• Find & Post (or post a link to) a concept of Communication in Film (photo, short video, brief piece of writing, song, etc — that no one else in the class has posted to the blog yet) related to this week’s chapter(s).  No two posts can be identical.
• Analyze the object according to the requirements for the week.
• Make a connection to the readings, videos or recordings for the week.
• Posts will be made in the Canvas discussion forum.
• Each post should be at least 3 paragraphs in length.
• Refer to CHAPTER 4 (acting) in book linked. ON TIME please. NO plagerism. Due monday night please. please attach the photo, video or what ever you decide to speak about

No Plagerismturn in on time

9 781292 041292
ISBN 978-1-29204-129-2
Movies and Meaning
An Introduction to Film
Stephen Prince
Sixth Edition
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Pearson New International Edition
International_PCL_TP.indd 1 7/29/13 11:23 AM
Movies and Meaning
An Introduction to Film
Stephen Prince
Sixth Edition

Pearson Education Limited
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Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN 10: 1-292-04129-3
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Table of Contents
P E A R S O N C U S T O M L I B R A R Y
I
Glossary
1
1Stephen Prince
1. Film Structure
13
13Stephen Prince
2. Cinematography
57
57Stephen Prince
3. Production Design
95
95Stephen Prince
4. Acting
121
121Stephen Prince
5. Editing: Making the Cut
149
149Stephen Prince
6. Principles of Sound Design
187
187Stephen Prince
7. The Nature of Narrative in Film
229
229Stephen Prince
8. Visual Effects
287
287Stephen Prince
9. Modes of Screen Reality
325
325Stephen Prince
381
381Index

II

G L O S S A R Y
3D digital matte A matte painting that has been camera
mapped onto a 3D geometrical model in computer space.
The digital matte can then be moved or rotated to
simulate the perspective of a moving camera. See also
camera mapping .
Additive Color Mixing A system used for creating color
on television where red, blue, and green lights are mixed
together to create all other hues.
ADR Automated dialogue replacement (ADR) is a post-
production practice in which actors re-record lines of dia-
logue or add new ones not present at the point of filming.
Computer software enables proper synching of these lines
with the performer’s lip movements as recorded on film.
Aerial Image Printing Method of producing dimensional
effects using matte paintings in an optical printer. An image
(such as a matte painting) is projected to a focal plane in space
(rather than onto a surface) where it can be photographed by
the process camera in the optical printer. That footage can be
combined with live action footage and other optical elements.
Aerial Perspective A visual depth cue in which the effects
of the atmosphere make very distant objects appear bluish
and hazy.
Alpha Channel In a digital image, this channel of informa-
tion specifies a pixel’s degree of transparency. The alpha
channel is often used for generating male and female mattes.
Ambient Sound The background sound characteristic of an
environment or location. For a film such as The Last of the
Mohicans , set in a forest, ambient sounds include the rustle
of branches and the cries of distant birds.
Anamorphic Method of producing a widescreen (2.35:1)
image by squeezing the picture information horizontally and
stretching it vertically. This method is used for both theatri-
cal films and for DVD home video formatted for 16 × 9 (wi-
descreen) monitors or projection systems. Unsqueezing the
picture information during projection or viewing produces
the widescreen image.
Ancillary Market All of the nontheatrical markets from
which a film distributor derives revenue. These include home
video, cable television, and foreign markets.
Angle of View The amount of area recorded by a given
lens. Telephoto lenses have a much smaller angle of view
than wide-angle lenses.
Animation 2D Traditional form of animation in cinema
which involves photographing flat artwork, typically a com-
bination of characters and background. Camera movement
and three dimensional depth perspective is fairly limited.
Animatronic Model A motorized, moveable miniature
model, often used for creature effects.
Animation 3D Animation of miniature models or puppets
or animation inside three-dimensional computer space.
Antinarrative A narrative style that tends, paradoxically,
toward eliminating narrative by employing lots of digres-
sion, avoiding a clear hierarchy of narrative events, and by
suppressing the causal connections among events.
Art Director Working under the production designer, the
art director supervises the translation and sketches into sets.
Art Film Films made by overseas directors in the 1950s
and 1960s that explored weighty and timeless themes and
took film style in new, unexplored directions.
Aspect Ratio The dimensions of the film frame or screen
image. Aspect ratio is typically expressed in units of width
to height.
Attributional Errors Mistakes of interpretation that arise
when a critic erroneously decides that some effect in a film
has a meaning expressly intended by its creators or incor-
rectly assigns the creative responsibility for an effect to the
wrong member of the production crew. Uncovering these er-
rors typically requires documentation of a film’s production
history.
Auteur A director whose work is characterized by a dis-
tinctive audiovisual design and recurring set of thematic
issues. Auteurism is a model of film theory and criticism that
searches for film authors or auteurs.
Auteurist Film Theory (Auteur Theory) A model of film the-
ory that studies the work of a film auteur (or author). Directors
are generally considered to be the prime auteurs in cinema.
Auteurist theory studies the films of a cinema auteur as works
of personal expression.
Back Light The light source illuminating the space between
performers and the rear wall of a set. Along with key and
fill lights, back light is one of the three principal sources of
illumination in a scene.
Beta Movement A perceptual illusion in which the hu-
man eye responds to apparent movement as if it were real.
Because of this illusion, viewers think they see moving fig-
ures on a film or television screen when, in fact, there is no
true movement.
Binocular Disparity Each eye has a different angle of view
on the world, and this difference or disparity provides a
source of information about depth, distance and spatial lay-
out. Stereoscopic cinema incorporates binocular disparity to
create an impression of 3D.
“Blaxploitation” The cycle of films that emerged in
the early 1970s aimed at African-American audiences.
Most of the “blaxploitation” films were crime and action
thrillers.
From Glossary of Movies and Meaning:An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince. Copyright
© 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
1

Glossary
Cognitive Film Theory A model of film theory that exam-
ines how the viewer perceptually processes audiovisual infor-
mation in cinema and cognitively interprets this information.
Composite in a visual effects shot, combining the image
layers to create the finished shot.
Composition The arrangement of characters and objects
within the frame. Through composition filmmakers arrange
the visual space on-screen into an artistic design.
Computer-Generated Images (CGIs) Images that are
created and designed using computer software rather
than originating as a scene before the camera that is pho-
tographed. Sophisticated software enables digital artists
to render textures, lighting effects, movement, and other
three-dimensional pictorial information in highly plausible
and convincing ways. Bearing this information, CGI can be
married (composited) with live action photography to stun-
ning effect, as the exciting interaction of real actors and CGI
dinosaurs in The Lost World demonstrates.
Condensation A concept in psychoanalytic film theory that
denotes the concentration of meaning found in images that
are highly charged with emotional or dramatic significance.
This concentration is symptomatic of repressed content that
find expression in a condensed, indirect manner.
Continuity Editing As its name implies, continuity editing
maximizes principles of continuity from shot to shot so that
the action seems to flow smoothly across shot and scene
transitions. Continuity editing facilitates narrative compre-
hension by the viewer.
Contrast The differences of light intensity across a scene. A
high-contrast scene features brightly illuminated and deeply
shadowed areas.
Convention A familiar, customary way of representing char-
acters, story situations, or images. Conventions result from
agreements between filmmakers and viewers to accept certain
representations as valid.
Convergence Movement of the eyes toward each other that
occurs when viewing near objects. Stereoscopic cinema uses
convergence information to elicit 3D effects.
Costume Designer Individual who designs costuming worn
by actors.
Costumes The clothing worn by performers in a film.
Costumes help establish locale and period as well as a given
film’s color design.
Counter-Matte A counter-matte masks the frame in an in-
verse manner to a matte. Used in combination with a matte,
the matte/counter-matte system provides a means of creating
composite images. See also Traveling Matte.
Coverage The shots an editor uses to bridge continuity
problems in the editing of a scene. By cutting to coverage,
rather than relying on the master shot, an editor can finesse
many problems of scene construction and can improve an
actor’s performance.
Blockbuster A hugely profitable film usually featuring a
fantasy theme and a narrative heavily dependent on special
effects.
Boom Shot A type of moving camera shot in which the
camera moves up or down through space. Also known as a
crane shot , it takes its name from the apparatus—a boom or
crane—on which the camera is mounted.
Camera Mapping Method of projecting a 2D matte paint-
ing onto a 3D geometrical model in computer space. Once
the image is projected onto the model, it can be treated as a
3D object and moved or rotated to simulate the perspective
of a moving camera.
“Camera Pen” The term used by Alexandre Astruc to
designate the use of cinema as a medium of personal expres-
sion. The concept was a major influence on French New
Wave directors and their conviction that cinema was a direc-
tor’s medium (see Auteur).
Camera Position The distance between the camera and the
subject it is photographing. Camera positions are usually
classified as variations of three basic setups: the long shot,
the medium shot, and the close-up.
Canted Angle A camera angle in which the camera leans
toward screen right or screen left, producing an imbalanced,
off-center look to the image. Filmmakers often use canted
angles to capture a character’s subjective feelings of stress or
disorientation.
Cells Transparent sheets of cellulose on which an ani-
mator draws and paints. A completed scene may be com-
posed of numerous cells photographed one behind the
other.
Cinematic Self-Reflexivity A basic mode of screen reality in
which the filmmaker establishes a self-referential audiovisual
design. A self-reflexive film calls attention to its own artificially
constructed nature.
Cinematography The planning and execution of light and
color design, camera position, and angle by the cinematogra-
pher in collaboration with the director.
Cinephilia Love for cinema. This designates a deep passion
for the medium of cinema, not merely a fondness for this or
that individual film.
Classic Hollywood Narrative Type of narrative prevalent
in Hollywood films of the 1930s to 1950s and still popular
today. The plot features a clear, main line of action (with
subordinate subplots), marked by a main character’s pur-
suit of a goal, in which the story events are chained in tight
causal relationships. The conclusion cleanly resolves all
major story issues.
Close-Up One of the basic camera positions. The cam-
era is set up in close proximity to an actor’s face or other
significant dramatic object that fills the frame. Close-ups
tend to isolate objects or faces from their immediate sur-
roundings.
2

Glossary
Digital Backlot Practice of simulating locations using digi-
tal tools as an alternative to location shooting.
Digital Composite A composited shot produced digitally,
rather than using an optical printer, by adding, substracting
or otherwise transforming pixels.
Digital Effects The computer-designed components of a
shot that may be composited with live action elements.
Digital Grading Method of digitally altering image ele-
ments, such as color balance and saturation, contrast,
gamma, and filtration. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the
first feature, shot on film, to be entirely digitized and then
color-corrected in this fashion. Also called digital timing.
Digital Intermediate The version of a film on digital video
that is subjected to digital grading or the computer correc-
tion of color, contrast, and other image qualities. After these
corrections are made, the footage on digital video is then
scanned back onto film.
Digital Rendering The process during which a synthetic
digital image is created from the files and data that an artist
has assembled.
Digital Video An increasingly accepted alternative to cel-
luloid film, this format captures picture information as an
electronic signal in binary code. Images captured on digital
video look different than those captured on film, but, once
in binary format, images can be stored and manipulated by
computer programs for editing and special effects work.
Direct Cinema A documentary style that emerged in the
1960s and sought to minimize all appearances that the film-
maker was shaping or manipulating the materials of the
film.
Direct Sound Sound that is captured and recorded directly
on location. Direct sound also designates an absence of re-
flected components in the final recording.
Director The member of the production crew who works
closely with the cinematographer, editor, production de-
signer, and sound designer to determine a film’s organizing,
creative structure. The director is generally the key member
of the production team controlling and synthesizing the
contributions of other team members. On budgetary issues,
however, the director is answerable to the producer who has
the highest administrative authority on a production.
Displacement A concept in psychoanalytic film theory
whereby repressed ideas, emotions or impulses find a sub-
stitute outlet in disguised form as they are projected onto
nonthreatening aspects of a scene or situation.
Dissolve A type of visual transition between shots or
scenes, created by the editor. Unlike the cut, the dis-
solve is a gradual screen transition with distinct optical
characteristics. The editor overlaps the end of one shot
with the beginning of the next shot to produce a brief
superimposition.
Diversification A corporate structure in which a company
conducts business operations across a range of associated
markets and product categories.
Crane Shot See Boom Shot.
Criticism The activity of searching for meaning in an art-
work. The critic seeks to develop an original interpretation
by uncovering novel meanings inside
a film.
Cross-Cutting A method of editing used to establish si-
multaneous, ongoing lines of action in a film narrative. By
rapidly cutting back and forth between two or more lines of
action, the editor establishes that they are happening simul-
taneously. By decreasing the length of the shots, editors can
accelerate the pace of the editing and imply an approaching
climax.
Cue Sheet A breakdown of a scene’s action, listing and
timing all sections requiring musical cues.
Cut A type of visual transition created in editing in which
one shot is instantaneously replaced on screen by another.
Because the change is instantaneous, the cut itself is invis-
ible. The viewer sees only the change from one shot to the
next.
Deduction The method by which the critic works, using
the general goals of the critical model to guide the search for
supporting evidence.
Deep-Focus Cinematography A style of cinematography
that establishes great depth of field within shots. Gregg
Toland’s cinematography for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is
a classic example of deep-focus composition.
Depth of Field The area of distance or separation between
sharply focused foreground and background objects. Depth
of field is determined by the focal length of a lens. Wide-
angle lenses produce deep focus or great depth of field,
whereas telephoto lenses have a shallow depth of field.
Depth Score The way that stereoscopic (3D) space is cho-
reographed on screen in order to express a film’s underlying
themes and story issues.
Description A stage in creating criticism wherein the critic
fully describes those relevant features of narrative or audiovi-
sual design on which the critical interpretation will be based.
Design Concept The underlying creative concept that orga-
nizes the way in which sets and costumes are built, dressed,
and photographed on a given production.
Deviant Plot Structure A narrative whose design and orga-
nization fails to conform with viewers’ expectations regard-
ing what is proper or permissible.
Dialogue One of the three basic types of film sound, it in-
cludes speech delivered by characters in a scene and voice-over
narration accompanying a scene or film.
Diegetic Sound Sound that can be heard by characters in a
scene and by film viewer. See also nondiegetic sound .
Digital Animation Animation inside three- dimensional com-
puter space, aided by software to produce many photographic-
like effects. Digitally created lighting effects, for example, can
be very elaborate, and when used with texture mapping of
skin and other surfaces, these can create remarkable illusions
of depth.
3

Glossary
Extras Incidental characters in a film, often part of the
background of a shot or scene.
Eyeline Match The matching of eyelines between two or
more characters who are engaged in conversation or are
looking at each other in a scene, in order to establish rela-
tions of proximity and continuity. The directions in which
the performers look from shot to shot are complementary.
That is, if performer A looks screen right in the first shot,
performer B will look screen left in the next shot.
Fade A visual transition between shots or scenes created by
the editor. Unlike the cut, the fade creates a gradual transi-
tion with distinct visual characteristics. A fade is visible on
screen as a brief interval with no picture. The editor fades
one shot to black and then, after a pause, fades in the next
shot. Editors often use fades to indicate a substantial change
of time or place in the narrative.
Fall-Off The area in a shot where light falls off into
shadow. Fast fall-off occurs in a high-contrast image where
the rate of change between the illuminated and shadowed
areas is very quick.
Fantasy A basic mode of screen reality in which settings
and subjects, characters, and narrative time are far removed
from the conditions of the viewer’s ordinary life. Fantasy
characters may have super powers or advanced technology
that lends them extraordinary abilities.
Feature Film A film typically running between 90 and 120
minutes.
Female Matte In a matte/counter-matte system, the female
matte (also known as a cover matte) is an opaque frame in
which the foreground figure is transparent. The opaque area
of the female matte blocks light during printing.
Feminist Film Theory A model of film theory that ex-
amines the images of women in film and issues of gender
representation.
Fetishizing Techniques As emphasized in psychoanalytic
film theory, these are elements of style that concentrate the
viewer’s attention for extended periods upon erotic imagery
or material in a way that displaces other components of a
scene or shot.
Fill Light A light placed opposite the key light and used to
soften the shadows it casts. Along with key and back lights,
fill light is one of the three principal sources of illumination
in a scene.
Film Noir A cycle of crime and detective films popular in
the U.S. cinema of the 1940s. Low-key lighting was a major
stylistic attribute of this cycle.
Film Stock Camera negative identified by manufacturer and
number. Stocks vary in terms of their sensitivity to light, color
reproduction, amount of grain, contrast, and resolution.
Film Theory A philosophical or aesthetic model that
seeks to explain the fundamental characteristics of the me-
dium of cinema and how it expresses meaning.
Final Cut The finished edit of a film. The form in which a
film is released to and seen by audiences.
Documentary A type of film dealing with a person, situa-
tion, or state of affairs that exists independently of the film.
Documentaries can include a poetic, stylized audiovisual
design, but they typically exclude the use of overt fictional
elements.
Documentary Realism A subcategory of the realist mode of
screen reality. The documentary realist filmmaker employs
the camera as a recording instrument to capture events or
situations that are transpiring independently of the filmmaker.
Documentary realism is also a stylistic construction in that the
filmmaker’s audiovisual design imposes an artistic organiza-
tion on the event that has unfolded before the camera.
Dolly A type of movable platform on which the camera is
placed to execute a tracking shot. Tracking shots are some-
times called dollies or dolly shots.
Editing The work of joining together shots to assemble
the finished film. Editors select the best shots from the large
amount of footage the director and cinematographer have
provided and assemble these in the proper narrative order.
Editor The member of the production crew who, in con-
sultation with the director, designs the order and arrange-
ment of shots as they will appear in the finished film and
splices them together to create the final cut.
Effects (Sound) One of the three basic types of film sound.
Effects are all of the nonspoken, nonmusical sounds in a
film (e.g., footsteps, breaking glass, etc.).
Emulsion The light-sensitive surface of the film. Light
sensitivity varies among film stocks. Fast films feature emul-
sions that are very light sensitive, requiring minimal light for
a good exposure. Slow films feature emulsions that are less
light sensitive, requiring more light on the scene or set for
proper exposure.
ENR Named for Ernesto N. Rico, this method of film
processing retains a portion of the silver in film emulsion,
which is normally removed during developing. This has the
effect of making shadows blacker, de-saturating color, and
highlighting the texture and edges of surfaces.
Errors of Continuity Disruptions in the appropriate flow
of action or in the proper relation of camera perspectives
from shot to shot. These errors may include the failure to
match action across shots or to maintain consistent screen
direction.
Establishing Shot A type of long shot used to establish the
setting or location of a scene. In classical continuity editing,
establishing shots occur at the beginning of a scene and help
contextualize subsequent close-ups and other partial views
of the action.
Explicit Causality The tight chaining of narrative events
into a strong causal sequence in which prior events directly
and clearly cause subsequent events. Characteristic of
Hollywood filmmaking.
Expressionism A basic mode of screen reality in which film-
makers use explicit audiovisual distortions to express extreme
or aberrant emotions or perceptions.
4

Glossary
Gray Scale A scale used for black-and-white cinematography
that measures color intensity or brightness. Black-and-white
film and the black-and-white video camera can differentiate
colors only if they vary in degrees of brightness. The gray scale
tells filmmakers which colors will separate naturally in black
and white.
Greenscreening Filming of live actors against a blank and
colored (green) screen for subsequent compositing with digi-
tal elements.
Gross The total box office revenue generated by a film be-
fore expenses are deducted.
Hand-Held Camera A camera that is physically held by the
operator rather than being mounted on a tripod, dolly, or
other platform. It permits more freedom of movement and is
especially suited for scenes where the action is spontaneous
and unpredictable.
Hard Light Light that is not scattered or diffused by filters
or reflecting screens. Hard light can establish high contrast.
Hard-Matted Method of producing letterboxed video
transfers of widescreen films. The widescreen ratio is pre-
served for viewing on a 4:3 monitor by masking that part of
the video signal that displays on the top and bottom of the
monitor’s screen and displaying the widescreen image in the
unmatted area.
High-Angle A camera angle usually above the eye level of
performers in a scene.
High-Definition Video Compared with standard video,
which has 480 scan lines of picture information, hi-def
video has up to 1080 scan lines. The Sony/CineAlta HD24P
format, which George Lucas used to shoot the latest install-
ments of his Star Wars series, runs at 24 frames per second,
like film, and carries a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels.
High-Key Lighting A lighting design that minimizes con-
trast and fall-off by creating a bright, even level of illumina-
tion throughout a scene.
Historical Realism A subcategory of the realist mode of
screen reality. Historical realist films aim to recreate in close
detail the manners, mores, settings, and costumes of a dis-
tant historical period.
Homage A reference in a film to another film or film-
maker. The climatic gun battle on the train station steps in
Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) is an homage to
Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), which
features the famous massacre on the Odessa steps.
Hue One of the basic attributes of color. Hue designates
the color itself. Red, blue, and green are primary hues. They
are not mixtures of any other color.
Identification A stage in creating criticism wherein the
critic selectively identifies those aspects of the film that are
relevant for the critical argument being developed. The
identification of selective film elements enables the critic to
simplify and reduce the wealth of material in the film.
Ideological Film Theory A model of film theory that exam-
ines the representation of social and political issues in film.
Flashing A technique used to de-saturate color and con-
trast from a shot and to create a misty, slightly hazy effect.
Film stock is flashed by exposing it to a small amount of
light prior to developing.
Flicker Fusion Along with persistence of vision and beta
movement, this is one of the perceptual foundations on
which the illusion of cinema rests. The human eye cannot
distinguish the individual still frames of a motion picture
because of the speed at which they are projected. Flicker fu-
sion designates the viewer’s inability to perceive the pulsing
flashes of light emitted by the projector. These flashes and
the still pictures they illuminate blend together to produce
an illusion of movement.
Focal length The distance between the optical center of the
lens and the film inside the camera. Lenses of different fo-
cal lengths will “see” the action in front of the camera very
differently. See Wide-Angle , Telephoto , Normal , and Zoom
Lenses .
Foley The creation of sound effects by live performance in
a sound recording studio. Foley artists perform sound effects
in sync with a scene’s action.
ForcedPerspective Perspective distortion that takes infor-
mational cues about depth and distance—such as the way
parallel lines seem to converge in the distance or the way
objects seem to grow smaller as they get farther away—and
exaggerates these to convey on the small scale of a miniature
model or a matte painting an impression of great size or
distance.
Foreground Miniature A miniature model suspended be-
tween the camera and the set or location and photographed
as part of the dramatic action.
Frame The borders of a projected image or the individual
still photograph on a strip of film. Frame dimensions are
measured by aspect ratio.
Framework of Interpretation The intellectual, social, or
cultural frames of reference that a critic applies to a film
in order to create a novel interpretation. It is the general
intellectual framework within which an interpretation is
produced.
French New Wave The group of filmmakers that emerged
in France beginning in 1959 and whose films broke with
existing studio style. They were very fond of American films,
and in time their work influenced such Hollywood films as
Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider.
Front Projection Method for simulating locations by
projecting location footage from a position in front of the
actors and set.
Genre A type or category of film such as a Western, musi-
cal, gangster film, or horror film that follows a set of visual
and narrative patterns that are unique within the genre.
Glass Shot Often used in early cinema, this was a method
for producing a composited image in-camera by filming a
scene with a matte painting on glass used to represent part
of the set or location.
5

Glossary
Letterbox A method of formatting wide-screen motion
pictures for video release. Black bars mask the top and bot-
tom of the frame, producing a wider ratio picture area in the
center of the frame. While the aspect ratio of a letterboxed
video image closely matches the original theatrical aspect
ratio, the trade-off is a small and narrow image as displayed
on a television monitor.
Limited-Release Market The theatrical distribution of in-
dependent film, typically on a smaller scale than the release
market for major studio productions.
Linear Editing System Until the late-1990s, editors worked
on celluloid film, with the footage in their workprints de-
rived from camera negative. Using a linear system, the editor
searched for material by running footage from beginning to
end and joined shots sequentially, one after another. Such
editors were in physical contact with actual film, unlike
those using nonlinear systems who access an electronic sig-
nal via a keyboard.
Live Action Those components of a special effects shot or
scene that were filmed live before the camera. These elements
may then be composited with digital effects.
Long Shot One of the basic camera positions in which a
camera is set up at some distance from the subject of the
shot. Filmmakers usually use long shots to stress environ-
ment or setting.
Long Take A shot of long duration, as distinct from a long
shot, which designates a camera position.
Low-Angle A camera angle usually below the eye level of
performers in a scene.
Low-Key Lighting A lighting design that maximizes con-
trast and fall-off by lighting selected areas of the scene for
proper exposure and leaving all other areas underexposed.
Majors The large studio-distributors that fund film pro-
duction and distribute films internationally. Collectively,
these companies constitute the Hollywood industry. They
are Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros., Disney, MGM/UA,
Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal.
Male Matte In a matte/counter-matte system, the male
matte, also known as a holdout matte, is a black silhou-
ette of the foreground element with all other areas of
the film frame being transparent. The opaque silhouette
blocks light from being transmitted through the film in
this area during printing (or, if working digitally, during
compositing).
Master Shot A camera position used by filmmakers to
record the entire action of a scene from beginning to end.
Filmmakers reshoot portions of the scene in close-up and
medium shot framings. Editors cut these into the master shot
to create the changing optical viewpoints of an edited scene.
When used to establish the overall layout of a scene or loca-
tion, the master shot can also double as an establishing shot.
Matched Cut A cut joining two shots whose compositional
elements strongly match. Matched cutting establishes conti-
nuity of action.
Ideology A system of beliefs characteristic of a society or
social community. Ideological film theory examines the ways
in which films represent and express various ideologies.
Implicit Causality The loose sequencing of narrative
events. Narrative causality is minimized, and the viewer’s
sense of the direction in which the story is moving is weaker
than it is in films that feature explicit causality.
Implied Author The artistic perspective implied and em-
bodied by a film’s overall audiovisual design.
Intensity A basic attribute of color. Intensity measures the
brightness of a hue.
Internal Structural Time The dynamic tempo of a film, es-
tablished by its internal structure (camera positions, editing,
color and lighting design, soundtrack). Perceiving this inter-
nal tempo, viewers label films as fast or slow moving, yet
internal structural time never unfolds at a constant rate. It
is a dynamic rhythm. Filmmakers vary the tempo of internal
structural time to maintain viewer interest.
Interocular Distance The amount of distance or separation
between human eyes. Stereoscopic cinema scales interocular
distance in terms of dual camera position to elicit 3D effects.
Interpretation The goal of criticism. By examining a film’s
structure, a critic assigns meaning to a scene or film that it
does not immediately denote.
Interpretive Processing The viewer’s attribution of mean-
ing to audiovisual information, as distinct from perceptual
processing, which is the purely perceptual response to
this information. Film viewing involves both components.
Understood in terms of perceptual processing, a viewer
watching a cross-cut sequence sees a succession of shots
flashing by on screen as an alternating series. Via interpre-
tive processing, the viewer attributes a representation of si-
multaneous action to the alternating series. This attribution
is not a meaning contained within the images themselves. It
is the viewer’s contribution.
Iris An editing transition prevalent in silent cinema. A cir-
cular mask closed down over the image (an iris out) to mark
the end of a scene or, alternatively, opened up (an iris in) to
introduce a new scene.
Jump Cut A method of editing that produces discontinuity
by leaving out portions of the action.
Key Frames In digital animation, the points at which a
character’s position changes substantially. The animator
specifies and creates these key frames, and a software pro-
gram then creates the intervening frames.
Key Light The main source of illumination in a scene usu-
ally directed on the face of the performer. Along with fill
and back lights, it is one of the three principal sources of
illumination in a scene.
Latent Meaning Meanings that are indirect or implied by a
film’s narrative and audiovisual design. They are not direct,
immediately obvious, or explicit.
Leitmotif A recurring musical passage used to characterize
a scene, character, or situation in a film narrative.
6

Glossary
from a multiplane camera. It can move toward or away
from them, and they can be moved across its field of view.
Multipass Compositing Method for creating a final, ren-
dered image from separate operations carried out upon
different image layers. Prior to the digital era, multi-pass
compositing had been carried out on optical printers. Some
of the optical printer effects shots in Return of the Jedi were
so complex that they required more than a hundred passes.
Music One of the three basic types of film sound. Film
music may include the score that accompanies the dramatic
action of scenes as well as music originating on screen from
within a scene.
Negative Cost Accounting term for the expenses incurred
by a film production, excluding the cost of advertising and
publicity.
Negative Parallax In stereoscopic cinema, placement of
the left-eye image on the right, and the right-eye image on
the left, requiring that viewers converge their eyes to fuse
the images. This results in positioning objects in front of the
screen.
Neonoir Film noir made in the contemporary period and
shot in color.
Neorealism A filmmaking style that developed in postwar
Italian cinema. The neorealist director aimed to truthfully
portray Italian society by avoiding the gloss and glitter of
expensive studio productions, emphasizing instead location
filmmaking, a mixture of non- and semiprofessional actors,
and simple, straightforward visual technique.
Newspaper/Television Reviewing A mode of film criticism
aimed at a general audience that performs an explicit con-
sumer function, telling readers whether or not they should
see the film being reviewed. Film reviews presented as part of
television news or review programs also belong to this mode.
New Wave A new stylistic direction or design appearing
within a national cinema in the films of a group of (usually
young) directors who are impatient with existing styles and
seek to create alternatives.
Nodal Tripod Camera mount that enables a camera to
pivot around the optical center of the lens, producing no
motion perspective. Often used in shots employing hanging
miniatures to disguise the presence of the miniature.
Nondiegetic sound Sound that cannot be heard by charac-
ters in a film but can be heard by the film’s viewer. See also
diegetic sound.
Nonlinear Editing Systems Computerized editing on digital
video. This system gives editors instantaneous access to any
shot or scene in a film and enables them to rapidly explore
different edits of the same footage. Once a final cut has been
reached on the digital video footage, the camera negative is
then conformed (edited to match) this cut. Unlike an editor
using a linear system who would actually handle film, the
nonlinear editor uses a computer keyboard to find shots and
join them together.
Matte A painted landscape or location that is composited
with the live action components of a shot. Mattes were
traditionally done as paintings on glass, but many con-
temporary films use digital mattes created on a computer.
Matte can also refer to a mask that is used to block or hide
a portion of the frame, as when producing a widescreen im-
age in theatrical projection. See Soft-Matted , Hard-Matted,
Counter-Matte, Traveling Matte .
Maquette A small, 3D sculpture that forms the basis for
subsequent digital animation. Often used in creature effects.
Medium Shot One of the basic camera positions in which
a camera is set up to record from full- to half-figure shots of
a performer.
Melodrama The predominant dramatic style of popular
cinema, emphasizing clear moral distinctions between hero
and villain, exaggerated emotions, and a narrative style in
which the twists and turns of the plot determine character
behavior.
Method Acting An approach to screen performance in
which the actor seeks to portray a character by using per-
sonal experience and emotion as a foundation for the por-
trayal.
Miniature A small-scale model representing a portion of a
much larger location or building.
Mise-en-scène A film’s overall visual design, created by
all of the elements that are placed before the camera. These
include light, color, costumes, sets, and actors.
Mockumentary A fiction film that uses the style of docu-
mentary to create the illusion, typically for comic effect, that
it is a documentary.
Monocular Depth Cues Informational sources about
depth, distance and spatial layout that can be perceived with
one eye.
Montage Used loosely, montage simply means “edit-
ing.” In a strict sense, however, montage designates
scenes whose emotional impact and visual design are
achieved primarily through the editing of many brief
shots. The shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho is a
classic example of montage editing.
Motion Control Cinematography in which the camera’s
movements are plotted by computer so that they can be rep-
licated when designing the digital components of the shot.
Motion Parallax Also known as motion perspective , the
term designates the changing positions of near and far ob-
jects as the viewer or the camera moves through space.
Motion Perspective The change in visual perspective
produced by the camera’s movement through space. The
visual positions of objects undergo systematic changes as the
camera moves in relation to them. Camera movement will
produce motion perspective but a zoom shot will not.
Multiplane Camera A standard tool of 2D animation used
to produce effects of camera movement and motion and
depth perspective. Cells are arranged at varying distances
7

Glossary
Perceptual Processing The film viewer’s perceptual response
to audiovisual information, as distinct from interpretive pro-
cessing, which is the active interpretation of that information.
Film viewing involves both components. The viewer sees color,
depth, and movement (perceptual processing) in cinema and
may attribute particular meanings to those perceptions (inter-
pretive processing). Understood in terms of perceptual process-
ing, a viewer watching a cross-cut sequence sees a succession
of shots flashing by on-screen as an alternating series. Via in-
terpretive processing, the viewer attributes a representation of
simultaneous action to the alternating series. This attribution
is not a meaning contained within the images themselves. It is
the viewer’s contribution.
Perceptual Realism The correspondence of picture and
sound in cinema with the ways viewers perceive space and
sound in the real, three-dimensional world.
Perceptual Transformation Those properties of cinema
(e.g., a telephoto lens or a simultaneous zoom and track in
opposite directions) that distort or alter the visual informa-
tion that viewers encounter in the everyday world or that
create completely novel visual experiences that have no basis
in real-world experience. An example of the latter would be
the high-speed bullet effects used in The Matrix.
Performance Capture Digital means for extracting the
movements of a live actor and compositing these into a
cartoon or special effects character. The live actor’s perfor-
mance is thereby mapped onto the digital character.
Performance Style The actor’s contribution to the audiovi-
sual and narrative design of a film.
Persistence of Vision A characteristic of the human eye in
which the retina briefly retains the impression of an image
after its source has been removed. Because of persistence of
vision, viewers do not see the alternating periods of light
and dark through which they sit in a theater.
Phi Phenomena The many different conditions under
which the human eye can be fooled into seeing the illusion
of movement. Beta movement is one of the phi phenomena.
Photogrammetry Method of building a 3D environment in
the computer by using photographs. By tracing the camera’s
lines of sight in multiple photographs of the same area, and
plotting their intersection, a 3D model of the depicted area
can be assembled.
Pictorial Lighting Design A lighting design that does not
aim to simulate the effects of an on-screen light source.
Instead, the design moves in a purely pictorial direction to
create mood and atmosphere.
Pixel With reference to computer-based images, a pixel is
the smallest unit of a picture capable of being digitally ma-
nipulated. The sharpness or resolution of an image is a func-
tion of the number of pixels it contains. High-end computer
monitors, used in sophisticated film effects work, may have
2000 pixels per screen line.
Plot The order and arrangement of story events as they ap-
pear in a given film.
Nonsynchronous Sound Sound that is not in synch with a
source visible on screen.
Normal Lens A lens of moderate focal length that does not
distort object size and depth of field. The normal lens records
perspective much as the human eye does.
Off-Screen Sound A type of sound in which the sound-
producing source remains off-screen. Off-screen sound
extends the viewer’s perception of a represented screen
location into an indefinite area of off-screen space.
180-Degree Rule The foundation for establishing conti-
nuity of screen direction. The left and right coordinates of
screen action remain consistent as long as all camera posi-
tions remain on the same side of the line of action. Crossing
the line entails a change of screen direction.
Open Matte Formatting of 1.85:1 aspect ratio films for the
television/home video ratio of 4:3 by transferring the film
full frame without the matting that was used during projec-
tion in theaters.
Optical Printer Device used to composite effects shots dur-
ing the Hollywood studio era. Optical printers were made
of a synchronized process camera and a process projector
that was called the printer head. Master positive footage of
effects elements—models, travelling mattes, animation—was
loaded into the printer head and run through and photo-
graphed frame by frame in the process camera. (A process
camera is one used in the laboratory for effects work, in
distinction to a production camera used to film live action.)
The final composite (the finished effects shot) was created
gradually by this process of re-photographing each of its
components.
Ordinary Fictional Realism A subcategory of the real-
ist mode of screen reality. Such films feature a naturalistic
visual design, a linear narrative, and plausible character be-
havior as the basis for establishing a realist style.
Pan A type of camera movement in which the camera piv-
ots from side to side on a fixed tripod or base. Pans produce
lateral optical movement on-screen and are often used to
follow the action of a scene or to anticipate the movements
of performers.
Pan-and-Scan A method of formatting wide-screen motion
pictures for video release. Only a portion of the original
wide-screen image is transferred to video. A full screen im-
age appears on the video monitor, but it represents only a
portion of the original wide-screen frame.
Parallel Action An editing technique that establishes mul-
tiple, ongoing plot lines and simultaneous lines of action.
Editors generally use the technique of cross-cutting to estab-
lish parallel action.
Perceptual Correspondence Those properties of cin-
ema that duplicate the visual information that viewers
encounter in the everyday world. These include informa-
tion about object size, light and shadow, movement, and
facial expression and behavior as signs of emotion and
intention.
8

Glossary
Product Placement The appearance of products on screen
as part of a film scene. These appearances are advertise-
ments for which the merchandiser pays a fee to a product
placement agency. Film production companies derive rev-
enue from these fees.
Product Tie-Ins Products marketed in conjunction with the
release of a blockbuster film. For example, a Jurassic Park
video game. These products often bear the logo or likeness
of characters in the movie.
Profit Participant An individual who is contractually entitled
to receive a portion of a film’s profits. This is often a star or
director who receives a percentage of gross revenue, a practice
known as taking points.
Prop Master Individual who supervises the design and con-
struction of props used in the film.
Psychoanalytic Film Theory A model of film theory that
examines the unconscious, sometimes irrational, emotional,
and psychological relationship between viewers and films or
between characters within films.
Real Author The actual flesh-and-blood author of a film,
as distinct from the implied author, the artistic perspective
embodied by a film’s overall audiovisual design.
Realism A basic mode of screen reality. Ordinary fictional
realism, historical realism, and documentary realism are
subcategories of the realist mode.
Realist Film Theory A model of film theory that seeks to
explain how filmmakers may capture, with minimal distor-
tion, the essential features of real situations and events, or,
in the case of fictionalized events, how filmmakers may give
them an apparent real-world status.
Realistic Lighting Design A lighting design that simulates
the effects of a light source visible on screen.
Realistic Sound Sound that seems to fit the properties of
a real source. In practice this is an elastic concept because
many sounds that seem to be realistic are, in fact, artificial
and derive from sources other than the one that is desig-
nated on screen.
Rear Screen Projection A technique for simulating loca-
tion cinematography by projecting photographic images of a
landscape onto a screen. Actors are photographed standing
in front of the screen as if they were part of the represented
location.
Recces Scouting trips to find locations by the production
designer and crew.
Reflected Sound Sound that is reflected off surfaces in a
physical environment before being captured by the micro-
phone. By manipulating characteristics of sound reflection,
sound designers can capture the physical attributes of an
environment.
Rental Accounting term for the revenues returned to a film
distributor.
Rhetoric The use of language to persuade and influence
others. Film criticism is a rhetorical activity.
Point of View The perspective from which narrative events
are related. Point of view in cinema is typically third-person
perspective, although filmmakers routinely manipulate au-
diovisual design to suggest what individual characters are
thinking or feeling. Point of view in cinema can assume a
first-person perspective through the use of voice-over narra-
tion or subjective shots in which the camera views a scene as
if through the eyes of a character.
Point-of-View Shot See Subjective Shot .
Positive Parallax In stereoscopic cinema, placement of the
left-eye image on the left, and the right-eye image on the right,
enabling viewers to fuse the images without converging their
eyes. This results in positioning objects behind the screen.
Polyvalence The attribute of having more than one mean-
ing. Motion pictures are polyvalent because they possess
multiple layers of meaning.
Postdubbing The practice of recording sound effects and
dialogue after principal filming has been completed. ADR
is the contemporary term for postdubbing. In the case of
postdubbing dialogue, the technical challenge is to closely
match the rerecorded dialogue with the performer’s lip
movements in the shot.
Postproduction The last stage of filmmaking, following the
shooting and sound recording of scenes, that includes the
editing of image and sound and finalizing of digital effects.
Practical (Light) A light source visible on a set used for
exposure.
Preproduction The stage of filmmaking that precedes the
shooting and sound recording of scenes. It is the planning
and preparation stage.
Previsualization Any of a number of methods by which
filmmakers try to visualize a shot before actually exposing
film in the camera. Storyboards are a form of previsualiza-
tion, as are various software programs that will model a set
as seen by different camera positions and lenses.
Producer A production administrator who hires a director
and supervises a film’s production to ensure that it comes in
under budget and on schedule. While directors work under
a producer, in practice producers generally allow directors
considerable creative freedom.
Production The stage of filmmaking that includes the
shooting and sound recording of scenes.
Production Design The planning and creation of sets, cos-
tumes, mattes, and miniatures according to an overall con-
cept articulated by the production designer in collaboration
with the director.
Production Track The soundtrack as recorded at the point
of filming. The final soundtrack mix included on release
prints to theaters includes portions of the production track
along with a great deal of sound created in postproduction.
Production Values Those elements of the film that show
the money invested in its production. These typically include
set designs, costumes, locations, and special effects.
9

Glossary
Shading A visual depth cue in which gradations and
patterns of light and shadow reveal texture and volume
in a three-dimensional world and can be used to create a
three-dimensional impression on a flat theater or television
screen.
Shot The basic unit of film structure, corresponding to the
amount of footage exposed in the camera from the time it is
turned on until it is turned off. Shots are visible on-screen as
the intervals between cuts, fades, or dissolves.
Shot-Reverse-Shot Cutting A type of continuity editing
generally used for conversation scenes. The cutting alter-
nates between opposing over-the-shoulder camera set-ups
showing each character speaking in turn.
Shutter Device inside the camera that regulates the light
reaching the film. In a film projector, the shutter func-
tions like an on/off switch, regulating the light reaching
the screen to produce beta movement and critical fusion
frequency.
Sign In communication theory, that which embodies or
expresses meaning.
Snorkel Lens A lens that is mounted to the end of an elon-
gated arm, which itself is attached to the camera body. The
lens can be rotated, tilted, and maneuvered separately from
the camera body to produce the illusion of camera move-
ment through a miniature model.
Soft Light Light that is diffused or scattered by filters or
reflecting screens. Soft light creates a low-contrast image.
Soft-Matted The use of mattes during projection to mask
the top and bottom of the film frame and produce a wides-
creen (1.85:1) image.
Sound Bridge Sound used to connect, or bridge, two or
more shots. Sound bridges establish continuity of place, ac-
tion, or time.
Sound Design (Designer) The expressive use of sound
throughout a film in relation to its images and the contents of
its narrative. Working in conjunction with the director, the
sound designer supervises the work of other sound personnel.
Sound Field The acoustical space created by all the speak-
ers in a multichannel, surround-sound system.
Sound Hierarchy The relative priority given to dialogue,
effects, and music in a given scene. In most cases, dialogue
is considered the most important of these sounds and rests
atop the sound hierarchy.
Sound Montage A type of sound editing that conjoins
many discrete sound effects and sources.
Sound Perspective The use of sound to augment visual per-
spective. Sound perspective often correlates with camera posi-
tion. In a long shot reflected sound may prevail, whereas in a
close-up direct sound may prevail.
Soundstage The acoustical space created by the front
speakers in a multichannel, surround-sound system.
Speech Dialogue spoken by performers playing characters
in a narrative.
Room Tone A type of ambient sound characterizing the
acoustical properties of a room. Even an empty room will
emit room tone.
Rotoscope A combination camera–projector used to
combine live action with animation. Live-action footage is
projected frame by frame onto a series of cells, enabling the
animator to produce drawings that exactly fit the live action.
Rough Cut The film editor’s initial assembly of shots in a
scene or film before the editing is tightened and perfected in
the fine cut.
Running Time The amount of real time it takes a viewer to
watch a film from beginning to end. Most commercial films
run between 90 and 120 minutes.
Saturation A basic characteristic of color. Saturation mea-
sures color strength and is a function of how much white
light is mixed into the color. The more white light that is
present, the less saturated the color will seem to be.
Scenic Artist Individual who supervises design and matte
paintings.
Schema This term derives from the psychology of percep-
tion and designates a mental category or framework used
to organize information. Applied to cinema, it helps explain
the function of devices like the master shot, which provides
viewers with a schema or map of a location and the char-
acters’ positions within it. Viewers use the visual schema
provided by master shots to orient themselves to changing
camera positions and to integrate partial views of a scene
provided by close-ups.
Scholarly Criticism A mode of criticism aimed at a special-
ized audience of scholars, employing a technical, demanding
vocabulary, and exploring the significance of given films in
relation to issues of theory or film history.
Schufftan Process Method for combining live action and
miniature models or matte paintings. By placing a mir-
ror that reflects the image of the miniature or painting at
a 45 degree angle to the camera, live action elements can
be filmed through portions of the mirror that have been
scraped away to leave transparent glass. The camera sees the
live action through the glass and sees the miniature reflected
in the glass. The actors and the miniature or painting are
thereby filmed simultaneously.
Screen Reality The represented reality depicted by a fic-
tional film. Screen reality is established by the principles of
time, space, character behavior, and audiovisual design as
these are organized in a given film.
Sequence Shot A long take whose duration extends for an
entire scene or sequence. Such a scene or sequence is accord-
ingly composed of only one shot and features no editing.
Set Decorator Individual who dresses a set with furnish-
ings and props.
Sets The controlled physical environment in which film-
ing occurs. Sets may be created by blocking and lighting
an area of ground outdoors or by building and designing
a physical environment indoors.
10

