tells

  that the Brechtian tradition seeks to control, under-

  him that physics doesn’t really exist, only individual

  stand, and influence.

  WEEKEND (NEW

  YORKER FILMS,

  1967)

  Storybook characters

  dressed in fairy-tale

  costumes help shatter

  realism in Godard’s

  Weekend . Dressed in

  these outlandish cos-

  tumes, Emily Brontë

  and Le Gros Poucet

  step into the film from

  some alternate poetic

  reality. They quar-

  rel with Corinne and

  Roland, who promptly

  burn them for violating

  the standard of realism.

  Frame enlargement.

  ( continued)

  366

  Modes of Screen Reality

  The Legacy of Godard

  The sequence is emotionally powerful and inflam-

  Godard’s self-conscious, radical cinematic techniques

  matory because it gives full-throated voice to various

  have exerted an enormous influence on other filmmak-

  racisms. Spike Lee realized that he needed to break

  ers, as has the Brechtian tradition that nourished his

  down and contain the emotions unleashed in the scene

  work. Spike Lee is a contemporary director who freely

  and that were likely to be aroused in the film’s audi-

  mixes modes of screen reality in his films, incorporating

  ences. Accordingly, he breaks the hypnotizing power of

  ordinary fictional realism, fantasy sequences, and modes

  the racist rhetoric with an explicitly didactic, Brechtian

  of self-reflexivity. The black-and-white narrative of She’s

  conclusion. A black radio deejay breaks into the mon-

  Gotta Have It (1986), for example, is punctuated by one

  tage, telling the characters to cool down, shut up, and

  striking color sequence, a musical fantasy, that departs

  break that nonsense off. The deejay heartily condemns

  greatly in tone and style from the surrounding narrative.

  the racial antagonisms of the characters, restoring calm

  In Do the Right Thing (1989), Lee displays a precise

  and sanity.

  understanding of how Brechtian techniques can be

  Filmmakers such as Lee or Godard use self-

  used to contain and control the emotions generated

  reflexive techniques in a didactic manner to maintain

  by the story on screen. During the famous racial slur

  a measure of control over the social impact of their

  sequence, a gallery of characters hurls obscenities

  films and the messages inside those films. These

  and insults at targeted social groups. A young Italian

  techniques enable the filmmakers to insert editorial

  man (John Turturro) insults African-Americans, Mookie

  remarks into the film, offering the viewer explicit

  (Spike Lee) insults Italian-Americans, a Hispanic gang

  guidance about how a scene should be interpreted

  member insults Koreans, a cop insults Hispanics, and

  or understood. The Brechtian tradition is a major

  a Korean merchant condemns Jews. Each character is

  aesthetic influence on filmmakers who want to speak

  filmed in an identical fashion: The camera quickly tracks

  directly to their audience and who wish to assert

  from long shot to medium close-up to add visual em-

  maximum control over the impact of their social

  phasis to the verbal invective.

  messages. ■

  He wanted his plays to become a stimulus to social action and reform, to have direct real-world consequences, and so he deliberately broke with realist and naturalist traditions by incorporating explicitly didactic techniques into his theater. Actors on stage might speak directly to the audience, or the social contradictions dramatized by the action of a play might be announced directly via titles projected on a screen above the stage. These methods were anti-illusionist in that they sought to dispel the illusion of a self-contained fictional world created by conventional drama and stagecraft.

  Impact on Viewers of Self-Reflexive Techniques

  The comic and didactic modes of cinematic self-reflexivity tend to pull viewers out of the reality represented on screen by reminding them that it is a cinematic construction.

  The illusion created by a screen world, however, is very powerful. It can sustain the digressions and intrusions of self-reflexive techniques. Such techniques typically dispel, momentarily , the emotional pull the viewer experiences from the screen world, but it is difficult to disrupt this emotional pull for very long. It tends quickly to reassert itself.

  In Weekend , for example, despite all the title cards, the radical camera movements, and the moments of performance self-disclosure, the basic spectacle of Corinne and Roland’s comic and increasingly violent car journey across France is exceptionally compelling. While one appreciates the social responsibility that Lee demonstrates as director when he brings on the calm deejay to conclude the racism scene in Do the 367

  Modes of Screen Reality

  DO THE RIGHT THING (UNIVERSAL, 1989)

  Mookie (Spike Lee) in the famous racial slur sequence from Do the Right Thing . Director Lee uses a self-reflexive technique to maintain artistic control over the sequence’s inflammatory stream of racist insults. By alternating between different modes of screen reality, Lee evokes the poisonous intensity of racial hatred and then contextualizes it with a clear and direct condemnation. Frame enlargement.

