CHAPTER 16 | Metaphors to Cinema
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Cinematic Technology
highlight some critical concepts and developments along this historical path, an encyclopedic reference, the History of the Discovery of Cinema website by Paul Burns, provides a more comprehensive list of the scientific and artistic developments leading to the creation of motion pictures
Persistence of Persistence of Vision
[Cinema] is the fixing of reality, the essence of time, a way of preserving time which allow to roll and unroll it forever. No other form of art can do that. Therefore, cinema is a mosaic made of time. – Andrei Tarkovsky [1]
Why do we perceive movement as movement? More precisely, why do we perceive a series of static images, changing slightly from one another and projected at our eyes in very rapid succession, as containing the illusion of motion? The traditional theory taught in schools of film is known as persistence of vision, a phenomenon whereby a retinal afterimage is retained for a fraction of a second and blended with what is occurring right now. The theory is useful, but was debunked by the one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer, in 1912. MediaCollege.com suggests "it is thought that the illusion of continuous motion is caused by unrelated phenomena such as beta movement (the brain assuming movement between two static images when shown in quick succession)." Visit Rod Munday's The Moving Image, a comprehensive web lecture on the topic.
Even though it has been proven a myth, persistence of vision persists in otherwise respectable cinematic theory. Why? Munday quotes some critics who blame sloppy scholarship. This author prefers the explanation that, as a metaphor, the idea of persistence relating to vision remains potent and useful to a motion picture artist. In any event, the phenomenon of apparent motion, whatever the cause, existed long before the movies came along.
Flip Book and Thaumatrope
Small, hand-held, and user controlled (interactive??), these devices came to popularity in the early 19th century. The flip book, comprehensively illustrated at flipbook.info, uses beta movement to imply motion, while the thaumatrope creates the illusion of combining two images into one.
Random Motion by Ruth Hayes has some smart examples of flip books and thaumatropes.
Phenakistiscope and Zoetrope
Slightly more complex, but building on the same phenomenon, the phenakistiscope by Joseph Plateau was a rotating disc that created the illusion of motion. It also went by the names stroboscope and zoopraxiscope.
The zoetrope turned the disc into a drum, and a variant, the praxinoscope, replaced slits with mirrors. William George Horner is credited with the invention of the zoetrope, but Wikipedia claims the "earliest elementary zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by the inventor Ting Huan.” [2]
Click here to see a simulation of a phenakistiscope in motion... and here for a zoetrope demo. In an interesting mash-up of old and new, digital artists are creating 3D zoetropes "printed" from digital models...
Projection and the Magic Lantern
The earliest idea for projection was doubtless a simple casting of hand shadows on a cave wall by the flickering fire (Figure 9). Imitating animals and people, a story could be told, and even sophisticated philosophical constructs could be illustrated (Figure 10).
Theatrical performances changing the scale of a human figure have used shadow castings for hundreds of years (Figures 11, 12). The simple moving silhouette gives inspiration to the magic lantern. A precursor to the slide projector, it was a popular Victorian entertainment; some sources claim it made an appearance as early as 1650.
Laterna Magica Galantee Show is reviving wildly popular live performances of magic lantern shows... go to their website to see a performance.
Building on the Camera
[CROSS REFERENCE TO PHOTOGRAPHY]
Stopping Motion…
With the discovery of faster photochemical processes, it became possible to shoot a photograph in a fraction of a second. This opened the door to chronophotography, the Victorian precursor to true cinematography. Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge developed techniques for creating frame-by-frame documentation of motion, typically of animals or people. Their techniques informed the kind of stop motion techniques that are still used in animation today, despite the dominance of computer animation.
Marey's device gives new meaning to "shooting" photographs... at 12 frames per second, it would record these instances on the same piece of film (Figures 27, 28), creating images that later inspire artists like the Italian Futurists to explore motion in painting (Figure 29).
Eadweard Muybridge extended Marey's explorations by recording images on separate pieces of film. Setting up an elaborate battery of cameras, trip wires and other means of controlling exposure, Muybridge proves that a horse leaves the ground under full gallop in 1873. He later expands on this exploration at the University of Pennsylvania and develops moving pictures in his zoopraxiscope. The recording of single images provides the breakthrough necessary for cinematography.