Glossary
narrative information from viewers, whereas creating sus-
pense depends on providing viewers with necessary informa-
tion. Showing the audience the bomb under the table before
it goes off will create suspense. Not showing the bomb be-
fore it goes off will create surprise.
Surrealism Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, this art
style aims to appeal to the viewer’s subconscious and irratio-
nal mind by creating fantastic and dream-like images. David
Lynch’s Blue Velvet is a surrealist film.
Suspense A narrative technique used to create tension and
anxiety in the film viewer. Creating suspense depends on
revealing rather than withholding narrative information.
Showing the audience the bomb under the table before it
goes off will create suspense. Not showing the bomb before
it goes off will create surprise. Unlike suspense, surprise de-
pends on withholding information from the audience.
Synthetic Sound Artificially designed sound that does not
match any existing source. The sounds of the light sabers in
the Star Wars films are examples of synthetic sound.
Taboo Images Imagery depicting forbidden or disturbing
subjects, often of a sexual or violent nature.
Technical Acting An approach to acting in which the per-
former thinks through the requisite gestures and emotions
and then exhibits them. In contrast to method acting, the
technical actor does not look to personal experience as a
basis for understanding the character.
Telephoto Lens A lens of long focal length that distorts
object size and depth of field. Telephoto lenses magnify the
size of distant objects and by doing so compress depth of
field and make them appear closer than they are.
Temp Track A temporary musical track usually derived
from an existing film that a director uses early in production
to show the composer the type of musical composition he or
she wants.
Thematic Montage A style of editing that draws an explicit
comparison between two or more images, as when Charles
Chaplin compares workers and sheep in a pair of shots at
the beginning of Modern Times.
Tilt A type of camera movement in which the camera
pivots up and down on a fixed tripod or base. Tilts produce
vertical movement on screen and are often used to follow
action and reveal detail.
Tracking Shot A camera movement in which the camera
physically moves along the ground to follow action or to re-
veal significant narrative information. Tracking shots can be
executed by pushing the camera along tracks, by attaching
the camera to a moving vehicle such as a car, or by using a
handheld Steadicam mount, in which case the camera opera-
tor runs or walks alongside the action. Tracking shots are
sometimes called dolly shots , after the “dolly” or movable
platform on which the camera is sometimes mounted.
Translite A photographic image, enlarged and backlit, this
is one of the basic tools of production design, used to simu-
late a large, scenic view in the background of a set.
Spotting A collaborative process between the director and
composer during which they spot or identify passages in the
film that require musical scoring.
Star The highest profile performer in a film narrative. Stars
draw audiences to theaters and establish intense personal
relationships with their publics.
Star Persona The relatively fixed screen personality of a
star.
Stereoscopic Cinema Films and filmmaking that employ bin-
ocular disparity and convergence to depict three-dimensional
depth in the frame.
Stereographer Member of a production crew who consults
with the director and choreographs stereoscopic (3D) space
on screen.
Steadicam A camera-stabilizing system that enables the
camera operator to work with a hand-held camera and
produce steady, jitter-free images. It is especially suited for
producing lengthy, extended moving camera shots.
Stop-Motion Animation Method used for animating
three-dimensional models, such as King Kong. The model is
moved and photographed a frame at a time.
Story The entire sequence of events that a film’s plot
draws on and references. The plot arranges story events
into a given order, which may differ from the story’s proper
chronology.
Story Time The amount of time covered by the narrative.
This may vary considerably from film to film. The narrative
of 2001: A Space Odyssey begins during a period of primi-
tive prehuman ancestry and extends into the era of space
travel, while the narrative of High Noon spans, roughly, 90
minutes, closely approximating that film’s running time.
Structure The audiovisual design of a film. The elements
of structure include the camera, lights and color, production
design, performance style, editing, sound, and narrative.
Subjective Shot Also known as a point-of-view shot. The
camera’s position and angle represent the exact viewpoint of
a character in the narrative.
Subtractive Color Mixing The method for creating color in
film. Magenta, cyan, and yellow dyes combined in color film
produce all other hues.
Super 35 Widescreen format that captures a 2:1 aspect
ratio image on the camera negative. This image is then
typically cropped to 2.35:1 for theatrical release and to
1.33:1 for full-frame home video release.
Supervising Art Director During the classical Hollywood
era, this was the head of the art department who supervised
art design in all the films under production at a studio.
Supporting Player A performer in a secondary role who
does not receive either the billing or the pay of a major
star. Many performers first establish themselves as sup-
porting players before they become stars.
Surprise A narrative technique used to jolt or startle the
viewer. Creating surprise depends on withholding crucial
11

Glossary
narrative or, as sometimes occurs in documentary films, the
narrator may exist independently of characters in the story.
Voyeurism A basic pleasure offered by cinema, derived
from looking at the characters and situations on screen.
Wavelength The characteristic of light that corresponds to
color. Colors are visible when white light is broken down
into component wavelengths.
White Telephone Films Derogatory term for the glossy
studio films produced by Cinecitta, Italy’s national studio,
during the Mussolini period.
Wide-Angle Lens A short focal length lens that exagger-
ates depth of field by increasing the size of near objects
and minimizing the size of distant objects. Because they
can focus on near and far objects, wide-angle lenses can
capture great depth of field.
Widescreen Ratios Any of a large number of aspect ra-
tios that exceed the nearly square, 1.37:1 ratio of classical
Hollywood film and 1.33:1 ratio of conventional television.
Wide-screen films must be reformatted for video release us-
ing methods of letterboxing or panning-and-scanning.
Wipe An editing transition prevalent in earlier decades of
sound film. A hard- or soft-edged line (generally vertical)
traveling across the frame marked the border of the outgoing
and incoming shots. Although wipes are rare in contempo-
rary film, George Lucas used them extensively in Star Wars
Episode I: The Phantom Menace to evoke the style of old
movie serials.
Z-Axis Specifies the amount of depth in a digital image
along which objects are arranged or through which they
move.
Z-Depth Map An image that supplies a graphic render-
ing of depth values in a shot. It uses gray-scale values to
visualize distances, ranging from white (objects nearest the
camera) to shades of gray to black (objects farthest from the
camera).
Zoom Lens A lens capable of shifting from short (wide-
angle) to long (telephoto) focal lengths. Using a zoom to
change focal lengths within a shot produces the impression
of camera movement, making it seem as if the camera is
moving closer to or farther from its subject.
Traveling Matte Travelling mattes enable filmmakers
to insert moving foreground figures into a landscape
or other type of background that has been filmed sepa-
rately. Accordingly, travelling mattes are an extremely
valuable and widely-used tool of visual effects. They in-
volve the application of a matte and counter-matte in or-
der to prevent double-exposures. These are composed of
male and female mattes. A male matte, also known as a
holdout matte, is a black silhouette of the foreground el-
ement with all other areas of the film frame being trans-
parent. The opaque silhouette will block light from being
transmitted through the film in this area during printing
(or, if working digitally, during compositing). A f emale
matte (also known as a cover matte) is the inverse of the
male. The female matte is an opaque frame in which the
foreground figure is transparent. Tromp l’Oeil Optical
illusions created by painting or other visual media. Matte
paintings in cinema routinely employ tromp l’oeil tech-
niques to achieve the effects of perspective, scale, depth
and distance.
Typage The manipulation of a screen character’s visual
or physical characteristics to suggest psychological or social
themes or ideas.
Unit Art Director In the classic Hollywood studio system
in the 1930s and 1940s, the unit art director oversaw the
creation of sets and costumes for a given production. The
unit art director worked under a studio’s supervising art
director who supervised set and costume design on all of
the studio’s productions.
Virtual Camera Simulation via computer of the many ways
in which a camera might view a scene. 2D animated films are
shot with a real camera. 3D computer animation uses a vir-
tual camera, mimicking the optical effects of different lenses,
depth of field, rack focusing, and panning-and-tracking
movements. These are far more vivid in digital animation
than in 2D animation.
Visual Effects Supervisor Member of the production crew
who oversees the design of a film’s special effects.
Voice-Over Narration Dialogue spoken by an off-screen
narrator. This narrator may be a character reflecting in
voice-over on story events from some later point in the
12

■ distinguish the three basic camera angles
and describe the ways they influence viewer
response
■ differentiate telephoto, wide-angle, and zoom
lenses and explain their optical effects
■ explain the basic categories of camera
movement and their expressive functions
■ explain how a film’s structural design is
shaped by a filmmaker’s choices about how to
use the tools of style
Film Structure
■ explain the nature of film structure and its
relation to the ways movies express meaning
■ describe the production process and its
relation to film structure
■ describe the relation between film structure
and the cinema’s properties of time and space
■ distinguish the three basic camera positions
and their expressive functions
■ describe how camera position can clarify the
meaning of an actor’s facial expression and
gestures
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

From Chapter 1 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
13

Film Structure
The shark in Jaws (1975) and the digital characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (2004) thrilled and amused moviegoers throughout the world. Audiences have em-
braced films as diverse as Toy Story 3 (2010), True Grit (2010), The Social Network (2010), and
The Dark Knight (2008). Each of these pictures provided its viewers with a strong cinematic
experience, crafted by filmmakers using the elements of film structure: camerawork, lighting,
sound, editing. To understand how movies express meanings and elicit emotions, one must
begin by understanding their structural design. This chapter explains the concept of film
structure, the camera’s role as an element of structure, and the relation between the camera’s
method of seeing and a viewer’s understanding of cinema.
ELEMENTS OF FILM STRUCTURE
Structure refers to the audiovisual design of a film and the particular tools and tech-
niques used to create that design. (Scholars sometimes refer to this by the term film
form . Thus, one might speak of formal design or of structural design. The terminol-
ogy is interchangeable.) A convenient way to illustrate this concept is to make a
distinction between structure and content. Consider the average newspaper movie
review. It provides a description of a film’s story and a paragraph or two about the
characters and the actors who play them. In addition, the reviewer might mention the
theme or themes of the film. These descriptions of story, character, and theme address
the content of the movie.
Now, instead of thinking about content, one could ask about those things that help
to create the story, give shape to the characters, and illustrate and visualize the themes.
These are questions about the elements of cinema—the camera, lights and color, produc-
tion design, performance, editing, sound—and their organization in a given film.
The Production Process
A helpful way of understanding film structure is to map its components accord-
ing to their place in the production process. When does production design oc-
cur? Cinematography? Editing? Filmmaking involves three basic steps or stages.
Preproduction designates the planning and preparation stage. It typically involves
the writing of a script; hiring of cast and crew; production design of sets, costumes,
and locales; and planning the style of cinematography. Set design and camera style
are both previsualized using software programs that enable filmmakers to “see”
in advance how camera setups and lenses will look on the sets that are planned.
Preproduction also sometimes includes a brief period of rehearsal for the actors.
Production designates the work of filming the script (cinematography) and sound
recording of the action. The director may request a temp track, a temporary musical
score that is similar to the one that will be created for the film. Postproduction in-
volves the editing of sound and image, composition and recording of the music score,
additional sound recording for effects (Foley) and dialogue replacement (ADR), cre-
ation of digital visual effects (these also may occur during production), and color tim-
ing to achieve proper color balance in the images. This may be done digitally (known
■ describe the relation between the
camera’s view of things and human
perception
■ explain how the camera creates images that
both correspond with and transform the
viewer’s visual experience
14

Film Structure
as digital grading) or using traditional lab methods. Copies of the film are then made
for exhibition, either as prints (on film) or as digital video.
Because filmmakers apply the elements of structure at different points in the
production process, these elements can be used to modify or influence one another. A
director might realize that a scene as filmed lacks emotional force and may turn to the
composer for music to supply the missing emotion or to the editor to sharpen its dra-
matic focus. A cinematographer in postproduction may alter the image captured on
film by using digital grading to adjust color, contrast, and other elements.
PREPRODUCTION
Script
optioning
writing
revisions
Hiring of Cast and Crew
Design of Sets and Costumes
Plan Style of Cinematography
Rehearsals
PRODUCTION
Shooting & Sound
Recording of Scenes
POSTPRODUCTION
Editing of Sound & Image
Music Scoring
Foley
ADR
Digital Effects
Color Timing (Digital/Lab)
Release Prints
FIGURE 1
The production process.
TITANIC (PARAMOUNT/20TH CENTURY FOX, 1997)
Titanic’s production design evokes a now-vanished early-twentieth-century world.
Meticulously detailed costumes and sets are an essential part of the film’s structural design.
Frame enlargement.
15

Film Structure
The Role of the Director
A wide range of creative personnel design picture and sound on any given produc-
tion. While filmmaking is a collaborative enterprise, one individual has chief artistic
authority, and this is usually the director . The director coordinates and organizes the
artistic inputs of other members of the production team, who generally subordinate
their artistic tastes or preferences to a director’s stated wishes or vision. The direc-
tor, in turn, answers to the producer , who generally has administrative control over
a production (e.g., making sure the production stays on schedule and within budget).
In practice, though, many producers hold more than administrative authority and are
actively engaged with the director’s creative decisions, especially if the producer is a
powerful figure in the industry.
Great variety exists in the working methods of directors. Some directors, such as
Robert Altman ( Gosford Park , 2001; The Player , 1992), welcome input from other
production team members in a spirit of shared collective artistry. Other directors, such
as Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Chaplin, tend to be more autocratic and commanding
in their creative approaches. Some directors, such as Woody Allen ( Match Point , 2005;
Deconstructing Harry , 1997), Steven Spielberg ( The War of the Worlds , 2005; Saving
Private Ryan , 1998), and Stanley Kubrick ( Full Metal Jacket , 1987; Eyes Wide Shut ,
1999), take an active role in the editing of their pictures. Most directors place special
emphasis on the quality of the script, believing a polished script to be essential to mak-
ing a good film. Clint Eastwood’s best films as director, Million Dollar Baby (2004),
Mystic River (2003), and Unforgiven (1993), feature exquisitely written scripts.
Most directors maintain enduring relationships with key production personnel.
As these relationships deepen over the course of several productions, the creative, col-
laborative work that results becomes richer. Steven Spielberg, for example, has used
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski for War Horse (2011), Munich (2005), The War of
the Worlds (2005), The Terminal (2004), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and others. Clint
Eastwood relied on production designer Henry Bumstead for eleven films, including
Million Dollar Baby (2004), Mystic River (2003), and Unforgiven (1993). Woody Allen
invariably relies on editor Susan E. Morse, as does Martin Scorsese with editor Thelma
THE IMMIGRANT (MUTUAL FILM
CORP., 1917)
Charles Chaplin was the complete film-
maker. He wrote, directed, performed
in, edited, and composed the music for
his films. Many said that, were it pos-
sible, he’d have played all the characters
as well. He rarely worked from a com-
pleted script. He preferred to build a set,
dress it with props, and then explore
its comic possibilities, making up gags
as he went along. Performance, not
camerawork, was the centerpiece of his
films. Here, Charlie and his companion
(Edna Purviance) have no cash to pay for
the meal they’ve just eaten. The hulk-
ing waiter (Eric Campbell) suspects the
worst. Frame enlargement.
16

Film Structure
Schoonmaker. George Lucas relied on Ben Burtt as the sound designer for all six of
the Star Wars films. The continuities established by these professional relationships are
vitally important to a director’s ability to get what he or she wants on the screen.
Time and Space in Cinema
The elements of cinematic structure, organized by directors and their production
teams, help to shape the distinctive properties of time and space in a film. A conve-
nient way of thinking about the arts is to consider the properties of time and/or space
that they possess. Music, for example, is primarily an art of time. Its effects arise
through the arrangement of tones in a musical composition that has some duration or
length. Movies, by contrast, are an art of time as well as space.
The time component of movies has several aspects. Running time designates the du-
ration of the film, the amount of time it takes a viewer to watch the film from beginning
to end. Most commercially released films are called feature films , which means that they
typically run from 90 to 120 minutes. Some films, however, are much longer. The Lord
of the Rings: The Return of the King (2004), in its theatrical release, was 201 minutes
long, and the director’s extended version on DVD runs even longer, 251 minutes.
Story time designates the amount of time covered by the narrative, and this can
vary considerably from film to film. In Fred Zinnemann’s Western, High Noon (1952),
the story spans 1.5 hours, roughly equivalent to the running time of the film itself. Story
time, on the other hand, can span many epochs and centuries, as in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which goes from the dawn of the apes well into the age
of space travel. Filmmakers also may organize story time through the use of flashbacks
so that it becomes fragmented, doubling back on itself, as in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
(1941), in which the story of Charles Foster Kane is told largely through the recollections
of friends and associates who knew him.
Internal structural time , a third distinct aspect of cinematic time, arises from the
structural manipulations of film form or technique. If a filmmaker edits a sequence so
that the lengths of shots decrease progressively, or become shorter, the tempo of the se-
quence will accelerate. A rapid camera movement will accelerate the internal structural
time of a shot. Regardless of the shot’s actual duration on screen, it will seem to move
faster. (The term shot designates the basic building block of a film. During production,
a director creates a film shot by shot. In this context, a shot corresponds to the amount
of film footage exposed by the camera from the time it is turned on until it is turned off.
Films are composed of many shots that are joined together in the process of editing. In a
completed film, a shot is the interval on screen between edit points.)
In Open Range (2003) and Dances with Wolves (1990), the editing imposes a
slow pace on the story by letting many shots linger on screen for a long time. Director
Kevin Costner felt that a slow pace suited those stately epics about an era when horse
and wagon were major modes of transportation. By contrast, contemporary action
films like the Mission Impossible series (1996, 2000, 2006) race at breakneck speed,
rarely pausing long enough for an audience to catch its breath.
A film’s internal structural time never unfolds at a constant rate. It is a dy-
namic property, not a fixed one. Filmmakers modulate internal structural time to
maintain viewer interest by changing camera positions, the lengths of shots, color
and lighting design, and the volume and density of the soundtrack.
Viewers experience internal structural time as a series of story events held in dy-
namic relations of tension and release. Viewers often describe films as being fast or
17

Film Structure
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Stanley Kubrick
During his 46-year career, Stanley Kubrick made
only 12 feature films. Despite the relatively small
body of work that he left, however, he had an
extraordinary impact on the medium and is recog-
nized as one of its major filmmakers. A director of
legendary stature, he was renowned for spending
years planning a film and years more shooting it and
working on postproduction. Famous for doing many
takes of each shot and for the precision of his visual
designs, Kubrick honed a style that is unique and
unmistakable, and his films offer bleak but compel-
ling visions of human beings trapped and crushed
by the systems—social, military, technological—they
have created.
Kubrick’s reputation was that of an intellectual
director, keenly interested in a range of subjects and
whose films explored issues and ideas, yet he never
finished high school. At age 17 he dropped out and
began work as a photographer, working at Look
magazine for several years before completing two
documentary shorts for the March of Time newsreel
company ( Day of the Fight [1951] and Flying Padre
[1951]). Borrowing money from family and friends,
he then completed his first two features as director,
Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). In a
move that announced his conviction that cinema
was a medium of personal artistry and that he would
control his own work, Kubrick produced, wrote, di-
rected, photographed, and edited these films.
After another crime film, The Killing (1956),
Kubrick made Paths of Glory (1958), a powerful
drama of World War I and the first of his films to
pursue what would be his great theme, the domi-
nation of people by the systems they have created
(envisioned in this film as the machinery of war and
the pitiless chain of command). Influenced by the
moving camera of director Max Ophuls, Kubrick’s
sustained tracking shots became a signature ele-
ment of his style.
Kubrick’s next film, Spartacus (1960), was a
production on which he, uncharacteristically, did
not have complete authority (the picture belonged
to its star–producer Kirk Douglas), and as a result,
Kubrick was careful to work as his own producer on
THE SHINING (WARNER BROS., 1980); A
CLOCKWORK ORANGE (WARNER BROS.,
1971)
Kubrick made some of the most imaginative
and precisely designed films in cinema history.
His passion for design led him to shoot 30 and
40 takes of a shot until he had what he wanted.
The results were mysterious, haunting, and po-
etic and included Jack Nicholson’s spectacular
madness in The Shining and visions of a violent,
authoritarian future in A Clockwork Orange . Frame
enlargements.
all subsequent films. He next went to England to
film Lolita (1962), from the controversial Vladimir
Nabokov novel, and he then settled there, using
English production facilities for most of his ensuing
films. He was becoming a filmmaker whose work
transcended national boundary.
Dr. Strangelove (1963) is a modern classic, a
shrewd and superb satire of the Cold War and the
policy of nuclear deterrence aptly named MAD
(Mutual Assured Destruction). Kubrick’s startling
marriage of baroque imagery and popular music
(detonating atom bombs accompanied by the sen-
timental ballad “We’ll Meet Again”) became one
18

Film Structure
of his trademarks, used famously in 2001: A Space
Odyssey (spaceships pirouette to the Blue Danube
waltz) and A Clockwork Orange (lurid violence set to
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”).
With Strangelove , these two films solidified
Kubrick’s reputation as a social and cinematic
visionary. 2001 (1968) is a visual feast whose
startling effects are married to a mystical and
mind-bending narrative that takes humankind on
a cosmic journey from the dawn of the apes to the
era of space travel. Controversial for its violence, A
Clockwork Orange (1971) depicted a brutal vision of
future society where the state learns to control the
violent impulses of its citizens. Kubrick said, “The
central idea of the film has to do with the ques-
tion of free will. Do we lose our humanity if we are
deprived of the choice between good and evil?”
By making the main character a thug and a men-
ace to society, Kubrick aimed to give the question
resonance.
With dazzling Steadicam shots of a labyrinthine
hotel, Kubrick explored the effects of space on
the mind in The Shining (1980), which depicts the
hotel’s sinister influence on a mentally unstable care-
taker and his family and ends with one of the direc-
tor’s bleakest images of futility and alienation.
Kubrick extended his pessimistic visions of hu-
man failure to eighteenth-century Ireland in Barry
Lyndon (1975) and the battlefields of Vietnam in
Full Metal Jacket (1985). His untimely death fol-
lowed completion of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a
haunting and mysterious evocation of erotic fan-
tasy and its emotional consequences.
Kubrick never made the same kind of film twice.
Each picture is uniquely different and uniquely reso-
nant and must be seen more than once before it
begins to yield up its treasures. Kubrick dedicated
his life to making films, and he believed that cin-
ema was an art. Few filmmakers gain the authority
to pursue this conviction without compromise.
Kubrick’s achievements in this regard place him in
very select cinematic company. By showing film-
makers what the medium can achieve, Kubrick’s
work remains a continuing inspiration. ■
slow moving, but in fact, the pacing of any given film typically varies as filmmakers
use structure to create narrative rhythms that alternately accelerate and decelerate.
While internal structural time results from a filmmaker’s manipulations of cinema
structure, viewers experience this type of time subjectively, and their responses often
vary greatly. One viewer may love the dramatic intensity and emotional lyricism of
The Bridges of Madison County (1995) or Monster’s Ball (2001), whereas another
may find the overall pacing of these films to be too slow.
Cinema is an art of time and space. The spatial properties of cinema have sev-
eral components. One involves the arrangement of objects within the frame (the di-
mensions of the projected area on screen; the term also refers to the individual still
image on a strip of film). This is the art of framing, or composition because it is a
part of the cinematographer’s job.
The spatial properties of the cinema, though, go beyond the art of framing.
Cinema simulates an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat screen. To do
so, it corresponds in key ways with the viewer’s experience of physical space in
daily life, and filmmakers create these correspondences in the design of their films.
Cinematographers control the distribution of light on the set to accentuate the shape,
texture, and positioning of objects and people. Film editors join shots to establish
spatial constancies on screen that hold regardless of changes in the camera’s position
and angle of view. Sound designers use the audio track to convey information about
physical space. The spatial properties of cinema are multi-dimensional and can be ex-
pressed through many elements of structure. This chapter explains these spatial prop-
erties and how filmmakers manipulate them.
19

Film Structure
OPEN RANGE (TOUCHSTONE, 2003) AND MISSION:
IMPOSSIBLE 2 (PARAMOUNT, 2000)
This Western, directed by Kevin Costner, has a slow pace because he wants to concentrate
on the characters and their situation rather than rushing over these for action or special
effects. Costner also believes that a slow pace works well in Westerns where characters
travel by horse or wagon. Snappy editing and a fast pace would be as ill-suited to this
material as a leisurely pace would be for contemporary action films, such as the Mission:
Impossible series. Frame enlargements.
STRUCTURE AND THE CAMERA
Let us begin our understanding of film structure by discussing the fundamentals of
camera usage. The basic issues of camera position and lenses as discussed in this
chapter are actually part of cinematography. But it will be helpful to cover them
here separately as an introduction to the camera. These must be grasped before more
complex issues of cinematography can be examined. The camera’s position, angle,
lens, and the camera’s movement have a major impact on the visual structure of ev-
ery film. The reader seeking to understand cinema should begin with a clear sense of
the relationship among these characteristics and the differences between them.
20

Film Structure
Camera Position
The most basic way of classifying camera usage is in terms of camera position . This re-
fers to the distance between the camera and the subject it is photographing. Obviously,
the camera-to-subject distance is a continuum with an infinite series of points from very
close to very far. In practice, however, the basic positions usually are  classified as varia-
tions of three essential camera setups: the long shot , the medium shot , and the close-up .
Each of these positions has its own distinct expressive functions in the cinema.
Filmmakers typically use the long shot to stress environment or setting and
to show a character’s position in relationship to a given environment. In Titanic
(1997), the majesty of the ship’s enormous size is conveyed with a series of long
shots that contrast the huge ship with the tiny passengers that crowd its decks.
When they are used to open a film or begin a scene, long shots may be referred to
as establishing shots . Many detective films, for example, begin with a long shot of
the urban environment, often taken from a helicopter.
In contrast to the long shot, the medium shot brings viewers closer to the char-
acters while still showing some of their environment. In The Phantom of the Opera
(2004), a medium-shot framing shows the Phantom (Gerard Butler) embracing
Christine (Emmy Rossum) while revealing details of the Phantom’s candlelit lair
underneath the opera house. Sometimes medium shots are labeled according to the
number of characters who are present within the frame. Accordingly, this shot from
The Phantom of the Opera would be termed a two-shot . A three-shot and a four-shot
would designate medium shots with larger numbers of people.
By contrast with long and medium shots, the close-up stresses characters or ob-
jects over the surrounding environment, usually for expressive or dramatic purposes,
and it can be an extremely powerful means for guiding and directing a viewer’s atten-
tion to important features of a scene’s action or meaning.
Once the filmmaker chooses a camera position, the camera is typically locked
down on a tripod or other type of platform in order to produce a steady image
without jitter. Alternatively, rather than locking the camera down, the filmmaker
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
(MGM, 1951)
Longer, full-figure framings in
the dance sequences of classic
Hollywood musicals showcase the
beauty of the dance. The longer
framing allows the viewer to see
the performer’s entire body in mo-
tion. By contrast, contemporary
filmmakers “cheat” when they
film dance, using fast editing and
close-ups to create the impression
of a dance performance without
showing the real thing. Here, Gene
Kelly dances in an elaborate pro-
duction number designed around
the styles of Impressionist painting.
Frame enlargement.
21

Film Structure
might work with a hand-held camera . In this case, the camera operator physically
holds the camera, either on his or her shoulder or on a harness strapped to his or her
body. Long shots, medium shots, and close-ups can be filmed in this fashion. Going
hand-held enables a filmmaker to cover the action of a scene in a more flexible and
spontaneous way, but the challenge is to produce a smooth and steady image. (The
Steadicam can help to achieve this—it is discussed in the section on camera move-
ment.) All the shots in Jaws (1975), when the characters are at sea, are done with a
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (NEW LINE, 2001)
Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) is a strong, spiritual presence as ruler of the domain of
Lothlorien, where the film’s heroes journey seeking refuge. Note how the close-up
framing concentrates attention on her face. The framing is tight, and the focal plane
of the shot does not extend beyond her face. This gives the close-up additional punch.
The halo of light and Galadriel’s glowing, luminescent appearance were created digitally
in post-production. Frame enlargement.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (PARAMOUNT, 2007)
Medium-shot compositions can stress the relationship among characters while integrating
them into their environment. This medium shot, in widescreen, preserves the intimacy of
this moment between Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and an orphaned child that
he has adopted. The widescreen frame enables the viewer to see a great deal of the train
compartment in which they are riding. Frame enlargement.
22

Film Structure
hand-held camera. It was impossible to do otherwise—locking the camera down on a
rocking boat would have made the film’s viewers seasick!
The fact that filmmakers can choose among different camera positions illus-
trates a basic difference between cinema and theater. In theater, the spectator views
a play from a single fixed vantage point, a position in the auditorium, usually from
a distance. By contrast, in film, viewers watch a shifting series of perspectives on the
action, and their ability to understand the story requires synthesizing the shifting
points of view as the filmmaker moves from one camera position to another, from
shot to shot. How viewers make sense of changing views of a scene supplied by differ-
ent camera positions is a major issue to be examined while editing.
CAMERA POSITION, GESTURE, AND EXPRESSION By varying the camera-to-subject dis-
tance, the filmmaker can manipulate the viewer’s emotional involvement with the
material in complex ways. What the camera sees is what the spectator sees. As the
camera moves closer to a character, viewers are brought into the character’s personal
space in ways that can be very expressive and emotional.
People express emotion and intention in ways that go beyond the words they
speak. Posture, gesture, facial expression, eye contact, and vocal inflection express
feelings and help to define relationships. These signals vary by culture, but all mem-
bers of a society learn how to read the expressions and gestures of other people as
a way of inferring what they are thinking or feeling. By varying camera placement,
filmmakers can call attention to significant expressions and gestures and thereby help
viewers understand the meaning of the relationships and situations depicted on screen.
When a filmmaker cuts to a close-up, the director can emphasize and clarify a charac-
ter’s reaction, as well as bring viewers into the action and the personal emotional space of
the character. Depending on how the viewer feels about that character, this can give rise to
either positive emotions (e.g., compassion, empathy) or negative ones (e.g., fear, anxiety).
JAWS (UNIVERSAL, 1975)
All the shots in the second half of Jaws , once the characters are at sea, are done with a
hand-held camera. They look remarkably steady, however, because the camera operator
used his body to absorb the rocking of the boat. The camera had to be hand-held
because locking it to a tripod or other fixed platform would have induced seasickness
in the viewer. The camera operator was Michael Chapman, who went on to become
cinematographer of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver . Frame enlargement.
23

Film Structure
In George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954), James Mason plays a tragic Hollywood
actor, Norman Maine. With his acting career destroyed, the alcoholic Maine col-
lapses into despair and considers suicide. He begins to cry. The camera draws in to a
medium close-up, and director Cukor keeps the shot on screen for a surprisingly long
time. Cukor said, “To see that man break down was very moving. All the credit for
that goes to James [Mason]. He did it all himself. What I did was to let him do it and
let it go on and on, let the camera stay on him for an eternity.” The shot is designed
to elicit the viewer’s empathy by revealing an intimate glimpse of a man’s private hell.
Facial expressions do not have to be realistic to express emotion or intention. Close-
ups of Gollum (Andy Serkis) in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2004)
emphasize his semi-human character, rendered with visual effects. These effects transform
normal human reality but also correspond with real facial cues. The bulging eyes and
open mouth accurately convey the character’s anger, but they do so with exaggeration.

A STAR IS BORN
(WARNER BROS.,
1954)
Changing facial ex-
pressions in a single,
extended shot from
A Star Is Born convey
the despair of Norman
Maine (actor James
Mason). As a photo-
graphic medium, the
cinema is especially
powerful in its ability to
capture and emphasize
the smallest details of
human facial expression
as signs of emotion.
The face is one of cin-
ema’s most profound
channels for emotional
expression. Frame
enlargements.
24

Film Structure
The application of digital tools in filmmaking has made great progress in little
over a decade, with digital artists learning to represent a great variety of images and
lighting conditions. Breakthroughs in the representation of water, for example, made
possible the convincing digital oceans in Finding Nemo (2003) and The Perfect Storm
(2000). (Compare the tidal wave in that film with the one in The Abyss (1989), a
decade earlier.) But the emotional richness and complexity of facial expression have
not yet been among these breakthroughs. The facial reactions of digital characters
in Madagascar (2005), Shrek 2 (2004), or The Incredibles (2004) are conveyed very
effectively as caricature rather than in a photorealist style.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (NEW LINE, 2004)
Unreal faces in fantasy films still can have a special expressive power. Gollum’s bulging eyes
and snarling mouth accurately convey his greed for the ring and his anger at those who stand
in his way, but the emotions are conveyed with some exaggeration. Frame enlargement.
THE POLAR EXPRESS (WARNER BROS., 2004)
To date, most digitally created faces have involved cartoon or nonhuman characters be-
cause their expressions can be rendered in broader terms. For this film, motion capture
techniques converted the performances of live actors (such as Tom Hanks, pictured here)
into cartoon figures. The results were disappointing. The faces look stiff and do not show
the range of expression of a real person. Frame enlargement.
25

Film Structure
Few filmmakers understood the emotional implications
of camera position better than Charles Chaplin. Chaplin
used a formula to guide his camera placements: long
shot for comedy, close-up for tragedy. He understood
that the long shot was best suited for comedy because
it allowed viewers to see the relationship between
Charlie the tramp and his environment, particularly
when he was causing chaos and confusion, as he might
when tackling a waiter carrying a tray of food or step-
ping on a board with a brick on one end, causing it
to catapult onto the head of a policeman. Laughter
depended on seeing these relationships and having
sufficient emotional distance from the character. The
long shot helped provide viewers with that emotional
distance. By contrast, Chaplin knew that the close-up,
by emphasizing a character’s emotional reaction, could
invite tears rather than laughter. Aiming for the heart-
strings of his audience, he used his close-ups sparingly
so that they would have exceptional dramatic intensity.
The ending of City Lights (1931) illustrates this quite
well. Charlie has been courting a blind flower girl who
believes that he is a millionaire. Charlie happily plays
along. At the end of the film, the flower girl regains her
eyesight, chances upon Charlie, the disreputable tramp,
and realizes with disappointment who he is. At this mo-
ment, Chaplin shows Charlie’s extraordinary expression
in close-up, a mixture of hope, love, fear, embarrass-
ment, and humiliation. This is one of the most perfect
close-ups in film history. It emphasizes the complex feel-
ings between the characters, magnifies the emotions on
screen, and intensifies them for the film’s viewers.
This scene elicits positive emotions from viewers.
Obviously, though, many films and genres, like horror,
appeal to viewers by eliciting such negative emotions
as fear, disgust, and anxiety. Within the safe confines of
a fictional film world, these negative emotions can be
pleasurable to experience. In this context, a strategi-
cally placed close-up can be disturbing and frightening
if it brings the viewer into a relationship of proximity
Case Study CHARLIE CHAPLIN
CITY LIGHTS (UNITED ARTISTS, 1931)
Chaplin’s sublime expression in the final image
of City Lights . Chaplin intuitively understood the
emotional implications of camera position, and
he reserved the close-up for special moments of
pathos and sentiment. His extraordinary face,
the tentative gesture of his hand, the rose it
clutches—these emphasize his romantic yearn-
ing and his pained embarrassment at being
revealed as a tramp and not a millionaire. Frame
enlargement.
and spatial intimacy with a terrifying or dangerous
character, as in The Exorcist (1973).
The effects of camera position, then, are context-
dependent, a matter of how a given position is related to
the dramatic or emotional content of a shot or scene. By
using camera position, filmmakers can enhance or inhibit
the viewer’s emotional involvement with a character or
situation and can elicit both positive and negative emo-
tions. Good filmmakers are intelligent in their choice of
camera position, understanding when to cut in to close-
up and when to pull back to long shot. Each position
gives the viewer a unique perspective on the action, and
filmmakers understand that the effects of these positions
can be enhanced by a careful choice of camera angle. ■
Camera Angle
The camera’s angle of view typically varies from shot to shot. Camera angles are clas-
sified as variations of three essential positions: low, medium (or eye-level), and high.
Low- and high-angle positions are usually defined relative to what the camera is film-
ing. A low-angle shot in Spider-Man 2 (2004) shows Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire)
26

Film Structure
throwing away his Spider-Man costume,
having decided to stop being a superhero.
The low-angle framing emphasizes the se-
riousness and drama of this moment.
Filmmakers use camera angles for
a variety of expressive purposes. These
include conveying information about a
character’s view of the world and ac-
companying emotions. In Citizen Kane ,
director Orson Welles uses camera angle
to evoke young Charlie Kane’s boyhood
feelings of bewilderment and powerless-
ness in his new foster home. Charlie’s
imposing guardian gives him a sled for a
Christmas present. To magnify Charlie’s
feelings of helplessness, Welles shoots the
man towering above him, from the boy’s
point of view, using an extremely low cam-
era angle that forces viewers to look up to
this figure, much as Charlie has to do.
Camera angle also can complicate emotional responses by playing against the visual
relationships viewers want to have with characters, as Hitchcock does in his use of high
angles during moments of extreme emotional crisis. In Psycho (1960), he used one of
these extremely high angles as a way of solving a dramatic and narrative problem and of
working at cross-purposes with the viewer’s desired response. A first-time viewer believes
that the psychopathic killer in the film is the deranged mother of motel owner Norman
Bates. In the film’s climax, Norman is revealed as the killer. The mother has been dead
for many years, and Norman has kept her alive in his mind, keeping her body in the
house, even dressing up like her and speaking in her voice. Hitchcock’s narrative prob-
lem was to keep the audience from realizing midway through the film—when Norman
moves her body from the upstairs bedroom to the basement—that the mother was dead.
THE EXORCIST (WARNER BROS., 1973)
Facial close-ups can be a very powerful way of eliciting nega-
tive emotion from viewers. When the possessed Regan (Linda
Blair) stares into the camera, as here, it is difficult to avoid
flinching. The camera’s proximity to a dangerous or frighten-
ing character can generate in viewers a sense of being threat-
ened. Frame enlargement.
DR. STRANGELOVE
(COLUMBIA PICTURES,
1964)
The psychotic General Jack
Ripper (Sterling Hayden)
launches a nuclear war be-
cause he feels his “precious
bodily fluids” are being
drained by communist spies.
The low camera angle em-
phasizes Ripper’s looming
presence and his madness.
The oversized cigar points to
his sexual anxieties. Frame
enlargement.
27

Film Structure
Hitchcock attached his camera to the ceiling and filmed from directly overhead
as Norman carries the corpse down to the cellar. The extremely high angle, coupled
with the jostling movement as Norman goes down the stairs, prevents the audience
from realizing he is carrying a corpse. The viewer is even fooled into thinking that the
mother is kicking in protest.
PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT
PICTURES, 1960)
Hitchcock solves a narrative prob-
lem in Psycho by using this high
camera angle. The bizarre, distort-
ing perspective conceals the fact
that Norman’s mother is dead as
he carries her down to the fruit
cellar. Frame enlargement.
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (FOCUS FEATURES, 2004)
Camera angle can visualize point of view, even one that cannot literally exist. When
Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carrey) lie on a frozen pond and look at the stars,
the camera looks down on the characters as if from the heavens. The stars cannot be gaz-
ing at the characters, but the camera angle creates an effect that suggests something like
this idea. The angle adds a moment of visual poetry. Frame enlargement.
28

Film Structure
Hitchcock’s use of the high angle in this scene is an ingenious solution to his
narrative problem. It introduces a bizarre, distorting perspective into the scene
that plays against the viewer’s desired visual relationship with the characters.
Because of the questions that the narrative has raised about this mysterious fig-
ure, viewers want to see Norman’s mother clearly and up close, not from the odd
angle Hitchcock provides. But, by delaying the desired response, Hitchcock builds
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock was a consummate showman and
entertainer and a serious artist who used film to
explore dark currents of human thought and be-
havior. He thrived in the classical Hollywood studio
system because his films were popular with audi-
ences and enjoyed considerable critical respect. As a
result, Hitchcock became one of the most powerful
Hollywood directors and one of the few known to
the public by name.
Born into a Catholic family in the East End of
London in 1899, Hitchcock grew into a solitary boy
possessed of an active imagination and fascinated by
crime. Uncommonly anxious, he believed his many
fears motivated his preference for making films about
innocent characters suddenly caught up in an unpre-
dictable whirlpool of danger, madness, and intrigue.
“I was terrified of the police, of the Jesuit Fathers, of
physical punishment, of a lot of things. This is the root
of my work.”
In 1920, Hitchcock entered the British film indus-
try as a scriptwriter and set and costume designer.
In 1924–1925, he worked as an assistant director,
and then director, in Germany on several British–
German co-productions. He studied and absorbed
the style of German Expressionism, and in all his
subsequent films he relied on expressionistically dis-
torted images to suggest an unstable world.
Hitchcock rose to the peak of the British industry
with a cycle of elegant spy thrillers— The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady
Vanishes (1938). Seeking greater creative freedom
and technical resources, Hitchcock left Britain for
Hollywood and completed his first U.S. film, Rebecca ,
in 1940. An auspicious debut, it won an Academy
Award for Best Picture. In the years that followed,
VERTIGO (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1958)
James Stewart portrays a detective terrified of
heights in Vertigo , Hitchcock’s most passionate
and poetic film. Stewart’s pose here is a classic
Hitchcock image of the individual haunted by
the darkness in his mind and beset by chaos in
the outer world. Hitchcock’s darkest films offer
no places of safety. Frame enlargement.
(continued)
Hitchcock rapidly consolidated his reputation as a
leading director and defined his unique screen world.
Using suspense as his method for drawing the
audience into the fictional screen world, Hitchcock
concentrated on stories of crime, madness, and
espionage in which ostensibly innocent characters
confront their guilt and complicity in unsavory or
villainous activities. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943) a
psychopathic serial killer (Joseph Cotton) visits his
sister in a small California town, and his idealistic
young niece discovers his secret and the many ties
that bind her to him. In Notorious (1946), two U.S.
spies (Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman) fall in love
29