  Right Thing , one nevertheless remembers the s
cene for its extraordinarily hypnotic stream of racial insults.

  The represented world on screen can be manipulated by filmmakers using self-

  reflexive techniques, but for spectators, the screen world tends to retain its emotional integrity and validity. Viewers know that Austin Powers and Bill are just movie characters. They admit this themselves, but viewers still want to spend time with them.

  The cinema compels emotional belief in its modes of screen reality even when filmmakers admit to viewers that it’s all just a movie.

  ANIMATION

  Because it is susceptible to the optical illusions on which cinema depends—beta movement and persistence of vision—the human eye can be fooled into seeing movement in a series of hand-drawn images just as with a series of still photographic images.

  The creative possibilities of animation—of making a still image or model appear to move—have long fascinated filmmakers.

  The illusion of movement in cinema is not dependent on seeing live action images—

  it can work for any type of image. Filmmakers have animated line drawings created by hand as well as stationary objects, built either as three-dimensional models or as virtual objects inside computer space. Animation forms a distinct mode of screen reality in which the constraints imposed by live action drop away.

  Most significantly, as a mode of screen reality, animation takes cinema away from the photographic tradition that informs virtually all feature films. The camera in 368

  Modes of Screen Reality

  GERTIE THE DINOSAUR

  (1914)

  Windsor McCay’s popular Gertie

  the Dinosaur was one of the first

  animated film characters with a

  distinctive personality. McCay

  had been a newspaper cartoon-

  ist intrigued by the potential of

  moving-image animation. Gertie

  became an instant star. Frame

  enlargement.

  an animated film is not focused on live actors and real sets or locations that get photographed to make the movie. (Performance capture, to be discussed shortly, is the exception to this rule in animation.)

  A line drawing with minimal detail like Gertie the Dinosaur can come to life, and the fish of Finding Nemo (2003) or Remy the rat in Ratatouille (2007) can speak and act with personalities that would be unconvincing in live action. Because this mode of screen reality departs from photographic origins, audiences readily accept things in an animated world that they would not in a live action world. In an animated world, if a cartoon character accidentally drives a car off the edge of a cliff, the car will hang suspended in space, just long enough for the character, now wise to the danger, to gri-mace at the camera. Then gravity grabs the car and down it goes.

  This mode of screen reality has been with cinema since the beginning, and the techniques for creating an animated screen world have changed over the decades.

  The earliest film cartoons appeared shortly after the invention of cinema. J. Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) used chalk and a blackboard to animate a series of amusing facial expressions. The French cartoonist Emile Cohl created over 75 film cartoons between 1908 and 1910 and then came to the United States to continue his work with The Newlyweds and Their Baby (1912), a movie cartoon based on a comic strip. One of the earliest and most popular cartoon characters with a distinct personality was Windsor McCay’s lovable Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).

  McCay made 10,000 separate drawings to bring this one reel film to life.

  2D Animation

  2D animation is the process of photographing flat artwork, typically a combination of characters and background. Until the development of computer animation in the 1990s, cartooning in cinema traditionally was a two-dimensional (2D) process.

  Characters such as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse were drawn on cells (transparent 369

  Modes of Screen Reality

  sheets of celluloid, the same material that a strip of film is made of). These are placed overtop a painted background. In order to create a movement, such as Bugs popping up from his rabbit hole, many cells are drawn, each containing a fragment of Bugs’s movement, and these are then photographed separately against the background. Thus, in 2D animation, the background art remains relatively unchanging; most movement occurs in the foreground characters.

  This method of animating cells against a painted background was developed in 1914. While it became an industry standard, it was limited in the amount of three-dimensional (3D) depth information that it could convey. If a character moved away from the camera into the distance, the camera could not follow into the depth of the scene. Furthermore, early cartoons such as Gertie or the popular Felix the Cat (a major character in the 1920s) involved very few light and shadow effects, which are a key means of creating the impression of depth.