… and Starting It
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Motion and Emotion
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While it's beyond the scope of this document to provide a comprehensive history of cinema, some key concepts and precedents are worth highlighting here.
First Film Firsts
The earliest surviving "film" is Roundhay Garden Scene, a technical demonstration by Louis Le Prince. It runs at 12 frames per second, about half the rate of the modern cinematography standard.
Motion pictures remain little more than a technical curiosity until they find their voice with D. W. Griffith. If Le Prince and Thomas Edison gave motion pictures an alphabet, Griffith gave them something to say. His seminal work of 1915, The Birth of a Nation, is tainted with an obvious racism that makes it difficult for a modern audience to appreciate, but the basic vocabulary of film pioneered in Nation... long shots, pans, close-ups, fades... is further refined in Intolerance, a four-part exploration of humanity's proclivity toward that vice. We are so familiar with film's vocabulary of continuity editing, it's hard to imagine a movie where the camera acts like it's sitting in the audience of a play, but that was the norm until Griffith literally turned the camera loose. Try to view the clip in Figure 3 with the eyes of a person born in 1890 and the wow factor is easier to appreciate.
The vocabulary created by Griffith was extended by the Russian master Sergei Eisenstein, who used fades and cuts among close-ups and long shots to create a concept of montage, the opposite of continuity editing. The emotional effects of montage are still startling in the "Odessa Steps" sequence from The Battleship Potemkin, one of the most influential films of all time.
Metropolis, by German Expressionist director Fritz Lang, has been recently restored. The dystopian grandfather to such films as Blade Runner and The Matrix, it pioneered the use of many special effects that became standard up until the development of computer-generated imagery.
Although not the first film to use color, Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz is notable for the use of color to advance the narrative. In L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale's home in Kansas is described as follows:
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side.... Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. [3]
Fleming uses a monochrome sepia-tone film for all the scenes in Kansas, while all the Oz sequences are in Technicolor, creating the contrast that Baum imagines in the book. The trick for making the transition (Figure 6) involved nothing more elaborate than making everything inside the house sepia... paint and fabric. A body double for actress Judy Garland wears a sepia version of Dorothy's costume to open the door, and as the camera dollies out, Garland appears to have transformed, walking out the door in her full-color costume.
Considered by many as the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane by Orson Welles innovates in the use of deep-focus cinematography and narrative devices of extended flashback and multiple narration, creating a non-linear story. It is also notable for the way Welles, in the title role, appears to age sixty years using makeup.
Animation
Some of the high points of animation history are mentioned below, but certainly not all of them. Visit Wikipedia's History of Animation article if you want to explore the topic more deeply. CGI is purposely being left out here... a topic for another article.
The earliest surviving fully animated film, by J. Stuart Blackton (Figure 8), combines two basic kinds of animation... stop motion with traditional hand drawing as the artist draws and erases Humorous Phases of Funny Faces on a chalkboard. We sometimes inadvertently see Blackton in flash frames where he didn't get out of the way in time.
The chalkboard look in Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl is really a reversal film process that renders black lines on white paper as negative... as a deliberate homage to Blackton's blackboard. It is the first animation using individual hand drawings... 700 of them.
Genuine artistry was brought to animation by Winsor McCay. His groundbreaking Gertie the Dinosaur not only has a genuine feel of anatomic structure, but a genuine personality to go with it. It's the first animation to use the concepts of keyframes and tweens, a vocabulary familiar to digital animation software users.
Inspired by McCay's artistry, animators like Walt Disney developed real stories, with characters that had real emotions. Although not the first Mickey Mouse feature, Steamboat Willie was the first Disney animated film with a post-production, synchronized soundtrack complete with music, sound effects and dialog. No other animated film had matched its quality of sound-image synchrony up to that time. In the feature you might notice that Mickey, as the title character, is much more devious and cruel than the Mickey we encounter as the more sanitized and familiar icon of the Walt Disney Company.
Norman McLaren experimented wildly with all kinds of animation techniques in association with the National Film Board of Canada. Stop motion and pixilation (such as in the levitation scenes from his Academy Award winning antiwar parable Neighbours of 1952), puppetry and other devices fed his work, but some of the most intense, and labor intensive, experiments involve McLaren drawing directly on 35mm film, animating without the use of a camera. Len Lye, a contemporary, also drew on film by, among other things, scratching it.