Film Structure
while manipulating and emotionally betraying one
another. In Strangers on a Train (1951), a charming
psychopath (Robert Walker) proposes an exchange
of murders to a celebrity tennis player. “You do
mine, I do yours,” he tells the shocked but intrigued
athlete.
Hitchcock reached the height of his powers, and
the zenith of his career, in the 1950s with a series of
now-classic films. In Rear Window (1954), about a
wheelchair-bound photographer intent on proving
one of his neighbors is a murderer, Hitchcock explored
the theme of voyeurism, applying it both to characters
in the narrative and to audiences watching the film.
To Catch a Thief (1955) was a classy, witty
Technicolor romp on the Riviera, and The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1956) was a glossy, big-budget re-
make of his 1934 British hit. Vertigo (1958), a com-
plex tale of detection, murder, and madness, was
Hitchcock’s most intensely personal, romantic, and
poetic creation. Widely regarded as his masterpiece,
it is hypnotic, dreamlike, with a remarkable depth
of feeling and an uncompromisingly bleak ending.
Disappointed with Vertigo ’s commercial perfor-
mance, Hitchcock made North by Northwest (1959),
a fast, witty, hugely entertaining summation of the
espionage and chase thrillers he had perfected in his
1930s British career.
Hitchcock’s next film, Psycho (1960), proved to
be his most influential. This story of murder, mad-
ness, and perversion at a seedy roadside motel was a
calculated exercise in audience manipulation in which
Hitchcock wanted only to make his viewers scream.
He succeeded brilliantly. In its coldness, its savage bru-
tality and violence, and its merciless attitude toward
the audience, Psycho anticipated, and introduced, the
essential characteristics of modern horror.
Hitchcock had one more hit in the 1960s— The
Birds (1963)—and then began a period of decline.
Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz
(1969) were critical and commercial disappoint-
ments. The industry and the modern audience were
changing, and Hitchcock could not adapt. The
old studio system was dead, and many of the stars
(Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart) who were
essential to Hitchcock’s films had retired or were
now too old for the parts he needed to fill. The bru-
tality and cynicism of modern film, which Hitchcock
had helped inaugurate with Psycho , swept by him.
Hitchcock had relied for his best effects on sugges-
tion and implication and felt unable to relate to a
world in which, and to a public for whom, extraor-
dinary acts of violence were becoming increasingly
commonplace.
Hitchcock achieved a brief popular comeback
with Frenzy (1972), a hit about a British serial killer.
Movie censorship had fallen, and Hitchcock in-
cluded horrific and distasteful scenes of explicit vio-
lence, inadvertently demonstrating how creatively
beneficial Hollywood censorship had been for him.
His last film, Family Plot (1976), was an entertain-
ing but unremarkable thriller. Hitchcock’s declining
health prevented completion of additional films, and
he died on April 29, 1980.
Hitchcock’s genius for self-promotion (realized
through his cameo appearances in films and his
witty introductions on his television show, which
ran from 1955–1965), and his brilliance at fright-
ening viewers made him one of the most popular
and famous directors in screen history. But he was
also a serious and sophisticated artist who made
brilliant use of cinema as a vehicle for expressing
the forces of darkness and chaos in human life. ■
considerable suspense, and when the payoff finally comes at the end of the film—a
close-up of the mother’s skeletal face—it is heart-stopping.
Other Angles The canted angle , involving a tilted camera leaning to one side or the
other, can be an effective way of making the world look off-kilter, often to express a
character’s anxieties or disoriented, disorganized frame of mind. In Thirteen (2003),
director Catharine Hardwicke uses a tilted camera to visualize the distress of a mother
(Holly Hunter) who learns that her 13-year-old daughter is into drugs. In a similar
fashion, the off-kilter angles visualize the disturbed world of Natural Born Killers
30

Film Structure
(1994). Tilted camera angles are an excellent means of visualizing emotional or psy-
chological instability.
Angle in Context While camera angles are capable of eliciting some of the kinds of
emotional responses from viewers described here, it is important to remember that
all these responses are context-dependent. The information they convey depends on
the emotional content and action of a given scene. They must be carefully matched by
filmmakers to the material of the scene. In other contexts, other scenes, low, high, and
canted angles may have other effects than those mentioned here.
Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, for example, used low camera positions and
angles extensively, but they are not correlated with any of the effects discussed here.
To a large extent, they are motivated by the action of the films, which feature charac-
ters sitting on tatami mats while conversing (as is the custom in traditional Japanese
homes). The camera gets closer to the ground to film them. One critic has suggested
that these low positions and angles work to include the viewer in the world of the
film, like a guest sitting on a tatami mat. To assess the function of camera position
and angle, then, one must bear in mind their potential for structuring emotional
response and also consider the expressive requirements of the scene. What are its
dramatic, comedic, emotional, or cultural requirements, and how is their expression
facilitated by camera position and angle?
Camera Lens
Besides position and angle, a third factor defines the relationship between the camera
and what it photographs. This is the type of lens used in each shot. The lens is the
device that gathers light and brings it into the camera to a focused point on the film,
thereby creating an image that is recorded on the light-sensitive surface of the film,
called the emulsion . A filmmaker’s choice of lens can drastically affect the look of
the image in terms of (1) the apparent size of objects on screen and (2) the apparent
relationships of depth and distance between near and far objects. Camera positions
generally are defined by the amount of distance between the camera and what it is
photographing, but without knowing something about the lenses employed, a viewer
is liable to misjudge the camera’s position. Certain lenses, for example, can make the
camera seem much closer to what it is photographing than it really is.
NATURAL BORN KILLERS
(WARNER BROS., 1994)
Unstable, tilted camera angles help
to establish the nightmarish, off-
kilter world of serial killers in Oliver
Stone’s Natural Born Killers . Stone
purposely created a wildly chaotic
visual design to give the film a psy-
chotic tone. Frame enlargement.
31

Film Structure
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 2009)
Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) admires his handiwork, having just carved a swastika on the
forehead of a Nazi colonel. The low camera angle shows Raine from the colonel’s pont of
view, lying on the ground. Although the camera itself is not tilted, the extreme wide an-
gle lens creates parallax distortion, making the characters seem tilted and the tree behind
them to lurch at an angle. The tilted composition is achieved with the lens rather than the
camera’s position. Frame enlargement.
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Yasujiro Ozu
Most movies resemble one another because
filmmakers use standard methods of setting their
cameras, lighting a scene, and editing the shots.
Interesting variations on the standard pattern are
possible, but it is rare for a filmmaker to define a
unique, singular visual style, essentially inventing a
novel method of scenic construction.
Yasujiro Ozu did just this in a career that lasted
from 1927–1963. He made most of his films for
Shochiku Studio, and almost all of his films are
family dramas that focus on transitional events—
children drift away from their parents or marry and
start new lives, aging relatives pass away. Ozu was
so committed to these portraits of family life that
he rarely strayed from the topic, and the titles of his
films demonstrate the regularity of the pattern—
Early Spring (1956), Late Spring (1949), Early Summer
(1951), The End of Summer (1961), Late Autumn
(1960), An Autumn Afternoon (1962), I Graduated,
But. . . (1929), I Flunked, But. . . (1930), I Was Born,
But. . . (1932).
Ozu’s films are often very funny, but they are
also serene and at times quite melancholy, as he
calmly views the transient nature of life and the
disappointments that living inevitably brings. He
frequently collaborated with screenwriter Kogo
Noda and relied on a stock company of actors that
included Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko
Sugimura.
He disliked melodrama and avoided the heated
emotions that movies often portray. He gave his ac-
tors meticulous directions about how to hold a pair
of chopsticks, how to lift a glass of sake, the angle
at which to look right, then left and then down.
And he often wanted them to do this without pro-
jecting strong emotions. The paradox, though, is
that watching an Ozu film can be a very emotional
experience. His emphasis on minimalism pays great
dividends. Less is more.
Most famously, Ozu’s visual style was rigorous and
almost unvarying. He set his camera about three feet
off the ground, which for many scenes corresponded
with the seated position on tatami matting in a tra-
ditional Japanese home. But even in outdoor scenes
where characters are standing or walking, Ozu’s cam-
era often stayed close to the ground.
32

Film Structure

EARLY SUMMER (SHOCHIKU, 1951); LATE SPRING (SHOCHIKU, 1949)
Ozu placed his camera a few feet off the ground, which corresponded with the traditional seating in a
Japanese home, but he maintained this practice even with outdoor scenes in which characters are not seated
on tatami matting. Frame enlargements.
He didn’t use fades or dissolves but preferred the
straight cut to join shots. He rarely moved the cam-
era, and he often cut away from a scene’s action
to shots of inanimate objects—an umbrella lean-
ing against a doorway, a glowing lantern outside
a restaurant, a lotus flower in bloom. The still-life
imagery provided moments of transition within the
narrative and also a space in which the viewer might
contemplate character behavior and conflict and
reach a calm understanding of these.
(continued)

LATE SPRING (SHOCHIKU, 1949); EQUINOX FLOWER (SHOCHIKU, 1958)
Ozu did not use over-the-shoulder framings in dialogue scenes. He preferred the frontal compositions
seen here in which characters look almost into the camera lens. The set-ups draw the viewer into the
scenes in a singular fashion. Frame enlargements.
33

Film Structure
each shot offered a reverse-field view of the scene’s
playing area.
These stylistic traits emerged early in Ozu’s career
and he sustained the pattern across the body of his
work. They give Ozu’s films an unmistakable profile.
Ozu’s films look like nobody else’s movies. But the
style was not gratuitous or a meaningless exercise to
establish authorship. Ozu was a great artist, and his
visual style is precisely calculated. It defines a cinema
of great poetry and delicacy and uncommon emo-
tional sensitivity. ■
Ozu’s camera set-ups did not follow the stan-
dard over-the-shoulder style of framing that be-
came so universally accepted among filmmakers.
He often filmed his characters in a head-on, frontal
fashion, and had them look back at the camera
in a way that was just slightly off-angle of its lens.
This compositional style draws the viewer inside
the scene by making it seem as if the characters
are addressing themselves to the camera and the
viewer. And he often cut between shots in ways
that shifted the line-of-sight by 180 degrees, as

FINDING NEVERLAND
(MIRAMAX, 2004)
Changing the lens’s fo-
cal plane within a shot
(a technique called rack
focusing) can make a
dynamic contribution
to the composition. It
creates a kind of edit-
ing within the frame
as the filmmaker racks
focus instead of cut-
ting to a new shot. In
a long, uninterrupted
shot, Sylvia Davies (Kate
Winslet) and James
Barrie (Johnny Depp)
talk about her children,
and the changes in focal
plane bring first one and
then the other charac-
ter into focus. Frame
enlargements.
FOCAL LENGTH AND DEPTH OF FIELD When the lens is focused on a distant object, the
distance between the film inside the camera and the optical center of the lens is known
as the focal length . The properties of different lenses are understood in relation to
their respective focal lengths. A focal length of 50 mm conventionally designates a
normal lens for 35-mm film, which is the film format used in commercial theaters.
Lenses with focal lengths greater than the normal range are telephoto lenses , or long-
focal-length lenses. Those with focal lengths less than normal are wide-angle lenses , or
short-focal-length lenses.
34

Film Structure
The focal length of a lens is directly related to how much it sees, termed the angle
of view . At a shorter focal length, the angle of view increases, allowing filmmakers to
film a wider area. At longer focal lengths, the angle of view decreases, limiting film-
makers to photographing a more narrow area.
Also varying with the focal length of the lens is the depth of field , the amount of
area from near to far that will remain in focus. A wide-angle lens can capture much
greater depth of field than a telephoto lens. With a wide-angle lens, the distance be-
tween near objects in focus and distant objects in focus can be very great. By contrast,
a telephoto lens will tend to give filmmakers a shallow depth of field, an inability to
hold near and far points in focus.
These issues of depth of field are connected to important aesthetic traditions in cin-
ema. Using deep focus , filmmakers like Orson Welles ( Citizen Kane ) and Jacques Tati
( Playtime , 1967) created complex compositions featuring a rich interplay of foreground
and background detail. By shooting in deep focus and extending the duration of their
shots, these filmmakers work with an aesthetic that respects the wholeness of time and
space; that is, the playing area of each shot is extended in time (the shot’s long duration)
and space (depth of field). This is a distinct stylistic alternative to the use of editing to
carve up space into many brief shots.
Yet another characteristic differentiating wide-angle from telephoto lenses is the
ability of telephoto lenses to make distant objects appear much closer than they really
are. In this respect, the effects of the telephoto lens can overwhelm the impression of

THE UNTOUCHABLES
(PARAMOUNT, 1987)
The wide-angle lens gives
filmmakers an expansive
depth of field. It also can
exaggerate depth per-
spective. Sean Connery
and Kevin Costner’s
hands appear very large,
relative to the apparent
size of their heads—this
is a distortion of depth
perspective created by
the wide angle lens.
In the closer framing,
note how close Costner
is to the camera, while
Connery in the middle
distance remains in fo-
cus. Wide angle depth of
field enables filmmakers
to put things right into
the face of the camera
while retaining the abil-
ity to focus on the mid-
ground or background.
Frame enlargements.
35

Film Structure
true camera position. What might appear to be a close-up can, in fact, be shot using
a telephoto lens with the camera in a long-shot position. In the two portraits of the
wooden bridge, the bridge is the same size in each photo, but in one case the size is due
to a close camera position, whereas in the other it is due to the magnifying effects of a
telephoto lens. Viewers will have developed a sophisticated eye for cinema if they can
tell when object size on screen is due more to camera position or to the choice of lens.
In sum, wide-angle lenses have a greater angle of view and depth of field than
telephoto lenses. Unlike wide-angle lenses, telephoto lenses will magnify distant ob-
jects and make them seem closer than they are.
Zoom Lenses In addition to normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses, a fourth
category of lens is important in the cinema. This is the zoom lens . The zoom is a lens
with a variable focal length. It can shift from wide-angle to telephoto settings within
a single shot. This can create the appearance of camera movement, making it seem
as if the camera is moving closer to or farther from its subject. In fact, however, the
camera in a zoom shot remains stationary. Viewers with a sophisticated cinematic eye
can discriminate zoom shots from true moving-camera shots. In a moving-camera
shot, perspective changes; that is, the spatial relationship of the camera to the objects
around it shifts because the camera is moving through three-dimensional space.
In a zoom shot, by contrast, perspective does not change because the camera does
not move. Zooming in will magnify all objects on screen evenly. Zooming out will shrink
all objects evenly. This is what produces the impression of camera movement. As objects
in the shot enlarge, the viewer has the impression of moving closer to them. Whereas
the zoom shot provides simple magnification, the moving camera provides a series of
changing spatial relationships produced by movement and known as motion parallax or
motion perspective . The absence of motion perspective in a shot where the camera seems
to be moving is a clear sign that the shot is a zoom and not a true moving camera shot.
Filmmakers sometimes use zoom lenses as alternatives to camera movement, espe-
cially if they are filming on a low budget and a quick schedule. Zoom lenses, though,
can be used for sophisticated effects. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), director Robert
Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond employ a zoom to create a moment of

Two portraits of the same subject, one taken a few yards away with a normal (55-mm)
lens and the other at a much greater distance using a telephoto (205-mm) lens. Which
composition is a function of camera position, and which is a function of lens focal length?
36

Film Structure
dramatic emphasis when the hero realizes a gang of gunmen has come to kill him. Altman
and Zsigmond rapidly zoom in on the gang, conveying the hero’s sense of anxiety and the
rush of excitement he feels. The optical effect suggests these emotional reactions.
USING LENSES Filmmakers often employ the telephoto lens when they are filming
a scene on city streets in which the characters are engaged in conversation and sur-
rounded by real pedestrians. A realistic impression depends on the pedestrians being
unaware of the camera and the actors. Filmmakers can hide the camera by placing it at
some distance from the action and then use the telephoto lens to bring the characters
into the medium shot or close-up framing suitable for the dramatic content of the scene.
Telephoto lenses also can facilitate the staging of stunts. When Tom Cruise runs across
a busy city street in The Firm (1993), viewers jump when a car nearly crashes into him.
The car’s apparent proximity, though, is an illusion created by a telephoto lens.
Viewers acquire greater cinematic sophistication when they become sensitive to the
effects produced by different lenses used in the shots of a given scene. Just as filmmakers
change camera positions and angles throughout a scene, they change lenses as well, fitting
these to the unfolding dynamics of the dramatic action. In a shot with extreme depth of
field, where near and distant objects are in focus, the lens is likely to be a wide angle. If,
on the other hand, depth of field looks very shallow, with a compression of distance so
that an object that definitely is very far off looks close, the lens is likely to be a telephoto.
Some filmmakers are closely identified with certain types of lenses. Orson Welles,
Martin Scorsese, and Tim Burton tend to favor wide-angle lenses, whereas Akira
Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah favor the telephoto. In Touch of Evil ,
his last U.S. picture, made for Universal Studios in 1958, Orson Welles filmed his
gargantuan detective hero, Hank Quinlan, with extremely short lenses to exaggerate
and enhance his huge and grotesque dimensions. Evaluating a filmmaker’s choice of
lenses requires that one be sensitive both to structure—in this case, the visual proper-
ties of lenses—and the requirements of the scene or shot. Consider the lead-in to the
gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone (1993), when Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and
Doc Holiday make their fateful walk down the town’s streets toward the corral. A
building blazes behind them for dramatic effect. The camera shoots them head-on as
they stride toward it. The long lens isolates the heroes in a shallow plane of focus,
giving them an unequivocal visual dominance in the frame. By excluding the fire from
the plane of focus, the filmmakers ensured that it would not distract unduly from the
foreground drama of the heroes’ determination. As an out-of-focus object, the fire is
TOMBSTONE (BUENA
VISTA, 1993)
Telephoto lens per-
spective used to iso-
late, emphasize, and
intensify a point of
dramatic climax. Frame
enlargement.
37

Film Structure
a subordinate element in the frame, but its presence is nevertheless dramatic, serving
to prefigure the violence to come. Assessed in these terms, the telephoto framing is an
effective one. By contrast, a wide-angle lens would have increased depth of field and
thereby eliminated the concentrated visual focus on the heroes.
BEOWULF (PARAMOUNT, 2007)
Digital effects often simulate many features of camera perspective, including camera
movement and depth of field. The exaggerated depth perspective seen here mimics what
an extreme wide-angle lens might capture. Building virtual camera perspectives into ef-
fects shots enables filmmakers to make the effects seem consistent with the way in which
a camera might view the world. Frame enlargement.
TOUCH OF EVIL (UNIVERSAL, 1958)
Orson Welles was the master of wide-angle filmmaking, as practiced in Citizen Kane and
subsequent films like this one about a corrupt sheriff in a Mexican border town. Filming on
a small set during this police interrogation scene, Welles fills the camera’s wide angle of view
with numerous characters and gives them a dynamic staging in deep focus. Note the strate-
gic positioning of characters at four planes of distance from the camera. Frame enlargement.
38

Film Structure
Camera Movement
The camera’s perspective not only changes from shot to shot, but it also can shift
and move within the shot. The camera can move in virtually any fashion through
space. To simplify things, this discussion will focus on four basic categories of
camera movement: (1) pan and tilt , (2) dolly or tracking , (3) boom or crane , and (4)
Steadicam . All these types of camera movements shift the boundaries and coordinates
of the frame. Moving the camera creates a fluid perspective, unlike a static shot with
its fixed framing.
PAN AND TILT A pan shot produces lateral movement on screen. The camera head
rotates in a horizontal fashion from side to side on top of the tripod, which remains
stationary. By contrast, in a tilt, the camera pivots vertically, up or down. If a film-
maker were shooting a skyscraper, she or he could start with a camera focused on
the bottom of the building and then tilt slowly up to the top to reveal, perhaps, King
Kong swatting at airplanes. The accompanying diagrams illustrate the action of
panning and tilting.
Pans and tilts tend to establish linking movements, which filmmakers often use
to connect objects or establish relationships between them or to call attention to new
areas of the scene. Pans also may be used to readjust the frame to accommodate char-
acter movement. If a character crosses the room to open a door, the camera operator
might pan to follow the movement. An early example of this use of the pan occurs in

RED BEARD (TOHO,
1965)
Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa preferred the
telephoto lens. He also
liked to film scenes with
multiple cameras, creat-
ing occasional problems
of perspective when
he cut between shots.
In this case he cuts
between two cameras
whose lines of sight
form a 90-degree angle.
The first camera setup
uses a telephoto lens
and makes the char-
acters seem very close
together, whereas the
second setup reveals
their true positioning.
The perspective change
between the two shots
is very striking. Frame
enlargements.
39

Film Structure
Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). When the robbers make their dar-
ing escape from the train after holding it up, they go down an embankment and across
a stream to get to their horses. As they do this, the camera operator pans left and tilts
down to follow them. It is done a bit sloppily, however, because the robbers get almost
out of frame at one point before the camera operator picks them back up again.
In most instances, pans are brief, with the camera only pivoting a small degree.
However, its physical design permits the camera to rotate an entire 360 degrees on the
mounting attached to its tripod. Nothing, therefore, except for conventional usage,
prevents filmmakers from executing a fully circular, 360- degree panning shot. These
tend to be rare, but they do occur. In Easy Rider (1969), when the heroes Wyatt
(Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) visit a hippie commune and its members
gather in a circle to pray for their harvest, cameraman Haskell Wexler uses a
360-degree pan across the faces of all the characters, who are grouped in a circle. The
camera’s movement brings each character’s face into frame, creating a symbolic image
of unity and completeness.
DOLLY, TRACK, AND BOOM Unlike the pan and tilt, in dolly, tracking, and boom
or crane shots, the camera, along with its tripod or base, physically travels through
space. As a result, these shots produce motion perspective, unlike pans and tilts. A
dolly is simply a wheeled platform used for mounting the camera in a tracking shot.
Sometimes these are called dolly shots because of their platform mount. In tracking,
or dolly, shots, the camera may move briefly toward or away from an object, such as
a character’s face, or it may describe more extended and elaborate movements. In the
latter case, a tracking shot may follow a character who is moving. As Rocky sprints
along the streets of south Philadelphia to train for his big fight, the camera tracks with
him. The rapid track helps to visualize Rocky’s power and adds energy to the shot.
Tracking, or dolly, shots generally move in a direction parallel to the ground. By
contrast, boom, or crane, shots execute elaborate movements up or down through
FIGURE 2
Pan.
FIGURE 3
Tilt.
40

Film Structure
space. They take their name from the apparatus—boom or crane—on which the cam-
era is mounted. A famous boom shot occurs in Gone With the Wind (1939), during
the scene where Scarlet O’Hara visits wounded confederate soldiers at the railroad
station. The shot begins with a full-figure framing of Scarlet. The camera then pulls
back and booms up to a high angle that shows Scarlet surrounded by a huge field of
the dead and dying. This change of perspective creates a powerful dramatic effect by
revealing the scale of the carnage surrounding Scarlet, a scale that the initial framing
of the shot had concealed.
STEADICAM The Steadicam has revolutionized camera movement in contemporary
film. It is a mechanical system that produces a very steady, jitter-free image from
hand-held camerawork. It consists of a vest worn by the camera operator, a stabiliz-
ing support arm connecting the camera to the operator’s vest, and a monitor through
which the operator views what the camera is seeing. (The Steadicam operator does
not look through the camera itself.)
Using Steadicam, the operator can move the camera through space in a com-
pletely smooth and fluid way as an extension of his or her own body. The operator
extends his or her arm and produces a “dolly” shot. The operator walks or runs along
a street and produces a “tracking” shot.
Steadicam was introduced in Bound for Glory (1976) and Rocky (1976) and
was used extensively in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Today it is used in
countless productions and is the means for achieving the restless, continuously mov-
ing camera work that is such a feature of contemporary film. A common shoot-
ing practice today is to have one or two Steadicam operators following the actors
through a scene and providing a full 360 degrees of coverage. Cinderella Man
(2005) and Alexander (2004) exemplify this approach. Atonement (2007) features a
5-minute-20-second Steadicam shot that reveals an epic landscape of war, the British
retreat at Dunkirk in World War II. It is a single, unbroken shot; no digital effects
are used to “glue” several shots together. Children of Men (2006) is shot entirely
with a hand-held camera, but not a Steadicam. The filmmakers wanted to avoid the
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
(EDISON, 1903)
After holding up the train, the
robbers run for their horses to
escape. In the next moment, as
they turn left and run down a hill,
the camera operator will pan and
tilt to follow the action. Frame
enlargement.
41

Film Structure
mechanical look that Steadicam sometimes creates. As in Atonement , many sequences
seem to be composed of a single, lengthy moving camera shot, except that in this case
digital effects were used to invisibly join several shots into one.
FUNCTIONS OF MOVING-CAMERA SHOTS This is a common and powerful function
of camera movement: to reveal dramatic information by enlarging the viewer’s field
of view. A complementary function is to narrow and focus attention on significant
objects or characters. As a director, John Ford rarely moved his camera, but when he
did, it had tremendous effect, as in The Searchers (1956), where a dolly in to John
Wayne’s face emphasizes the character’s intense and pathological hatred of Indians.
Note the difference of emphasis between the opening and closing frames of the dolly
as pictured in the frame enlargements as pictured after few pages in the photo “The
Searchers (Warner Bros.,1956)” .
In addition to revealing action or concentrating the viewer’s attention, moving-
camera shots can serve other purposes. One extremely common function is to
express a dynamic sense of movement that makes a shot or scene more sensuous
and dramatically exciting. When the Joker hijacks a police car and speeds through
Gotham City in The Dark Knight (2008), the traveling camera plunges the viewer
into the scene’s frenzied action. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is a master of
sensuous camera movements that add extraordinary dramatic and visual impact
to his scenes. In films such as Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957),
where characters on foot or horse race through a dense forest, Kurosawa tracks
the camera rapidly with them, darting in and out of trees, over streams and under
branches, plunging the viewer into dense foliage and expressing in the most visually
convincing manner the sensation and experience of flight.
U.S. directors Martin Scorsese ( Shutter Island , 2009; Taxi Driver , 1976) and Brian
De Palma ( The Untouchables , 1987) are masters at using sweeping, sensuous camera
movements. In Goodfellas (1990), Scorsese uses a hand-held camera in a single shot
FIGURE 4
Tracking shot.
42

Film Structure
to follow the main character, a New York
gangster, as he gets out of his car, crosses
the street, enters the side door of a night-
club, winds through narrow hallways and a
crowded kitchen, and walks into a ballroom
filled with hundreds of people and a stand-up
comic in midroutine. In Snake Eyes (1998),
De Palma used a hand-held camera to simu-
late a 20-minute moving-camera shot that
follows Nicolas Cage as he walks through a
sports arena filled with a capacity crowd. This
was a deceptive sequence, however, because
it was composed of several shots. These were
joined at hard-to-see edit points when a wall
or a person passed closely in front of the cam-
era. Another bravura moving-camera shot—
9 minutes long—opened Robert Altman’s The
Player (1992) as a way of letting the audience
know that this would be a very self-conscious
film. In the shot, characters discuss their love
for the elaborate opening tracking shot of
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil , as Altman essen-
tially repeats the famous Welles shot.
Filmmakers also use moving-camera shots
to visualize important thematic ideas. In such
cases, the camera’s movement is metaphoric and
symbolic, its motion correlating, as a visual de-
sign, with important issues in a film’s narrative.
In Seven Samurai (1954), for example, to suggest
the developing friendship and unity between
samurai and peasants, Kurosawa groups them
in a circle and tracks the camera around its pe-
riphery. In We Were Soldiers (2002), to suggest
the Vietnamese enemy closing in on an army lieutenant colonel (Mel Gibson) and his men,
the cinematographer did an inwardly spiraling tracking shot that loops around and in on
Gibson. In The Sea Inside (2004), a digitally enhanced helicopter shot expresses a para-
lyzed man’s fantasy of flying.
Some of the most unique and carefully conceived moving-camera shots occur in
the films of French director Jean-Luc Godard. Godard’s structural designs are ex-
tremely self-conscious; that is, they call attention to the technique at work. Weekend
(1967) is Godard’s dark, savagely funny satire of the barely repressed violence of
an absurd Americanized consumer society. In the film, an amoral couple, Corrine
and Roland, travel by car to Oinville, where they plan to murder Corrine’s mother
so that they might claim the family inheritance. On the way to Oinville, they are
caught in a traffic jam. On a narrow country road, a long line of vehicles impedes
their progress. Anxious to get past the stalled line, Roland impatiently edges his car
along the shoulder of the road, past the other vehicles.
Godard films the sequence in a single, unbroken tracking shot that lasts over 7
minutes. The camera tracks along the road and the line of stalled vehicles, keeping
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…
(GAUMONT, 1953)
Camera movement in contemporary film often has an
unstructured and sometimes sloppy look because the prolif-
eration of lightweight equipment makes cameras very por-
table and hand-held shots relatively easy to execute. In con-
trast with this contemporary trend, director Max Ophüls
was the master of elaborately choreographed, precisely
designed tracking shots. The Earrings of Madame de… is
composed with the camera in continuous motion. Its move-
ments reveal décor, simulate character perspective, visualize
social connections among groups of people, and create
a series of fluid framings that are exacting in their focus
and design. The film is composed as an elaborate series of
dances by the camera. Ophüls’ brilliance at choreographing
tracking shots and using them as vehicles for narrative and
theme has never been equaled. Frame enlargement.
43

Film Structure

ATONEMENT
(UNIVERSAL, 2007)
Camera movement can
work to reveal details
and vistas by enlarging
perspective. Trying to
rejoin British forces at
Dunkirk in World War II,
Robbie Turner (James
McAvoy) finds a group
of schoolgirls who have
been killed by German
soldiers. The camera
move reveals the hor-
ror gradually. At first,
Robbie is framed alone
(a). Then the camera
pulls away a short dis-
tance to reveal a few
bodies (b), and then it
continues moving to
reveal the full scale of
the outrage (c). Frame
enlargements.
44

Film Structure
pace with Roland as he inches his way forward. The camera frames the scene slightly
to the rear, preventing viewers from seeing what lies ahead. The effect of this madden-
ing and funny sequence depends on the length of the shot—lasting an extremely long
time—as well as on the slow, methodical progress of the camera along what seems an
endless line of stalled vehicles. The tracking shot becomes a metaphor for the experi-
ence of being stalled in traffic and enables the filmmakers to subject the audience to
that oppressive experience.
These examples of camera movement point toward an important conclusion.
Whether a filmmaker uses it to reveal detail, to convey the sensory experience of mo-
tion, or to symbolically express thematic and narrative ideas, camera movement pro-
vides filmmakers with an essential means of shaping and organizing the visual space of
a scene. Camera movement gives structure and meaning to the composition of a shot.
TECHNOLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF FILM ART Technological developments in recent
years have made camera movement especially easy to achieve. The elaborate camera
moves in Snake Eyes and Goodfellas were achieved with the Steadicam, as were the
sweeping camera moves during the climactic battle in Terrence Malick’s The Thin
Red Line (1998).
Malick’s film also benefited from the use of an Akela crane for scenes showing
U.S. soldiers hunting their Japanese foes through waist-high grass. These grassy

THE SEARCHERS (WARNER BROS.,
1956)
Camera movement can work to con-
centrate the viewer’s attention on dra-
matically important objects or details.
John Wayne’s character in this John
Ford Western has an intense racial ha-
tred for the Commanche, and Ford uses
a dolly shot to emphasize the depth of
this animosity. Pictured here are the be-
ginning and ending frames of the shot.
Notice how the dolly brings Wayne’s
face forward, emphasizing his extraordi-
nary expression. Frame enlargements.
45

Film Structure
fields on the Australian location (subbing for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands,
where the story was set) were dense, with rocks and holes underneath, an impossi-
ble terrain for a camera operator to move about. But the Akela could be positioned
securely on solid ground and the camera extended on its 72-foot arm into the
grassy areas that were vital to the story. On the crane, the camera could execute
sweeping moves through the fields. In Ali , a film biography of boxer Muhammad
Ali, Michael Mann used a “lipstick” camera—as tiny as its name implies—that he
could hold in his hand as he moved between the boxers in order to film the fight
scenes from unconventional angles.
Camera moves also can be simulated digitally today. Computer-effects shots in
Panic Room (2002) create effortless camera moves through floors in a house, through
air vents, and other impossible objects. This is animated footage that imitates the
appearance of a camera move. And filming digitally enables a filmmaker to create an
endless camera move, or at least one that doesn’t, of necessity, end when the camera
THE DARK KNIGHT (WARNER
BROS., 2008)
Rapid movement by objects or
by the camera produces mo-
tion blur. Even digital effects
sequences simulate motion blur
because it is so characteristic
of the camera’s way of seeing.
The Joker (Heath Ledger) takes
a maniacal ride through Gotham
City, and the fast- moving
camera makes the background
appeared blurred. Frame
enlargement.

WEEKEND (NEW YORKER FILMS, 1967)
Godard’s tracking camera slowly travels the length of a line of stalled cars. The framing
prevents a view of what lies ahead, deliberately frustrating the viewer. Finally, after several
minutes, the camera reveals the cause of the accident. Frame enlargements.
46

Film Structure
runs out of film. Shot on digital video, Russian Ark (2002) is composed of a single
moving-camera shot that runs the entire length of the film’s 96 minutes.
Obviously, filmmakers in earlier decades did not have the luxury of such devices.
When viewing older films, therefore, one must be aware of the physical resources
available in earlier periods. Sometimes filmmakers had to struggle with clumsy or
cumbersome equipment, and it is often their ingenuity at devising solutions to these
technical problems that is a mark of their talent.
During production of The Last Laugh (1924), for example, F. W. Murnau
experimented with many different ways of producing camera movement. The
camera was attached to a ladder, to scaffolding, to a rubber-wheeled trolley, and
to the stomach of cameraman Carl Freund while he rode a bicycle. So impressed
was Hollywood with the work of Murnau and Freund in The Last Laugh that it
sent a telegram to Ufa, the German studio that produced the film, inquiring about
the special camera that had been used to take the shots, adding that in the United
States there was apparently no such device. Robert Herlth, the set designer for The
Last Laugh and several other Murnau films, remarked that what the Americans
didn’t know was that Murnau and the crew had not used sophisticated equipment
but only the most primitive and basic methods to achieve outstanding results.
Technical sophistication, by itself, provides a misleading yardstick for measuring the
quality of films. Film equipment is so advanced today that filmmakers of only moder-
ate talent (a category that does not include Malick, Mann, Scorsese, or De Palma) can
produce images with a sophistication that the early masters—Renoir, Murnau, D. W.
Griffith—could only dream of. Technology without intelligence, however, is just me-
chanics. It must be balanced by artistic vision and ingenuity.
STRUCTURAL DESIGN AND CREATIVE CHOICE
A film’s structural design results from the creative choices made by filmmakers, who
confront a range of options as a project moves into production. There is no single,
right way to film a scene. Where to position the camera, from what angle, which lens
to use, whether to employ camera movement, how to light the set, how to choreo-
graph the actors on screen, how to record the sound and balance dialogue, music, and
sound effects, a filmmaker wrestles with all these decisions. How they are resolved
defines the style or structure of a given film.
Two prominent World War II films—Steven Spielberg’s
Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of
Our Fathers (2006)—include vivid scenes of combat that
are accentuated by an intentionally harsh visual design.
But the filmmakers on each production used different
tools and took different creative approaches in achiev-
ing their designs.
Case Study SAVING PRIVATE RYAN AND FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
Saving Private Ryan (1998) begins with a star-
tlingly graphic depiction of the D-Day invasion of
the Normandy beaches, a battle that helped turn
the tide of World War II in June 1944. In a harrowing
25-minute sequence, Spielberg and cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski depict the carnage on Omaha beach,
where the Allied forces suffered their greatest casualties
(continued)
47

Film Structure
under withering fire from German troops barricaded on
high ground overlooking the beach.
Spielberg wanted the violence in Saving Private Ryan
to have a chaotic quality that would correspond to the
subjective experience of the men on the beach, know-
ing that death could come at any time, regardless of
how one tried to avoid it.
He and Kaminski used the documentary footage
shot by combat cameramen on the Normandy beaches
as a model. They aimed to emulate the striking features
of this footage, much of which was shot in color and
had a flat look, with reduced contrast. Accordingly,
they decided to film in color, in contrast to their previ-
ous World War II collaboration, Schindler’s List (1993),
shot in black-and-white in order to correspond with
much of the historical footage of Nazi atrocities.
They used two photochemical (non-digital) tech-
niques—flashing and ENR—to render the colors more
monochromatic and to reduce contrast. When film
is flashed, the negative is exposed to a small amount
of light prior to filming. This has the effect of de-
saturating color and reducing the density of shadows,
allowing more detail to come through in shadow areas.
ENR (named after the technician, Ernesto N. Rico, who
helped develop the process) is a somewhat comple-
mentary process and has been used widely in recent
films ( Evita , 1996; Amistad , 1998; Bulworth , 1998). ENR
retains a portion of the silver in film emulsion, which
is normally removed during developing. This has the
effect of making shadows blacker, de-saturating color,
and highlighting the texture and edges of surfaces.
As a result of ENR, the patterns on the uniforms in
Saving Private Ryan grew more vivid, as did the edges
of helmets and guns and the reflective surface of the
water, heightening the physical effect Spielberg was
after. To darken the blood so it would stand out amid
the de-saturated colors, the effects crew added dyes to
make it more blue.
Because the lenses used by combat cameramen
were inferior to what a modern filmmaker would use,
Kaminski and Spielberg ordered that the protective
coating be stripped from some of their lenses. This
gave the photographed images a sharp but cloudy
appearance, with reduced contrast. To heighten
the sense of chaos, they shot scenes with cameras
using mismatched lenses, with and without the
coating, to give the resulting footage a disjointed and
disconnected feel.
To accentuate this off-kilter feeling, they manipulated
the camera’s shutter (a device that regulates how light
reaches the unexposed film) to create strange, memo-
rable effects in some shots. They threw the shutter out
of synch to create a streaking, teary effect from top to
bottom of the image and set the shutter at unusual
angles to give the action a stroboscopic appearance.
( Pearl Harbor (2001) copied this effect.) To create a dis-
turbed, visually unsettled perspective, they used hand-
held cameras and employed a Clairmont Camera Image
Shaker to vibrate camera perspective both horizontally
and vertically.
Through all these choices about technique,
Spielberg and Kaminski aimed to capture the jarring
experience of being inside combat. As Spielberg said,
the film’s style is hard and rough. He stated that he
and his crew were trying to capture fear and chaos.
Technical imperfections actually worked to achieve
this end. If blood or sand hit the lens, no attempt was
made to clean it off. Spielberg wanted the footage
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
(DREAMWORKS, 1998)
The ferocious intensity of this film’s bat-
tlefield sequences resulted from highly
stylized manipulations of cinema tech-
nique. In cinema, there is no one “right”
way to shoot a scene. Structural design
results from the creative choices made by
filmmakers. Frame enlargement.
48

Film Structure
to look as if it had been filmed by a combat camera-
man. The film’s design has its visual point of origin in
combat photography, even though many of the tech-
niques they used had no basis in such photography.
Their design choices—rendering a monochromatic
look, emulating the visual qualities of the documen-
tary footage of the invasion, creating a subjective view
of the battle—led them to elaborate technological
manipulations to achieve these ends.
Flags of Our Fathers depicts the brutal fighting on
the Pacific island of Iwo Jima between American troops
and Japanese soldiers who were determined to hold the
island. Eastwood wanted the battle scenes to have a
monochromatic look, but, unlike Spielberg, he achieved
this look using digital methods.
Cinematographer Tom Stern and Eastwood had
planned to use ENR in order to de-saturate the color,
but they ran tests comparing ENR with comparable
results that could be achieved digitally. They decided
to use digital methods because these allowed results
that could not be achieved through traditional pho-
tochemical means. Because ENR is applied during the
creation of a positive release print, the smallest incre-
ment in which it can be used is one lab reel (about 10
minutes of film), and it cannot be varied within that
unit. By contrast, working digitally Stern could not only
replicate the de-saturated ENR look but he could vary
it dynamically within a shot, adjusting individual colors
and areas of the frame. Accordingly, the film foot-
age was scanned to digital video where the extensive
color manipulations could be carried out. Once these
were finished, the results were scanned back to film for
distribution to theatres. (This process of scanning to
digital video for color correction is known as the digital
intermediate (DI) .)
Eastwood likes rich, deep blacks (shadows and dark
areas in the image), and digital color correction enabled
him to “crush” the blacks—making them so dark that
little or no detail is visible—to a degree that went be-
yond what he had achieved using photochemical means
on films such as Million Dollar Baby .
The film has a severely monochromatic look that
verges on black-and-white, but individual colors were
intensified in portions of the image—blood erupting
from soldiers hit by gunfire, the reds on the American
flag raised on Mt. Suribachi, skintones on faces and
hands. The film was shot in Iceland, and the sandy
beaches were digitally darkened to depict the volcanic
soil of Iwo Jima.
The de-saturated design of the battle scenes contrasts
with other sequences in the film that take place in the
United States and that have more vivid colors. The de-
saturation was meant to evoke the hellish and brutal con-
ditions faced by the soldiers doing battle on the island.
Flags of Our Fathers marked the first time that
Eastwood had used digital methods of color correction,
and he continued to do so on each of his subsequent
films.
Structural design results from a filmmaker’s inevi-
table need to choose one or more sets of techniques
and tools, based on an organizing design concept. On
Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg emphasized traditional
photochemical methods of achieving his goals, while
Eastwood on Flags of Our Fathers used a digital ap-
proach to achieve his goals. While the imagery of both
films is severe looking, de-saturated in color, and heavy
in contrast, Spielberg and Eastwood took different
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
(PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 2006)
Clint Eastwood used digital
methods of color correction
for the first time on this pro-
duction. The film’s severely
monochromatic design verges
on black-and-white. The film
footage was shot and processed
normally but then was converted
to digital video for manipula-
tion to achieve the extremely
de-saturated look that Eastwood
wanted. Frame enlargement.
(continued)
49

Film Structure
THE CAMERA AND HUMAN PERCEPTION:
CINEMA’S DUAL CAPABILITY
The camera records screen action through a changing series of positions, angles,
lenses, and movements, and as they make their creative decisions, filmmakers need to
anticipate how viewers will see and make sense of their images. To what extent does
the camera’s way of “seeing” approximate the viewer’s customary habits of viewing
the world? Is there a relationship between the appearance of images on the movie or
television screen and the appearance of real-world objects and things in the viewer’s
mind’s eye? These issues are relevant for comprehending how film structure operates
and how viewers understand films.
Transforming Visual Reality
Obviously, both camera and human eye can see color, texture, movement, and the
location of people and things in three-dimensional space. Motion pictures seem very
lifelike, and even impossible objects, like Godzilla, can be rendered with apparent
photographic realism. The camera, though, can see selectively in ways the human eye
cannot. In other words, it has the property of perceptual transformation , the
ability to show things in ways that differ from ordinary visual experience. Telephoto
and wide-angle lens perspectives have no counterpart in human vision. The eye cannot
magnify the size of distant objects, as a telephoto lens can, or increase the apparent
distance between near and far objects, as a wide-angle lens can. A cinematographer
who cranes up to a high-angle long shot employs a unique cinematic technique that
routes to achieve these goals. The many potential ways
to design a film are narrowed to a single approach as
filmmakers decide how to organize the tools of film-
making. Decisions about where to place the camera,
whether to move it, and what type of lenses to use
must be integrated with other decisions about lights,
color, sets, costumes, editing, and sound—as well as
the relationship between traditional analog methods
of production and digital tools—in order to arrive at a
coherent and expressive audiovisual design. ■
DO THE RIGHT THING
(40 ACRES AND A MULE
FILMWORKS, 1989)
A wide-angle lens alters normal
visual reality by stretching and
exaggerating perspective in
this shot of Radio Raheem (Bill
Nunn). His hands and rings seem
unnaturally large compared to
the rest of his body, and the lines
of perspective in the image are
bent. Note the way the roofline
on the buildings seems to curve.
The optics of the lens have trans-
formed the ordinary appearance
of things. Frame enlargement.
50