  Walt Disney achieved the key breakthroughs in these and other technical areas, and his work dominated cartooning in the 1930s. (Max Fleischer’s popular Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor cartoons were key competitors with Disney.) Disney made the first sound cartoon in 1928 with Steamboat Willie , starring his new character Mickey Mouse, and then a Technicolor animation in 1932 with Flowers and Trees.

  He introduced Donald Duck in 1934, whose popularity (along with Goofy and Pluto) displaced Mickey Mouse.

  The short films that Disney was making with Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto were wildly popular, but determined to push the creative boundaries of animation, Disney resolved to produce a full-length animated feature.

  To do this, he had to solve the problem of limited depth perspective. The feature needed to be completely cinematic. It would have to do many of the same things as a live-action feature film—create lighting effects, depth perspective, and camera movement—in order for the audience to accept it.

  To achieve this, the Disney team created a multiplane camera , which thereafter became a standard tool of 2D animation. A multiplane camera is mounted above a series of cells, each containing separate elements of the scene. Because the cells are mounted at varying distances from the camera, if it pans or moves toward them, an effect of motion perspective is created (near objects moving more rapidly than distant objects), which is a powerful source of depth perception.

  Moreover, the multiplane camera enabled animators to create depth-of-field effects. They could shift focus from a tree on a foreground cell to Mickey Mouse on a cell mounted farther from the camera, again creating an animated equivalent of depth perspective. And moving-camera shots could be simulated by moving a series of cells past the camera and at different rates to simulate motion perspective. The camera, the background art, and the cells could be adjusted in 64 different ways for every frame of film, a huge increase in the amount and variety of visual information.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney’s first animated feature, capitalized on these innovations, as well as fine attention to lighting effects, in particular a new ability to create transparent shadows attached to solid characters, achieved by underexposing the cells containing the shadows. Disney and his team also perfected the difficult art of personality animation. As a result, Snow White and her seven dwarves were as emotionally involving as live-action characters. The film was a stu-pendous hit.

  The success of Snow White opened the door to the golden age of 2D animation, during which Hollywood’s major studios started their own animation departments. Disney 370

  Modes of Screen Reality

  dominated features in this period, with Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), and Cinderella (1950). But the other studios excelled at shorts. 20th Century Fox had Terrytoons, with animated stars Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, and Deputy Dawg. Universal had a series produced by Walter Lantz, starring Woody Woodpecker. Columbia had cartoon stars Krazy Kat and Mr. Magoo, MGM had Tom and Jerry, and Paramount had Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  But it was Warner Bros. that produced more carto
on stars and classic cartoon shorts than anybody else. Warners was home to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Pepe LePew, and many others. Animators and directors Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and Fritz Freleng and vocal artist Mel Blanc were among the key people responsible for this amazing run of cartoons that lasted until the end of the 1950s.

  Rising production costs and television killed the golden age. Former MGM animators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera developed a “limited movement” approach for television that quickly became the standard in The Yogi Bear Show, Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons , and Magilla Gorilla.

  2D animation survives in today’s world of digital film. The Iron Giant (1999) combined traditional 2D animation with digital animation in a well-written tale about a friendly space traveler who lands in the United States during the paranoid Cold War era of the 1950s.

  Japan’s pre-eminent animator, Hayao Miyazaki, helped to pioneer the revival of animated features with Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005). He has remained committed to hand-drawn animation with minimal use of digital effects. Working on Spirited Away , Miyazaki told his staff,

  “This is a two-dimensional film. This is our strength,” and he believes that hand-drawn work gives the creator more freedoms than digital.

  RABBIT SEASONING

  (WARNER BROS.,

  1952)

  Beginning in the

  1930s, Warner Bros.

  launched a cartoon se-

  ries released under the

  banners Looney Tunes

  and Merrie Melodies

  featuring a gallery of

  now-classic characters:

  Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck,

  Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd,

  Road Runner, and oth-

  ers. This was the golden

  age of 2D animation.

  Frame enlargement.

  371

  Modes of Screen Reality

  SPIRITED AWAY (TOHO, 2001)

  Digital tools have not replaced traditional 2D animation. Hayao Miyazaki is the world’s preeminent 2D animator. His films are epic, and wonderfully imaginative and use fantasy to reflect on today’s world. He deliberately keeps digital work to a bare minimum. Frame enlargement.