Terry Gilliam is a director with a unique visual sensibility known for feature films like Twelve Monkeys. He got his start as an animator who joined the famous British comic troupe Monty Python, with whom he produced a signature style of animation that has influenced a generation of animators from Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) to Evan and Gregg Spiridellis (JibJab Media, below). He uses a tactile collage-montage technique that presages the use of bitmap images in Flash animation.
The Spiridellis brothers, known as JibJab, achieved instant, viral fame when their Flash animation parody of Woodie Guthrie's folk tune This Land is Your Land landed in cyberspace in 2004. This Land was such a popular video it crashed JibJab's server after the first day. Like all good parody, it takes no prisoners, lampooning George W. Bush and John Kerry with a bipartisan relish that remains a hallmark of their work today.
Art Films
Since the birth of cinema, artists have been creating moving images, and many of the aforementioned works could easily be grafted into this segment. Again, unfortunately because of brevity, there are only a few highlights below.
Fernand Léger, with Dudley Murphy and the musical composer George Antheil, had a grand vision for a film titled Ballet Mécanique. This vision was not fully realized because the score and film ran to different duration, but the project created several interesting offshoots, including the video portion in Figure 15. Paul Lehrman later combined an abridged score and the film in 2000, which can be heard in the clip.
Duchamp keeps showing up everywhere, so film should be no different. Interested in the possibilities of motion since the time of his Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, his classic, anagrammatically titled Anémic Cinéma juxtaposes images of his Rotoreliefs with spiraling, nonsense puns in French. The version in Figure 16 includes a modern soundtrack by Laptop Quartet Twentytwentyone. Don't look for narrative... this is Dada at its finest.
Artist and film-maker Hans Richter creates a Surrealist-Dada mash-up with Dreams That Money Can Buy. It includes segments by a who's who of the avant-garde... Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and himself. The disparate segments are bound by a diegesis in which the protagonist sets up a business in a room with a very complicated lease. This is such a crazy interesting work, the clip below is the full feature on Internet Archive... feel free to come back to it when you have some time to spend.
Straddling the border between artist and designer, husband-and-wife collaborators Charles and Ray Eames produced many film shorts celebrating culture and phenomena. Their seminal documentary, Powers of Ten, makes macrocosmic-microcosmic leaps of scale perception based on orders of magnitude. The film became one of the primary inspirations for Google Earth and the long zoom effect now common in films and games.
Considered by art historians to be the first true "video artist," Nam June Paik engages in ironic cultural criticism through his work. Global Groove starts with a voiceover claiming "[t]his is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." A devotee of media theoretician Marshall McLuhan, Paik could have been talking about channel surfing and YouTube... but when the piece was created in 1973, there were 3 networks and no cable, never mind the Internet. No AfterEffects here...
Since 1976, Bill Viola has been exploring extreme states of human emotion, often disassociated with any cause for the display. A student of history and mysticism, his tableaus often map onto classical and medieval art compositions. The power of his work doesn't emerge from complex use of computer technology. On the contrary, he uses long shots with ultra-slow motion cameras to heighten the state of emotion.
Like a bizarre Rube Goldberg scenario, The Way Things Go by Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss documents a thirty-minute chain reaction of everyday objects cast in very non-everyday situations. The work is not really sculpture and not really performance; thus, the film becomes much more than a simple record of events. Filmed in real time with a hand-held camera, we get caught strangely up in the drama of a lit fuse or waiting for a ladder to slide down a ramp.
Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle is a kind of parallel universe, where the familiar is strange and the strange is familiar. Not only five films, but also sculptural installations, photographs, drawings, a book and a website embody this metaphorical exploration of creation, mapped out on two biological phenomena: the process of fetal gender differentiation and the function of the male cremaster muscle.
Sound and Vision
Concurrent with the technical search for recording images was the quest for recording sound. In 2008, historians at First Sounds announced an amazing discovery: the earliest known recording of a human voice occurred on April 9, 1860, almost a generation before Edison's phonograph. Here you can read about their process of discovering the phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, whose voice we presumably can hear in this audio clip... one hundred and fifty years later. Not to take anything away from Thomas Edison, though, as he was instrumental in not only refining the recording and playing of sounds, but also of moving pictures as well...