Film Structure
the viewer’s eye cannot duplicate, as does an editor who cuts among shots taken from
different camera positions and angles, and with different lenses, to provide a shifting
series of perspectives on the action. Viewers quickly learn that motion picture images
and stories can define their own rules of representation. Stylized films like The Crow
(1994) or The Matrix (1999) take viewers on imaginary journeys to screen worlds
that differ remarkably from the one they inhabit in daily life. Viewers accept the un-
usual images, characters, and stories established in these films as a representational
reality that is true on its own stylized terms.
Corresponding with Visual Reality
But the camera and other elements of film structure do not simply alter and transform
the viewer’s experience of people, places, and physical environments. Cinema also has
the capability of perceptual correspondence , the ability to show things in ways that
reference and correspond with the viewer’s visual and social experience. Close-ups,
for example, emphasize facial expressions. Social experience has taught viewers how
to interpret these as signs of a person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
How Movies Create the Impression of Motion on Screen
CLOSE-UP
is emitting. (A popular nickname for the movies
is flicks . This term dates from the silent era when
slower projection speeds were used, enabling spec-
tators to see a flicker effect, produced by the pulsing
light from the projector. Hence the term flicks .)
Retinal after-images and flicker fusion explain
why viewers fail to perceive the projector’s pulsating
light. They do not, however, explain why viewers
see moving objects on screen. Motion perception is
a complex phenomenon, and under the right condi-
tions spectators will see apparent motion when no
real movement has occurred. If a series of closely
spaced light bulbs are illuminated in rapid sequence
in a darkened room, a spectator will see a single
light source moving across the room rather than a
series of lights illuminated one after another. This
phenomenon has been called beta movement . If
the intervals between a series of illuminated lights,
or the positions of a galloping horse captured in a
series of film frames, are small enough, the eye’s
motion detectors encode this information as move-
ment. The viewer sees a single travelling light or a
galloping horse on screen.
Viewers see only apparent motion on screen. As a
strip of film runs through the projector, each frame
is projected individually. Inside the projector is a
device called the shutter , which blocks the light for
a fraction of a second while the next frame is pulled
down into place. The projector thus emits light in a
pulsating beam that turns on and off. In the theater,
viewers see a series of still frames projected on the
screen and sit in alternating periods of light
and dark.
The illusions of cinema—the viewer’s impressions
of movement and of a continuously illuminated
screen—are due to several factors of perception. The
retina of the eye retains an image for a fraction of
a second after the source is gone (a phenomenon
called persistence of vision ). If a light source is
switched on and off rapidly enough, a threshold
is reached where flicker fusion occurs, a blending
together of the individual pulses of light. 24 frames
per second, the projection speed of sound film, is
adequate to sustain retinal after-images and pro-
duce flicker fusion. At 24 frames per second, view-
ers cannot see the pulsing light that the projector
(continued)
51

Film Structure
do not have to make any effort to bring them
into play. The cinema activates universal percep-
tual abilities held by all members of its audiences.
This fact underlies the medium’s great appeal and
accessibility. ■
Many viewers today watch movies on elec-
tronic display devices such as computer screens or
widescreen monitors and image resolution varies
considerably depending on the video source and
the display device. Electronic images are scanned as
lines of pixels (a pixel is the smallest unit of picture
information in an electronic display). A standard
DVD outputs 720 x 480 pixels (width by height)
to create an interlaced image that is composed of
two fields (odd-numbered scan lines are one field,
even-numbered lines are the other). A DVD video
frame is composed of the two fields, presented in
an alternating fashion. Resolution suffers in an in-
terlaced image because it is prone to distortion and
noise. HD (high definition) video, as found on Blu-
ray offers a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels that
are progressively scanned, that is, the lines of pixels
composing each frame are created in sequence,
producing superior resolution and a much cleaner
image. In each case, the output of scan lines is
above the critical fusion threshold, ensuring that a
viewer sees a continuously illuminated image rather
than scan lines or individual pixels. In these ways,
the most fundamental features of cinema—the ap-
pearance of continuous light and motion—are built
on shared characteristics of perception common to
all viewers. These features are automatic. Viewers
FIGURE 5
Intermittent motion at 24 frames per second.
1 2 3 4 5…
FIGURE 6
Successive events perceived as apparent
motion.
The Na’vi of planet Pandora in Avatar (2009) are tall, blue, cat-people created as
digital characters, but their behavior is modeled on the performances by live actors. The
animators preserved the actors’ distinctive facial features in their Na’vi counterparts
so that the characters played by Zoe Saldana, Wes Studi, Sam Worthington, Sigourney
Weaver, and others would seem recognizably human. They did this even when it re-
sulted in a ‘wrong’ face. Sigourney Weaver, for example, has a thin, aquiline nose that
is one of her most distinctive features. Na’vi, though, have broad, flat noses consistent
with their cat-like appearance. Even so, Weaver’s Na’vi character was animated to have
the actresses’ distinctively thin nose so as to visually connect the digital character with
the famous face of the actress playing that character. Throughout the film viewers study
the faces of the Na’vi for clues about their feelings, thoughts and motivations. These
blue, cat-like faces were built to correspond with a viewer’s understanding of human
behavior and feeling.
Among the most powerful correspondences that cinema can establish with the
viewer’s experience are perceptual ones. On the movie screen, the viewer sees depth,
distance, and motion in ways that seem remarkably lifelike. A fully three-dimensional
world comes to life on the flat two-dimensional screen. When the Na’vi ride atop the
giant flying banshees, a viewer experiences the sensation of gliding through space
52

Film Structure
AVATAR (TWENTIETH
CENTURY FOX, 2009)
Even in highly stylized films,
facial expression corresponds
with the viewer’s under-
standing of behavior and
personality. Zoe Saldana’s
performance as Neytiri was
captured using an innova-
tive camera that focused
exclusively upon her face.
The facial information cap-
tured by this camera, in
turn, was used to digitally
animate the character. Frame
enlargement.
because of the highly detailed and emphatic motion perspective that has been built in-
side the computer-generated flying shots. But movement and depth on screen are both
visual illusions. Neither really exists.
The camera captures the same information about light, shadow, color, texture, mo-
tion, and location in space that viewers use in perceiving and responding to the real
three-dimensional world. Movies build this information into shots in ways that em-
phasize the three-dimensionality of the image appearing on the flat screen. This opens
the door to tricks of all kinds in cinema. In The Matrix , some of the most memorable
visual effects are the high-speed moving camera shots that envelop the characters in
scenes of fast action. But during production these shots did not involve any camera
movement. Keanu Reeves and the other performers were photographed by a series of
still cameras arranged into the circuit that the nonexistent moving camera would travel.
Computer software interpolated the missing pictures to fill out the orbit of a continu-
ous camera move. Moreover, Reeves and the others were photographed against a blank
background (a “greenscreen”) and were then digitally inserted into computer-animated
environments. The filmmakers jokingly referred to their work as “virtual cinematogra-
phy.” Neither the interactions of character and location nor the moving camera that the
viewer “sees” in The Matrix in fact existed. But because the perceptual cues in the shots
about movement and space seemed true, the illusions were credible and compelling.
Cinema, then, has a dual capability: It corresponds with, and also transforms,
the viewer’s visual and social experience. These functions—correspondence and
transformation—establish a very complex relationship between movies and view-
ers. To understand how filmmakers design their work, one needs to grasp how those
structures build on and connect with the viewer’s perceptual skills and how they can
go beyond these as well. The first condition furnishes the grounds that make film in-
telligible, while the second underlies much of the delight that the medium provides.
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has a main character who is afraid of heights. To visual-
ize the character’s dizziness, Hitchcock films a city street from an extremely high angle
and combines a zoom and track in opposite directions to suggest the feeling of falling
through space. The resulting image deforms normal visual reality, but viewers readily
accept this in the interest of style and for the delight that it provides.
53

Film Structure
SUMMARY
Film structure or style results from the ways a filmmaker chooses to manipulate the
camera, editing, light, sound, and color. This chapter has explained the fundamentals
of the camera, specifically the factors of position, angle, lens, and movement, and
how these factors affect the way a viewer perceives the content of a shot or scene. By
understanding the range of creative choices filmmakers confront, and by appreciating
their options in resolving those choices, one begins to understand a film’s structural
design.
Camera positions are variations of three basic set-ups: the long shot, the medium
shot, and the close-up. While long shots typically stress landscape or environment
over character, close-ups usually privilege character over environment. By varying the
camera-to-subject distance, the filmmaker manipulates the viewer’s emotional involve-
ment with the scene or character in complex ways. Camera position can emphasize
facial expressions as signs of a character’s inner emotional life or can even work at
cross-purposes to a viewer’s desired relationship with a scene or character.
Camera angles are variations of low, medium (or eye-level), or high angles. Like
camera position, camera angle can be used to manipulate the viewer’s reactions.
Camera angles can represent a character’s point of view and emphasize a character’s
strength or, conversely, his or her insignificance. Angles can be consistent with, or
play against, a viewer’s desired relationship with a scene or character. As with camera
position, the effects of camera angle are always dependent on the emotional context
and action of a given scene.
Camera lenses supply distinctive optical characteristics to shots. Telephoto lenses
reduce depth of field and angle of view, while wide-angle lenses enlarge these. Zoom
lenses can substitute for camera movement, although they will not produce motion
perspective as does a moving camera.
THE MATRIX (WARNER BROS., 1999)
The illusion of high-speed moving camera shots in The Matrix was created without any
actual camera movement. Sophisticated digital software supplied the motion perspective
that created the effect. Because the 3-D motion cues in the images were realistic, viewers
found the effect credible. Frame enlargement.
54

Film Structure
Camera movement includes pan and tilt shots, dolly or tracking shots, and
boom or crane shots. Pans and tilts create linking movements, connecting objects or
establishing relationships between them. Tracking and crane shots can add a dynamic
sense of movement to a shot or express thematic ideas.
The camera and the structural designs it helps create both record and transform
the outward appearance of things, the way they look. The cinema has a fundamental
connection with the viewer’s perceptual skills and experience. The viewer’s impres-
sions in film of continuous light, apparent motion, and spatial depth all derive from
this fundamental connection. What makes the cinema such a rich imaginative experi-
ence is the way it builds on and creatively enhances this connection. Style, then, can
be understood as a kind of creative response by filmmakers to the tendency of the mo-
tion picture camera to reproduce the surface appearance of the objects it photographs.
By intervening stylistically—by choosing to use a wide-angle lens or a high camera
angle—a filmmaker can creatively shape the material of the shot and the world of the
film to the dimensions of the imagination.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Geoff Andrew, The Director’s Vision: A Concise Guide to the Art of 250 Great Filmmakers
(Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill, 1999).
David Breskin, ed., Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation (Winchester, MA: Faber and
Faber, 1997).
John P. Frisby, Seeing: Illusion, Brain, and Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Eve Light Honthaner, The Complete Film Production Handbook (Boston: Focal Press, 1996).
Steven D. Katz, Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen (Boston: Focal
Press, 1991).
Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Ken Russell, Directing Films: The Director’s Art from Script to Cutting Room (London: B. T.
Batsford, 2000).
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
angle of view
beta movement
boom or crane
camera position
canted angle
close-up
composition
deep focus
depth of field
director
dolly or tracking
emulsion
establishing shots
feature films
film form
flicker fusion
focal length
frame
hand-held camera
internal structural time
long shot
medium shot
motion parallax
motion perspective
normal lens
pan and tilt
perceptual correspondence
perceptual transformation
persistence of vision
postproduction
preproduction
producer
production
rack focusing
running time
shot
shutter
Steadicam
story time
structure
telephoto lens
wide-angle lens
zoom lens
55

56

■ explain why pictorial lighting designs work
especially well for creating visual symbolism
■ differentiate between hard and soft light and
explain their expressive functions
■ explain the differences between high- and low-
key lighting setups
■ explain the principles of lighting continuity
■ explain the differences between lighting for
color and lighting for black-and-white
■ describe the work of previsualization
■ describe what the cinematographer
contributes to a film’s visual design
■ explain how cinematographers work with film
stock, lenses, and aspect ratios
■ differentiate between realist and pictorial
lighting designs
■ describe the creative challenges of light source
simulation
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Cinematography

From Chapter 2 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
57

Cinematography
During production, a film’s visual design results from the way that filmmakers arrange ele-
ments before the camera—sets, costumes, actors, props, light, and color. Titanic (1997), for
example, featured extremely detailed sets and costume design, and the film’s meticulous re-
creation of that vanished historical world held extraordinary fascination for audiences. Viewers
responded to the romance at the center of the film’s narrative but also to the luxuriance of its
imagery. The term mise-en-scène is sometimes used to designate a film’s overall visual design
and to refer to all the elements placed before the camera to be photographed.
Filmmakers also control the visual design of their work through editing, but this occurs
during postproduction, after they have implemented the designs achieved through light,
color, production design, and performance. Accordingly, we will examine editing after
considering these other elements of production proper.
Cinematography , examined in this chapter, pertains to the use of light and color.
Production design involves the creation of sets, locations, costuming, and all visual
environments that are depicted on screen. Performance style deals with the actor’s
contribution to the film and how filmmakers incorporate actors as visual elements within
the frame. A filmmaker’s use of actors can be quite realistic or extremely stylized and
pictorial.
■ describe how color design establishes
symbolic meaning, narrative organization, and
psychological mood and tone
■ explain the relationship between
cinematography and digital effects
■ explain how visual conventions help establish
representational reality and how filmmakers
may “quote” from other films
COLLABORATION AND PRE-VISUALIZATION
The director, cinematographer, and production designer work together in close col-
laboration to create an effective visual design. Production designers and cinematog-
raphers translate the director’s vision into the terms of their respective crafts, and
in practice, they subordinate their own artistic inclinations to the director’s wishes.
Production designer Mel Bourne, whose credits include Woody Allen’s Annie Hall
(1977) and Manhattan (1979) and Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal (1993), charac-
terizes the creative partnership necessary to plan the visual design of a film by stress-
ing that the production designer and cinematographer should be working on the same
wavelength, which, in turn, comes from the director.
During preproduction, the cinematographer and production designer con-
sult with the director to discuss and define the film’s design. This work is called
pre-visualization because it is an initial attempt to formulate the basic features of
how the film will look. As aids to pre-visualization, the director, cinematogra-
pher, and production designer often will look for references in such visual fields
as architecture, painting, and photography. On The Passion of the Christ (2004),
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and director Mel Gibson based the look of the
film on Renaissance painting, especially the work of Caravaggio. The Romantic
paintings of J. M. Turner helped establish the look of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of
58

Cinematography
Heaven (2005). To visualize J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the filmmakers of
The Lord of the Rings studied the book covers and the watercolor paintings used
to illustrate the novels and hired two of the illustrators to serve as conceptual art-
ists on the films. To design L.A. Confidential (1997), director Curtis Hanson and
cinematographer Dante Spinotti used photographer Robert Frank’s 1958 book,
The Americans . This collection of Frank’s work showcased the visual elements they
wanted in their film—high-intensity light that “burns out” in the photos, high con-
trast, and the incorporation of light sources within the photos—as well as a 1950s
time period that coincided with the film’s narrative. Even comic books might sup-
ply inspiration, as Japanese manga did for the directors and cinematographer of
The Matrix (1999).
Other motion pictures are a common source for pre-visualization. To plan the light-
ing for Insomnia (2002), cinematographer Wally Pfister studied modern film classics
distinguished by their moody lighting, The Godfather, Part III (1990), Apocalypse Now
(1979), Seven (1995). The film noir classic The Third Man (1949) influenced the light-
ing style of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). To pre-visualize the Mel
Gibson Vietnam war film, We Were Soldiers , cinematographer Dean Semler studied the
classic war films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Pork Chop Hill (1959).
Cinematographer Robert Elswit and director Paul Thomas Anderson used The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre (1948) as a visual model for There Will Be Blood (2007), and to
achieve the look of an old film they also used old-fashioned, outdated lenses on the
camera. Several crime films of the 1970s, including The French Connection (1971) and
Serpico (1973) furnished the influence for Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007), a film
set in that period.
AMERICAN BEAUTY (DREAMWORKS, 1999)
The relationship between the director and cinematographer is a crucial one on any pro-
duction, and it can vary considerably depending on their talents and personality. Many
first-time directors lack the aptitude for strong visual design and depend on their cin-
ematographer’s choices about lighting and camera placement. By contrast, Conrad Hall,
the cinematographer for American Beauty , found first-time director Sam Mendes to be
a strong visual stylist with very precise ideas about framing, lighting, and camera place-
ment. Stimulated by Mendes’s ideas and cinematic talents, Hall produced work that won
the 1999 Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Frame enlargement.
59

Cinematography
THE ESSENTIALS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
The cinematographer creates the images that viewers see on screen, manipulating their
elements to establish a unified and memorable design. Memorable compositions
result from the careful control of image elements and their balancing within the
frame. Such compositions can vividly express a film or scene’s underlying emotional
dynamics or themes.
How does a cinematographer organize visual elements to produce such images?
Working with the director, the cinematographer determines the film stock on which
the picture will be shot, the aspect ratio, the lenses and camera positions used in film-
ing scenes, and the lighting and color design of the scenes.
Film Stocks, Lenses, and Aspect Ratios
Cinematographers work with a variety of film stocks , which are identified by their
manufacturer and stock number (e.g., Kodak 5298). Selecting one or more stocks for
a production enables the cinematographer to control a large number of image charac-
teristics. Film stocks vary in terms of their sensitivity to light, color reproduction, toler-
ance for diverse lighting conditions, amount of grain (grain is visible as tiny specks or
dots within the image), contrast levels, sharpness, and resolving power (the ability to
discriminate fine detail). A cinematographer will select a given stock depending on how
it handles these characteristics and its suitability for the design of a given production.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji, for example, shot all the nighttime scenes for
Seven (1995), a dark thriller about a serial killer, on Kodak 5287 because this stock
gave him exceptionally dark blacks, suitable for the film’s mood and theme. To ac-
centuate this effect even more, Khondji used ENR to restore silver to the negative,
increasing the density of its blacks. To create the off-kilter visual style of Natural Born
Killers (1994), Oliver Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson intermixed five
35-mm stocks, four 16-mm stocks, and three 8-mm stocks to create vivid changes in
color, contrast, grain, and resolution. In U Turn (1998), during an argument and fight
between two principal characters, Stone and Richardson switched film stocks in mid-
scene to create glaring changes of color and grain. These were intended to visualize
the scene’s volatile emotional swings. On Alexander (2004), Stone used color infrared
stock to portray Alexander the Great’s mystical visions.
Filmmakers often emulate the inspiring innovations of other directors and cinema-
tographers. On Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995), cinematographer Malik Sayeed employed a
stock never before used in a motion picture, Kodak 5239, which was manufactured for
use by NASA and the Air Force. The grain structure of the stock made its images look
extremely raw—suitable for this grim film about urban drugs and violence—and it viv-
idly rendered primary colors, making reds and blues glow on screen and leap out of the
frame. The unusual look of Clockers impressed Oliver Stone and Robert Richardson,
who used the stock in U Turn to create selectively lurid color effects. Spike Lee again
employed 5239 on Summer of Sam (1999). Since then, the “cross-processing” of a raw,
grainy stock has come into general use. Recent examples include the dream sequences
in From Hell (2001), the Hughes brothers’ film about Jack the Ripper, and the 1950s
flashback scenes in Blow (2001), which starred Johnny Depp as a drug dealer.
Cinematographers select their lenses to give images the visual properties that will ex-
press a film’s underlying themes or the dramatic requirements of given scenes. Pleasantville
(1998) is a fantasy about a 1950s-style sitcom whose characters become progressively more
60

Cinematography
ATONEMENT (UNIVERSAL, 2007)
Controlling a shot’s depth of field—the
area in focus—can be a powerful way of
achieving an effective composition. The
shallow plane of focus makes all of the
foreground objects a blur and thereby
concentrates the viewer’s attention on one
character (Keira Knightley), as her face is
reflected in a mirror. Frame enlargement.
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
(COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1962)
Great depth of field can also help
create powerful compositions. In
this famous shot—held by editor
Ann V. Coates and director David
Lean for a long time—Lawrence
(Peter O’Toole, left) and his
guide watch a mysterious figure
ride toward them from the hori-
zon. Positioning the foreground
characters on each side of the wi-
descreen frame and having them
gaze at the approaching rider
create a fulcrum that draws the
viewer’s eye irresistibly toward
the rider. The extreme depth of
field and the way the shot is held
on screen without cutting create
remarkable tension about what
in the story is going to happen
next. Frame enlargement.
THE MATRIX (WARNER
BROS., 1999)
When Neo (Keanu Reeves)
learns the truth about the
Matrix from Morpheus
(Laurence Fishburne), he
appears as a reflection on
Morpheus’ eye-glasses. By
making Morpheus the domi-
nant visual element in the
shot, it stresses his power
and wisdom compared with
Neo’s lack of knowledge
about the world he has en-
tered. Frame enlargement.
61

Cinematography
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (PARAMOUNT, 2007)
Composition can visualize a scene’s emotional content through a careful arrangement of ob-
jects in the frame. Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor, left) claims to be the long-lost brother of Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, left). Plainview is skeptical, and the composition depicts the emo-
tional gulf between the men by placing them on opposite sides of the widescreen frame. The
visual distance between them corresponds to their emotional state. Frame enlargement.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
(NEW LINE CINEMA, 1984)
Horror films regularly make use of
disturbing compositional styles. His
knife-like claws make the killer, Freddy
Kreuger (Robert Englund), look mon-
strous, but so does the composition.
Kreuger is back-lit, making him a silhou-
ette. His face is lit from below, reversing
the normal way that shadows are dis-
tributed on a human face. The camera
angle is low, making him into a looming
figure. And he looks directly, and threat-
eningly, at the camera and therefore at
us, the viewers. Frame enlargement.
modern in their outlook. To suggest this change at a visual level, the cinematographer
began shooting with shorter lenses that corresponded with those used in 1950s films and
then, as the story progressed, began moving to the longer focal lengths characteristic of
contemporary filmmaking. In a subliminal fashion, this gave the images an evolving histori-
cal look and context. To suggest a world in which everything was for sale, the cinematog-
rapher of The Truman Show (1998) used the extreme wide-angle perspectives often seen in
television advertising. To capture a 1970s look for scenes in The Velvet Goldmine (1998)
occurring in that time period, the cinematographer used zoom lenses rather than camera
movement. Zooms were featured prominently in films of that era, and the cinematogra-
pher liked the way the zoom emphasized surfaces (because it merely magnifies an image)
rather than depth and perspective, as true camera movement does.
When choosing an aspect ratio (the dimensions of the screen image), cinema-
tographers must balance several considerations. Which of the available ratios is best
62

Cinematography
What Are Light and Color?
CLOSE-UP
The Gray Scale
Until the 1960s, black-and-white was a common
film format. Since the 1960s, by contrast, black-and-
white has been used rarely but with powerful artistic
effect. Steven Spielberg shot his film about the
Holocaust, Schindler’s List (1993), in black-and-white
because it would give his film a harsher, stark look
appropriate to its grim subject matter.
Black-and-white film and television cameras see
only degrees of brightness, ranging from white to
black through intermediate shades of gray. This
spectrum is known as the gray scale , and it deter-
mines which colors are used or avoided in costumes
and sets during filming. Different colors have the
same degree of brightness. In black-and-white cin-
ematography, this creates a problem. Objects of
different colors but the same intensity, or gray-scale
value, will blend together on screen. Black-and-
white film will not distinguish them.
Light and color are the tools of the cinematogra-
pher’s art. In addition to planning camera setups
and movements, the cinematographer organizes
the lighting design of scenes and the placement of
color gels to augment or enhance certain colors on
screen.
Light is a form of radiant energy, a part of the
total electromagnetic spectrum. Light is visible
only at its source or as it is reflected off another
object. Colors are visible when white light is
broken down into its component wavelengths .
Colored objects reflect or transmit their color
values depending on whether they are solid ob-
jects or translucent. A rose appears red because it
absorbs all visible wavelengths with the exception
of red light, which it reflects. A bottle of green
dishwashing liquid looks green because the liquid
transmits only green light and acts as a filter to
block out all other colors.
In the cinema, colors can be created on the set
by using these processes of reflectance and trans-
mission. Lighting a blue object on the set will in-
crease its ability to reflect blue to the camera. Using
a red gel or filter over a white light source will cause
that source to transmit only red light.
Properties of Color
Three properties of color are important. Hue refers to
the color itself. Red, blue, green, and yellow are hues.
These four hues are unique. They do not resemble
one another. By contrast, pink, a derivative of red, is
not a unique hue. Saturation refers to the strength of
a color. Red is more highly saturated than pink.
Intensity , or brightness, refers to how much
light a given colored object reflects. In respect of
this property, the viewer makes certain assumptions
that influence the way colors are perceived. For ex-
ample, a viewer will judge a red cloth seen at high
noon and again at dusk as the same color, but its
intensity will vary. Seen at high noon, it will appear
much brighter than at dusk. In this regard, percep-
tions of hue and intensity do not always correspond.
Viewers assume color constancy while correcting for
perceived variations in brightness.
White SunlightPrism
Yel
low
Gre
en
Blu
e
Pu
rpl
e
Red
Red
-Yel
low
FIGURE 1
Prism.
63

Cinematography
In color film, hues will naturally separate objects.
Shooting in black-and-white, cinematographers
must separate objects by their degrees of bright-
ness. Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs ( Easy Rider ,
1969; Ghostbusters , 1984) points out that in color
a brown head will separate naturally from a beige
wall, but in black-and-white the two may run to-
gether. The cinematographer has to keep in mind
not only how the human eye will see the colors in a
scene but also how the black-and-white camera will
read the brightness values of those colors.
Additive and Subtractive Color Mixing
The earliest color systems in film history were additive .
By adding varying proportions of red, green, and blue
light (achieved through the use of filters to convert the
white projector light into these hues), they produced
a diverse range of colors on screen. Adding green and
red, for example, will produce yellow. Additive systems
in film, though, were soon replaced by subtractive
color mixing, which removes various wavelengths
from white light. To accomplish this, subtractive color
filters are used. These colors are magenta, yellow, and
cyan. They are contained as layers of dye in the strip
of raw, unexposed film, and as white light enters the
camera, they filter and transmit only those few wave-
lengths needed for subtractive mixing. ■
FIGURE 2
Additive mixing.
FIGURE 3
Subtractive mixing.
suited for the themes or action of the film? Memento (2000) was shot in anamorphic
widescreen (2.35:1) because the shallow-focus lenses typically used in that format
could be used to isolate the main character (who is confused and suffering from mem-
ory loss) from his surroundings. The Phantom of the Opera (2004) also was shot in
anamorphic widescreen, but for a different reason. The filmmakers liked the way the
anamorphic lenses handled candlelight, which featured prominently in many scenes.
A second critical consideration involves the consequences of converting a film ex-
hibited theatrically in widescreen to home video and conventional television monitors.
During the classic Hollywood period of the 1930s and 1940s, frame size remained fairly
standard, with an aspect ratio (width to height) of 1.37:1. This was a nearly square ratio
64

Cinematography
Standard Aspect Ratios
1.33:1
1.85:1
2.35:1
FIGURE 4
Standard aspect ratios.
and one that approximated the dimensions of conven-
tional television screens.
Since the 1950s, however, widescreen ratios have
been standard. Today, viewers see films projected in
ratios of 1.85:1 or 2.35:1. These ratios are wider and
more rectangular than the classic Hollywood ratio.
Accordingly, cinematographers must be careful to
compose their shots in ways that make best use of
the chosen aspect ratio. A 2.35:1 ratio, for example,
facilitates compositions using the horizontal axis of
the frame more effectively than the vertical axis, as the
frame enlargement from Yojimbo (1961) demonstrates.
Filmmakers working in this ratio can spread things out
across the frame, but the ratio is not good for depicting
tall objects. Because of this, Janusz Kaminski shot The
Lost World in a 1.85:1 ratio to give the dinosaurs more
headroom than a 2.35:1 ratio would supply. The latter
ratio, however, is well suited for epics, Westerns, and
historical dramas and has been used extensively in such
pictures.
Anamorphic widescreen produces its image through a process of
squeezing and stretching. Cinemascope, brought to market in the 1950s,
was an early and widely-used example of the process, and anamorphic films some-
times are referred to generically today as ‘scope’ films. During filming an anamorphic
lens squeezes the widescreen field of view onto the square frame of film. During
projection, a corrective lens on the projector unsqueezes the image, correcting the
distortion and reproducing the widescreen image dimensions. Christopher Nolan shot
Inception (2010) in anamorphic widescreen, and the frame enlargements (see images
a-c on the following pages) demonstrate the squeezed and unsqueezed versions of the
image.
YOJIMBO (TOHO, 1961)
The widescreen 2.35:1 ratio accentuates horizontal space across the screen surface,
and skilful filmmakers fully utilize this compositional area. Director Akira Kurosawa
loved to arrange his characters in a lateral fashion across the screen, making maximum
use of the frame. Frame enlargement.
65

Cinematography
To reproduce proper aspect ratio for home video viewing, a 2.35:1 film typi-
cally is letterboxed . The image is hard-matted for video; that is, frame bars will mask
the top and bottom of the image displayed on the monitor, producing a wider-ratio
picture in the center of the screen (and without eliminating anything from the top
and bottom of the image). Viewers of a letterboxed video get to see proper, or nearly
proper, screen ratio.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON
(MGM, 1962)
Cinema adopted widecreen
ratios in the 1950s as a way
of competing with television,
which, at the time, offered
a small, square 4 x 3 image.
Numerous widescreen processes
proliferated. Cinerama was the
grandest, offering a huge, curved
screen onto which three projec-
tors cast an image. The screen’s
curvature stimulated the viewer’s
peripheral vision and immersed
spectators deeply within the im-
age. The ‘smilebox’ presentation
pictured here is available on Blu-
ray and DVD and attempts to
reproduce in miniature the visual
experience of the huge Cinerama
screen. Frame enlargement.
AMARCORD (F.C. PRODUZIONI, 1973)
The 1.85:1 ratio allows filmmakers plenty of width for compositions as well as a comfort-
able amount of headroom for vertical elements in the frame. The great Italian filmmaker
Federico Fellini used the ratio for strikingly pictorial images in this autobiographical film
about his youth. For theatrical release, films in this ratio will be soft-matted : An aperture
matte in the projector will mask the top and bottom of the image captured on the square
frame of film, producing the 1.85:1 ratio on the theater screen. Frame enlargement.
66

Cinematography
Digital formats like DVD, electronic delivery systems such as cable television and
the Internet, and digital imaging routinely used in post-production have led the industry
toward wide use of an alternative method of producing a 2.35:1 image—a scope extrac-
tion. A tremendous number of films today are shot digitally or in Super 35, which uses
the full aperture of the 35mm negative frame, including the area normally masked for a
soundtrack. The film images can then be scanned digitally (electronically captured images
will already be digital) and can then be formatted for release in a variety of aspect ratios
and for distribution to electronic delivery systems like disk or Internet. A scope extraction,
for example, may be performed to produce a 2.35:1 image for theatrical release in ana-
morphic widescreen, and since the footage has already been digitized, it’s ready for release
into electronic non-theatrical markets. Gladiator (2000), The Lord of the Rings, The

INCEPTION (WARNER BROS., 2010)
Director Christopher Nolan often films in anamorpic widescreen. The first two pictures (A and B)
illustrate the frame image unsqueezed for viewing and the squeezed image capturing during film-
ing. Many cable television channels today show cropped versions of 2.35:1 films, reproducing only
a part of the frame, as illustrated in image C. Frame enlargements.
(a)
(b) (c)
67

Cinematography
Aviator (2004), and Cinderella Man (2005) were all shot in Super 35 and given a scope
extraction for theatrical release.
When a filmmaker shoots in anamorphic widescreen during production, the im-
ages are usually well-composed because it is an unambiguous format. Super 35 scope
extractions can be more ambiguous because shots are composed simultaneously for
two ratios, the square, full-frame and the widescreen area selected for extraction. The
frame enlargements from Harry Potter and the Scorserer’s Stone , pictured below, il-
lustrate this problem well. The shot of Hermione (Emma Watson) and Harry (Daniel
Radcliffe) is arguably more pleasing in its full-frame version than in the scope extrac-
tion, which feels cramped by comparison.
In recent years, filmmakers have mixed aspect ratios and film gauges. The Dark
Knight (2008), the sequel to Batman Begins, and Inception were shot in two very dif-
ferent aspect ratios and film gauges. (A film’s gauge designates the width of the film;
the wider the film, the higher the resolution because the frames are larger.) Director
Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister shot most of these films in ana-
morphic widescreen on 35mm gauge film, which is the conventional gauge used in or-
dinary theaters. They also shot selected scenes on 65mm Imax. On The Dark Knight,
these included the opening and closing sequences and all of the aerial sequences. Imax
is a super high-resolution gauge that is typically reserved for special attractions that
are presented in Imax theaters.
Shooting this way enabled the film to be shown in both ordinary and Imax the-
aters. The aspect ratio of an Imax film frame is 1.33:1, so for conventional theaters
a 2.35:1 image was extracted from the 1.33:1 frame for the footage that had been
shot in Imax. The benefits of having shot in Imax were still apparent, even after ex-
tracting part of the frame and printing it in 35mm. It had a superior resolution to the
rest of the 35mm footage, which had originated on that gauge. For presentation in
Imax theaters, 35mm widescreen footage was digitally scanned to Imax 65mm and

HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE (WARNER BROS., 2001)
Super 35 is widely used today in movies shot on film (as distinct from digital capture) be-
cause it enables easy scope extractions. The Harry Potter series was shot on Super 35 and was
screened in theaters as scope extractions. The left frame shows the full image as captured
during production; the right image shows the scope extraction. Frame enlargements.
68

Cinematography
electronically cleaned and sharpened. These scenes were combined with the material
originally shot in Imax. A viewer watching the films in an Imax theater would see a
widescreen movie, but when the scenes shot in Imax appeared, the aspect ratio sud-
denly changed and the huge Imax screen was filled with imagery. The Dark Knight
was the first feature film to combine footage shot in two such different gauges.
The aspect ratio selected often will influence the lenses employed during produc-
tion. Many cinematographers dislike shooting wide-angle in anamorphic 2.35:1 be-
cause of the curvature the lens introduces into the composition during moving camera
shots. If they are committed to working at the shorter focal lengths, they will often
shoot 1.85:1 or on Super 35. However, director Christopher Nolan and cinematog-
rapher Wally Pfister shot many of the action scenes in Batman Begins wide angle be-
cause they felt it provided greater realism.
Having decided on the film stock, lenses, and aspect ratio, the cinematographer
determines with the director the camera’s placement for each shot in a given scene and
how the shot will be lit. Camera placement and lighting are interconnected issues: The
lighting of each shot is a function of where the camera is positioned.
Lighting Design
Depending on the style and subject matter of a given film and the dramatic require-
ments of the scene, the cinematographer may employ a realistic or a pictorial lighting
design or some combination of each approach.
REALISTIC LIGHTING A lighting design that distributes light to simulate an explicit
source on screen, whether it be the sun or a table lamp indoors, is a realistic lighting
design . It suggests that the light on screen is cast by one or more specific sources. If it
is an exterior scene, the light source is usually, by implication, the sun. If it is an inte-
rior scene, then the table lamps, overhead ceiling lights, or street lights visible through
windows become the implied source lights. These are “effect” lights because the cin-
ematographer uses them to convey the effect that they are casting the visible light in
the scene. This may or may not actually be true. If the table lamp in the set is rigged
to be a real source of lighting for the camera, then it is called a practical because it is
a visible light source on the set that actually works for exposure of the film. In other
cases the actual lights for exposure may be off screen. Lights for effect, then, may be
distinct from the lights for exposure. In the case of those lights termed practicals , the
light source that creates the effect and the exposure is the same.
Burnout effects sometimes may be an important part of a realistic design. The
term refers to an overexposed portion of an image in which details are lost. Much of
the action of The English Patient (1996) takes place in the Sahara Desert. To convey
the heat of that landscape, cinematographer John Seale photographed the film’s char-
acters by exposing on their shadowed faces and letting the sunlit areas of the desert
burn out with overexposure. This made the desert look hotter.
Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus devised a very creative approach to simulat-
ing light sources in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). There were
no electric lights in Dracula’s time, all light being supplied by candles, lanterns, oil
lamps, or torches. The light these instruments cast was flickering and unsteady. To
simulate this, Ballhaus placed his electric lights on flicker boxes, which created waver-
ing, flickering illumination. Coppola’s film is a gaudy and stylized fantasy. Realism is
not the sort of term that one would apply to such a film. Nevertheless, the filmmakers
sometimes observed realistic principles of light-source simulation.
69

Cinematography
Cinematographers
CLOSE-UP
instance of Alton’s style can be seen in the film
noir The Big Combo (1955). Alton also shot part
of the concluding ballet sequence in the musical
An American in Paris (1952) and broke the rules by
shooting directly into the light sources.
The striking visual look and design for which many
films and directors become famous actually must be
achieved by the cinematographer. Ingmar Bergman
(Persona, 1966 ) relied on Sven Nykvist, Sergio Leone
( The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966) on Tonino
Delli Colli, and Akira Kurosawa (Ran, 1985 ) on Takao
Saito. Kurosawa, in fact, did not begin shooting in
color until he partnered with Saito as his cinematogra-
pher. Steven Spielberg frequently has relied on Janusz
Kaminski, and the Coen brothers often work with
Roger Deakins.
Other outstanding cinematographers include
James Wong Howe ( Body and Soul, 1947), Haskell
Wexler ( Matewan , 1987), Nestor Almendros
( Days of Heaven, 1978), and Gordon Willis ( The
Godfather, 1972). Studying the careers of cin-
ematographers can be an excellent way of learn-
ing about film. Seeking out films shot by Sven
Nykvist, Tonino Delli Colli, or Gordon Willis
enables one to understand the key contribution
made by cinematographers. ■
Moviegoers often think about cinema as being
mainly a director’s medium. Many movie crit-
ics discuss films as being the exclusive creation
of their directors. In fact, the cinematographer
is a key influence on the visual design of a
film, and a convenient way of thinking about
films—and classifying them—is in terms of the
cinematographer.
Gregg Toland is well known for collaborating
with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane (1941) and that
film’s deep focus compositions. But Toland had al-
ready used deep focus to striking effect on The Long
Voyage Home (1940) for director John Ford, and he
would continue to use deep focus in other films,
such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), directed
by William Wyler. Deep focus cinematography is
one of Toland’s signatures as an artist, and directors
interested in this technique found him to be a natu-
ral collaborator.
The most radical cinematographer in the clas-
sical Hollywood period was probably John Alton,
who shot a series of film noirs, often with director
Anthony Mann ( T-Men , 1947; Raw Deal , 1948),
that featured single-source lighting, extremely dark
blacks, huge areas of the frame in shadow, and
an extremely wide-angle look. The most extreme
THE SEVENTH SEAL (SVENSK
FILMINDUSTRI, 1957)
Sven Nykvist shot many of acclaimed
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s films,
and Nykvist’s sensitive and bold use of
light made Bergman’s films into paintings-
in-motion. Nyvkist’s deep shadows and
chiaroscuro lighting enhanced the brooding
nature of this film, a medieval parable about
death and salvation. Frame enlargement.
(continued)
70

Cinematography
THE GODFATHER (PARAMOUNT, 1972)
Cinematographer Gordon Willis created a unique look for the Godfather series by using an am-
ber color palette to unify the story across all of the films. He also broke several rules of traditional
cinematography, such as the one stipulating that an actor’s eyes must be lit. Instead, Willis often
placed faces deep in shadow. His work on these films is a classic example of how a cinematog-
rapher helps establish a look, mood, and tone on a production. Frame enlargement.
THE LAST EMPEROR (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1987)
Vittorio Storaro is a legendary cinematographer acclaimed by his peers as one of the great mas-
ters of cinema. Storaro brings an elaborate theory of color to his work, believing that color is a
universal form of communication and that it can be orchestrated to evoke specific emotional
tones and responses in viewers. Like all great cinematographers, he is a master of lighting.
Much in demand, he has worked most famously and regularly with Italian director Bernardo
Bertolucci. Their films together include The Last Emperor as well as The Conformist (1970), Last
Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 (1976), and The Sheltering Sky (1990). Frame enlargement.
71

Cinematography
Sometimes the way to achieve a realistic design is to avoid lighting set-ups that
look calculated or complicated. Using practicals as exposure lights, and underlighting
the actors or set, can work very well, as cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki demon-
strated on Children of Men (2006). That film’s director, Alfonso Cuaron, wanted the
movie to have a documentary feel even though it was fiction, and Lubezki lit numer-
ous locations using only practical sources. This helped give the film a rawness and im-
mediacy that a glossy lighting design could achieve.
PICTORIAL LIGHTING Pictorial lighting design stresses purely pictorial or visual
values that may be unrelated to strict concerns about source simulation. Realistic
and pictorial approaches are not rigid categories, and many films may use both
THE MALTESE FALCON (WARNER
BROS., 1941)
Light-source simulation in a realistic
design, whose effect is that the table
lamp is casting the visible illumina-
tion. The actual lights illuminating
the set are off-camera, and they have
been set up to light the character in
ways that seem consistent with what
the table lamp would do. Although
realistically motivated, the overall
design is stylish and moody, fitting
the character, Brigid O’Shaughnessy
(Mary Astor), a wicked and danger-
ous murderer. Cinematographer
Arthur Edeson was an expert at han-
dling shadows and moody tones, as
illustrated by his work on such key
films as Frankenstein (1931), The Old
Dark House (1932), and Casablanca
(1942). Frame enlargement.
CHILDREN OF
MEN (UNIVERSAL,
2006)
Cinematographer
Emmanuel Lubezki
wanted to avoid the
pretty, glossy look
that conventional
film lighting often
creates. He used as
few lights as possi-
ble in order to make
the action seem
harsh and real. This
climactic birth scene
was filmed with a
single, practical light
simulating a lantern.
Frame enlargement.
72

Cinematography
BARRY LYNDON (WARNER BROS., 1975)
Candlelit scenes are almost always filmed using electric lights to simulate the glow of
candles. Stanley Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott (who had worked together previ-
ously on 2001 and A Clockwork Orange ) wanted to break with tradition and, in the interest
of realism, shoot by candlelight alone. The film, about the rise in society of an 18 th century
Irish rogue, was shot entirely on location in England using period houses and castles. There
were no studio sets, and Kubrick wanted to capture the special quality of light that people
living in these old buildings had experienced after sunset when candles provided the only il-
lumination. Kubrick and Alcott used a super-light-sensitive lens, specially constructed for their
purpose. Because the light levels were so low, there was virtually no depth of field in which
to stage the action. But the results were extraordinary, unlike anything moviegoers had seen
before, and became one of the film’s most talked-about features. Frame enlargement.
approaches. Bram Stoker’s Dracula includes many scenes in which the lighting design
is governed by extravagantly pictorial considerations. When Dracula (Gary Oldman)
meets with real estate representative Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), who has
journeyed by train and coach to the vampire’s remote Transylvanian castle, Coppola
and Ballhaus achieve one of their most striking pictorial effects.
Harker shows Dracula the portrait of Mina, the woman he is engaged to marry.
Dracula realizes that she is the reincarnation of his own true love lost many centu-
ries ago. Wanting to possess Mina as his own beloved, Dracula feels murderous rage
toward Harker. As the two converse, Dracula’s shadow, which had been cast on the
back wall, disengages itself from the vampire. The shadow advances on Harker and
begins to strangle him.
The effect is not only visually striking but surprising and uncanny. Coppola and
Ballhaus creatively violate the logic of shadow phenomena. Shadows are either attached
to or cast by the object to which they belong, but in neither case do they behave indepen-
dently of that object. Coppola violates the perceptual regularities governing cast-shadow
behavior, shocking viewers and guiding their interpretations toward ideas of supernatu-
ral power. It is a purely pictorial (and physically impossible) moment in the scene.
The effect was created by shooting part of the scene live and part of the scene with
rear projection . Dracula’s cast shadow on the wall is not a true shadow at all but was cre-
ated by a dancer working in sync with actor Gary Oldman’s movements. The dancer was
placed behind the “wall,” which was actually a screen onto which the dancer’s shadow
73