“Silent” Film
For the first thirty years of cinema history, there was not a practical way of synchronizing sound and image. Thus this era, from about 1895 to the mid-Twenties, has become known as the Silent Era. This is actually a misnomer, as rarely were the films shown in complete silence. Live musicians, orchestras, organs, live sound-effects artists, and other ways of creating sound in real time were more than common.
Typical of the grand scale for "blockbusters" of the time, Napoléon by Abel Gance (Figure 2) was intended to be shown accompanied with a full orchestra creating the soundtrack. The film was restored with a new score by Carmine Coppola, premiering at Radio City Music Hall in 1981, and here shown at a performance at the Colosseum in Rome.
As sound became part of cinema, sound effects experts known as foley artists would thump a watermelon to emulate a punch sound or flap a piece of sheet metal to suggest thunder, synchronizing their efforts with the action on screen.
Talkies
The first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue elements was The Jazz Singer in 1927. By 1930, the "talkies" had pretty much taken over Hollywood. Most of the improvements over the coming decades were chiefly technical, allowing sound to play the supporting role necessary to carry the visual narrative. Sound itself doesn't become the star until much later, but the addition of sound does give rise in the 30s, 40s and 50s to the golden age of musicals, adapted from the Broadway stage or written for film outright.
Films for Music for Films
In the 1980's a new phenomenon began with the experimental documentary film Koyaanisqatsi (Figure 3). Director Godfrey Reggio avoids dialog in place of an intimate relationship between slow-motion and time-lapse film techniques of Ron Fricke and the mesmerizing minimalist musical score by Philip Glass. The musical score became so popular that the Philip Glass Ensemble toured the world, creating the music in front of the movie, replacing the recorded film score with live performance. Below is a snippet... MGM Digital Media has posted the entire film here, and it's worth a watch (even if it is interrupted by über-ironic adverts that break the spell... exactly the kind of thing Reggio is raging against in his film!).
Another minimalist, Brian Eno, concocted a trio of albums as a Music for Films series in the late 70s and early 80s. These classics of the ambient music genre are soundtracks to films that don't exist, yet they have informed so much film music since their release it's difficult to not hear them as actual soundtracks (and some of the tracks actually did make it into some films, after all...).
The Future is the Past
A trend of the past decade has been the revisiting of old art films by young musicians. Reclaiming a lost territory, Eno-inspired groups like Laptop Quartet Twentytwentyone compose for Duchamp, Eggeling (Figure 4), Richter and other avant-garde film-makers, making the older work fresh for a new audience. Found sound combines with real-time samples from acoustic instruments in a way that honors the content without losing a contemporary edge.
Another group who creates new sounds for old silent films is Alloy Orchestra. Roger Miller (of Mission of Burma fame), Terry Donahue and Ken Winokur are three musicians, but they sound like 15 in this adaptation of Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (Figure 5). With soundtracks for Nosferatu (see Figure 1 above) and Metropolis, Alloy has even inspired some modern filmmakers to make silent movies today.
Found Sound
Let's face the fact that it's hard to do it all. It's tempting to snatch a bit of sound and hope no one notices that you stolen a copyrighted work... but remember the opportunities in sharing and licensing from ART 201. Fortunately there are tons of places where sound is free, and as long as you play along with terms of use, you'll soon have a pretty impressive library of sound to glean from.
Sites like Stonewashed or FindSounds allow you to collect an impressive array of snippets to create sound collage and sampling from, all either public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Sites like these often stipulate to credit the site as the source of your sound... always oblige any request like this.
Some artists are now providing free services for independent, non-commercial or student [that would be you on all three counts] filmmakers. Moby, no stranger to film scoring himself, has donated part of his website to a project called mobygratis.com, where you can set up an account and request the rights to use tracks under a license that restricts your use to the film project proposed. It does take a couple of weeks to get the rights to download, but it's good stuff.
Lastly, don't forget the Free Media Library at Penn State's Media Commons.
The Language of Cinema
Image making is a language. It has an alphabet [bits of light, shadow, color], words [groupings of light-shadow-color we can recognize], and grammar [rules for organizing those groupings], all of which generate semiotic meaning or compositional relationships. As a way of communicating, image-making can be understood around the globe... perhaps even around the rest of the universe, which is why pictures rather than words are used to communicate on the Voyager Golden Record.