Cinematography
was projected. When the “shadow” disengages itself from Dracula, the effect is created by
the dancer breaking sync with Gary Oldman and pantomiming the act of strangulation.
PICTORIAL LIGHTING FOR THEMATIC SYMBOLISM Filmmakers often employ pictorial
designs to visually symbolize the thematic content of a scene or film. Pictorial designs
do this more successfully and explicitly than realistic designs because filmmakers can
manipulate light and color in ways that are unfettered by concerns about realism and
BRAM STOKER’S
DRACULA (COLUMBIA
PICTURES, 1992)
Pictorial lighting designs
suggest purely visual ef-
fects unconnected to is-
sues of realism. Dracula’s
shadow disengages itself
from the vampire count,
advances on Jonathan
Harker (Keanu Reeves),
and begins to strangle
him. The effect is picto-
rial and poetic. Frame
enlargement.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (ORION, 1990)
After a long scene with subtle, restrained lighting, the filmmakers suddenly switch to this
extravagant design for a shot showing one of serial killer Hannibal Lecter’s victims. The
lighting is completely unmotivated in that it has no connection to any sources estab-
lished within the dramatic action of the scene. With no attempt to hide them, the cross
lights and backlights are visible in the frame. The effect is purely pictorial, a visual flourish
designed to give impact to this moment of horror. Frame enlargement.
74

Cinematography
SEVEN (NEW LINE, 1995)
Filmmakers often create pictorial effects by showing and filming a light source within the
scene. Investigating a murder scene, police inspector Morgan Freeman cradles his flash-
light on his forearm. The dust suspended in the hazy air reflects in the flashlight beam to
make it visible. Director David Fincher’s film portrays a world of absolute moral and spiri-
tual darkness for which the flashlight’s inability to illuminate the room becomes a potent
metaphor. Frame enlargement.
ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (UNIVERSAL INTERNATIONAL PICTURES, 1955)
Flagging a light source means blocking a selective portion of it, and cinematographers
use flags—square wire frames wrapped in non-reflective cloth—to control where light will
fall within the frame. Flags enable cinematographers to create highly expressive lighting
designs. Director Douglas Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty collaborated on sev-
eral films that showcased elaborate color and lighting effects. In this scene, Ned (William
Reynolds) harshly criticizes his widowed mother, Cary (Jane Wyman), for dating a much
younger man. The flagged light gives his face a sinister cast and adds a volatile and dan-
gerous emotional tone to their confrontation. Frame enlargement.
that can directly relate to the underlying social, psychological, or emotional themes of
a scene. Pictorialism enables filmmakers to use light and color to visually embody the
underlying significance of a given scene or film.
TYPES OF LIGHT: HARD AND SOFT LIGHT Once the cinematographer and director de-
cide on the overall balance of realistic and pictorial elements, they further specify their
lighting design in terms of the proportions of hard and soft light .
75

Cinematography
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s pictorial designs for
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) create a
precise visual statement of the existential moral issues
at the heart of the film. The Vietnam War drives a ren-
egade U.S. soldier named Kurtz (Marlon Brando) insane,
and the military brass sends an assassin named Willard
(Martin Sheen) upriver to Kurtz’s compound to murder
the colonel. Most of the narrative takes place during
Willard’s trip upriver and raises the question about what
Willard will do when he finally meets Kurtz. Will he kill
him as he has been instructed, or, because both men are
equally murderous and bestial, will he join Kurtz instead?
To suggest the psychological and spiritual bond be-
tween the two characters, Storaro employed a strikingly
similar lighting design for each man. Kurtz is filmed
with his face half in and half out of shadow to convey
the character’s cruelty and moral darkness and the in-
ner struggle between good and evil that has driven him
insane. After Willard kills Kurtz, the same lighting de-
sign is used to make him look Kurtz-like. Willard’s face
Case Study APOCALYPSE NOW
is partially eclipsed, half in the light, half in the shadow.
The lighting tells the viewer that Willard has become
Kurtz. Postproduction editing of the film, however,
weakened the visual and thematic force of this pictorial
statement. After early test screenings indicated that the
original ending did not work for audiences, Coppola
added a different conclusion in which Willard rejects
Kurtz’s kingdom and leaves.
Coppola’s original ending was more ambiguous.
In both the original and revised endings, Willard kills
Kurtz, but in Coppola’s original version, Willard remains
behind on the steps of Kurtz’s compound facing Kurtz’s
army, his face lit to look like Kurtz. Coppola’s preferred
version ended here. He wanted the film to conclude
with the question of whether Willard has become Kurtz,
and Storaro’s lighting clearly implied that he has. The
way this ending was changed—by showing Willard
leaving Kurtz’s compound—undermined the meaning
established by Storaro’s lighting design, and this made
the film thematically less coherent. ■

APOCALYPSE NOW
(UNITED ARTISTS, 1979)
Pictorial lighting for the-
matic symbolism: the faces
of Kurtz (Marlon Brando)
and Willard (Martin Sheen).
Cinematographer Vittorio
Storaro’s lighting design
stresses the moral conflict
between good and evil within
each character and suggests
an essential equivalence be-
tween both men. Frame
enlargements.
76

Cinematography
Hard and soft lighting differ in terms of fall-off and contrast . Hard lighting typically
creates high contrast and fast fall-off. The boundaries between the illuminated areas and
the areas in darkness or shadow are sharply defined. The rate of fall-off, or change be-
tween light and dark, is rapid. This creates a high contrast between light and dark areas
as they are distributed throughout the frame. Another way of understanding contrast
is in terms of shadow definition. High-contrast lighting produces very strong shadow
definition, as in the shot from Out of the Past (1947), a film noir made during a period
when high-contrast black-and-white cinematography was very popular.
By manipulating fall-off and contrast, cinematographers enhance the three-
dimensional appearance of film images. Notice how vividly the shadow information
renders the folds of Robert Mitchum’s trenchcoat in the shot from Out of the Past .
Light organizes and defines space. The distribution of light and shadow conveys
physical properties of depth, distance, and surface texture, expressed by the ways light
falls across objects in a room or scene. Motion picture images easily copy this source
OUT OF THE PAST
(RKO, 1947)
Low-key lighting in a sophisti-
cated, complex design typical of
1940s film noir. Small portions of
the frame are selectively exposed
using hard light, leaving other
areas to fall quickly into shadow.
The effect is moody and omi-
nous. Frame enlargement.
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Francis Ford Coppola
Along with Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and
Brian De Palma, Coppola belonged to a young
generation of university-trained film students-
turned-directors who established careers in the
early 1970s. His earliest films ( Dementia 13 , 1963;
Finian’s Rainbow , 1968) are undistinguished and do
not hint at the talent that suddenly burst forth in
The Godfather (1972), the most successful example
of epic narrative filmmaking produced by a major
studio since Gone With the Wind (1939). Starring
Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, The Godfather offers
a richly romanticized and harshly brutal portrait
of the rise to power of the Corleone crime family.
Feeling he had oversentimentalized the Corleones
in the first film, Coppola set out to destroy them in
the harsher, bleaker sequel, The Godfather, Part II
(1974), which many critics consider superior to its
predecessor.
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Cinematography
THE GODFATHER: PART 2 (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1974)
Coppola brilliantly integrated masterful storytelling with an ambi-
tious visual design in The Godfather , an enduring modern classic.
And then he surpassed that film with its sequel focusing on Michael
Corleone (Al Pacino) and the disintegration of his empire. Gordon
Willis’ cinematography used light and color to create a consistent
through-line that helped to unify the two films. Frame enlargement.
Between these two epics, Coppola made The
Conversation (1974), an edgy, sophisticated portrait
of the psychological disintegration of an electron-
ics wizard and domestic spy (played by Gene
Hackman). An extraordinarily stylized and ambigu-
ous work, The Conversation avoids the formulaic fea-
tures of the bigger-budgeted Godfather films.
These three films remain Coppola’s greatest
achievements as director. His subsequent career is
checkered with grandly conceived but incompletely
realized ambitions. Seduced by a huge budget and
ballooning ambitions, Coppola released Apocalypse
Now (1979), a visually spectacular but conceptually
muddled account of the Vietnam War. For much
of its length it is undeniably hypnotic, but after the
precision and clarity of his previous three films, its
diffuseness is disappointing.
His next films, One from the Heart (1982), The
Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton
Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Gardens
of Stone (1987), and Tucker (1988), generally failed
to connect with critics or the public and often
seemed more conventional than visionary. Part of
Coppola’s problem was a faltering economic base.
He attempted to establish his own studio by creating
Zoetrope Studios in 1980, but Apocalypse Now
saddled him with huge debts, and the disastrous
box-office performance of One from the Heart com-
pounded his problems. The more conventional films
that followed are partly a result of Coppola’s efforts
to extricate himself from a mountain of debt by craft-
ing less audacious and more commercial products.
Coppola returned to epic form with The
Godfather, Part III (1991), a compelling but uneven
conclusion to the saga of Michael Corleone, and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a controversial but
genuinely visionary and audacious adaptation of
the Stoker novel. The latter film is one of Coppola’s
most ambitious and artistically successful works.
Coppola’s up-and-down career has been marked
by an unresolved tension between grandiose artistic
ambitions and the budgetary limitations and need
for box-office success inherent in studio-financed
productions. Unlike Woody Allen, who works suc-
cessfully and well on limited resources, Coppola
often required huge budgets for his visions and had
difficulty accommodating the inevitable compro-
mises such budgets entail. Presently, he has semi-
retired from filmmaking in order to concentrate on
his vineyard and wine-making business. ■
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Cinematography
of everyday perceptual information, and filmmakers use this information in light to
create a convincing impression of three-dimensional space on a flat screen.
In contrast with hard light, soft light is highly diffused or scattered. It is produced
by using a filter in front of the light source or by bouncing light off a reflective surface
(cinematographers use “bounce cards” to accomplish the latter goal). Once light is
scattered in this fashion, it will move in all directions to wrap around and envelop the
actors and set. For this reason, soft light is much less directional than hard light, which
can be precisely controlled to spotlight small details or areas of a set or an actor’s face.
During the Last Supper scene in The Passion of the Christ (2004), Caleb Deschanel’s
cinematography creates a strong, single-source effect, with the light seeming to come
from the candles on the table. The soft light creates a gradual transition between light
and shadow, and the design is realistic. It looks as if the candle is casting all the vis-
ible light within the frame. By contrast, the lighting in Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow (2004) simulates a hard-light look by using soft light. The soft light is pre-
cisely controlled to create sharp fall-off. The light does not wrap around the actor.
Hard and soft lighting can establish time of day very effectively in a scene by mim-
icking the way sunlight changes during the course of a day. At noon, sunlight tends to
be very hard, and shadows tend to be short. During the morning and dusk, sunlight
is more highly diffused and produces longer shadows. Bright exterior lights visible
through windows of an indoor set and diffused light on the interior of the set will estab-
lish daytime, whereas night is indicated by using dark or dim exteriors and hard, con-
trasting illumination on the interior. In Peter Weir’s Fearless (1993), cinematographer
Fill Light
Key Light
Back Light
FIGURE 5
Three-point lighting.
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Cinematography
SCHLINDER’S LIST
(UNIVERSAL PICTURES,
1993)
A strong key light on the face
of actor Liam Neeson (as Oskar
Schlinder) makes his gaze seem
especially intense. Lighting
defines space and character
and can convey mood, psy-
chology, and emotion. The
intensity of this image is due
as much to cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski’s striking
use of the key light as it is to
Neeson’s performance. Frame
enlargement.
Allen Daviau used hard light to establish the late-morning hour during which a critical
airline flight occurs. He positioned lights at a high angle to cast short shadows through
the windows of the airplane set. The lighting arrangement realistically replicated quali-
ties of light at this time of day.
Hard and soft light also can convey emotional qualities. In Batman Begins , the
filmmakers used soft light to film the flashback scenes to Bruce Wayne’s childhood,
before the trauma of losing his parents and being attacked by bats. The soft light
helped to establish this as a happier time—thereafter, he is depicted with harder light.
HIGH- AND LOW-KEY SETUPS Hard and soft lighting designs can be achieved by us-
ing high-key and low-key lighting setups. The key light , in the traditional three-point
lighting employed in Hollywood films, is the main source of illumination usually
directed on the face of the performer. The other two light sources are the fill light
and the back light . The back light illuminates the rear portion of the set and/or the
performer to establish a degree of separation between the actor and the rear of the set.
The fill light fills in undesirable areas of shadow that are created by the positioning of
the key light and the back light.
Low-key lighting features a relatively bright key light in comparison with a small
use of fill light. This produces abundant shadows. In low-key lighting, most of the
frame is underlit, whereas other, usually small, portions are adequately exposed.
Typically, low-key lighting employs hard light in a high-contrast, fast fall-off image.
This style was very popular in crime films throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.
Many of these were called film noir , meaning “black film,” a term designating the
low-key lighting setups they employed as well as the moral darkness of their stories
and characters. The shot from Out of the Past (few pages back) is low-key.
High-key lighting is the opposite of low-key. High-key employs similar, bright
intensities of key and fill, producing an even level of illumination throughout the
scene with low contrast and few shadow areas. While low-key setups are suited to the
gloomy, sinister films noir, high-key styles brightened the tone of Hollywood’s popu-
lar musicals. High-key styles assertively displayed the cheerful sets, colors, costumes,
and dancing in such films as Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris , and The Band
Wagon . The MGM studio in particular favored high-key styles to showcase the sump-
tuous sets and costumes in their productions, musical and nonmusical alike.
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Cinematography
LIGHTING CONTINUITY
Continuity of Lighting across Shots Viewers watching a narrative motion picture
generally want to believe in the plausibility and integrity of the world represented
on screen. In other words, it should behave much as the viewer’s own world does
and obey the same kinds of physical laws of time and space, unless, as in adventure,
fantasy, or science fiction, there is a clearly established reason for not doing so.
Filmmakers manipulate cinematic style to represent and transform the viewer’s sense
of reality. Viewers, in turn, expect films to reference, and correspond in key ways
with, their experience of the world while granting filmmakers a great deal of free-
dom in the ways they do this. Stylistic manipulations operate within limits. These are
partly dictated by the logical demands of the style itself. Sylvester Stallone’s character
Rambo can have superhuman abilities, but if these are too excessive, his adventures
will lose all sense of danger and peril, and the films will lack suspense.
Stylistic manipulations are also limited by the viewer’s demands for reference and
correspondence in the represented screen world. In this respect, continuity principles
impose fundamental limitations on style in the interest of achieving reference and cor-
respondence. In the areas of image editing and sound editing, principles of continuity
are fundamental to narrative filmmaking. The same is true for lighting, irrespective of
whether a filmmaker employs a realistic or pictorial design.
Cinematographers follow principles of continuity in their lighting designs. They
are not free to drastically change light values from shot to shot. Changes of camera
perspective from shot to shot should not produce major changes in the light values
that have been established for the scene. A cinematographer, therefore, must take ad-
equate measurements of the amount of light available within a scene and understand
how to make small adjustments in that light depending on the camera’s position.
Close-ups, for example, are generally lit a bit brighter than long or medium shots, but
viewers do not notice these small variations.
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
(MGM, 1951)
High-key lighting balances key,
fill, and backlights to create
an even level of illumination
throughout the frame. Notice
how minimal is the shadow
information in this shot of Gene
Kelly. The brightness of high-
key lighting was suited to the
optimism of the Hollywood
musicals. Frame enlargement.
81

Cinematography
Filming on location can introduce complications into the way cinematographers
plan for lighting continuity. When shooting out-of-doors, filmmakers often must
supplement naturally available sunlight with artificial lights. The position of the
sun in the sky overhead changes during the course of the day, and so does the ap-
parent hardness of the light. Light is hardest at noon. While filming The Last of the
Mohicans (1993), cinematographer Dante Spinotti found that artificial electrical lights
offered several advantages during location shooting in the forest where much of the
film’s action is set.
In designing a visual look for the film, Spinotti wanted to be faithful to the
story’s eighteenth-century period. At that time, there were no electric lights, so il-
lumination in the forests would have been produced by sunlight during the day and
by moonlight and firelight at night. To simulate the effect of powerful shafts of
sunlight pouring into the forest, Spinotti used a few very large, very powerful elec-
tric lights. These cast narrow beams of light to effectively simulate rays of sunshine
penetrating the dark forest.
This use of artificial light accomplished two things. It established lighting continu-
ity across shots regardless of the different times of day or dusk when filming occurred.
Using electrical lights that could be positioned at appropriate angles enabled filmmak-
ers to compensate for changes in the sun’s position. Using these lights also extended
principal hours of cinematography beyond the noon hour when light was at its hardest
and least diffused. Supplementing sunlight with the electrical lights permitted shooting
to occur well past the noon hour, even at dusk.
Continuity of Lighting within Shots A cinematographer must plan for lighting
continuity within shots as well as across shots. Many shots involve camera move-
ment, and most involve actors who change positions in the frame. Lights that pro-
vide adequate exposure and atmosphere for a camera in one position will not do so
if the camera moves to another portion of the set. The cinematographer must plan
for a lighting design that can accommodate the entire range of the camera’s move-
ment. This may require adjusting the light level and the exposure level in the camera
during the shot itself. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Bulworth , 1998) regularly
uses an elaborate dimmer board that enables him to raise and lower light levels dur-
ing filming and while the camera and actors are in motion.
Filming Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), cinematographer Walt Lloyd con-
fronted a scene in which a chauffeur drives a limousine in bright, hard sunlight, parks
it by a trailer, and goes into the trailer’s dim interior. In one shot, the camera follows
the chauffeur as he gets out of the car in the hard sunlight and walks over to the trailer,
opens the screen door, and goes inside. To accommodate this drastic change in light
levels from exterior to interior within the moving camera shot, Lloyd executed a wide
range of “stop pulls,” changes in the lens aperture setting that determines how much
light the lens is letting into the camera. The stop pulls helped maintain light continuity
as the action of the shot moved from the bright exterior to the dim interior.
These examples indicate one of the key requirements of a cinematographer’s
job: the ability to quickly and creatively solve artistic and practical challenges.
Cinematographers must strategically fit the demands of a location shoot or a direc-
tor’s preferred visual design with available camera resources and the imperative for
lighting continuity. This may entail supplementing natural light with artificial light,
executing elaborate on-set lighting adjustments during the course of a shot, or read-
justing exposure levels in the camera to compensate for changes in light level.
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Cinematography
LIGHTING FOR COLOR Black-and-white film registers only brightness levels, not colors.
Brightness values range from white through gray to black. When shooting black-and-
white, the cinematographer must be careful to avoid using colors in a scene, such as red
and green, that have the same degree of brightness and will be indistinguishable on film.
By contrast, the cinematographer who works in color can use it to add to the
tone and atmosphere of the scene. By appropriately choosing film stocks with an
understanding of their sensitivity to color, by employing color gelatins over the
lights to intensify a dominant color motif within a scene, and by working closely
with the production designer to establish the range of colors to be employed in sets
and costumes, the cinematographer helps organize the color design of a given film.
Functions of Color Cinematography Color design performs three basic functions
in film. It establishes symbolic meaning, narrative organization, and psychological
mood and tone.
Conveying Symbolic Meaning Filmmakers often use color to establish a symbolic
association or idea in the mind of the viewer. In Thirteen (2003), to express the
downward arc of a young girl’s life as she gets involved with drugs, the filmmakers
slowly, gradually drained most of the color out of the film. In Pleasantville , a teenage
brother and sister find themselves trapped within a 1950s-era television sitcom whose
characters lead humdrum and predictable lives. The siblings disrupt the scripted equi-
librium of the show, causing some of its characters to reflect on and examine their
personalities and identity. Color emblemizes this dawning self-awareness. The sitcom
world is initially a black-and-white world, corresponding to the simplified morality of
the show. But as the characters awaken into complex selves, color begins to appear,
at first in selective parts of the black-and-white image and eventually into the entire
image. The shift from black-and-white to color suggests the transition by the sitcom
characters to a fuller, more emotionally rounded life.
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Apocalypse Now , Bulworth ) believes that
colors have an inherent symbolism, based in their wavelength, to which viewers re-
spond physiologically. Of all contemporary cinematographers, Storaro has the most
elaborate theory of color expression in cinema, and he typically uses colors for highly
specific purposes. In Bulworth , he used an elaborate color palette to suggest the
spiritual crisis and regeneration of the title character, played by Warren Beatty. To
suggest Bulworth’s initial despair, the film opens in darkness, with no color, and then
its scenes move through the hues of red, orange, yellow-cyan-magenta, blue, indigo,
and white. Storaro’s color design bookends the film with the absence of color (black)
and, at the end, the unity of all colors (white). For Storaro, the aesthetic structure of
Bulworth is determined by this color plot and the symbolic ideas associated with its
progression of hues.
Establishing Narrative Organization Many contemporary films use color design in an
overt way to establish narrative organization, and this function often overlaps with pro-
viding symbolic meaning. Ray (2004), about the life of singer Ray Charles, marks the
flashbacks to his youth with bright, vibrant color. Scenes showing his adult life—after he
had lost his eyesight—have a more limited range of desaturated color. The complex narra-
tive of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic takes place in three locations, two of which are color-
coded. The Washington, DC, sequences were shot unfiltered to achieve a cold, blue look.
Scenes in Mexico were overexposed and shot with a tobacco filter to give them a hot,
brown look. As the story switches between the locations, the color change is quite strik-
ing. In Blow , the story spans the 1950s–1990s, and each decade gets a distinctive color
83

Cinematography
characterization. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan bracket their
narratives with a prologue and epilogue and use color to differentiate these sections from
the narrative body of the films. In both films, the prologue and epilogue are shot in natu-
ralistic color, whereas the narrative body of Schindler’s List is filmed in black-and-white
and that of Saving Private Ryan is filmed in desaturated color. These color differences
create a counterpoint within the structure of each film that invites the viewer to reflect on
what each section of the films is expressing.
The narrative of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1993), about the life of the charismatic
black leader, is divided into three sections. The first section of the film, dealing with
Malcolm’s life as a young man, is the most colorful, the most visually romantic, and
the section that features the warmest colors. The sections dealing with Malcolm’s time
in prison contrast with the warmth of the earlier episodes by using a color scheme
that stresses grays, blacks, and bluish grays. The lighting scheme is very cool and
hard, eliminating all diffusion.
The third section of the narrative, dealing with Malcolm’s career as a civil rights
leader and relationship with the Nation of Islam, features browns, greens, and very
natural tones. Dickerson wanted each of these schemes to work on the viewer sub-
liminally and to provide a way of visually characterizing the content of Malcolm’s life
during these periods.
Conveying Mood and Tone The most common use of color design in film is prob-
ably to augment and intensify the emotional mood and tone of a scene. The film-
makers constructed a color plot for The Lord of the Rings films, using color to
convey emotional tones for the diverse locations. Bags End, the Hobbits’ village,
has a cozy, comfortable feel, with a warm, yellow-orange fire in the fireplace. In
the sinister village of Bree, in contrast, the fireplace has a dirty greenish-yellow
glow. Autumnal colors help give Rivendell, the decaying empire of the Elves, a
melancholy quality. Green light, draining color from the actors’ faces, gives the
Moria Mines a tomblike atmosphere. In L.A. Confidential (1997), Kim Basinger
plays Lynn Bracken, a Hollywood hooker who lives in a palatial Los Angeles
THE WIZARD OF OZ (MGM,
1939)
One of the most famous symbolic
uses of color in movie history occurs
in The Wizard of Oz . When Dorothy
(Judy Garland) leaves her dreary
Kansas home—shown in sepia (a
brown-gray color) —she steps into
the fairyland of Oz, shown in glorious
Technicolor. The brightly saturated
colors of Oz make it a fantasy-land
come true for Dorothy, a child of
Depression-era America. Frame
enlargement.
84

Cinematography
house where she has two bedrooms, one the working bedroom, the other her own.
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti used color to contrast the emotional tone of these
two rooms. He shot the working room with cool blue light to give it a slightly
harsh and emotionally distant aura. By contrast, when Lynn takes a man she loves
to her real bedroom, Spinotti used a romantic amber lighting to create a sense of
warmth and emotional security.
In James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), a science fiction fantasy set in
Los Angeles during two time periods, 1984 and 2029 a.d. , cinematographer Adam
Greenberg used hard, strong, blue light to photograph the terminator (played by
Arnold Schwarzenegger). Greenberg found that hitting Schwarzenegger with this light
from a high angle made the character seem less human and more savage. When he lit
Schwarzenegger with strong light, the actor looked like a piece of sculpture. The high
angle of the light increased the shadows on Schwarzenegger’s physique and created a
harder look, and the blue cast of the light accentuated his coldness.
Much has been written about the psychological and emotional effects of color
schemes, and many cinematographers have very intense preferences for and against
certain colors and a belief that specific colors can have precise effects on the emo-
tional responses of viewers. In general, however, the emotional effects of color are

MALCOLM X (40 ACRES & A
MULE FILMWORKS, 1992)
Cinematographers often use a color
arc to organize a film, orchestrating
color changes across the running time
of the film in ways that correspond
with changes in the characters and
their situations. In collaboration with
director Spike Lee, cinematographer
Ernest Dickerson used changes in
color to define the film’s three nar-
rative sections. Pictured here are the
first, in which bold, saturated colors
characterize an era of excitement,
energy and recklessness in Malcolm’s
youth. In the film’s third section, a
more restrained and balanced palette
emphasizing earth tones typified the
mature and settled phase of his adult
life. Frame enlargements.
85

Cinematography
strongly context-dependent. Color can augment, intensify, and sometimes contrast
and cut against the dominant emotional tone and mood of a scene, but an indi-
vidual color in itself rarely can supply emotional and psychological content that is
otherwise missing in a scene. In the case of the contrasting color schemes of the two
bedrooms in L.A. Confidential , the action of the scenes in those locations works
with the lighting to help set a unified emotional tone in each locale. Rather than
imposing extraneous meaning on a scene or film, color design extends, sharpens,
heightens, or, conversely, minimizes, mitigates, or contrasts with the existing narra-
tive, dramatic, or psychological material of a given scene.
CINEMATOGRAPHY AND THE DIGITAL DOMAIN
Digital imaging is now a standard part of contemporary film, and the cinematogra-
pher’s job intersects with the work of computer-effects artists. Light, color, camera
perspective, and movement can be created either digitally or through traditional cin-
ematography. Digital tools enable filmmakers to pre-visualize (or “previz”) their shots
before any footage is actually exposed. Software tools such as Frame Forge 3D allow
filmmakers to build a virtual set in the computer, to plan their camera positions, and
to specify the type of lenses and focal lengths that will be on the cameras. The soft-
ware package will then show how the set and characters will look when filmed with,
say, a Primo E-Series line of lenses. Filmmakers can simulate lens changes and camera
moves, can move furniture around inside the virtual set, and can see when a shot is so
wide that the ceiling or other unwanted information is visible. This kind of prepara-
tion can save valuable time once production actually begins.
DIGITAL CAPTURE For much of its history, cinema meant film , strips of celluloid that
run through cameras and projectors. Cinema is no longer exclusively a film medium, and
it is moving swiftly to replace film with digital video. Many films originate as digitally
THE TERMINATOR (ORION, 1984)
Cinematographer Adam Greenberg used hard, blue lighting to bring out the violence and
savagery of the title character. Color and lighting design intensify the dramatic and emo-
tional impact of the film’s narrative. Frame enlargement.
86

Cinematography
captured images. High-end digital cameras, like the Red (used to film David Fincher’s
The Social Network ) or the Thomson Viper (used to shoot Michael Mann’s Collateral
and Miami Vice ) capture images that have remarkable resolution and tonal values ap-
proaching that of film. These cameras operate like computers, crunching huge amounts
of data, require a process of rebooting after they are shut down, and get regular software
and hardware updates.
The luminous, sumptuous imagery in Steven Soderbergh’s Che (2008) and
Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and The Social Network (2010) show what can be accom-
plished with the new generation of data cameras, making these among the most beau-
tifully rendered digital films yet produced. These filmmakers—Fincher, Soderbergh,
Mann, along with James Cameron on Avatar (2009)—have been leading the industry
toward a digital future, and they have embraced digital capture for aesthetic reasons
as well as convenience. (The convenience factor is the elimination of dailies. A cin-
ematographer shooting in digital video sees the results immediately; shooting on film
requires waiting for the footage to be developed and printed by a lab, a process that
came to be known as waiting on “dailies.”)
Film still offers superior resolution and tonal values, but not by much. Viewers
watching Che, The Social Network, or Zodiac see images that look remarkably film-
like. That is because these are high-definition video images or are ultra-high. HD
(high-definition) cameras, like the Viper or Sony’s CineAlta used by George Lucas
to film his second batch of Star Wars movies, produce 1920 x 1080 pixels. The Red,
by contrast, can shoot at 4K, producing 4096 x 3072 pixels (ultra-high-definition).
Many filmmakers and cinematographers believe that a 4K image is indistinguishable
from an image projected from 35mm celluloid film. At this high end of digital cap-
ture, the gap with what film provides is increasingly narrow. The main giveaway to
the films’ digital origins is the difficulty that digital video has in handling highlights.
Bright areas tend to clip and burn out, looking harsh as compared with film. But
careful filmmakers can handle this issue to minimize the limitation, as Soderbergh
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 2010)
Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth shot David Fincher’s film using the Red camera operat-
ing at 4K resolution. He found that the Red enabled him to work fast, shoot in low light
levels, and get rich, luxurious-looking images. And digital capture facilitated color and im-
age correction in the DI (digital intermediate). In the film, Jesse Eisenberg (pictured) plays
Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook. Frame enlargement.
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Cinematography
showed with Che and Fincher did with The Social Network . Moreover, digital video
compensates for this limitation by seeing more information in shadow areas than does
film, and Michael Mann shot his crime films— Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies
(2009)—in HD for this very reason.
The Digital Intermediate
Whether productions are shot on video or film, digital timing (or digital grading )
is used increasingly to adjust and balance color and tweak other image elements.
Traditional laboratory methods, using photochemical processes, in earlier periods
(a process known as lab timing ) enabled cinematographers to make color adjust-
ments in the entire image overall, whereas today they can selectively remove or
alter individual colors or sections of the image, as cinematographer Andrew Lesnie
did on The Lord of the Rings films. Whereas traditional lab timing only makes
gross adjustments in the three primary colors of red, blue, and green, digital tim-
ing enabled Lesnie to work directly with delicate blends, such as lavenders and
salmons, and in small, precisely defined areas of the image (skin tones, for exam-
ple). O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the first feature film to be entirely digitized
and color corrected using this method. Because of the image control that digital
timing affords, cinematographers are becoming increasingly involved in this area of
postproduction, whereas in previous decades their work was largely finished with
the completion of principal photography.
An entire film may be digitally graded or select scenes only. In either case, the
first step involves making a digital intermediate (DI) —the film images are con-
verted to digital video (if the movie was digitally captured in production, this step is
skipped), where they undergo the grading process. The corrected digital footage (the
digital intermediate) is then scanned back out to film for exhibition in theaters. If
the movie is to be shown in a 2.35:1 ratio, then the scope extraction typically is per-
formed during the DI.
Many light and color effects that were once accomplished during filming are now
achieved with a digital intermediate. The intensely saturated colors of House of Flying
Daggers (2004), as well as the monochromatic, desaturated color palette of Flags of
Our Fathers (2006), were achieved with a digital intermediate. Lighting problems also
can be fixed. While filming the appearance of the samurai in a twilit, smoky forest in
The Last Samurai (2003) and the many day exterior scenes in Alexander (2004), the
cinematographers accepted problems of lighting continuity, knowing these would be
fixed with digital grading.
The great advantage offered by a DI is the precision with which alterations in the
image can be made. Filmmakers can select a small area, for example, and alter it. A
selecting and masking function, called power windows, enables artists to work on one
part of an image and leave the rest unchanged.
When cinematographer John Alton wrote Painting with Light , this description
of the cinematographers’ art was mainly a metaphor. The DI takes it closer to reality
by virtue of the expanded aesthetic powers it gives to a cinematographer. At the same
time, while many cinematographers welcome the new levels of control that digital
grading gives them, others prefer the traditional photochemical methods of color
correction. On There Will Be Blood (2007), Batman Begins (2005), and Inception
(2010), the filmmakers used traditional tools of light and color because they did not
want a digitally graded look.
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Cinematography
KING KONG (UNIVERSAL, 2005)
Naomi Watts commands the viewer’s attention in this shot because the focal plane is shal-
low and also because the highlights in her eyes add the spark of life to her face. Director
Peter Jackson used power windows in the DI to make many subtle alterations in the film,
which included emphasizing the highlights in Watts’ eyes. Frame enlargement.
Case Study RATATOUILLE
Filmmakers today can accomplish many tasks of cinema-
tography—color, lighting, camera movement—using
digital tools. Pixar’s animated film Ratatouille (2007) fea-
tures exquisitely rendered lighting effects. Indeed, light-
ing was essential to the story, which is about a clever rat
working as a gourmet chef in one of the world’s great
restaurants. Making the animated food on screen look
real enough to eat was accomplished by careful digital
lighting. The digital light designer works with key, fill,
and back lights but these are not real in the physical
manner of traditional cinematography. They are virtual
lights, created in a computer. Ratatouille presented
numerous lighting challenges because so many of its
scenes presented a kitchen full of food, and the food
needed to look real. The digital designers created virtual
lighting effects that emphasized texture and surface
detail, and made the food look fresh. To do so, they
studied the photography that appears in food maga-
zines and cookbooks. As they wrote about this kind of
photography, “Light falls across cuts of meat to reveal
their perfectly cooked texture, a soft backlight hints that
fruits and vegetables are plump and juicy, and highlights
glisten on sauces.”
In particular, the digital lighting of the animated
food conveyed the properties of softness (to avoid a
hard and plastic look), reflection (to convey an appeal-
ingly moist texture), and color saturation (to indicate
freshness). They also used the technique of subsurface
scattering , which had been developed on The Lord of
the Rings for simulating Gollem’s skin. This technique
mimics the way that light penetrates an object, scatters
below the surface, and then exits at a different place
from where it entered. They also used a complemen-
tary technique they called “Gummi,” which emulated
light transmission through an object, such as a glass of
wine. To get both techniques to work required running
a series of computations to determine how light would
behave in contact with different surfaces, densities, and
degrees of translucence. Consultants on the film who
were gourmet cooks instructed the CG artists in how
food looks, how sauces behave when stirred, and how
food reacts when chopped with a knife.
The result in the film is food that looks good enough
to eat, an illusion created by the careful way that digital
light is used to model the surface properties of texture,
color, and translucence. While the film is an animated
fantasy, the lighting is quite realistic—the digital
lighting behaves according to the known properties
of real light. The illusion created on screen is a
convincing one. ■
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Cinematography
VISUAL STYLE AND DESIGN QUOTATIONS
The discussion thus far has tended to emphasize how cinematography functions
within individual films, with a stylistic design suited to expressing the needs of a given
production. But one also can understand cinematography in terms of visual styles
across groups of films. The cinema is now more than a century old, and cinematogra-
phy has established some important visual traditions. Certain lighting and color de-
signs, used extensively across many films, have emerged as enduring features of style.
Filmmakers can quote from these in their own work, and what is “real” for an audi-
ence is sometimes a function of how films in the past have represented the world.
During the decade of the 1940s, hard, low-key lighting was an established visual
convention pervasive in Hollywood cinema. (A convention is an agreement shared
by filmmaker and audience about what will be valid and acceptable in a film.) Dark,
moody, shadowy compositions were firmly established in crime and detective films, espe-
cially film noir. The low-key shot from Out of the Past is such an example.
Contemporary cinematographers photographing crime films whose narratives are
set during the 1940s consciously try to evoke this lighting style. In Bugsy (1991), deal-
ing with real-life gangster Ben Siegel’s experiences in Hollywood in the 1940s, cin-
ematographer Allen Daviau used abundant hard lighting because this was one of the
staples of 1940s crime film cinematography. Barry Levinson, the director of Bugsy ,
wanted the dark areas of the compositions to be extremely dark, and to comply,
Daviau worked small pieces of highly directional hard light.
What is striking about this aesthetic choice, from the standpoint of visual conven-
tions, is that to evoke a period style and setting for Bugsy , the filmmakers chose to imitate
the lighting style of 1940s Hollywood pictures. In this regard, the lighting style has estab-
lished its own reality and its own validity. To visually represent the world of 1940s crime
on film means to evoke the lighting style that Hollywood employed in its films during
those years. Roger Deakins’s black-and-white, low-key cinematography for The Man Who
Wasn’t There (2001) reproduces the look of Hollywood film during this period, appropri-
ately because the story is set in the 1940s.
Hollywood is a very small community whose artists know each other and study one
another’s work. This accentuates the speed at which influences can operate. The strik-
ing visual designs created by one cinematographer can shape the work of other artists
and their films. In JFK (1991), cinematographer Robert Richardson created a distinctive
RATATOUILLE (PIXAR,
2007)
Remy, the film’s hero and a
gourmet rat, surveys some
tempting bread. All of the food
in the film had to look real
and edible, an illusion accom-
plished by digital lighting and
careful rendering of surface
textures and colors. Frame en-
largement.
90

Cinematography
halo-style lighting that made the characters glow under hot lights. Richardson has used
this lighting style on other productions, and it has come to be known as the Richardson
style. Shooting Spike Lee’s Clockers , cinematographer Malik Sayeed emulated this look
during a police interrogation scene. Using floor and ceiling lights and a reflective table
surface, Sayeed replicated “the Richardson aura.”
Among their many visual innovations in Saving Private Ryan , Steven Spielberg
and Janusz Kaminski used an oddly configured shutter inside the camera, which
created a streaking effect on the image because shutter and film frame were out of
synchronisation. In reviewing the footage shot by combat cameramen in World War
II, they noticed these streaking effects (which occurred when the cameras lost their
loops), and they wanted to reproduce that look.
It became one of the memorable visual effects in Saving Private Ryan , and it has
impressed other filmmakers, who have incorporated it into their own work. Michael
Bay used it in Pearl Harbor (2000) during the bombing attack. In The Limey (2000),
Steven Soderbergh removed it from the combat context of these films and used it for
a flashback scene in which a character accidentally kills his girlfriend. The streaking
effect helps to stylize the flashback and to visually suggest the tension and stress of the
moment.
In Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks
created a highly influential shot—the combination zoom and track in opposite
directions—used to simulate the main character’s fear of heights. In the years since,
JFK (WARNER BROS.,
1991); INGLOURIOUS
BASTERDS
(UNIVERSAL, 2009)
In Oliver Stone’s JFK ,
cinematographer Robert
Richardson’s lighting
created a glowing, halo
effect, a design that he
repeated in films for
other directors, such as
Quentin Tarantino, and
which other cinematog-
raphers have employed
in homage to Richardson.
Frame enlargements.
91

Cinematography
the combination zoom-track has been used by a great number of filmmakers to
express unease, disturbance, or anxiety. Steven Spielberg used it in Jaws (1975)
to capture the fears of police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) as he nervously watches
bathers frolicking offshore. Martin Scorsese used it in Goodfellas (1990) to capture
the disorientation of a gangster who realizes a trusted friend might be planning his
execution. Spike Lee employed it in Clockers to show a mother’s reaction to the

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (PARAMOUNT/DREAMWORKS, 1998); THE BOURNE
ULTIMATUM (UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 2007)
Filming with the shutter inside the camera out of synch produces these streaks of light
in the image. Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski were emulating
the look of World War II combat footage, which frequently had this flaw. The look they
achieved was so striking that other filmmakers have incorporated it into their own work,
often with greater exaggeration. It has evolved into a stylistic device for expressing emo-
tional or physical distress, as in this scene from The Bourne Ultimatum where Jason Bourne
(Matt Damon) learns the truth about his origins as a trained killer. Frame enlargements.
92

Cinematography
spectacle of her son’s being beaten by a policeman. In The Ghost and the Darkness
(1996), the zoom-track visualizes the rush of fear in a hunter facing a killer lion
when his gun misfires. Hitchcock and Burks did more than create an effective vi-
sual metaphor for their main character’s psychological affliction. They fashioned an
enduring visual symbol for emotional disorientation, a template for other filmmak-
ers interested in evoking this quality of mind, a convention that has passed into the
general vocabulary of contemporary filmmaking.
The repetition of visual conventions establishes compelling artistic realities not
only for audiences but also for the artists who make films and who borrow from and
are influenced by the designs of their peers. Memorable cinematographic designs estab-
lish powerful artistic traditions and influences on the work of subsequent filmmakers.
SUMMARY
The cinematographer helps the director to achieve a desired visual design by using
the camera to capture images that reflect the director’s visual goals for the film. To
do this, the cinematographer chooses a film stock and aspect ratio, and controls and
designs the use of light and color in film and the planning and placement of camera
setups. Cinematographers employ realistic and pictorial lighting designs. In the first
they simulate the effects of a real light source on screen, whereas in the second ap-
proach they aim for more purely pictorial effects.
Either approach to lighting design will employ varying proportions of hard
(high-contrast) and soft (low-contrast) light. Specific lighting setups tend to create a
hard or soft look. Low-key lighting is hard. High-key lighting is often soft. Like im-
age and sound editing, lighting designs follow continuity principles. Light levels and
angles must match across shots and even within shots when the moving camera is
employed.
With respect to color design, a cinematographer lights objects on the set or uses
colored gels over white lights to manipulate color hue, saturation, and intensity.
Color can be used to separate and define objects in a composition, but when shoot-
ing black-and-white, a cinematographer has to use gray-scale values when organiz-
ing a composition. Color cinematography establishes symbolic meanings, narrative
organization, and psychological moods and emotional tones. In each of these func-
tions, color is integrated into the overall dramatic context and design concept of a
scene or film.
The cinematographer’s tools are shared by digital effects artists, and the scope of
cinematography, as traditionally defined, has expanded to include the collaboration
necessary for creating convincing digital effects.
Light and color designs, once established, can become enduring features of style,
repeated across many films. When this happens, those designs take on a high level of
representational reality. Filmmakers are sensitive to this, and if they need to express a
particular social milieu, such as urban crime, or a time period, such as the 1940s, they
may deliberately imitate famous lighting designs from older movies picturing those
settings or periods. Filmmakers also may replicate the striking visual designs of fel-
low filmmakers, deliberately borrowing design elements in a way that “quotes” from
other films.
93

Cinematography
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
additive
anamorphic
aspect ratio
back light
burnout
cinematography
contrast
convention
digital grading
digital intermediate (DI)
digital light designer
digital video
fall-off
fill light
film noir
film stocks
gray scale
hard light
hard-matted
high-definition video
high-key lighting
hue
intensity
key light
letterboxed
low-key lighting
mise-en-scène
performance style
pictorial lighting design
practical (light)
pre-visualization
production design
realistic lighting design
rear projection
saturation
soft-matted
soft light
subsurface scattering
subtractive
Super 35
wavelengths
widescreen ratio
SUGGESTED READINGS
Dan Ablan, Digital Cinematography and Directing (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2002).
John Alton, Painting with Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
American Cinematographer , monthly journal of film and electronic production techniques pub-
lished by ASC Holding Corp., Hollywood, CA.
Kris Malkiewicz, Cinematography: A Guide for Film Makers and Film Teachers (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1992).
Kris Malkiewicz, Film Lighting: Talks with Hollywood’s Cinematographers and Gaffers (New
York: Simon and Schuster 1992).
Pauline B. Rogers, The Art of Visual Effects: Interviews on the Tools of the Trade (Boston:
Focal Press, 1999).
Pauline B. Rogers, Contemporary Cinematographers on Their Art (Boston: Focal Press, 1998).
Dennis Schaeffer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary
Cinematographers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
94

■ describe how a design concept organizes a
film’s production design
■ explain changing production designs in
contemporary science fiction films
■ describe how production design in
fantasy films utilizes realistic perceptual
information
■ explain the work of production design
■ describe costumes, sets, mattes, and minia-
tures, the basic tools of production design
■ explain how production creatively transforms
existing locations
■ explain how production design can fabricate
locales that are made to seem real
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Production Design
From Chapter 3 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
95

Production Design
In addition to cinematography, filmmakers use sets, props, costumes, and actors to achieve a
film’s total visual “look.” This chapter examines the contributions of production design .
WHAT THE PRODUCTION DESIGNER DOES
The production designer is the individual who supervises the design of a film’s visual
environments. The production designer oversees the work of set decorators and de-
signers, costume designers, and the prop crew. This array of artists and technicians
creates costumes and sets using colors and concepts supplied by the production de-
signer, who arrives at an overall visual organization through close consultation and
collaboration with the director and cinematographer. As a result of these conferences,
the production designer prepares a series of sketches that illustrate the basic design
concept and organization of the film. Set and costume designers then work to produce
settings and costumes that embody the concepts outlined in the production designer’s
sketches. During preproduction, the sketches are turned into storyboards and into
miniature models that are used to plan camera and lighting positions.
Stages of Work
The first step in the production designer’s work is reading the script and visualizing the
look of the film that might be made from it. Production designer Wynn Thomas ( Do
the Right Thing , 1989) explains this in terms of “How do you want the movie to feel?”
Films that have a powerful and enduring “feel”— The Wizard of Oz, Alien, The Lord
of the Rings —establish this through their production design.
The production designer will next break the script down in terms of budgeting is-
sues. What kind of sets will be needed? How much of the film should be shot in a studio,
and how much on location? What will all this cost? One of the production designer’s
most important jobs is to find ways to trim these costs. In other words, the production
THE DUCHESS (PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, 2008)
Skillful production design vividly recreates historical eras, as in this film about
Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightly), the 18 th -century Duchess of Devonshire.
Filming occurred at more than a dozen historic homes across England, such as
Holkham Hall, an 18 th -century country house on the coast of Norfolk. As selected by
production designer Michael Carlin, these locations enhanced the realism of the film’s
settings and costumes. Frame enlargement.
96

Production Design
designer will explain to the producer how the film can be made for its allotted budget. As
Stuart Craig ( The English Patient , 1996) explains, “The designer addresses the script and
the amount of money available and offers the producer a viable way of making the film.”
It’s often cheaper today to build sets or to film locations overseas. All the exteriors
in The Last Samurai (2003) were shot in New Zealand, not Japan, where the story
takes place. Cold Mountain (2004), about the Civil War, was shot in Europe.
As the production designer breaks down the script in terms of budget issues,
he or she also breaks it down into visual concepts, which are expressed in sketches.
These sketches of proposed sets that the production designer prepares from the script
provide a first indication of how the film will look and feel. Many designers prefer to
do these in pencil first—because lines and shadows stand out with more clarity—and
only then move on to colored drawings.
Production Design as Character and Story Design
Creating the sketches and then the sets requires the designer to think about very spe-
cific issues of character and story. To design a set is also to design the characters that
will live in it. A set makes a statement about the characters, and, therefore, to visualize
a set often means thinking about the personality and the life history of the characters
who will use it. John Beard, whose work as a designer includes The Last Temptation of
Christ (1988), points out that to do good work, “you should know what art a charac-
ter would have on their walls, what books they would read, and even what music they
would listen to.” Wynn Thomas, who has collaborated frequently with director Spike
Lee, speaks of this process as “character design,” and he encourages the actors to come
on set a few days before shooting to explore it and become familiar with it. “I encourage
THE ROAD (DIMENSION FILMS, 2009)
Choosing locations is one of the chief responsibilities of a production designer. But the locations
where a film is shot do not always correspond to the locations of the story, and real locations
may be altered, enhanced or changed to serve story and drama. Based on a respected novel by
Cormac McCarthy, The Road shows a post-apocalyptic landscape, an unspecified locale devas-
tated by a mysterious, unnamed catastrophe. The film was shot in Pennsylvania and Louisiana.
The neighborhood pictured here was a row of houses abandoned in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina. In the actual location, an open freeway occupied the left of the frame, and
the row of houses that appears there now in the shot is a digital element added to the image.
The car in the foreground is a real prop, but the brooding sky is a digital matte painting stand-
ing in for the clear and more tranquil sky that existed on the day of filming. Frame enlargement.
97

Production Design
them to explore the space, open the drawers and look inside; I always provide the sort of
stuff their characters might have to be dealing with, paperwork in a desk, for example.”
While these items may have a subliminal presence for viewers, they provide mo-
tivation for drama, setting and character. In a good design, their presence helps actors
to give better performances. The Hollywood star Burt Lancaster travelled to Italy to
appear in The Leopard (1963), directed by the great Luchino Visconti. At Visconti’s
insistence, production designer Mario Garbuglia’s recreation of the film’s 19 th -century
aristocratic world was so detailed and lavish that Lancaster was stunned to open the
drawers of a dresser and find them fully stocked with clothing. Hollywood’s norm
was only to design and build what the camera will see. Visconti had gone far beyond
this, and Lancaster felt humbled, and he resolved to work extra hard on his perfor-
mance in order to be worthy of this kind of attention.
A good example of the way that production design can motivate the drama is
found in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing . One of the main sets is Sal’s Pizzeria, run by
Sal (Danny Aiello), a white Italian, and his two sons, but located in a black neighbor-
hood. While Sal is proud that he has served food to the neighborhood for years, ten-
sions with some of the black patrons flare up periodically. Framed photos that Sal has
hung on the walls of the pizzeria provide one source of conflict. These show prominent
Italian-American entertainers, like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Frank Sinatra, but
the portraits do not contain any famous African-Americans. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo
Esposito), who eats a lot of pizza there, gazes at the “Wall of Fame” and challenges Sal
about the absence of prominent black celebrities. Sal tells him if he gets his own pizze-
ria, he can put up any pictures he wants, but here only Italian Americans go on the wall.
Sal’s remark provokes a confrontation with Buggin’ Out, and the conflict flows
naturalistically from the setting and the performances. Thomas points out that the
actors spent time on the set prior to filming so that it would seem as if the characters
had worked there or eaten pizza there for years, and this illusion comes across viv-
idly in the scene. “I think it’s important that there’s a point where a set ceases to be a
world I have designed and begins to become the world the actors live in.”
The celebrities on Sal’s “Wall of Fame” were pre-selected by director Spike Lee and
Thomas in order to motivate this action. In turn, the action enabled Lee to make a thematic
point. He agreed with Sal’s view, that the owner of the business gets to say what goes. One
of the film’s sub-themes is the need for black-owned businesses, that black entrepreneurs
would provide a vital link between economic development in the city and an expanding
social authority. The pictures on Sal’s wall help to make this larger theme concrete.
Where the production designer puts a window in a set or places interior lights will
determine how the set is lit by the cinematographer, so the two must consult early on.
The production designer will show the cinematographer his or her sketches and models
and get feedback about potential camera positions. These, in turn, will affect how a set is
dressed with props. The film stock chosen by a cinematographer will affect how skin tones
look, and this, in turn, will influence a production designer’s choice of colors on the set.
As in other areas of contemporary filmmaking, digital tools have become im-
portant aids to production design. Digital pre-visualization enables filmmakers to
build three-dimensional computer models of sets and locations. By rotating and
reformatting these models, filmmakers can simulate views of the set from different
camera positions and with lenses of differing focal lengths. The process enables film-
makers to see in advance how the set will look under a variety of filming conditions.
Based on this information, filmmakers can plan camera setups or, if necessary, revise
the design of a set.
98

Production Design
During all of this, the production designer also will make trips to scout locations.
These trips are called recces (pronounced “wreckies”), and the objective is to find places
that will be economical to use and also will fit with the evolving look and feel of the film.
As the sketches become models and full-scale sets, the production designer super-
vises a crew that he or she often has hired. These people include the art director (a
kind of second-in-command who oversees the translation of sketches into sets), the set
decorator (who dresses a set with curtains, lamps, furniture), the prop master (who
supervises the design and construction of props, such as a cigar lighter or walking
stick), the scenic artist (who supervises matte paintings and other backdrop portions
of a set), and the costume designer (who designs what the characters will wear).
Creating a Unified Design
The production designer thinks about the visual statements made by the layout of
sets, architectural styles and building materials, coloring and texture of buildings and
costumes, and the interplay of all design elements in the frame. The goal is to use these
elements to make a unified and coherent design statement or series of such statements.
Chinatown (1974) was one of the best-designed films of the 1970s, and it is instruc-
tive to hear how its production designer, Richard Sylbert, conceptualized the different
details that went into that film’s highly distinctive mise-en-scène. The film takes place
in 1937 in a drought-stricken Los Angeles and follows Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson),
a private eye investigating the death of Hollis Mulwray. Sylbert insisted there be no
clouds visible in the sky because clouds suggest rain; that buildings be colored white
because white denotes heat; that glass windows on office doors be cloudy and opaque
to make it hard to see through them and enhance a sense of mystery; and that the
color green, because it denotes lushness and moisture, be used only in significant
scenes where the viewer feels something important is about to happen.
As Sylbert’s design suggests, each element in a well-designed film has a reason for be-
ing there, some contribution that it is making to the story, theme, or style of the production.
Throughout cinema history, films have been designed in this fashion, even though the title
“production designer” is of relatively recent vintage. While the title is commonly employed
in contemporary productions, during the studio era of the Hollywood period the title barely
existed. During the 1930s and 1940s, each studio had an art department that employed il-
lustrators, model builders, set decorators, prop men and prop women, and costume
DO THE RIGHT THING (40
ACRES & A MULE, 1989)
Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo
Esposito) demands to know
why there are no African-
American portraits on the Wall
of Fame. Brilliant production
design motivates characters,
drama, setting and theme
and stimulates actors to do
their best work. Sal’s “Wall
of Fame” illuminates one of
the film’s core themes, the
role that African-American
entrepreneurs can play in
transforming the city. Frame
enlargement.
99

Production Design
CHINATOWN
(PARAMOUNT, 1974)
Detective J. J. Gittes (Jack
Nicholson) and the mys-
terious Evelyn Mulwray
(Faye Dunaway, pictured)
grapple with murder and
deceit in 1930s Los Angeles.
The film’s unified produc-
tion design evokes the
period setting with excep-
tional concentration and
metaphoric suggestiveness.
Frame enlargement.
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Henry Bumstead
Henry Bumstead was one of Hollywood’s most
successful production designers. He worked at
Paramount Studios from 1937 to 1960, during the
great era of studio filmmaking, then at Universal
Pictures, and then as an independent. He formed
lasting partnerships with directors Alfred Hitchcock,
Robert Mulligan, George Roy Hill, and Clint
Eastwood, leaving an enduring visual imprint on their
films through the sets and locations that he created.
Bumstead described Paramount as being like a
miniature city, bustling with creative people under
long-term contract. He worked in many genres—
Westerns ( Run for Cover, 1955), war films ( The Bridges
at Toko-Ri, 1954), comedy ( My Friend Irma, 1949)—
and moved quickly from one architectural style to
another. “One day you might have to do something
Gothic, next day, art nouveau,” he recalled. He
learned how to break down a script into locations and
set designs that would include key character details
and a color scheme suited to character and situation.
He met Hitchcock while at Paramount through
Hitchcock’s cinematographer, Robert Burks, who was
shooting a picture— The Vagabond King (1956)—for
which Bumstead was doing the art direction. On
Burks’ recommendation, Hitchcock asked to meet
Bumstead, and they then collaborated on four films,
(continued)
designers, all of whom worked under a given production’s unit art director . (The Motion
Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, still employs this older ter-
minology, giving the award for “Best Art Direction.”) The head of the art department who
oversaw all the films in production was the supervising art director . At MGM, this indi-
vidual was Cedric Gibbons. At 20th Century Fox, the equivalent figure was Lyle Wheeler.
Producer David O. Selznick first employed the term production designer on Gone
With the Wind (1939) as a tribute to the importance of William Cameron Menzies’s design
sketches. These sketches and storyboards provided the unifying visual structure that helped
give Gone With the Wind its stylistic coherence. This contribution was especially important
in light of the fact that several different directors worked on Gone With the Wind . The
man who gets screen credit as director is Victor Fleming, but during production Selznick
changed directors several times, and it was Menzies’s design concept that furnished a unify-
ing visual structure. Menzies was a brilliant visual artist whose work has inspired genera-
tions of production designers. For this reason, he is sometimes referred to as the “father of
production design,” although, as we shall see, imaginative set design extends well back into
silent cinema. As a director, he made one of the classic early science fiction films, Things to
Come (1933), notable for its flamboyant and imaginative futuristic sets.
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Production Design
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958),
Topaz (1969), and Family Plot (1976). Bumstead’s
memorable designs for Vertigo —which included the
church bell tower where the climax occurs—helped
provide the film with its singular visual power.
At Universal Studios, Bumstead designed five films
for Robert Mulligan, of which the most important was
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on the Harper Lee
novel of a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Bumstead
created a believable town built not in Alabama but on
the Universal back lot. Even the trees on the set were
built. So real did the sets seem that numerous art di-
rectors asked him where in Alabama he had found this
town! It was Bumstead’s attention to detail—dressing
the sets with period décor, including porch swings
and a house with brick pillars elevating its foundation
above the flood plain and creating a little crawl space
underneath—that made the sets seem so real.
Bumstead designed eight films for George Roy
Hill, which included Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Slap
Shot (1977), The World According to Garp (1982),
and their Oscar-winning film, The Sting (1973). For
this Depression-era story set in Chicago, Hill wanted
to shoot on location, but Bumstead persuaded him
to build the sets in the studio, and Hill later said
that the best-looking stuff in the film was that shot
on Bumstead’s studio sets. In designing the sets,
Bumstead used the period photographs of Walker
Evans as inspiration, and he created a dominant pal-
ette of red and brown to set mood and tone.
Bumstead’s longest relationship was with Clint
Eastwood, for whom he designed twelve films begin-
ning with High Plains Drifter (1973) and ending with
Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima
(2006). Eastwood is noted for working very fast and
efficiently, and Bumstead’s training during the studio
period enabled him to adapt to the fast schedule of
an Eastwood shoot. In Unforgiven (1991), for example,
Bumstead created the Western town of Big Whiskey on
a location in Calgary, Canada, in 43 days. It was one of
many Western towns that he had created for the mov-
ies, and he always ran the main street on an east-west
axis so that cinematographers would have backlight
available for dramatic framing. Toward the end of his
life, Bumstead planned to retire, but Eastwood kept
coming by with new scripts, and “Bummy,” as he was
affectionately known, found each new collaboration
with Eastwood to be irresistible. When Bumstead won
the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of
Motion Picture and Television Art Directors, Eastwood
paid him a high compliment, saying “Dear Bummy,
you take the BS out of filmmaking.” ■
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Universal, 1962)
Bumstead built the sets for a Depression-era Alabama town on the back lot at Universal
Studios, and the sets looked so authentic that many people believed the film had been shot
on an actual Alabama location. Frame enlargement.
101

Production Design
BASIC TOOLS OF PRODUCTION DESIGN
Filmmakers design the visual environments of a film by using a set of tools that have re-
mained essentially the same over many decades of filmmaking, although today they are
augmented by digital effects. These tools are costumes, sets, matte paintings, and min-
iatures. Costumes , of course, are worn by performers on the set in front of the camera.
Period films use historical costuming whose style and fashions designate a particular
time period. The sumptuousness of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) is evident in the
lavishly detailed costumes (and sets) that evoke the early modern world of 1912.
Sets are the physical locations on which the action occurs. These locations can be
outdoors or indoors in the studio. At times, an indoor location may masquerade as an
outdoor location. In Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1998), scenes that were supposed to
be taking place outdoors in the courtyard of a New England prison holding African
slaves actually were filmed on an indoor set. The filmmakers hung a giant silk shroud
from the ceiling of the stage and lit it brightly from behind so that it would “burn out”
on film. To the camera—and the viewer—it looked like a bright, cloudy sky.
Matte paintings are printed into the shot in the laboratory or, more often today,
are digitally composited as a part of the background of a setting. Mattes very effec-
tively extend the scale and depth of the represented scene. Matte work can be excep-
tionally sophisticated and subtle and, when done well, is virtually impossible for the
GONE WITH THE WIND (MGM, 1939)
William Cameron Menzies’s design sketches helped provide a unifying visual structure for a pro-
duction that frequently changed directors. Menzies’s architectural visions brought the novel’s
settings memorably to life. Ashley Wilkes’s Twelve Oaks plantation is the stage for several critical
scenes in the film’s first act. The sumptuous sets and costumes provide a vivid backdrop for the
drama, and the filmmakers take care to display them in a luxuriant fashion. Frame enlargement.
102

Production Design
casual viewer to spot. Digital mattes, created on the computer, are employed in many
contemporary films.
Miniatures are small models that stand in for a portion of the set. Filmmakers often
need miniatures when a very large set, such as a castle or, in the case of the Batman films,
the entire city of Gotham, is required for a scene but cannot be built on its true scale. In the
opening, pre-credit sequence of Goldeneye (1995), James Bond blows up a poison gas fac-
tory. While the effect is spectacular, it was executed using a small-scale model surrounded
by a replica of the Swiss Alps. Let us now examine each of these tools in more detail.
Costumes
Costume design performs several functions. It furnishes details of period or setting ap-
propriate to the story. Second, it provides opportunities for color and spectacle. Third,
it provides a commentary on the characters, suggesting or revealing essential aspects of
their personality or function in the story. Let’s consider some examples of these functions.
Costume designers typically research the clothing styles associated with a film’s
period or locale because these styles can vividly evoke time and place. On the Civil
War film Glory (1989), the filmmakers wanted to be as authentic as possible and used
Matthew Brady’s documentary photographs as guides and relied on a large community
of Civil War re-enactors, buffs who had designed their own uniforms with exacting his-
torical precision, down to the salt stains on their jackets and the scuffs on their boots.
In contrast to the historical realism of Glory , the costume designs Cecil Beaton
furnished for the classic musical My Fair Lady (1964) are considerably more flamboy-
ant. They demonstrate the way that costuming creates opportunities for spectacle.
Audrey Hepburn plays an uneducated, working-class woman who, by learning to
speak proper English, is transformed into a beautiful and poised epitome of high
fashion. Note the extraordinary hat that Beaton has furnished her with, as pictured
on the next page. As an article of clothing, it is impractical and dysfunctional. But as
a visual design, it is sumptuous and magnificent, commanding the viewer’s attention
and suggesting the gorgeous butterfly into which the drab character has changed.
The costuming in Planet of the Apes (2001) provides one of the film’s main attractions,
and makeup designer Rick Baker improved on the ape designs used in the 1968 version of
the film. In the earlier film, the actors in ape makeup could not move their lips and teeth
independently because the teeth were glued onto the prosthetic lips. Moreover, their masks
were relatively inflexible, so they couldn’t show much facial expression. Baker designed
masks that were much more flexible and made the teeth and lips as separate rigs. This en-
abled the actors to move their lips over their teeth and to convincingly simulate ape speech.
Costuming also provides a way of revealing character, creating subliminal mes-
sages about the person wearing the costume. In The Graduate (1967), an older woman,
Mrs. Robinson (Ann Bancroft), makes a habit of seducing young men, and when she sets
her sights on the film’s hero (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate, she wears a
predatory costume, a leopard-print coat. The costumes worn by Satine (Nicole Kidman)
in Moulin Rouge (2001)—red dress, black top hat, garters, and stockings—link her to the
famous movie temptresses, and the actresses who played them, on whom she is modeled.
In Titus (1999), director Julie Taymor shows the growing weakness and vulnerability of
Rome’s General Titus (Anthony Hopkins) using costume changes, taking him from dark
colors, armor, and hard fabrics early in the film to light colors and soft, revealing fabrics
later on. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), costume designer Eiko Ishioka reserved the
color red for Dracula. He is the only character in the film to wear this color, except when
the plot foreshadows his next victim, who then also appears in red.
103

Production Design
Sets, Matte Paintings, and Miniatures
Using sets, matte paintings, and miniatures, production designers have an opportunity
to create extraordinary visual statements that become an essential part of a film’s
mise-en-scène. Viewers remember not only what happened in a movie but how a given
film looked . Memorable screen environments, achieved through set design, can be an
indelible part of the film experience.
MY FAIR LADY (WARNER BROS., 1964)
When Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) makes her high-society debut, her effect is electric,
due in no small part to the eye-catching attire costume designer Cecil Beaton provided.
Her hat is beyond words. Frame enlargement.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (RSO, 1977)
John Travolta’s famous white suit became an enduring emblem for this movie. Production
designer Patrizia von Brandenstein had something very specific in mind: “We wanted
to make a world where people came alive on Saturday night, lived for Saturday night,
expressed their true selves on Saturday night (the rest of the week was putting in time).”
The flamboyant suit expressed the dreams and desires of Tony Manero (Travolta), a
working-class kid who lived to dance. Frame enlargement.
104

Production Design
THE
GRADUATE
(EMBASSY
PICTURES,
1967)
When Mrs.
Robinson (Ann
Bancroft) se-
duces Benjamin
(Dustin
Hoffman), she
wears a leopard-
print coat, pro-
viding a visual
commentary on
her predatory
behavior. Frame
enlargement.
STAR WARS
EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM
MENACE (20TH CENTURY
FOX, 1999)
Queen Amidala’s (Natalie
Portman) costumes create an
exaggerated futuristic spec-
tacle. They blend a variety of
ethnic and regional elements
into a series of outlandish de-
signs. From scene to scene, the
viewer never knows in what
flam boyant manner she will
appear. Frame enlargements.
Inspired by William Cameron Menzies’s work, Ken Adam has been one of cin-
ema’s most imaginative production designers, designing two films for Stanley Kubrick
( Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon ) and seven of the James Bond films, an enor-
mously popular and influential series. Adam’s work on the first Bond production,
Dr. No (1962), established an essential feature of the series: the villain’s huge, futuris-
tic headquarters, the designs for which blended serious and comic elements and which
have influenced many films in the action–thriller genre. Built to colossal proportions,
these sets often were constructed on the huge soundstage at Pinewood Studios in
England. So essential has Adam’s design become for the series that even productions
105

Production Design
such as Goldeneye , on which he did not work, use Ken Adam–like sets for the vil-
lain’s lair. Trained like many production designers as an architect, Adam was skilled
at using space to create a visual statement. His brilliant set for the war room in Dr.
Strangelove —where the president and military generals gather to plan for nuclear
war—used a giant round table suspended beneath a hanging circular light panel. The
design was eye-catching and explicitly metaphoric, a giant poker table around which
the president and military had gathered to gamble on the fate of the world.
The tradition of building huge sets to serve as film locations has very deep roots
in cinema, going well back to the silent period. One of the most famous examples
in early cinema is the mammoth set D. W. Griffith erected to serve as a Babylonian
palace in Intolerance (1916). The set was so huge that it could accommodate scores
of extras, and its most famous feature was six fabulous white elephants, statuary atop
glistening marble pillars. Griffith introduced the set to viewers with a dramatic crane
shot, with the camera slowly descending through the vast open space of the set. For
many years after the film’s production, the set remained standing, a reminder of this
opulent chapter in the history of production design.
In the 1920s, the German expressionist filmmakers preferred to work on sets be-
cause they could design them to perfectly embody a film’s style and theme. Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1926) used imaginatively designed large-scale sets to evoke a city of the
future and, together with Menzies’s Things to Come , established the tradition in cin-
ema of using set design to visualize ultramodern cityscapes, a tradition that includes the
Batman movies, Dick Tracy (1990), Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987), Dark City
(1988), The Fifth Element (1997), and other films.
Large-scale set design in contemporary film includes the climax of Saving Private
Ryan , a fierce battle between the Allies and the Germans in the fictitious French
town of Ramelle. The Ramelle set, built from scratch, was three blocks long, with
multistory buildings and a bridge over a canal, with massive buildings constructed in
various states of rubble to simulate the effects of years of war. Because the set enabled
the lighting crew to bury its electrical cables beneath the rubble and to hang fixtures
inside its buildings, it facilitated many elaborate and complex lighting setups.
BRAM
STOKER’S
DRACULA
(COLUMBIA
PICTURES,
1992)
The imagina-
tive design of
Dracula’s suit of
armor evokes
a body flayed
of its skin. The
helmet is batlike,
with horned ears
and menacing
slits for eyes. It is
both angel and
devil and is rust-
colored, a varia-
tion of red. Frame
enlargement.
106

Production Design
Stylized films like Moulin Rouge or The Lord of the Rings
clearly depend on production design for achieving
the visual look appropriate for their imaginary screen
worlds. But filmmakers who shoot on real locations de-
pend as deeply on the production designer to find lo-
cales and to create sets that will further a film’s themes
and visual tone. Shooting on location is not a substi-
tute for production design. Patrizia von Brandenstein
( Saturday Night Fever, The Untouchables, Working Girl )
has said that her trademark as an artist is building on
location.
Steven Spielberg shot on location in Poland for
Schindler’s List (1993), a factually based film about a
German factory owner, Oskar Schindler, who used his
business connections with the Third Reich to shield
Jews from extermination and also to help them escape
from the Nazis. Spielberg relied on Polish produc-
tion designer Allan Starski to find sets and locations
for his film, and Starski’s work won an Oscar for Best
Production Design.
Starski grew up in Lodz, one of the principal
locales for the film, and he had worked on numer-
ous films with the great Polish director, Andrzej
Wajda, which included a movie that challenged and
changed the Communist system in Poland, Man of
Marble (1976). Prior to Schindler’s List, Starksi had
visualized the Nazi era in a black-and-white film for
Wajda ( Korczak , 1990) and a color film for Agnieszka
Holland ( Europa, Europa , 1991). His experience de-
signing filmic portraits of the World War II era and his
intimate knowledge of Lodz locations made him the
right choice for the project. Starski felt that strong
production design could push a film deeply into the
viewer’s consciousness. He wanted his sets to work as
strong images conveying story, theme, setting,
period, and character.
Spielberg gave him great freedom to find locations
and design sets and wanted to be surprised by the results,
so that he could adapt quickly to them like a documen-
tary filmmaker coming into an uncontrolled situation and
having to respond. Spielberg wanted mainly hand-held
cameras on the shoot, in order to avoid the glossy look
Case Study SCHINDLER’S LIST
that equipment like booms and cranes will produce, and
Starski designed sets that facilitated a free approach to
camerawork. Starski said that for the story to feel real, the
camera should be able to move as in a documentary, and
his set designs aimed to facilitate this.
Spielberg noted that Holocaust photos had been in
black-and-white. Accordingly, working in black-and-
white became essential to achieving the film’s realist,
documentary-like style. This required Starski to design
a tonal palette for the film, finding colors and textures
that would separate naturally in black-and-white and
would be consistent with the kind of naturalism that
Speilberg wanted.
Production design requires careful research into
period and style, and Starski’s designs were based on
detailed historical research. He collected numerous
books, drawings, and photographs from the period. He
studied the Nazi SS architectural plan for the Plaszow
forced labor camp (presided over by Kommandant
Amon Goeth, played in the film by Ralph Fiennes), and
he simplified the design for the film while retaining its
essential features, such as the triple-tiered bunks inside
the prison houses and the circular, outdoor assembly
area (A).
But research is in service to drama, and some of
the sets departed from known facts in the interests
of theme, idea and style. The windows in the film’s
depiction of Schindler’s factory, for example, were
unnaturally big (B) because this enabled Spielberg to
convey a visual idea that he thought was essential.
Spielberg asked for large windows so that the office
overlooking the plant would seem like a paradise
to the workers below, and Starski complied even
though he knew authentic windows would have
been smaller.
Starski’s sets and locations were a major factor in the
film’s ability to sustain a sense of historical realism. About
his objectives, Starski emphasized that his design goal
was to make viewers believe that what they are watching
is real. His success is demonstrated in frame enlargement
C, which looks compellingly like a newsreel image and
not like something from a Hollywood feature film. ■
107

Production Design

(a)

(b)

(c)
108

Production Design
DR. STRANGELOVE
(COLUMBIA, 1964)
Global nuclear war as a high-
stakes poker game. Ken Adam
visualized the Pentagon war
room in these memorably meta-
phoric terms for director Stanley
Kubrick. Illuminated maps
against the back wall track the
flights of bomb-laden planes.
The hanging circular light panel
supplied the source lighting in
the scene. Frame enlargement.
USING REAL LOCATIONS Filmmakers frequently “dress up” real locations to make
them part of a film’s unified style. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing explores racial
tensions that explode into violence on a hot summer’s day in a New York City neigh-
borhood. Translating the ideas of heat and tension into a visual design for the film,
production designer Wynn Thomas transformed a real location in ways suitable for
the film’s themes and visual concepts.
While scouting locations, Thomas wanted to find a block with few trees to suggest
the absence of shade and the inescapability of the summer heat. When he found the loca-
tion, the filmmakers had to refurbish the buildings because the brownstone exteriors were
decayed. Their fronts were cleaned and repainted in warm browns to evoke the summer
climate. Because the action was largely confined to this block, however, Thomas wanted
to add additional colors to the setting, and he began to see his own function on the film in
terms of finding opportunities to add color to existing scenes. A recurring set of characters
are the three men who sit on the street corner under an umbrella and gossip about their
neighborhood. The action in these scenes was static; the men sit in their chairs in front of
a concrete wall. To add energy to the scene, Thomas wanted to paint the wall red. When
he suggested this to director Spike Lee, Lee visualized it as fire- engine red, and that is how
it exists in the film. The wall’s fiery coloring intensifies the film’s mise-en-scène and its
underlying concepts of heat, fire, and explosion. By skillfully applying color to the setting,
the production designer made the locale an embodiment of the film’s themes.
In many films, locations that may seem real and authentic are actually the work of
clever production design. The conclusion of Terminator 2 (1991) is set in a steelworks
factory where the evil Terminator hunts his victims and eventually perishes in a vat of
molten steel. The location was a real steel mill, but it had been shut down since the mid-
1980s and was about to be dismantled. It was totally inoperative, but in the film it had
to appear active, with fiery, sparking furnaces. To create the illusion—to make the fac-
tory spit fire and glow with molten heat—the filmmakers used lights and colored gels.
To create the vats of molten steel in which the Terminator perishes, the filmmakers
placed powerful lights inside the vats and used orange gels over the lights to give a fiery
glow. They then covered these with sheets of plastic, on which they placed a mixture
of water, mineral oil, and white powder. This created the impression of molten steel
109

Production Design
moving in the vat. To simulate flame, they manipulated the lights to create a flickering
effect, which they augmented with the use of heaters near the camera to create ripples
in the atmosphere, heat waves from the molten steel. In the background, artificially
produced sparks added atmosphere and a sense of realism to the scene. With these tech-
niques, the dead factory came alive. The molten steel on screen had a terrifying reality,
but the illusion rested on some very basic manipulations of light and color.
On many films, real locations in one region or country may double for those
in another, primarily to save money. It’s often cheaper to shoot somewhere other
than where the story dictates. From Hell (2001), about Jack the Ripper, was shot in
Prague, Hungary, with East European castles and museums doubling for 19th-century
London, the period and locale of the story. In Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of
July (1989), scenes set in Vietnam and Mexico were filmed in the Philippines, and
those set in Massapequa, Long Island, were filmed in Texas.
MATTE PAINTINGS To extend the size and scope of their sets, filmmakers use matte
paintings, which are usually placed behind a set or miniature model and may show a dis-
tant horizon or landscape. When these are used effectively, viewers do not notice the shift
from a three-dimensional set or model to a two-dimensional matte painting.
Matte painting is based on the techniques of tromp l’oeil , first practiced by
Renaissance painters, which are designed to fool the eye into seeing three dimensions on a
DO THE RIGHT THING (40
ACRES & A MULE, 1989)
Production designer Wynn
Thomas came to movies with a
background in theatre, which
trained him to think conceptu-
ally and not to feel confined by
a need to be realistic. Color is
Thomas’ emotional response to
the world of the script, and he
envisioned this wall as red be-
cause it enlivened the scenes at
this location and corresponded
well with the themes of heat
and anger that the film drama-
tizes. Frame enlargement.
TERMINATOR 2
(TRI-STAR
PICTURES,
1991)
Through some
basic manipu-
lations of light
and color, an
abandoned steel
mill comes to
fiery life in
Terminator 2 .
Frame
enlargement.
110

Production Design
flat surface. The illusion has to be a good one because matte shots are often held on screen
longer than other optical effects. Matte paintings are used to establish locations, and in
order for the viewer to feel the reality of the locale, it needs to be on screen for some time.
The matte painter has to convey size and scale—sometimes many miles in height or
depth—on the flat painted surface. Unlike a cinematographer who uses real light, the
painter must draw and color the light effects into the picture—how will the atmosphere
look, how will the tonal quality of light change, how will color relate to distance? To
fool the eye, all this must be convincing. And the painting technique needs to produce a
picture that will resemble a photograph when viewed from six or more feet away.
Some of the greatest matte paintings ever created appear in Black Narcissus (1947).
The story takes place in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, but the film was made in-
doors on studio sets in suburban London. Nothing was shot on location. And yet the matte
paintings of the Himalayas, when conjoined in effects shots with sets and live actors, pow-
erfully establish the remote locale of the story. The tromp l’oeil illusion is very powerful.
A more recent example is provided by Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The ware-
house in the film’s last scene is, in fact, a matte painting.
Today, filmmakers often create digital matte paintings in the computer. Light and
color effects on a simulated landscape are achieved easily by coloring pixels in the com-
puter image. Once the digital matte has been painted by computer, it is composited with
the live-action components of a shot. The opening scene in The Passion of the Christ
(2004), in the Garden of Gethsemane, is a studio set with a digital matte painting repre-
senting the sky. The spectacular long shot in True Lies (1994) of a Swiss chateau nestled
by a lake and the Alps was a digitally composited image employing a computer matte
painting of the Alps. In working with digital mattes, filmmakers sometimes face an in-
teresting problem. Light and color in a digital painting can be optimized for style and
beauty, whereas live-action imagery cannot. In Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), for
a scene where the Dalai Lama leaves the Tibetan capital in a small boat, digital artists
added mountains and a star-filled sky to the background of the shot. The soft, beautiful
BLACK NARCISSUS
(RANK ORGANIZATION/
THE ARCHERS, 1947)
The majestic Himalaya
Mountains provide the
story setting, but the film
was shot on indoor sets
in suburban London. A
series of matte paintings
visualized the mountains
and valleys surrounding a
convent, where the action
takes place. Here, one of
the nuns rings the morn-
ing bell. Everything except
the floor of the set on
which the actress stands
and the bell tower is a
matte painting created by
Walter Percy Day. Frame
enlargement.
111

Production Design
moonlight in the matte, however, was better looking than what the cinematographer
could achieve with the live-action elements. The digital artists had to redo their lighting,
making the light harder and more directional so that it would match the cinematography.
Similar to a matte painting, a translite is another common way of creating a
distant background for a scene or set. A translite is a photograph, blown up to huge
proportions, mounted on a translucent screen, and then lit from behind. A translite
provides the dramatic skyline in the background of the set at the climax of Fight Club
(1999). The translite was composed of several 8 × 10 inch photographs, combined
and blown up to a size measuring 130 feet wide by 36 feet tall. This is a very common
method for creating landscapes or city views glimpsed outside the windows of indoor
sets. The views of the city outside the windows of the Nakatomi Plaza building in Die
Hard (1988) are translites, as are the views of rural countryside surrounding the home
in the first section of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Throughout most of cinema history, matte paintings—whether painted tradition-
ally or digitally—have been flat, unmoving components of a scene, typically placed in
the background, behind actors, props, and sets. Actors and the camera could not in-
teract with them. Today, by contrast, 3D digital mattes can be manipulated to simu-
late the perspective of a moving camera, as in the David Fincher film, Zodiac (2007).
NORTH BY
NORTHWEST
(MGM, 1959)
Roger Thornhill
(Cary Grant) care-
fully approaches
the luxurious man-
sion of arch-villain
Philip Vandamm in
Alfred Hitchcock’s
popular thriller.
Hitchcock never
hesitated to wink at
the audience. The
house is a matte
painting. Frame en-
largement.
FIGHT CLUB (20TH
CENTURY FOX, 1999)
The dramatic skyline in
this scene at the climax is
a translite, an enormous
photographic image
mounted on a translu-
cent screen. A thin net-
ting hung in front of the
translite, and as it moved
in the air currents on the
set, the distant lights of
the city seemed to twin-
kle. Frame enlargement.
112

Production Design
Digital tools enable filmmakers to place actors inside vir-
tual sets that look photographically real. Zodiac featured
extensive digital effects work, but most of this was quite
subliminal and subtle. Most viewers do not experience
this movie as a showcase for effects. The film is a histori-
cal portrait of the Zodiac killer’s rampage in the San
Francisco area beginning in 1969 and of police efforts to
apprehend him. Because the film chronicles true events,
Fincher wanted to be as faithful as possible in visually
portraying the San Francisco Bay area as it existed in that
period.
But the city has changed a great deal, and many of
the crime scenes no longer look as they did in the late
sixties. So when a location could not be photographed
Case Study ZODIAC
so as to represent this earlier period, the filmmakers
used digital methods of creating their locations. A
prominent establishing shot of the harbor, showing the
ferry terminal, which has the camera flying in over the
water as if on a helicopter, was entirely computer gen-
erated. Photographs of the area taken from a U-2 spy
plane in the early 1970s provided information about
buildings in the area that no longer existed, and using
methods of photogrammetry the filmmakers were
able to construct a three-dimensional environment
from these photographs. Photogrammetry is a process
of tracing lines of sight from the cameras in several
photographs and then mathematically plotting their
intersections to yield the 3D landscape.
ZODIAC (WARNER
BROS., 2007)
A spectacular establish-
ing shot of the San
Francisco harbor was
entirely computer
generated, with the
3D models built from
archival photographs
to achieve histori-
cal accuracy. Frame
enlargement.
ZODIAC (WARNER
BROS, 2007)
The crime scene at
Washington and Cherry
Streets was recreated on
a studio set, with actors
and a few props against
a bluescreen. The dis-
tant buildings are a 3D
digital matte, capable of
being rotated to simu-
late the view of a mov-
ing camera. The near
police car is a real prop,
while the distant one is
a CGI element. Frame
enlargement.
113

Production Design
THE DESIGN CONCEPT
Production designers typically work from a detailed visual concept that organizes the
way that sets and costumes are built, dressed, and photographed. Let’s examine two
examples of this.
Such information can assist in camera mapping a
virtual 3D environment. A good example of this occurs
later in the film when the police investigate one of
Zodiac’s killings at the intersection of Washington and
Cherry Streets. The area looks wealthier today than it
did in 1969, and so parts of the scene were shot in a
studio with actors and a few props against a bluescreen.
The surrounding buildings were added through camera
mapping as a 3D digital matte . Camera mapping in-
volves projecting a matte painting or photograph onto
a 3D wireframe geometry built in the computer that
corresponds with the objects in the matte. Period pho-
tographs of buildings in the area were projected onto a
geometrical rendition of the area. Because the wireframe
geometry of the virtual set can be rotated and moved in
the computer, once the photographic information has
been projected onto this geometry, the digital matte can
then be moved and rotated to simulate such things as
camera movement. When the camera follows Inspector
David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) as he walks down the street
at the intersection (Ruffalo is actually on the bluescreen
set), the digital matte background moves according to
the camera’s changing line of sight. This creates a con-
vincing 3D illusion and enables the actors to credibly
interact with a virtual set that is dynamic.
3D digital mattes are used extensively in films today.
In earlier periods of filmmaking matte paintings were
static and flat. They were two-dimensional areas added
to the background of a set. By contrast, the dynamic
properties of 3D mattes enable the camera and the ac-
tors to credibly interact with them and can make virtual
sets seem photographically real and authentic. ■
Director Peter Jackson and his team of filmmakers used
set and costume design with great care and intelligence
to convey the illusion that the fanciful locations in the
story were real and authentic. To accomplish this, al-
though the film involved a considerable amount of dig-
ital effects, the filmmakers relied on traditional tools of
production design—hand-built sets, miniatures, props,
and costumes. They believed that these hand-built sets
and costumes would establish the reality of the film’s
fictional worlds and help to anchor the digital effects.
As a result, the film achieves a careful and successful
balance of digital and traditional design methods. This
helps to avoid the cartoonish quality that sometimes
results when a film goes overboard on digital effects.
As visual-effects cinematographer Alex Funke noted,
“At some subconscious level, viewers can tell when
they’re seeing real photography.”
The size of the film (actually, it was three films be-
cause the entire trilogy was shot at once— principal pho-
tography lasted over 15 months, and total production
Case Study THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
time was 4 years!) was unusually large. Three hundred
and fifty sets were constructed, plus 68 miniatures, and
each of the Middle Earth civilizations visited by the char-
acters required an average of 150 costumes. Forty-two
tailors, cobblers, jewelers, and embroiderers worked on
these.
The most complicated sets and miniatures were
those for the seven-tiered city of Minas Tirith. A lot of
the film’s action takes place in that city, including a
long siege and battle. The art department’s conceptual
designer, Alan Lee, first visualized the city’s design in a
series of pencil sketches, in which he pictured the city’s
culture and its architecture. These were meant to be
reminiscent of medieval Europe. The pencil sketches
furnished the basis for set and model construction.
The entire city could be constructed only as a min-
iature model, which would be used in long shots such
as the one where Gandalf approaches it on horseback.
Before building it, the miniatures unit consulted with
cinematographer Andrew Lesnie to work out lighting
(continued)
114