Moving pictures linked with sound creates the special case of image-making language we call film. If you come to this course having started as a painter, you might think you know enough about the language of image making that your movie-making efforts will translate easily. But it's a bit like knowing Italian and believing that will help you speak Spanish... they are both derived from Latin, but each has enough uniqueness that it becomes important to really learn the language you intend to use. So... let's break the process down into three related, overlapping, intertwining actions: shooting, editing and sound. As we do, we'll be using film jargon... use the Glossary to help you with these terms and others as the project unfolds.
[INTEGRATE
- · The Language of Film - Glossary
- · A terrific reference in PDF form can be found at InPoint.com: The Language of Film.
- · Since this is a new language for you, a guide to avoid unsuccessful filmmaking: .
INTEGRATE]
Shooting
Whether you choose abstraction or traditional narrative, animation or live action, the universe depicted in your film is known as the diegesis, which consists of two related but very different things:
- · The Mise-en-scène, a French term meaning "formatting the scene" or "staging." In a traditional, live action narrative, it includes how you use actors, sets, props, costumes, lighting, sound, location... anything that shows up on film. In an abstract animation, visual elements and principles... line, shape, color, balance, rhythm, and so on... become your mise-en-scène.
- · The Mise-en-shot, French for "formatting the shot" or "shooting," involves the translation of your mise-en-scène into shots, individual instances where the camera is recording action in the mise-en-scène. Placement and movement of the camera, duration of the shot, depth of focus, and scale of shot [long shot, medium shot, close-up] all contribute to the nature of the movement in the picture. Movement is described as primary action [movement of actors or elements in the visual field] and secondary action [movement of the camera itself].
[here a discussion of types of shot and types of secondary movement]
Editing
When you're done recording action, you're barely half done. Taking the individual shots and putting them all together into an organic, coherent temporal composition is the art of editing, which is where you'll be spending quality time with Premier. The quality of your editing, like the quality of your shooting, can make or break your project. In other words, it's hard for a good editing job to make anything out of bad shooting, and it's easy for a bad edit to destroy good shooting. The nature of your film will broadly determine your editing style as either:
- · Continuity editing, a sense of continuous, sequential action in a logical space-time continuum. Most Hollywood films favor this style as less demanding on an audience. Since the audience is largely unaware of the editing in this style, it is sometimes referred to as transparency editing.
- · Montage, action that develops in a non-linear fashion, inviting the audience to create connections between what may appear to be unrelated shots. This kind of editing, sometimes referred to as framed editing, continually reminds the audience that the film is an artificial construct. Flash-backs, flash-forwards, jump cuts, cutting to black or fading to white, sudden starting and stopping of sound or action are typical hallmarks of this style of editing.
Some filmmakers favor one or the other, while others feel free to pitch back and forth between them, even within one film.
When editing, you are stringing pearls... placing one shot next to another in a deliberate sequence. The link between the shot is known as a transition. The most elementary transition is the cut, a simple straight splice from one piece of action to another. A fade brings the action to a stop slowly and gradually by transitioning to a neutral visual field, usually black or white. A dissolve or cross-fade is similar to a fade, but transitions gradually from one shot to another. A wipe suggests a shot pushing or pulling another shot out of the way. In the digital age, new transitions... 3D swoops, pixilated dissolves and the like... are available through software.
Sound
The next time you see a film, don't watch it. Listen to it. Sound is a vital part of the filmic language and can fundamentally change the meaning of the action. Sound can be diegetic... the voices of the characters in the world of the film, for example. It can also be non-diegetic... a voice-over narrator or a full orchestral soundtrack don't exist in the world of the film. It can also switch... a pop-tune overdub soundtrack can feel non-diegetic until a character unexpectedly switches off a radio.
Sound comes from a variety of sources: dialog, sound effects and music. Human voices or sound effects can be synchronous [exactly matching the action in the film] or asynchrous [not matching the action, or occurring outside of the visual field].
[1] Bielawski, Jan and Trondsen, Trond S. "Andrei Tarkovsky Talks About... ." nostalghia.com: an Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site. 2001-2005.
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/AT_For_Dummies.html
[2] "Zoetrope." Wikipedia. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope
[3] Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill, 1899. p. 12
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