Production Design

THE LORD OF
THE RINGS:
THE RETURN
OF THE KING
(NEW LINE,
2004)
The city of
Minas Tirith
is a principal
setting of the
third film in the
trilogy. It ap-
pears as a min-
iature model,
as in the scene
where Gandalf
approaches it
on horseback.
It also appears
as a series of
full-scale sets
inhabited by
live actors,
accentuating
the authen-
ticity of the
setting. Frame
enlargements.
design, color, and texture so that shots of the minia-
ture (not photographed by Lesnie) would match with
his footage of other scenes.
Miniatures of the city and its selected parts were
then built at 1/72 scale, with exacting detail. More
than 1000 houses populated the city, with fine detail-
ing in the architecture, yards, and even the interiors.
This was necessary because director Peter Jackson
wanted elaborate camera moves, swooping across the
rooftops, between the buildings, and down through
the streets, especially in the battle scene.
These moves were accomplished with a snorkel
lens . Attached to a camera at the end of a long flexible
tube, or snorkel, the lens can be maneuvered through
the very small and tight spaces of a miniature model,
and it has a pitch-and-roll mechanism that enables it
to move in an acrobatic fashion, as if the camera were
mounted in an airplane. This produces a convincing
illusion of elaborate and extended camera moves. In
many of the shots, the lens passed so close to the min-
iature that it almost scraped the paint on its surfaces.
Other sequences in the film—Faramir and his men
riding out of the city to their deaths, Gandalf and Pippin
galloping through the streets—required that live actors
interact with their surroundings. Therefore, portions of
Minas Tirith also were built as full-scale sets. These were
constructed at the huge Dry Creek Quarry (also used for
the Helms Deep Castle sets in The Two Towers ). Building
these sets required six months because Jackson wanted
the size and scale of a true city and wanted it captured
in real photography rather than as a digital effect.
Director Peter Jackson said that he wanted viewers
to feel like the film had been shot on actual locations
in Middle Earth. He wanted everything on screen to
seem real. He knew that digital effects alone could
not achieve this. Thus traditional methods of produc-
tion design became key ingredients in this strategy of
visiting Middle Earth “for real.” ■
115

Production Design
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had
special effects far more sophisticated than any film of its
time, and even today they remain impressive. Kubrick’s
model spaceships were remarkably detailed and three-di-
mensional, and he used mattes to insert moving images
of people into their interiors, glimpsed behind windows.
Inside the spacecraft, the production design emphasized
blank, white, controlled, and regulated environments
that suggested an antiseptic future, in which human
behavior was rational and orderly rather than unpredict-
able and impulsive. The designs spoke to control and
authority rather than decay and chaos. Doing so, they
embodied the central irony of the film, namely, the way
in which people had ceded control over their lives to the
mechanical systems and synthetic environments they
created. The pessimism inherent in this view would in-
spire the next generation of science fiction film and give
rise to an alternative way of visualizing the future. Alien
(1979) initiated this alternative visual design.
Ridley Scott, director of Alien and Blade Runner , has
acknowledged the importance and influence of Kubrick’s
film. Alien replicated the antiseptic Kubrick design in se-
lected sets of the spaceship, Nostromo, but in other ways
it established a new design template for the next decade
and a half of science fiction filmmaking. The Nostromo
has two faces. The control rooms and science bays up-
stairs are gleaming and antiseptic. By contrast, sets in
the bowels of the ship—its engine rooms and storage
areas—were grimy, dark, and dank. These established a
mise- en-scène that became the norm not just for the Alien
series but for subsequent science fiction films in general,
Case Study THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
including such pictures as Blade Runner (1982), Escape
from New York (1981), Robocop (1987), and Dark City
(1998). Locales are dirty and dimly illuminated, with rain-
and smoke-filled air. This mise-en-scène might be termed
future noir because of its similarity to the gloomy and op-
pressive look of classic film noir. It has another root in Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927), specifically that film’s under-
ground city where the workers reside and labor, a place of
enormous machinery, darkness, and congestion.
Alien ’s future noir transitioned film away from the
antiseptic 2001 look, and Blade Runner ’s landmark
production design reinforced this shift with its dark
vision of a future city. Production designer Lawrence
G. Paull based his design concept on the social reali-
ties evoked in the film’s script and the novel from
which it derived. The film is set in a futuristic society
where the middle class has relocated to pleasurable
off-world colonies, leaving the cities to choke in
urban decay, architectural collapse, and overpopula-
tion. The visual design of the film creates a world
of clutter, a ghettoized alley environment in which
transient, jobless, urban poor jostle together in a mix
of nationalities and languages, whereas, far overhead,
video monitors and electronic billboards carry corpo-
rate advertisements and media messages. High-rise
buildings of high-tech opulence coexist with the
crumbling alley environment, creating a striking mix
of contrasting architectural and social styles and reali-
ties. Paull’s production design is a stunning transla-
tion of the social realities of the story into extremely
powerful visual environments.
2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (MGM,
1968)
Human figures against
a sterile, white environ-
ment. The production
design evokes an anti-
septic, sterile future in
which human beings
have ceded authority to
the technological sys-
tems they have created.
Frame enlargement.
(continued)
116

Production Design
ALIEN, ALIENS (20 TH
CENTURY FOX, 1979, 1986)
Production design of the space-
craft Nostromo evoked two
sharply contrasting environ-
ments. The sterile, antiseptic sci-
ence bays and computer rooms
showed the influence of Kubrick’s
2001 . But it was the dark, grimy
interior of the Nostromo, and
its low-key lighting, that helped
establish “future noir” in science
fiction films for years to come.
Frame enlargements.
The noirish, pessimistic mise-en-scène established by
Alien and Blade Runner predominated in science fiction
films for the next 15 years. Even fantasies such as the
Batman series visualize a noir environment. So prevalent
had it become that when director Luc Besson and de-
signer Dan Weil were planning The Fifth Element (1997),
they felt it imperative to break with this style and define
an alternative. Accordingly, The Fifth Element ’s city is seen
mostly by day, and has a recognizable Manhattan skyline,
and in place of the tangled and shadowy architectural
styles in sci-fi noir, it was built on a grid pattern, like
Manhattan, with vanishing single-point perspective. This
design connects this futuristic cityscape with the recog-
nizable metropolis of today. Innovative and startling in
its time, the future noir look had become conventional, a
mise-en-scène to avoid for The Fifth Element ’s filmmakers,
interested in creating new imagery. Like cinematogra-
phers, production designers study and borrow from the
work of their peers, and really successful design concepts
in time can become obstacles to fresh creation. ■
BLADE RUNNER (THE
LADD COMPANY, 1982)
Blade Runner ’s influential
design concept followed the
social realities depicted in
script and novel. The visual
clutter evokes a ghettoized
urban future marked by
social breakdown. The film’s
production design brilliantly
embodies the novel’s themes
of entropy and decay.
117

Production Design
PRODUCTION DESIGN AND VISUAL EFFECTS
As with cinematography, production design in contemporary filmmaking overlaps with
the creation of digital effects. Many special effects sequences in film blend miniature
models with digital mattes or digital animation. In The Truman Show (1998), the tall
buildings on the main street set of Seahaven, Truman’s home town, were only partially
constructed as ground-level facades. The upper floors were digital creations, giving the
sets greater mass and height than they actually possessed. The same strategy was used to
create the huge Coliseum in Gladiator (1999). Audiences delight in these manipulations
of place and setting and embrace the movie magic that makes them possible.
In some cases, sets, locations, and props may be entirely digital, with live actors in-
habiting computer-designed environments. In this case, production design occurs within
a digital realm, and films like Sin City (2005) and 300 (2006) illustrate this approach.
SUMMARY
The term mise-en-scène refers to the design and manipulation of all the objects placed
in the frame in front of the camera. These typically include sets, costumes, light and
color, and the actor’s performance. The three chief members of the filmmaking team
who are responsible for mise-en-scène are the director, cinematographer, and the pro-
duction designer. They form a close three-way partnership to arrive at the visual con-
cepts that will underlie and guide the visual design of the film.
Both cinematographer and production designer have the responsibility of helping
the director to realize his or her vision for the film. The cinematographer does this by
planning lighting and camera setups and assisting in the coordination of color as it will
appear in the scene, often by placing colored gelatins in front of the lights. The produc-
tion designer assists the director, organizing a visual design for the environments of the
film. Components of these environments include sets, costumes, mattes, and miniatures.
The production designer, in conference with the cinematographer, helps organize the
film’s color design through the choices that are made about sets and costumes.
The importance of an organizing visual design for a film, agreed on by the direc-
tor, cinematographer, and production designer, is to facilitate a unified mise-en-scène
in which all of the elements—costumes, sets, lights, color, and performance—work to-
gether to advance the narrative and to represent mood and atmosphere on screen and
to evoke appropriate interpretive and emotional responses by the viewer.
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
art director
camera mapping
costumes
costume designer
design concept
matte paintings
miniatures
photogrammetry
pixels
production design
prop master
recces
scenic artist
sets
set decorator
snorkel lens
supervising art director
3D digital mattes
translite
tromp l’oeil
unit art director
118

Production Design
SUGGESTED READINGS
Sybil DelGaudio, Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1992).
Peter Ettedgui, Production Design and Art Direction (Woburn, MA: Focal Press, 1999).
Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body
(New York: Routledge, 1990).
Beverly Heisner, Hollywood Art: Art Direction in the Days of the Great Studios (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1990).
Andrew Horton, Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2003).
Vincent LoBrutto, By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1992).
119

120

■ explain how performance elicits
interpretive and emotional responses from
viewers
■ list the basic types of film performers
■ differentiate between method and technical
approaches to performing
■ describe four ways in which performance
becomes an element of visual design
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Acting

From Chapter 4 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
121

Acting
The actor is the human element in film. Many components of cinema involve machinery—
lights, camera, computers for editing and visual effects—but performance puts the reality of
human emotion directly onto screen. Carl Dreyer, one of cinema’s greatest directors, felt that
the human face was the most important element of cinema, and many filmmakers agree with
him. Dreyer’s most emotionally intense film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is composed
almost entirely of close-ups of faces.
Nearly all film acting derives from the tradition of naturalism established by Constantin
Stanislavsky (1863–1938), a Russian teacher, actor, and director who emphasized that perfor-
mance should be anchored in the emotional reality of the script and story, the characters, and
their situation. Good film actors aim to find these moments of emotional truth in a scene and
to play these as honestly as they can using the tools of their craft—their face, voice, and body.
Many of cinema’s greatest actors—Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis, James Stewart,
Spencer Tracy, Tom Hanks—are so honest that they don’t seem to be acting at all. Their perfor-
mances become transparent, revealing the characters with exceptional clarity.
Actors have different methods of preparation, but the good ones all try to find the emotional
arc in the story and to play that. They search for correspondences between their inner emotional
life and the situation of the characters they are playing. A good actor is always “in the moment,”
speaking and moving in ways that honestly embody the drama at each moment in a scene.
Good film acting has an element of unpredictability, and that is why some directors are
uncomfortable with actors. Directors have to turn actors loose in front of a camera, and to get
good results, they can’t control actors with the mechanical precision that they can exercise
over lighting or editing.
But this lack of control is where the artistry of acting resides, where the actor’s interpre-
tation of the material arises. During a tender scene between actors Marlon Brando and Eva
Marie Saint in On the Waterfront (he plays a tough dockworker and ex-boxer; she’s a proper
young lady), Saint accidentally dropped her white glove on the ground. Brando picked it
up, but instead of handing it back to her, he put it on and wore it for the remainder of the
scene. Watching the scene, you can see that Saint expects him to give her back the glove.
She reaches for it, but Brando holds onto it, plays with it as they talk, and then wears it. It was
a spontaneous, unscripted moment that is wonderful because it’s true to the scene. It conveys
the tenderness in Brando’s tough character and the unspoken attraction he feels for her.
THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)
Director Carl Dreyer felt that the human
face was the most cinematic element of all,
and he composed this film, about the trial
and execution of Joan of Arc, almost entirely
as a series of facial close-ups. Most films are
not as stylistically radical as this, but Dreyer
was right about the special emotional truth
that the actor’s presence before the camera
uniquely conveys. Frame enlargement.
122

Acting
ACTING IN FILM AND THEATER
What are the basic characteristics of acting in the cinema, and how does performance
style become an element of a film’s visual design? Acting in the cinema is a uniquely
difficult challenge. While screen acting would seem to bear some similarity with
performance in the theater, the differences between acting in the two mediums are
significant. Only in live theatre can actors be said to own their performances. Film
actors do not own their performances. In cinema, an actor’s performance is recon-
figured by editing, sound design, music, and other elements of structure. Filmmakers
use these elements to redesign performance. While this makes the actor’s contribution
to the medium of cinema somewhat more ambiguous than it is in theatre, it remains
true that narrative cinema is heavily reliant upon good acting. Five characteristics of
the motion picture medium make the actor’s task different from what it is in theatre:
lack of rehearsal; out-of-continuity shooting; the amplification of gesture and expres-
sion by the camera and sound recording equipment; the effects of lighting, lenses, and
greenscreening; and the absence of an audience.
Lack of Rehearsal
In theater, rehearsal is an essential part of the production process. Actors do not go before
a live audience until the play and their performance in it have been thoroughly rehearsed.
This enables actors to achieve the right nuances and timing in their performance and to
work on, and hopefully resolve, problem areas in the production.
By contrast, in cinema, rehearsal is a relative rarity. For a film production to
accord its actors a two-week rehearsal period is a luxury. With thousands of dollars
consumed by each day of a shoot, the great expense of film production works against
ON THE
WATERFRONT
(COLUMBIA
PICTURES, 1954)
Good acting conveys
the emotion of a scene
with truth and honesty.
Good actors can be
so “in the moment”
that they create new,
unscripted material in
their performance that
adds to and improves
the scene. Brando’s
brilliant gesture with the
glove reframes all the
scene’s dialogue with this
spontaneous expression
of his character’s
attraction to Edy (Eva
Marie Saint). In this
frame enlargement, Saint
clearly expects Brando to
give back her glove.
123

Acting
a lengthy rehearsal period. Moreover, the sad fact is that many film directors dislike
working with actors and mistrust the actor’s contribution to a scene or shot and feel
relatively insecure about collaborating with performers to secure the right nuance in a
scene. Other directors who are skilled at working with actors, such as Sydney Pollack
( Out of Africa , 1985), prefer to avoid rehearsing because the time that is available is
simply too short. Because of these factors, actors in film lack the elaborate prep time
to develop a role and a performance that is standard in theater. Film actors have to
hit the ground running, learn their lines, arrive on the set, and play their character for
the camera. This is an extraordinary demand, but it is compensated by the fact that, in
most cases, the performer is one element among many in the frame, and the filmmaker
can use lighting, camerawork, editing, and sound to modulate and strengthen the
actor’s performance.
Shooting Out of Continuity
Motion pictures are filmed out of continuity. The order in which scenes are filmed is
very different from the order in which they appear in the finished film. The sequenc-
ing of scenes as they appear in the final finished film is achieved during the process of
editing and does not occur during shooting. Economies of time and cost determine the
order in which scenes are filmed, the goal being to do it in the most cost-efficient way
possible. To save time and money, all scenes occurring in a given location or on a par-
ticular set may be filmed at one time, regardless of how they are distributed through-
out the narrative. When the filming of all scenes occurring in a given location or set
has been completed, the production company moves on to the next set or location to
film the scenes that occur there.
The filming of each scene also fails to observe proper continuity. Typically, the
master shot is filmed first, and the performers run through the entire action of the
scene from the master shot camera position. This is generally a framing of the action
in medium long shot that shows an overall view of the set and the actors in it. Then
the actors recreate bits of the action for inserts and close-ups. These supply what is
known as coverage , which the editor will intercut with the master shot to create the
edited scene. When filming coverage, an actor typically will deliver all his or her dia-
logue that is recorded from a given camera position, regardless of when it may appear
in the scene.
All of this can complicate the actor’s job. One of cinema’s great actors, Michael
Caine, wrote a highly respected book, Acting in Film , in which he discussed how
strange this way of working might seem to an actor. “If the last scene in a picture
takes place outside, you can count on the fact that it will get shot first and then you
will move to the studio to shoot all the scenes leading up to it. You might shoot the
master in the morning, then rush out in the afternoon to shoot another scene be-
cause suddenly the sun came out. Then you have to come back some other time and
continue with the morning scene, then perhaps do the medium shot and close-up a
week later.” One of the most famous acting scenes in U.S. films, the so-called Brother
Charlie scene from On the Waterfront (1954), dramatically illustrates these chal-
lenges. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) are part
of the mob that controls the longshoremen’s union on the New York dockyards.
Sickened by its corruption, Terry wants to leave the mob, but his brother tries to per-
suade him to stay because he knows if Terry leaves and turns informant, as the state
prosecutor wishes him to do, a mob contract will be issued on his life.
124

Acting

ON THE WATERFRONT (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1954)
Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in two camera setups from On the Waterfront. In the two-
shot, both actors are present, and each can build a performance by playing off the other.
In the close-up, however, Rod Steiger (pictured) had to deliver his lines while Brando
was absent from the set. The angle of Steiger’s eyes makes it seem as if he is looking at
Brando, but he had to create his character in the scene under highly artificial conditions.
Frame enlargements.
In the scene, a master shot of the two actors alternates with close-ups of each. In
the close-ups, actor Rod Steiger had to deliver all his dialogue in the scene that was
to be recorded from this camera position, regardless of when the dialogue occurred.
Complicating this task, Steiger later reported, was the fact that Brando left the set on
the days Steiger had to deliver these lines. Steiger played his scene and projected his
emotions to an actor who was not there.
These conditions of filming require that actors be able to recreate their character
at any moment in the drama as required by the shooting schedule. By contrast, the
performer in the theater has it a bit easier. He or she creates a character sequentially
and chronologically in real time, from act one to the last act of the play.
Amplification of Gesture and Expression
On stage, the actor plays to an audience that is sitting some distance away in the au-
ditorium. The actor’s gestures and vocal inflections must be large and loud enough
to reach the most distant point in the auditorium. By contrast, the film camera and
sound equipment act as magnifying instruments, amplifying even the tiniest of ges-
tures and the smallest of vocal inflections. The film actor has to understand when a
little is too much and has to know how to precisely calibrate the smallest degree of
facial and vocal reaction with the knowledge of how that will play when magnified on
the giant motion picture screen.
The acting styles of many famous motion picture stars would be totally inappro-
priate and ineffective on stage. The quavering, tremulous undertone in Judy Garland’s
voice is a subtlety of performance that precisely and powerfully conveys the vulnerabil-
ity of her characters in movies like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Star Is Born (1954).
It is a characteristic captured by the motion picture medium in its ability to amplify
125

Acting
voice and gesture. Humphrey Bogart’s nervous facial tics and James Cagney’s trademark
shrug of the shoulders, repeated from film to film, helped establish the star presence of
these performers. These tiny gestures would be lost if played in a theater auditorium.
Lighting, Lenses, and Effects Work
The film actor has to know not just the emotional arc of the character in the story
and how to play this arc but also how to play for the camera’s view of the scene. In
other words, the actor has to know how the camera is viewing the area within its
frame. What is the depth of field? Where is the focal plane of the shot—the area in
focus—and where are its borders? Where does the light fall off into shadow as the
camera reads it , not as it appears to the eye? These considerations complicate how an
actor must move on screen.
Performing with these considerations in mind is called hitting the mark . Actors
hit their mark when they move in precise accord with the constraints imposed by
lighting and depth of field. In a complex and highly specific lighting setup, if an actor
misses his or her mark by taking one extra step crossing the set, he or she may deliver
his or her line from an unexposed or out-of-focus area of the frame. Hitting the mark
without letting the audience see this dimension of performance requires tremendous
skill from a performer.
How the camera frames a shot will influence the way an actor plays the scene.
In a master shot, where the camera is some distance away, actors often will put more
energy into their scene and then recalibrate their energy level for closer shots. Some
directors, like Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, like shooting with multiple cameras running
simultaneously so that actors won’t feel the need to play to a specific camera and will
therefore give a more natural performance.
Director Paul Greengrass used multiple cameras when he made United 93
(2006), about the aircraft hijacked on 9/11 which crashed in Pennsylvania after a
THE GENERAL (BUSTER
KEATON PRODUCTIONS,
1926)
Minimalist acting styles can be
highly effective in cinema because
the camera is so sensitive it sees
everything a performer does, no
matter how tiny. Buster Keaton
was, with Chaplin, one of the great
masters of silent comedy. Unlike
Chaplin, though, Keaton avoided
expressing emotion. He was called
the “Great Stoneface.” In situations
of chaos and danger, his characters
are calm and stoic, their faces un-
responsive to crises. This contrast
is part of what makes his films so
funny. Keaton’s extraordinary abil-
ity to underplay his characters offers
the purest example of the general
rule in art that “less is more.” Frame
enlargement.
126

Acting
struggle onboard between the hijackers and the passengers. By shooting scenes with
several cameras and starting each camera at a different time, Greengrass could film
an entire, lengthy scene without interruption. He did this for the benefit of the ac-
tors, enabling them to stay in character for a much longer time than is the norm in
movies shot with only one camera and therefore to give more naturalistic, extended
performances.
Visual effects scenes in film impose an additional set of demands on performers.
Actors play these scenes in nonexistent sets and often to nonexistent characters, if
those characters are effects creations like Godzilla or the bugs in Starship Troopers .
The actor performs in front of a greenscreen, a blank-colored wall that will be digi-
tally subtracted from the shot, leaving the performer as an element that can be com-
posited with other digital elements in a special effects shot. Much of Keanu Reeves’s
performance in The Matrix (1999) and Liam Neeson’s in The Phantom Menace
(1999) were greenscreened.
Lack of a Live Audience
On stage, performers play to a live audience, and they typically modify their perfor-
mance based on the immediate feedback they get from the audience. The film per-
former does not have this luxury. To shape a performance, the actor has to depend
on the guidance of the director, and those who have the reputation of handling actors
well—Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack, Oliver Stone—have consistently
attracted the industry’s finest performers to their films.
Some film actors periodically do stage work precisely because they value the im-
mediate feedback of a live audience and consider this to be essential to developing
their skills as an actor. By contrast, other performers have found film acting more
congenial precisely because the audience is absent. Perhaps the most famous ex-
ample of this is Charlie Chaplin, who had a fear of playing to live audiences and felt
more comfortable perfecting his performances in the relative seclusion of the motion
picture studio.
THE HOURS (MIRAMAX,
2002)
Makeup effects can be an
essential tool of the ac-
tor’s craft. Many actors, for
example, have worn false
noses. Orson Welles often
did so, and Kevin Spacey
in Beyond the Sea wore
one to better resemble his
character, singer Bobby
Darin. Playing writer Virginia
Woolf, Nicole Kidman wore
a prosthetic nose to enhance
her resemblance to Woolf.
Changing one’s appearance
in this manner can help the
actor to get “in character.”
Frame enlargement.
127

Acting
Jim Caviezel gives a very intense performance as Jesus,
one that helps to create the film’s emotional power and
appeal. Caviezel’s enactment of Christ’s agonies during
his torture and crucifixion struck many viewers as emo-
tionally true and deeply moving. It is a very physical per-
formance, as Caviezel graphically depicts the anguish of
a man whose body is being systematically broken.
But the most powerful moments in the film were
digital effects, requiring that Caviezel pretend that
some action was occurring when, in fact, it was not.
The scourging scene, for example, shows a Roman
guard whipping Jesus with a flagrum, a torture device
with sheep bones and iron balls attached to the ends
of leather thongs. The flagrum tears out large chunks
of Jesus’ flesh, which the viewer sees on camera as
Caviezel pretends to react in pain.
While the action may seem convincing, in fact, it
was assembled from many different elements combined
digitally, which included the actors’ performances.
The flagrum was a digital effect. The actor playing the
Roman guard did not hold any such device. Instead,
he merely pantomimed the action of whipping. The
wounds that seem to open on Jesus’ back when the
flagrum hits also were effects. Caviezel wore a body
Case Study THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
prosthesis that contained the wounds, but these were
covered digitally in postproduction with fake skin. To
simulate the whip strikes, the digital skin was removed,
revealing a prosthetic wound.
The climax shows the flagrum tearing out a large
chunk of flesh from Jesus’ side. Caviezel was not in-
volved in this action. Another actor wore a chest pros-
thesis with a flagrum attached to it, and the camera
filmed the action of it being torn loose. This imagery
was then digitally pasted onto Caviezel’s body. Caviezel
pretended to react to something that was not there.
This provides one measure of the quality of his
acting—he convinces us that what we are seeing is
actually occurring. Viewed in a naive way, the scene
seems to put the actor’s performance at the center of
the action. In fact, however, the detailed performance
provided by Caviezel occurred in very artificial condi-
tions—without a key prop (the flagrum), with the scene’s
action conveyed in pantomime, and with no on-camera
depiction of the climax (the tearing of Jesus’ side).
This is the kind of artificiality that is commonly
encountered by actors today. They must share the
screen with missing elements that are added in post-
production, long after the actor has gone home. ■
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (DIMENSION FILMS, 2004)
Jim Caviezel’s performance helps lend credibility to this special-effects scene in which
none of the pictured action happened on camera. The whip and the wounding were
digital effects added in postproduction. Film actors today increasingly must do their
work in relation to nonexistent (digital) props, sets, and even other characters. Frame
enlargement.
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Acting
CATEGORIES OF FILM PERFORMERS
Motion picture actors tend to fall into three categories. There are stars, supporting
players , and extras. The star is an indelible feature of motion pictures. Audiences go
to the movies in large part because of the stars who appear in them, and this has been
the case for decades. This is true not just for the U.S. film industry but for virtually
every film industry in the world.
Stars are distinct from supporting players in that the star commands the largest
salary, usually gets top billing, and is foremost in the minds of viewers. Supporting
players, as their name implies, have secondary and supporting, rather than starring,
roles in a production. By contrast, extras occupy the smallest amount of screen time.
Extras are performers who appear incidentally and briefly—pedestrians crossing a
street, the crowd watching a baseball game.
Although stars typically get the most attention from viewers, many supporting
players have established careers with considerable distinction and have created recog-
nizable screen personalities. Supporting players such as Walter Brennan, for example,
developed very distinct screen personalities in such films as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(1936), Red River (1948), and Rio Bravo (1959). Brennan frequently portrayed cantan-
kerous old coots who came close to stealing the film from the established stars. Other
supporting players, such as Danny Aiello and Robert Duvall in more recent years, have
approximated star status. Duvall began his career with memorable supporting work in
pictures such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Godfather (1972) and, by vir-
tue of his star turn in Lonesome Dove (1989), graduated to leading-player status. The
Apostle (1997), which he wrote, directed, and starred in, showcases his charismatic per-
sonality and subtle, nuanced playing style. It is very much an actor-centered film, em-
phasizing the human emotional drama for which performance, not effects, is essential.
The Star Persona
The star persona is the collective screen personality that emerges over the course of a
star’s career from the motion pictures in which he or she appears. The star persona or
on-screen personality is a collective creation generated by many films and is greater
than any single performance in an individual film. One of the easiest ways of gauging
whether a performer has become a star is to evaluate whether a star persona exists.
Names such as John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn
instantly call to mind a very fixed, distinct screen personality that exists beyond their
individual film appearances and that unifies these.
Stars with long careers evidence interesting changes in their star personas. If one
looks at the screen appearances of a performer before they became a star, one often
sees a different persona, resulting from atypical roles that the performer, once a star,
thereafter avoided. Before he became a star, Humphrey Bogart spent many years as a
supporting player in Warner Bros. crime films. In such pictures as Angels with Dirty
Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), Bogart portrayed a series of unsympa-
thetic, if interesting, villains. These roles did not showcase the essential feature of his
star persona, namely, Bogart’s world-weary romanticism, his cynicism with a heart.
It was not until High Sierra in 1941 that Bogart, still playing a gangster in a
Warner Bros. picture, became a star in a role that allowed him to embody the kind of
bruised romantic idealism that he would go on to perfect in such enduring pictures as
129

Acting
The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), and
Key Largo (1948). In Bogart’s later career, his star persona underwent another change.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he stopped playing romantic leading men and
turned toward interesting character types in such pictures as The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). Gone from
these pictures were his romantic star qualities. In their place was a series of neurotic,
quirky, and eccentric characterizations.
The greatest stars give their pictures an electricity and charisma that ordinary per-
formers can’t provide. Consider Julia Roberts and the excitement of her star-making
performance in Pretty Woman (1990). When she is on screen, she dominates the scene.

CASABLANCA (WARNER BROS., 1942); THE AFRICAN QUEEN (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1951)
Evolution of a star performer. Two phases of Humphrey Bogart’s career: the roman-
tic leading man (with Ingrid Bergman) in Casablanca and the player of grizzled,
quirky, neurotic characters, as with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen . Frame
enlargements.
ERIN BROCKOVICH
(COLUMBIA TRISTAR,
2000)
As a star vehicle, this
film provides a showcase
for Julia Roberts’ screen
personality and charisma.
She commands the
camera’s attention with
her beauty and force
of personality. Frame
enlargement.
130

Acting
Her star performance carries Erin Brockovich (2000), a picture for which she won an
acting Oscar. In Ocean’s Eleven (2001), her character doesn’t appear until halfway
through the film, and director Steven Soderbergh was counting on her to make a strong
impression on the viewer very quickly, and she did. There is an indefinable quality of
charisma that stars provide, and each of these pictures is a vehicle for the star.
Some stars have a greater acting range than others. John Wayne tended to
play the same type of characters from film to film. His acting range is quite small
compared with Robert De Niro’s, but this is not to say that he was a poor actor. His
performances in Red River (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956),
The Cowboys (1972), and many other films are carefully crafted, and his power and
charisma are essential components of those films.
THE SEARCHERS (WARNER BROS.,
1956)
After years of struggling in low-budget
B Westerns, John Wayne achieved
stardom in Stagecoach (1939) and dur-
ing the next four decades projected a
powerful masculine image characterized
by physical strength, moral dignity,
fair play, and stubborn independence.
Directors John Ford and Howard Hawks
appreciated Wayne’s physical power
on screen and considered it essential to
the making of a good Western. Wayne’s
physical presence easily dominates the
frame. Frame enlargement.
TRAINING DAY (WARNER BROS., 2002)
Playing against type can be very effective but also risky. Sometimes audiences don’t want
to see their stars in a different kind of role. Denzel Washington has tended to play very
courageous and moral characters. Here, though, he plays an evil, corrupt cop and gives
the role a savage intensity. Washington’s daring switch of character, and the brilliance of
his performance, had a sensational effect on the film’s critical and box-office performance.
For the role, he earned an Oscar for Best Actor. Frame enlargement.
131

Acting
Other stars, such as Meryl Streep, have an extraordinary range. She has played
an actress and country-western singer in Postcards from the Edge (1990), a distraught
Australian mother accused of murdering her baby in A Cry in the Dark (1988), a Polish
woman who has survived internment in the Nazi concentration camps in Sophie’s Choice
(1982), a Danish author who establishes a life in Nairobi in Out of Africa (1985), a
whitewater adventurer in The River Wild (1994), and an Italian-American housewife
living in the midwestern farm belt in The Bridges of Madison County (1995).
Even stars who can play a range of characters often project a relatively consistent
personality from role to role. Robert De Niro, for example, is known for his psychopaths
in such films as Taxi Driver and GoodFellas , whereas Dustin Hoffman tends to play more
introverted, withdrawn characters who have trouble expressing themselves, in films such
as The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Hero (1992), and Rain Man (1988).
What finally counts in cinema is not acting range, but the magnetism of the
actor’s personality before the camera. John Wayne is a great film actor, as are Streep,
De Niro, and Hoffman, despite the differences in their range.
Meryl Streep
CLOSE-UP
dialect, and diction. These included The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Sophie’s Choice (1982),
Out of Africa (1985), Ironweed (1987), and A Cry in
the Dark (1988). She won an Oscar for Best Actress
for her role in Sophie’s Choice as a Polish mother
forced by a Nazi officer to choose which of her chil-
dren will be executed.
Most of her roles in the 1980s were in serious and
very literate dramas, and beginning in the 1990s she
expanded her range of characters by playing flam-
boyant villains and comic characters in movies that
had a more popular orientation. Her comic villains in
She-Devil (1989) and Death Becomes Her (1992) were
startling changes of pace, as was her rugged, white-
water-rapids-shooting character in the action film,
The River Wild (1994). But she kept returning to seri-
ous drama for her best work, as in Clint Eastwood’s
The Bridges of Madison County (1995), as an Iowa
housewife vaguely unhappy in her marriage who falls
in love with a visiting photographer. In The Hours
(2002), she costarred with two other outstanding
contemporary actors—Nicole Kidman and Julianne
Moore—in a finely directed and performed story of
three generations of women coping with despair.
Streep formed a very productive relationship with
director Mike Nichols on the films Silkwood (1983),
Heartburn (1986), Postcards from the Edge (1990),
Born in 1949, Meryl Streep found rapid success and
acclaim as a film actress and currently holds the
record for the most Academy Award nominations.
She has also won numerous Golden Globe Awards,
Emmy Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
As these honors suggest, many professionals in the
film and television industries view her as one of the
finest—perhaps the finest— actors currently work-
ing in motion pictures. The film industry today does
not produce many films with a female lead at their
center, and yet Streep has sustained a long and dis-
tinguished career in the face of this obstacle. She has
worked regularly and often, and has supplemented
her film roles with performances on television and
the stage.
Her first film roles in the 1970s, as supporting
characters, were in very prominent films by major di-
rectors. These included Fred Zinnemann’s Julia (1977),
Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1979), Woody
Allen’s Manhattan (1979), and Robert Benton’s
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). She had an Oscar nomina-
tion as Best Supporting Actress for The Deer Hunter
and won in that category for Kramer vs. Kramer .
In the next decade, she became a major star,
playing lead roles in a variety of highly prestigious
films, many of which were historical dramas that
showcased her exceptional command of language,
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Acting
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (20TH CENTURY FOX, 2007)
Streep’s performance as fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly added another pow-
erful character to her portfolio. While Miranda is not a villain, she is an unsympathetic
character, one of many that Streep has bravely played. Many stars are reluctant to play
characters they know the audience will not like. Other films in which she does not try
to elicit the audience’s favor include Rendition (2007) and The Manchurian Candidate
(2004). Frame enlargement.
ANGELS IN AMERICA
(HBO, 2003)
As a performer, Meryl
Streep has few limits. She
is equally adept at comedy
and drama, and there
seems to be no role she
cannot play. She plays
four roles in this film, in-
cluding the elderly rabbi
pictured here. Frame
enlargement.
and Angels in America (2003), a television mini-series
in which she played four different characters and
won an Emmy Award. Nichols also directed her on
the stage in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull .
She has lent her voice to cartoon characters in the
television series The Simpsons and King of the Hill and
in film, The Ant Bully (2007). She also has a splendid
singing voice, which can be heard in Postcards from
the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).
Off-screen Streep has lent her name and prestige
to various environmental, health, family, and arts
charities and benefits, remaining extremely active in
social and community causes.
At a time when major roles for women in
Hollywood film are in short supply, Streep has not
only endured; she has prospered and has accumu-
lated a significant body of work, enduring films that
define her as one of the screen’s great performers. ■
133

Acting
METHOD AND TECHNICAL APPROACHES
TO PERFORMING
In creating a character, film actors today tend to use a blend of method and technical
approaches. For the sake of clarity, these approaches will be discussed in distinction
to one another, although in practice most actors use some elements of both. Method
acting grew out of acting teacher Lee Strasberg’s workshops and exerted a powerful
influence over a generation of actors in U.S. motion pictures beginning in the 1950s.
This generation included Marlon Brando ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 1951; On the
Waterfront , 1954); James Dean ( Rebel without a Cause , 1955); Paul Newman ( The
Left-Handed Gun , 1958; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , 1958), and others. They brought
to their roles a more reflective psychological dimension than had existed in preceding
decades of screen acting. In a performance by Brando or Newman, one senses a res-
ervoir of thought and feeling within the character, a rich inner life, that is only partly
disclosed through dialogue and gesture. Their playing style was emotionally rich and
projected volatile and at times contradictory psychological dynamics.
The method involved using emotional recall to play a role. Called on to portray fear,
anxiety, sadness, or other emotions, the method actor searches his or her personal expe-
rience for moments when these emotions were experienced and tries to reimagine the sit-
uations that led to those feelings and internally recreate them. Re-experiencing the emo-
tion, or one similar, becomes the basis for its performance. The method actor searches
for the relevant personal experiences that will enable him or her to feel the character.
Marlon Brando is one of the supreme exemplars of this approach. One of his great-
est performances is in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). During a lengthy
scene in the middle of the film, shot largely in a single take to accentuate the continuity of
Brando’s performance, his character reminisces about his youth and his parents. Brando
improvised the scene on camera and largely drew on his own life to flesh out the memo-
ries of the character he was playing, as he did in other scenes of the picture. The result is
a performance of authentic emotion that shocks and disturbs the viewer with its candor.
An alternative to the method is a more technical approach. Here, instead of bas-
ing a character on personal emotional memories, the actor plays the script and creates
the character by performing the behavior and dialogue called for in the scene. The
classic Hollywood actors of the 1930s and 1940s represent this approach, perhaps
none better than James Cagney. Cagney was one of the industry’s finest actors and
possessed an impressive range, excelling in gangster movies ( The Public Enemy , 1931;
The Roaring Twenties , 1939), light comedy ( The Strawberry Blonde , 1941), and the
musical ( Yankee Doodle Dandy , 1942).
In his autobiography, he discussed one of his most famous scenes in White Heat
(1948), where, as gangster Cody Jarrett, he goes berserk in a prison cafeteria on learn-
ing of his mother’s death. Cagney wrote his autobiography after the method perform-
ers had arrived in the 1950s, and his discussion contains an implied criticism of that
approach. He recalled being asked by reporters whether he prepared himself in some
special way for the extraordinary emotional and physical outburst he displays in the
scene. He said that he didn’t psych himself up in any special way and (here was the
implied criticism) that he didn’t understand actors who felt the need to emotionally
pump themselves up in order to do a scene. Cagney said that he remembered seeing
some lunatics in an asylum when he was a boy and tried in the scene to imitate the
way they looked and sounded. While Cagney admitted drawing on personal experi-
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Acting
ence to play the scene, it is significant that he did not phrase it in emotional terms. He
did not try to recall the emotions he felt as a boy viewing people in the asylum or to
imagine what those so confined must have felt. He merely tried to imitate some of the
inmates’ gestures and behavior patterns. He created the role from the outside in rather
than from the inside out. Cagney took pride in maintaining that the pro knows how
to do a scene without extensive “psyching up” and just goes and does it.
Prior to the arrival of the method performers, most Hollywood acting tended to
be of this sort, extremely accomplished but without excessive psychologizing about a
character’s motivations and personality. It was in this context that the more introspective
approach of Brando, Newman, and their generation of actors seemed so revolutionary.
While today it may seem less so, that is because the playing styles of so many contempo-
rary actors—Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn—owe much to the 1950s method actors.
LAST TANGO IN PARIS
(UNITED ARTISTS,
1972)
In this single, lengthy shot,
Marlon Brando used details
from his own childhood
to create his character in
Last Tango in Paris . The
raw emotional candor of
this performance remains
unsurpassed in his career.
Frame enlargement.
WHITE HEAT (WARNER
BROS., 1948)
Exemplifying a technical
approach to acting, James
Cagney, as gangster Cody
Jarrett, goes beserk on learn ing
of his mother’s death. The scene
is a classic in the history of
American screen performance.
Frame enlargement.
135

Acting
THE PERFORMER AS AN ELEMENT OF VISUAL DESIGN
Now that the fundamentals of motion picture acting are clear, it is time to examine
how performance style becomes an element of mise-en-scène. Filmmakers can treat
actors as design elements in several ways: by emphasizing a performer’s unique body
language, by choreographing performance and regulating its intensity, by transform-
ing the performer into a visual “type,” and finally, by relating the performer to addi-
tional structural elements of design.
Unique Body Language
Many stars have distinctive, highly identifiable ways of moving. Denzel Washington,
for example, has a centered, rolling gait that projects calmness and power.
Filmmakers often capitalize on the body language of an established star so that it
becomes part of the visual design of a film. John Wayne had a peculiar manner of
walking that, in time, became famous. A large and very graceful man, his feet were
quite small in relation to his bulk, and he developed an easy, fluid gait that riveted at-
tention—such a large man moving so easily on small feet. Actress Katharine Hepburn
(with whom he worked in Rooster Cogburn , 1975) was very impressed by his light
movements.Wayne’s graceful, catlike movements became a justly famous part of his
screen persona, evident in scores of films over many decades. In Red River , Wayne
walks through a herd of cattle, and they scatter to get out of his way. It’s an impres-
sive thing to see.
In 1976, at the end of his career, Wayne appeared in The Shootist , a film with
strong biographical elements in which he played an aging gunfighter dying of cancer,
much as Wayne, the actor, would soon do. At the climax of the film, Wayne’s charac-
ter, J. B. Books, agrees to meet three gunfighters for a shoot-out in the town saloon.
Wayne enters the saloon, and the film’s director, Don Siegel, privileges his walk by
letting Wayne traverse the length of the saloon from the front door in the background
to the bar in the foreground. Siegel lets the moment play without cutting, enabling the
viewer to observe and enjoy the walk one final time in what was to be his last film.
By emphasizing the unique body language of its star, the visual design of The Shootist
tailors its mise-en-scène to blend Wayne’s screen persona and the character of J. B. Books
into a seamless whole. It does so most explicitly during the opening credit sequence, when
Books is introduced through clips from earlier John Wayne Westerns. In each clip, Wayne
gracefully performs some physical action—galloping a horse across a river, diving off a
wagon under gunfire, snatching a thrown rifle from midair. The clips span 20 years of
filmmaking, their images encoding a history of John Wayne’s physical performances, a
history that in The Shootist becomes the identity of the character he plays.
Charlie Chaplin is another performer whose films center on his unique and
expressive body language. Chaplin’s famous exit at the conclusion of his pictures
showed him walking away from the camera with his back to it, waddling in his
famous splay-footed fashion and twirling his cane. Chaplin’s camerawork was ex-
tremely simple and functional. He avoided extravagant camera movements and fancy
angles, preferring, instead, to use the camera as a passive observer of his pantomime
performance, believing, correctly, that what he did in front of the camera was more
important than how the camera itself might move to comment on the action of a
scene. The mise-en-scène of his films centers on his body language and costume.
136

Acting
Choreographing Expression
Filmmakers regulate acting style in keeping with their design objectives for a film.
This often entails a deliberate placement of the performers in relation to the camera.
Alfred Hitchcock, for example, precisely choreographed his performers, and they had
very limited freedom to bring material of their own devising that affected the content
and design of Hitchcock’s shots. During a love scene in Notorious (1946), in one ex-
tended shot Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman walk from a balcony to the interior of a
hotel room, and Grant picks up a telephone and converses with his boss. Hitchcock
insisted that Grant and Bergman maintain an embrace, kiss, and nuzzle during the
length of the shot as they walked across the set, and they were filmed by a moving
camera. The maneuver was extremely difficult to execute. It required that the actors
maintain a very unnatural posture, but Hitchcock wanted the visual effect of the sus-
tained embrace and the camera’s intimate involvement with the lovers.
A filmmaker also can regulate performance by controlling its degree of emotional
expression. At one extreme, severe restraint can work to orient the viewer to surface
rather than depth. Citizen Kane (1941) revolves around the mystery of how Charles
Foster Kane came to be the man he was. In a crucial scene from childhood, where he
is taken from his parents to be raised by a rich guardian, director Orson Welles has
actress Agnes Moorehead play Kane’s mother in an opaque and impenetrable way.
Her facial expressions and voice are flat and unmodulated, even when the character
appears in close-up framings. As a result, the viewer can only attend to the surfaces
of this character—her face, her posture—as Moorehead’s performance establishes
these. It is very difficult to “read” beyond them, to see into the character, to infer her
FUNNY FACE (PARAMOUNT, 1957)
Born in Belgium and trained as a ballet dancer, Audrey Hepburn became one of Hollywood’s
biggest stars in the 1950s. With her lean, dancer’s body and natural beauty, she com-
manded the screen with exceptional whimsy and charm. She was very adept at physical
comedy, and her movements were light, airy, and graceful, even when a scene called on her
to play clumsy. Hepburn was a unique personality on screen in the period, and even when
playfully costumed as she is here, her star appeal shines through. Frame enlargement.
137

Acting
motives and feelings in abandoning her child and to understand the nature of Kane’s
relationship with his parents. This difficulty helps state the film’s overall theme and
design, which stress that Charles Foster Kane is, in fundamental ways, unknowable.
The impenetrability of the mother deepens the mystery of Kane. The acting style
expresses the theme that is evoked elsewhere in the film by low-key lighting, camera
movement, and editing.
French director Robert Bresson was a master filmmaker who worked from a
set of unique ideas about the proper role of actors in cinema. He generally preferred
that his performers be empty vessels. He regarded his performers not as actors but as
models who should pose in an emotionally flat manner for the camera. He avoided
using actors whose facial expressions and gestural styles projected specific emotions.
He wanted his actors to be recessive, passive, and neutral in their playing style, and
he directed them to speak in a monotone. By reducing all stylistic ornamentation,
he wanted to illuminate the interior, spiritual lives of the characters. Conventional
acting, he felt, turned cinema into theatre and did not get at the interior realities he
wanted to explore.
Bresson explained his creative philosophy in a series of memos published in book
form as Notes on Cinematography. His preference for relatively emotionless acting is
very different from the norms of U.S. filmmaking, which tend to emphasize acting that
communicates a great deal of emotional information. Bresson’s style, however, has
influenced U.S. filmmakers. The end of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) shows the titular
thief, now in jail, finally acknowledging the grace a woman’s love has brought into
his life. By acknowledging this, he achieves a kind of spiritual redemption. Director
Paul Schrader was so impressed with this ending and its emotional restraint that he
recreated it as an homage in two of his own films, American Gigolo (1980) and Light
Sleeper (1992). (An homage is a reference in a film to another film or filmmaker.)
Compare Bresson’s approach with the expression on Chaplin’s face in the
concluding close-up of City Lights . Chaplin conveys a great deal of emotional
CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)
Mrs. Kane (Agnes Moorhead)
gazes at the young son she
is sending away and whom
she will never see again. As
directed by Orson Welles,
Moorhead’s expression is un-
readable. Is the character sad?
Relieved? What is she feeling?
By making the expression un-
readable, Welles plays against
the viewer’s desire to under-
stand the character. Doing
so, he treats the relationship
of Mrs. Kane and her son as a
mystery. Frame enlargement.
138

Acting
information about his character, and consequently, his expression is richer. In each
case, though, the playing style results from specific decisions made by the filmmakers.
These differences are tied to the respective mise-en-scènes of the films and the creative
approach of their directors. In each case, the actor’s level of expression becomes a
crucial element in the design of the film.
Many films feature more extroverted playing styles. Much comic acting depends
on exaggerating a character’s responses and emotions. Jim Carrey ( The Mask , 1994)
or Mike Myers ( Austin Powers , 1997) are funny because their reactions are dispro-
portional to the situation in which the character finds himself. But outside of comedy
there are important examples of this playing style. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon
(1950) is set in twelfth-century Japan and deals with a rape and murder, the circum-
stances of which are told differently by all the witnesses who recall it. As they recall
the crime, they assume extremely exaggerated and flamboyant acting styles. Actors
in the film gesture wildly, laugh hysterically, and contort their faces into extreme
emotional expressions.
Many viewers are struck by what seems to be a flamboyantly melodramatic and
excessive acting style. In part, this was precisely Kurosawa’s intention. In Rashomon
he wanted to recover some of the visual aesthetics and performance styles of the silent
cinema. Acting in early silent films was coded in uniquely different terms than those
that would become established during the sound period.
One scholar has termed early silent performance style histrionic because it was
based on a series of precise and exaggerated gestures. The histrionic gesture for fear
was to extend the arm palm out and clutch the throat with the other hand, whereas
shame was indicated by covering the face with one’s hands or arms. The histrionic
style of silent film melodrama was replaced in sound films by a more naturalistic style,
incorporating a more subtle and wider range of gestures based on concepts of realism
and naturalism. But Kurosawa had his performers overplay their roles as if they were
in a silent film.
Filmmakers regulate expression to integrate the actor into the design structure of
a shot. Acceptable modulations range from the extremely minimal, as in the films of
A MAN ESCAPED (GAUMONT, 1956)
Bresson said that he liked keeping actors in
the dark about the nature of the film they
were making. The less actors knew, he felt,
the better. He was a radical filmmaker. His
working methods and goals were quite
unusual. By stripping the ornamentations
of theatre from an actor’s performance,
by directing them not to project emotion,
Bresson aimed to illuminate the poetry of
a person’s interior life. The film portrays
the efforts of Fontaine (Francois Leterrier),
a French Resistance fighter in World
War II, to escape from his Nazi captors.
Characteristic of Bresson’s lack of inter-
est in melodrama, the film’s title—in past
tense— removes the elements of surprise
and suspense from the narrative. Frame
enlargement.
139

Acting
Bresson or the acting of Clint Eastwood, to the histrionically exaggerated, as in the
films of Kurosawa, early silent cinema, or popular comic performers.
Typage
A third way in which performance style becomes an element of mise-en-scène is
through the employment of typage . Here, actors and their performances are visually
stylized, often in extreme terms, to suggest that the character embodies a particular
social or psychological type or category. This visual encoding of social or psychologi-
cal information often predominates in a film’s mise-en-scène.
SOCIAL TYPAGE Social typage was a major feature of classic Soviet filmmaking in the
1920s. Directors such as Sergei Eisenstein cast performers whose physical appearance
could be made to suggest the more abstract characteristics of social class. In Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin (1925), the sailors on board the battleship who mutiny against
their oppressive officers are embodiments of working-class virtue. The actors portray-
ing these sailors are beefy, muscular, and handsome. The actors portraying the ship’s
officers have unappealing physiques, alternately thin and wizened or obese. A master of
visual caricature, Eisenstein correlated the appearance of actors, their faces and bodies,
with more general ideas about social identity.
A recent instance of this kind of visual caricature is evident in Starship Troopers
(1997), in which the military officers wear Nazi-like uniforms and insignias and are
filmed in stark, geometric patterns to express the film’s underlying theme that war
makes fascists of everyone. Like many of the combat veterans in the film, Rasczak
(Michael Ironside) is an amputee with a mechanical appendage, making the character
an emblem of the state’s war machine.
In Sergio Leone’s epic Western Once upon a Time in the West (1969), the spread of
corrupt business practices into the undeveloped American West is symbolized in the bone
cancer that has twisted and crippled the body of the wealthy railroad baron, J. P. Morton
(Gabriel Ferzetti). Morton’s twisted body is given significant visual attention in the scenes
RASHOMON (1950)
Exaggerated performance
styles may deliberately
break with traditions of nat-
uralism and realism. Toshiro
Mifune’s mannered acting
enables director Kurosawa
to recover the visual
aesthetics of silent cinema.
Frame enlargement.
140

Acting
where he appears. In Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985), a political belief that Soviet
communist society dehumanizes its citizens is expressed through the social typage of
Rocky’s Soviet opponent, Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who has a robot-like appearance and
behaves as a merciless fighting machine.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPAGE Psychological typage can be seen in the expressionist style
of filmmaking that has its origin in 1920s German cinema. Expressionist films such
as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922) present grotesque char-
acters, pathological emotional states, and fantastic settings in which the visual distor-
tions were indicators of twisted minds or spirits. The expressionist style entered U.S.
cinema in the 1930s in the cycle of horror films made at Universal Pictures. The physi-
cal deformities in characters such as Frankenstein’s monster externalize their warped
inner humanity.
The Night of the Hunter (1955), a psychological thriller about good and evil fo-
cusing on a maniacal preacher’s pursuit of two young children who know the where-
abouts of a fortune, used expressionist pictorial and performance styles. Actor Robert
Mitchum’s contorted face intentionally recalls the expressionism of early German
cinema. Conceived in homage to this tradition is the villain Max Schreck (Christopher
Walken) in Batman Returns (1992). The character is named for the German actor
who played the vampire in Nosferatu , and he sports a hairpiece that makes him look
like Rotwang, the mad inventor in Metropolis (1926).
Performance style, then, can be manipulated to evoke ideas of social category or
psychological condition. Soviet political typage evoked the idea of the virtue of the pro-
letariat, whereas the visual typage operative in expressionist styles elicits the anxieties
associated with the supernatural, madness, or psychological disturbance. Warren Beatty’s
production Dick Tracy (1990) illustrates a combination of psychological and social
typage. The visual style of the film is borrowed from comic strips, and the grotesquely

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925); ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1936)
Social typage in the films of Eisenstein. In Battleship Potemkin, a snarling naval officer
personifies the evil of the old regime. He commands a firing squad about to execute the
film’s noble heroes. In Alexander Nevsky, helmets give the evil Teutonic Knights a sinister and
dehumanized appearance. Frame enlargements.
141

Acting
exaggerated features of the gangsters, in comparison with Dick Tracy’s clean-cut good
looks and the virtuous appearance of his lover, Tess Trueheart, are a powerful shorthand
way of visually expressing the social Darwinian view that criminals are mentally de-
formed and sick and that the law-abiding are virtuous and emotionally sound.
Visual Design of Performance
Filmmakers use elements of visual design in ways that affect how a viewer understands
a character at given moments in the story. In such ways, the performer is integrated as
one component in the visual design of shots and scenes. It is for this reason that an ac-
tor in cinema is not the author of their performance as in theatre. In cinema, too many

NOSFERATU (1922); FRANKENSTEIN (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, 1931)
Contorted bodies, twisted psyches in the German expressionist style. In Germany, the
vampire killer in F. W. Murnau’s version of Dracula. In Hollywood, the expressionist style
used in the horror classic Frankenstein. Frame enlargements.
THE DARK KNIGHT (WARNER BROS., 2008)
The Joker’s disfigured face points to his disfigured mind. Heath Ledger’s performance in-
ternalizes the visual typage suggested by the makeup in ways that enable him to portray
the Joker as a grotesque psychological monster. Frame enlargement.
142

Acting
other variables come into play to structure, rework, or revise the performance. In the
expressionist style of early German films, low-key lighting enclosed grotesque charac-
ters in a surrounding sea of darkness. The lighting adds to the performance styles used
in those films, accentuating the creepiness of the characters and situations. In a some-
what different fashion, the lighting in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) makes serial
killer Hannibal Lecter look especially creepy. Placing a light below his face reverses
the normative distribution of shadows. Actors are virtually always lit from an elevated
angle, and reversing this practice gives the character an unnatural appearance.
A love scene in L.A. Confidential (1997) between Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger)
and Bud White (Russell Crowe) was filmed with warm amber light. A subsequent argu-
ment between the characters was shot in harder, bluish light. The color design visualizes
a tone that extends the emotions of the characters as conveyed by the actors. The two
are not separable. The viewer’s emotional impression of the scenes is a product of both
the performances and the color design. By being compatible with the psychological
mood of the scenes, the color design externalizes the emotional quality of the perfor-
mances and the shift from passion to psychological distance in the characters.
Consider another example. In Citizen Kane (1941), the title character, newspa-
per owner Charles Foster Kane, announces to his employees that his newspaper will
be guided by a series of principles. Among these are truthfulness in reporting and a
commitment to look out for the interests of the poor. Kane announces these by lean-
ing over his desk. As he does so, his face goes into the shadows. (The scene occurs at
night and is lit using low-key setups.)
Because of the lighting, the viewer has an ambivalent response to Kane’s declara-
tion of principles. The viewer suspects that he doesn’t really mean them. On the one
hand, this conviction is based on the understanding of Kane that has been developing
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (ORION PICTURES, 1991)
The lighting of Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) reverses the normative distribution of
shadows on the human face to give him an eerie and unnatural appearance. Hopkins’s
performance accentuates Lecter’s disturbing qualities, but the lighting and composition
(he looks directly into the camera) enhance and intensify the performance, integrating
the actor into the shot’s visual design. Frame enlargement.
143

Acting
through the narrative and from the performance of Orson Welles, who masterfully
suggests Kane’s mercurial, opportunistic, and ever-changing personality. On the other
hand, however, the viewer’s ambivalence arises from the lighting design. The shadow-
ing of Kane’s face as he reads the principles extends and comments on his opportunism
and lack of sincerity. Performance style and visual design become part of a unifying
whole called mise-en-scène .
PERFORMANCE, EMOTION, AND THE VIEWER’S
RESPONSE
As with other areas of film structure, the performance component includes stylistic
transformations of human behavior and feeling but also establishes clear references
and correspondences with that behavior. Viewers evaluate performances and char-
acters by drawing comparisons with their knowledge of human behavior and what
seems to be a plausible, likely, or consistent response by a character in a scene’s dra-
matic or comedic situation. These judgments are based on standards derived from
real-life experience, as well as expectations based on genre or other storytelling
conventions.
Experimental evidence indicates that people are extremely skilled at evaluating and
identifying the emotions that can be conveyed through gesture and facial expression.
Many of these emotions are context-dependent. Certain expressions have particular
meanings in given cultures. Other kinds of expressions, though, seem to cross cultures
and function as universal signs of human emotion (in particular, expressions associated
with the emotions of fear, anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust). A viewer
can watch a movie from another country or culture and easily identify from the actors’
expressions many of the emotions being conveyed in the scene. This universal aspect
of facial expression, and the camera’s ability to emphasize it, are major reasons for the
cinema’s appeal throughout the world and across cultures.
CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)
Lighting and composition add
information to an actor’s performance
to make it part of a film’s visual design.
Charles Foster Kane reads his declaration
of principles but steps into the shadows
as he does so, enhancing the viewer’s
suspicion that he is insincere. Frame
enlargement.
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Acting
Interpretive and Emotional Responses by Viewers
Because the facial and gestural components of performance invite comparisons with
real-life emotions, situations, and circumstances, they elicit both interpretive and emo-
tional responses from viewers. Interpreting the performance, a viewer asks whether
the character’s response is plausible, likely, convincing, and/or proportional to the
situation. These are cognitive judgments that influence emotional responses. In many
older movies, characters behave quite differently than in contemporary cinema. In
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), for example, a young woman and a police de-
tective, who have just met only a few days ago, declare their love for one another and
talk of marriage. Despite the evident sincerity of the actors’ performances, many con-
temporary viewers find this turn of events implausible. It doesn’t square with their un-
derstanding of how people under those circumstances would behave. This judgment,
in turn, underlies such viewers’ decision not to invest their emotions in the scene.
On the other hand, if viewers decide that a character’s behavior and an actor’s
performance are appropriate and convincing, given the narrative circumstances, they
may go on to share in the character’s emotions by way of empathy. Empathy is a will-
ingness to understand a character’s feelings and even, under the right circumstances,
THE SILENCE OF
THE LAMBS (ORION
PICTURES, 1991)
Watching The Silence of
the Lambs , viewers react
to Clarice Starling (Jodie
Foster) and serial killer
Hannibal Lecter (Anthony
Hopkins) by forming com-
plex cognitive, emotional,
and moral judgments about
the characters. The ele-
ments of structural design
guide viewers in forming
these judgments. Frame
enlargements.

145

Acting
to feel similar emotions. It is based on complex allegiances with characters, as viewers
evaluate the moral and emotional acceptability of a character’s screen behavior. This,
in turn, influences their readiness to empathize with the characters and situations.
In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), most viewers are probably scared of the
insane serial killer Hannibal Lecter, although they may find him a compelling and
fascinating figure. By contrast, the film’s heroine, Clarice Starling, behaves in a
way that most viewers probably deem exceptionally heroic, displaying extreme
honesty and courage in her dealings with both Lecter and her male superiors at the
FBI. As a result of the cognitive, emotional, and moral judgments they make about
these characters, viewers have differing emotional responses toward them. They
are frightened of Hannibal Lecter but are frightened for Clarice Starling when she
is in a situation of danger. Of the two serial killers in the film—Lecter and Buffalo
Bill—viewers respond with loathing and disgust toward Bill because he has no
redeeming qualities. Lecter, by contrast, is funny, witty, and cultivated and shows
real tenderness toward Clarice, qualities that Anthony Hopkins emphasizes in his
performance. Thus, while viewers morally condemn both killers, their response to
Lecter is far more ambivalent.
A viewer’s reaction to a character and the actor’s performance is a complex pro-
cess. It involves an intricate series of inferences and evaluations, judgments, and ap-
praisals at cognitive and emotional levels. In films displaying high levels of craft and
artistry, performance style becomes part of a unified mise-en-scène in evoking these
reactions. Camera placement, color, composition, and other aspects of mise-en-scène
work to emphasize the emotional displays by performers. A director can cut to a
closer camera position—the better to highlight a character’s response and the actor’s
facial display at a crucial moment in the narrative—or a cinematographer and produc-
tion designer can employ a palette of colors expressly designed to heighten the psy-
chological mood or atmosphere of the scene. The design of a coherent mise-en-scène
gives the filmmaker a uniquely powerful way of guiding the viewer toward a desired
set of intellectual and emotional responses.
SUMMARY
Acting links cinema with theater as a medium of performance, but the film actor is
not always the center of the show. A filmmaker typically combines an actor’s perfor-
mance with other elements of design furnished by the camera, sets, lights, and props,
and in the final combination of elements, the actor may or may not be central.
Compared with theater, film acting is more challenging because its condi-
tions are more artificial. The film actor must make do with little rehearsal, must
know how much the camera will magnify what he or she does, must play to a
nonexistent audience, must know how a camera reads a scene, and must share
the scene with nonexistent props, characters, or effects that will be added in
postproduction.
Film acting has emphasized a naturalistic playing style, and historically, actors
have been divided into stars and supporting players. Among stars, the personality star
has been the most common type. Since the beginning of cinema, viewers have been at-
tracted to personality stars, and their appeal continues undiminished.
Film actors today may combine method and technical approaches, although the
method approach did not itself appear in cinema until the 1950s.
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Acting
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
coverage
expressionist
extras
homage
master shot
method acting
Stanislavsky
star persona
stars
supporting players
technical acting
typage
SUGGESTED READINGS
Charles and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (Piscataway,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Michael Caine, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making (New York: Applause,
1997).
Steve Carlson, Hitting Your Mark: What Every Actor Really Needs to Know on a Hollywood
Set (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Production, 1999).
James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1990).
Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith
Biograph Films (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Carole Zucker, Figures of Light: Actors and Directors Illuminate the Art of Film Acting (New
York: Plenum, 1995).
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148

■ describe the basic rules of continuity editing
and the ways in which they establish
continuity of action from shot to shot
■ explain how continuity editing establishes a
coherent and orderly physical world on screen
■ explain how editing approaches that
emphasize jump cuts, spatial fragmentation,
and thematic montage work as alternatives to
continuity editing
■ define the role of editing in the production
process
■ describe the difference between linear and
nonlinear editing systems
■ explain the basic methods of joining shots
■ explain how editing helps create continuity,
dramatic focus, tempo, and narration and
point of view
■ explain how editing establishes parallel action
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Editing: Making the Cut

From Chapter 5 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
149

Editing: Making the Cut
Many filmmakers regard editing as the single most important creative step in determining the
look and shape of the finished film. A good editor can save a film that has been directed in
a mediocre fashion, and poor editing can damage the work of even the finest director. This
chapter looks closely at the role of editing in the production process, continuity editing codes
(these are the rules of editing that are found in most commercial feature films), and alterna-
tives to continuity editing.
WHAT IS EDITING?
Editing is the work of joining shots to assemble the finished film. The editor selects the
best shots from the large amount of footage the director and cinematographer have pro-
vided, assembles these in order, and connects them using a variety of optical transitions.
In theory, the process of editing begins with the completion of filming or cinematog-
raphy. In practice, however, the editor may begin consultations with the producer and
director and may even begin cutting the film while principal filming is being completed.
Most editors, however, will not watch the process of filming or view the locations where
the film is shot. This allows them to view the footage unhampered by knowledge about
the actual conditions that existed in front of the camera and to visualize with greater
freedom various ways of combining the shots.
The amount of authority that the editor has may vary from production to pro-
duction and, consequently, so may the editor’s relationship with the director and pro-
ducer. These factors determine when the editor may begin work and in what capacity
on any given production.
Despite these variations, the basics of editing have remained relatively constant.
The first task is to assemble a rough cut , which is done by eliminating all the unusable
footage containing technical or performance errors. These may include out-of-focus
shots or shots containing unstable camera movement, flubbed lines by an actor, inau-
dible sound recording, or lighting problems. Once all this footage has been removed,
the editor then assembles the remaining footage in scene and sequence order. This
rough assembly will be pruned, refined, and polished to yield the final cut . The final
cut is the completed product of an editor’s work. It includes the complete assembly
and timings of all shots in the film’s finished form. It is in going from the rough cut to
the final cut that the real art and magic in editing lies.
LINEAR AND NONLINEAR SYSTEMS
Editors today use a nonlinear editing system to accomplish their work. A nonlinear
system, such as the Avid, is computer-based and works with digital video (footage
shot on film must be converted to digital video), giving an editor instantaneous access
to any frame, shot, or edited sequence distributed anywhere in the existing footage.
The editor decides which footage to work on by using notes that describe the char-
acteristics, strengths, and flaws of particular shots. Prior to the 1990s, when the film
industry adopted digital editing systems, editors worked directly on celluloid film and
had to search manually through all the footage to find a desired shot or segment. This
■ describe how editing cues viewers to draw
connections and interpretations across shots
■ explain how editing establishes perceptual
constancies across shot and scene transitions
150

Editing: Making the Cut
older approach was a linear system because the editor could only search for one shot
at a time and had to do so by viewing footage sequentially, from beginning to end.
Digital systems have made editing a much faster process, and the complex and
instantaneous control they give an editor over the digitized footage helps to explain
why so many films— Mission Impossible 2 (2000), An Enemy of the State (1999),
Armageddon (1998)—have such fast and aggressive editing.
Films today have many, many more cuts and shot transitions than in earlier decades.
Many shots are only a few frames long, less than a second of screen time. The Bourne
Ultimatum (2007) features a dizzying array of speedy shot changes that often disorient
the viewer because the camera perspective is shaky and unsteady. Nonlinear systems
facilitate this more intensive editing style. To create the hyperfast shot transitions of
Moulin Rouge (2001), editor Jill Bilcock worked with a massive amount of digitized
footage. Scenes in the film were covered with a huge number of camera angles and set-
ups. She then created files of shots labeled “men in top hats and tails” or “glamour shots
of Nicole [Kidman]” and had instant electronic access to this material to use in building
the film’s montage sequences. (A montage is a scene composed of a rapid series of shots.)
Nonlinear systems enable editors to organize and manipulate such vast amounts of foot-
age. A film such as Moulin Rouge could not exist without computerized editing.
While digital systems have given editors greater control over their footage and in-
creased their abilities to manipulate it in ever more elaborate ways, these systems have
disadvantages. Unlike linear systems, the editor does not view a film image but rather an
electronic image on a small monitor, which is degraded in quality, with poor resolution.
This can bias editors toward close-ups because they will look better on the monitor than
long shots. Furthermore, because the monitor’s image is a poor guide to the visual quali-
ties of the actual film images, it forces an editor to rely more heavily on his or her notes
about the footage. It is arguable that editors using linear systems get to know their footage
MAN ON FIRE (PARAMOUNT, 2004)
Like many films today, Man on Fire has an especially fast cutting rate, with shot transitions
occurring at a rate of more than one per second. This quick shot of Denzel Washington
in a gun battle is only a few frames long, a fraction of a second in duration. The viewer
barely sees it as a single shot. Nonlinear editing systems have accelerated the editing rate
of contemporary films, giving editors new levels of control over huge amounts of footage
and enabling them to create the complex montages that have become typical of modern
film. Frame enlargement.
151

Editing: Making the Cut
better because they must search manually through all of it to find what they need. The
editor working on a digital system will not access footage that the notes have excluded.
Types of Visual Transitions
In joining the shots together into a rough and then a final cut, the film editor typically
employs three basic types of visual transition. The most commonly used transition is the
straight cut , which is visible on screen as a complete and instantaneous change of one
image or shot to another. The cut is typically used to join shots where there is no change
of narrative time or place involved. A cut from a shot of Julia Roberts looking off-frame
right to a shot of Denzel Washington looking off-frame left tells the viewer that Roberts
and Washington are looking at each other and that no changes in time or place have oc-
curred in the story between the shots.
When changes of time or place do need to be specified, the editor has several tech-
niques available. One is the dissolve . One shot begins to fade out to black, but before
it is gone completely, the next shot begins to appear on top of it so that there is a mo-
ment of superimposition in which the two shots are visible together. If an editor dis-
solved from a shot of Julia Roberts to a shot of Denzel Washington, the viewer would
know that some change in time or place in the story had occurred. The shot after the
dissolve might be taking place several hours after the shot preceding the dissolve, or it
may be occurring in a new location.
A substantial change of time or place is often indicated by the use of a fade . In this
case, the first shot fades completely to black. The darkness lasts on screen for a few mo-
ments, and then the next shot begins to fade in. In a fade, there is no moment of superim-
position. If the editor faded from a shot of Roberts to Washington, the shot after the fade
could be taking place several days or even weeks after the first.
By using these basic transitions, editors can establish important relations of time and
place in the story. These visual codes developed early in the history of film to enable
filmmakers to organize their story material and construct complex narratives by, for
example, using a fade to establish that one set of events is occurring at a later time than a
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (UNIVERSAL, 2007)
Director Paul Greengrass has developed a style that many have called “shaky-cam.” It
marries jerky, unstable camerawork to super-fast editing, creating an explosive style for
action filmmaking. Shot lengths are extremely brief, and the film as a whole becomes an
aggressive montage. Frame enlargement.
152

Editing: Making the Cut
A VERY LONG
ENGAGEMENT
(WARNER BROS.,
2004)
Because the dissolve
overlaps images,
editors often use this
transition for poetic
effects. Matilde (Audrey
Tautou) is searching
for her fiancé, who
was lost on the battle-
field during World
War I. She telephones
a woman who has
information and is
told about a group
of soldiers who found
a body hidden in an
underground bunker—
perhaps this was her
fiancé. As the call ends,
she reflects on this
information. The scene
plays in a single frame
containing a series of
shots that dissolve in
and out as split-screen
effects. This design
presents the story infor-
mation in a very fluid
and poetic manner.
Frame enlargements.
153

Editing: Making the Cut
previous scene. But filmmakers also use these optical transitions for their poetic and expres-
sive visual effects. Editors examine the footage closely, and when they join shots together,
they often do so because of the suggestive effects and ideas these combinations can create.
An editor may use a cut to join shots with similar graphic properties. The instantaneous
change of images produced by the cut calls attention to the graphic similarities or
differences, as the frame enlargements from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) demonstrate. In
Apollo 13 (1995), the cut was used poetically to show astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks),
stranded in a crippled spacecraft thousands of miles from Earth, and his anxious wife
“looking” at one another (across the cut and the thousands of miles that separate them).
Because it overlaps images, a dissolve can create many poetic effects. For a scene
in Blow (2001), when drug kingpin George Jung (Johnny Depp), in prison for the
remainder of his life, writes a tender letter to his father (Ray Liotta), whom he will
never see again, the editor joined shots of the characters, seen in separate locations,
with dissolves. One series of shots shows George taping a letter in prison, and the
other shows his father listening to the letter at a later date. The edited scene goes back
and forth between shots in each series. Each pair of shots is linked with a dissolve,
which connects the images of each character and suggests that the emotional bond be-
tween them persists despite their physical separation.
In The English Patient (1996), editor Walter Murch used a dissolve as the transi-
tion out of a flashback to show the youthful Count Almashy (Ralph Fiennes) touching
the face of his older self (by overlapping these images at the midpoint of the dissolve)
as he lay dying at a point many years later in the story.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
(COLUMBIA PICTURES,
1962)
Editors pay very close atten-
tion to the visual proper-
ties of the shots they join
together. They carefully
choose the edit points,
where they place cuts and
other optical transitions.
This famous cut in Lawrence
of Arabia —from a close-up
of Lawrence (Peter O’Toole)
blowing out a match to a
long shot of the Arabian
desert with the sun just
below the horizon—startles
the viewer with its radical
change of scale and with
the poetic association that
motivates the cut, one that
links the burning match
with the fiery desert. Frame
enlargements.
154

Editing: Making the Cut
OTHER OPTICAL TRANSITIONS Editors can use other optical transitions to sequence story
information and create visual effects. In this regard, however, contemporary film is rela-
tively impoverished. A viewer who looks at films from the silent period, for example,
may notice devices such as the iris . Irises were used much like fades to signal the end of
an important chapter in the story or to conclude a scene or film. In an iris-out, a circular
APOLLO 13 (UNIVERSAL,
1995)
Separated by thousands of miles,
Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and his
wife (Kathleen Quinlan) “see”
each other across the cut. Their
matching eyelines and the cam-
era angles imply that they are
looking at one another, despite
the literal impossibility at this
point in the story for them to do
so. The film’s editor has created a
moment of visual poetry. Frame
enlargements.

THE CIRCUS (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1928)
Contemporary films seldom
use the iris, which is a shame
because it offers filmmakers a
uniquely expressive visual effect.
It directs the viewer’s attention to
a selected portion of the frame,
providing visual emphasis. When
used to conclude a scene or film,
it does so with great finality. At
the end of The Circus, Chaplin’s
melancholy tramp walks away
from the camera as an iris slowly
closes down around his figure.
Visually poetic, it makes for a
splendid exit and conclusion to
the film. Frame enlargement.
155

Editing: Making the Cut
pattern appeared on screen and gradually closed over the image. To open a scene, an iris-
in might be employed, in which case the image appeared inside a small circular opening
that gradually expanded on the screen.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s editors used wipes quite frequently. The
wipe is visible as a solid line traveling across the screen, sometimes vertically, some-
times horizontally. As it moves, it pushes one shot off the screen to reveal another.
Unlike fades and dissolves, which tend to be more gradual and more subtle transi-
tional devices, the wipe is a very aggressive, highly visible, and noticeable device.
Perhaps for this reason, Hollywood eventually stopped using it.
However, when contemporary filmmakers want to evoke early film style, they
may choose to use these archaic editing devices. Joel and Ethan Coen use irises
in O Brother Where Art Thou! (2000), a film whose story is set during the Great
Depression, and George Lucas uses wipes throughout his Star Wars films, emulating
the early movie serials that were an inspiration for the series.

SEVEN SAMURAI (TOHO,
1954)
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa
frequently used the wipe. He
liked the aggressive, decisive way
that it replaced one shot with the
next. In Seven Samurai, a wipe
traveling from screen right to
screen left erases the shot of an
old farmer and reveals a crowded
town square. The wipe is visible
as the hard bar or line bisecting
the frame and dividing the two
shots. Frame enlargement.
Film Editors in the Hollywood Era
CLOSE-UP
During the Hollywood studio era, many of the indus-
try’s most prominent film editors were women.
Margaret Booth, for example, began work with
the great silent film director D. W. Griffith and then,
in the early 1930s, became one of the chief edi-
tors at MGM, the most prestigious of Hollywood’s
studios. She edited such prominent MGM films as
Historically, women have been shut of out many key
film production positions. Until the modern period,
very few women could be found working as directors,
cinematographers, producers, or sound designers.
Even in the modern period, by comparison with men
in the Hollywood industry they are underrepresented
in these positions. But this was never true for editing.
(continued)
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Editing: Making the Cut
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Camille (1936). In
1939, the studio promoted her to be the head of
all of its film editing operations. This was a tremen-
dously influential position, enabling her to shape the
emergence of Hollywood’s classical continuity edit-
ing in its mature form.
She ran the studio’s editing operations until the
late 1960s, when MGM fell on hard times. She then
worked as a freelance editor, extending classical
continuity editing into the modern period on such
films as The Way We Were (1973), The Sunshine Boys
(1975), The Goodbye Girl (1977), and others.
In some ways, Barbara McLean was her counter-
part at 20 th Century Fox. She began work as an edi-
tor in 1929, joined Fox in 1935 and was promoted
to chief editor in 1949. She edited many of Fox’s
now-classic films, including 12 O’Clock High (1949),
All About Eve (1950), The Gunfighter (1950), The
Snows of Kilamanjaro (1952), and The Robe (1953).
The editing of The Gunfighter is especially brilliant,
maintaining a tight running time of less than 90
minutes while sustaining a tense, exciting tone.
At MGM, Adrienne Fazan cut many of the great
musicals, including Anchors Aweigh (1945), An
American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952),
and Gigi (1958). At Paramount, Anne Bauchens
edited all of director Cecil De Mille’s movies from
1918 to 1956, and these included the two versions
that De Mille made of The Ten Commandments
(1923, 1956). Partnerships between an editor and a
director have been very common throughout cinema
history.
Dede Allen, for example, exerted a major influ-
ence on modern cinema style through her work
with key 1960s-era filmmakers. She literally changed
the look and rhythms of modern film with the
jumpy, discontinuous editing of Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), and she continued working with that film’s
director, Arthur Penn, on Alice’s Restaurant (1970),
Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975), and The
Missouri Breaks (1976). She also worked extensively
with director Sidney Lumet on such key classics as
Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and
her innovative editing helped to give those films a
nervous, jumpy tension and rhythm. She won an
Oscar for best editing for her work on the historical
epic Reds (1981), about the American journalist John
Reed, who witnesses the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Verna Fields edited numerous television
Westerns during the 1950s and feature films in the
1960s before emerging in the 1970s as a major
collaborator with key figures in the new genera-
tion of Hollywood filmmakers. After editing Haskell
Wexler’s classic Medium Cool (1969), she edited
three films for Peter Bogdanovich ( What’s Up
Doc , 1972; Paper Moon , 1973; Daisy Miller , 1974)
and did the sound editing on his Targets (1968).
Bogdanovich was an important new directorial tal-
ent in the period, as were George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg. Fields edited the breakthrough film for
both Lucas ( American Graffiti, 1973) and Spielberg
( Jaws , 1975). Her extraordinary gifts for telling a
story through editing helped to make Jaws into a
blockbuster.
Anne V. Coates’ career has had extraordinary
breadth. She began work as an editor in 1952
with The Pickwick Papers and cut numerous films
in Britain, which included the classic comedy The
Horse’s Mouth (1958). She emerged as one of cin-
ema’s greatest editors with her peerless work on
the magnificent Lawrence of Arabia (1962). She
continued in this vein of historical period films with
Beckett (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974),
and Chaplin (1992). But her work also includes
pictures in nearly every genre, including comedy
( What About Bob? , 1991; Catch and Release , 2006),
drama ( Erin Brockovich, 2000) action films for Clint
Eastwood ( In the Line of Fire , 1992) and Arnold
Schwarzenegger ( Raw Deal , 1986), and fantasy ( The
Golden Compass , 2007).
Thelma Schoonmaker has worked as Martin
Scorsese’s editor of choice since Raging Bull (1980).
Their collaboration is one of the most significant
director–editor partnerships in cinema history.
Schoonmaker’s aggressive shot combinations, freely
mixing jump cuts, long takes, freeze frames, mon-
tage, slow motion, and propulsive music video-style
cutting, have provided Scorsese’s films with one
of their dominant stylistic signatures. Their work
together includes Goodfellas (1990), The Age of
Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and
The Departed (2006). ■
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Editing: Making the Cut
FUNCTIONS OF EDITING
In close consultation with a film’s director, an editor combines shots to create nar-
rative and expressive effects. Let us now examine the editor’s work in more specific
terms. In turning a rough cut into a fine cut, the editor works to create (1) continuity,
(2) dramatic focus, (3) tempo, rhythm, mood, and (4) narration and point
of view.
Continuity
Continuity is a fundamental principle of narrative filmmaking. The story, and
the images used to tell it, must move along in an orderly and organized fashion.
Editors join shots in ways that emphasize relationships of continuity—of
orderliness— between them. If, during the course of a story, a character grows a
beard, then shots must be carefully selected to establish the proper continuity of
growth. In an early scene, the beard should not be longer or fuller than it appears
in a later one.
Proper continuity also may apply to movement. During a chase scene, if camera
positions establish that the escaping prisoner is running from screen right to left, fol-
lowed by a posse hot on his trail, it will not do to change direction by editing sub-
sequent shots with the escaping prisoner running from left to right while the posse
moves from right to left. If this were to happen, it would seem as if both the prisoner
and the posse were running toward each other. These principles of continuity are a
little complicated, but they are extremely important, and we will cover them fully
later in the chapter.
The continuity that editing creates often exists only on screen and not in the
material as it was filmed . A dialogue scene in Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), for
example, is composed of reverse-angle shots of two groups of characters. In the
film’s story, they are conversing in one location. In reality, as the scene was filmed,
each reverse-angle setup was filmed in a different location, miles away from one
another, and was shot a month apart. The editing joined the locations together and
made them seem connected as one. Many films are made this way.
THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS
(PARAMOUNT, 1956)
This spectacular epic from
producer-director Cecil B.
DeMille was the last picture
from the editor–director
team of Anne Bauchens
and DeMille. The two had
worked together regularly
since the silent era, making
Bauchens one of the key au-
thors on these films. Frame
enlargement.

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Editing: Making the Cut
TITUS (FOX
SEARCHLIGHT, 1999)
This conversation scene
composed of reverse-angle
shots was photographed
in two different loca-
tions and a month apart.
One setup (A), showing
Tamora (Jessica Lange)
and Saturninus (Alan
Cumming) on the stairs,
was shot at Mussolini’s
government building in
Rome. The other setup
(B), showing them with
Titus (Anthony Hopkins,
center background), was
shot a month later at the
Villa Adriana, a historical
site outside Rome. The
editing joins the locations
as if they were one. The
continuity that editing
creates may be very dif-
ferent from the reality of
what the camera actually
has photographed. Frame
enlargements.

(a)
(b)
Dramatic Focus
The editor cuts the footage to find or emphasize the dramatic focus of a scene. In this re-
spect, the editor actually can improve an actor’s performance by deleting footage in which
the actor may give an improper line reading or by tightening up the reaction time between
shots to make the actor appear to have swifter psychological reflexes. In extreme cases,
the editor may entirely reshape the film so that a secondary character becomes a major
character. This happened in Woody Allen’s Academy Award-winning Annie Hall (1977).
In Allen’s initial conception and all through shooting, the character of Annie Hall
was a subsidiary one. The focus was on Alvy Singer, the character played by Woody
Allen, and rather than telling a story about a relationship, the film was conceived as a
loosely connected series of skits emphasizing Alvy’s personality and psychological hang-
ups. But the editing changed the nature and structure of the film, making Annie a major
character and the movie a story of the affair between Alvy and Annie. During editing,
it became apparent that the original conception for the film was not working. With
Allen’s approval, editor Ralph Rosenblum began to cut to emphasize the Alvy–Annie re-
lationship. The resulting film won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Direction.
In finding the dramatic focus of the scene, the editor may, on occasion, create
scenes that did not exist in the script or the filming but result purely from editing.
Annie Hall furnishes another example. At the end of the film, after Alvy and Annie
have broken up, the story concludes with Alvy in a reflective mood thinking back
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Editing: Making the Cut
on their relationship. Editor Rosenblum put together a memory sequence in which
Alvy speaks in voice-over about his attitudes toward relationships while the im-
ages show a series of highlights from previous episodes in Alvy and Annie’s affair.
The sequence was cut to music, a reprise of Annie singing “Seems Like Old Times”
from an earlier scene. This concluding montage enabled the film to end in a visually
creative way and one that was emotionally complex and evocative. But the montage
had not been scripted; it resulted purely from the editing process.
A similar experience occurred during the editing of Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather (1972). At the end of production, Coppola had to go to Sicily to film some
sequences there, the last he needed to complete even though they dealt with material
much earlier in the story. The script called for the film to conclude with the bap-
tism of Michael Corleone’s son followed by the assassination of Michael’s enemies.
While Coppola was in Sicily, editor Peter Zinner, believing the original conception
to be somewhat flat, decided to create a montage in which the baptism was intercut
with the assassination scenes. This sequence, conjoining the baptism with the bloody
executions, is one of the most memorable and powerful montages in modern cinema,
concluding the film on an exceptionally strong note.
Tempo and Mood
By varying the lengths of shots, the editor establishes rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Brief
shots will produce a faster pace, whereas shots of longer duration typically produce a
fuller, more measured pacing. The length of the shots never remains constant through-
out a film. By varying their length, the editor modulates the pacing of a film. Action
films today are cut at an extremely fast pace, whereas a historical epic such as Dances
with Wolves (1990) establishes a measured tempo with shots of longer duration.
ANNIE HALL (UNITED ARTISTS, 1977)
Intensive collaboration between director Woody Allen and editor Ralph Rosenblum drastically
rearranged the design of Annie Hall . Most significantly, Annie (Diane Keaton, pictured) be-
came a major character, and a stronger narrative emerged. Frame enlargement.
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Editing: Making the Cut
The editor also may cut to establish appropriate moods. In a horror film, for ex-
ample, the cutting can help to create suspense and shock. If a character goes into a dark
room where viewers know a monster is lurking, the editing might emphasize tight close-
ups of the character’s face. Typically, the director and cinematographer would have
filmed these with the express purpose of facilitating this approach to the scene’s edit-
ing. The tight close-ups prevent viewers from seeing the room and what may be lurking
there. If the monster suddenly lurches into the frame, or if the editor abruptly cuts to a
longer shot showing the monster just behind the character, viewers will jump with fright.
In The Bridges of Madison County (1995), director Clint Eastwood and edi-
tor Joel Cox purposely created a slow pace, letting shots linger on screen, in order
to give the screen romance room to develop in a convincing manner and to let the
lovers have ample time with one another and the viewer with these characters. The
lush, full-bodied romantic tone of the film is very much a function of its editing.
Narration and Point of View
Editing permits filmmakers to control the flow of story information and point of view
as it is established through changing camera positions. Editing determines the way in
which a scene’s story information is conveyed.
A sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), edited by George
Tomasini, demonstrates this relationship between editing, storytelling, and the
control of point of view. Hitchcock designed Rear Window as an experiment. He
wanted to restrict the physical scene and setting of the action while maintaining
dramatic interest. Most of the camera’s positions are restricted to what the main
character—a professional photographer with a broken leg who is confined to a
wheelchair—can see from his apartment window. The photographer, Jeffries (James
Stewart), begins to eavesdrop on his neighbors; from his window, he can see into
the windows of their apartments across the courtyard. Jeffries comes to believe that
a murder has been committed by one of his neighbors, a salesman named Thorwald
(Raymond Burr). Jeffries hears a mysterious scream during the night and then sees
Thorwald going in and out of his apartment carrying a large suitcase. Because this is
a Hitchcock film, viewers are not surprised to learn that the contents of the suitcase
turn out to be quite ghoulish. They are the dismembered pieces of Thorwald’s wife.
Throughout this sequence, the editing implies associations between the shots.
This is an important principle of narrative filmmaking. Each shot means what it

(a)

(b)
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Editing: Making the Cut
(c) (d)
(e) (f)
(g)
REAR WINDOW (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1954)
In cross cutting shots of Jeffries (James Stewart) looking off frame with shots presenting views of the apartment
courtyard, the editing gives the shot series a point-of-view structure. Viewers infer that the courtyard views are what
Jeffries sees. The shots A-B-C show a comic series—Jeffries sees a couple struggling to get out of the rain and is
amused. Shots D-E-F-G show Jeffries watching the killer Thorwald leaving his apartment in the middle of the night.
Note that the more extreme angle of Jeffries’ glance in shot F points to a new location, the street beyond the apart-
ment complex. The angles at which Jeffries looks off-frame tell us where things are located. In reality, actor James
Stewart is not seeing anything pictured here. Hitchcock simply told him “look off-camera right” and “look up and
off-camera left” and then created the associations and story meanings in the editing. Frame enlargements.
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Editing: Making the Cut
does by virtue of its surrounding context. Hitchcock and Tomasini cut back and
forth between Jeffries’s face and shots of what he is meant to be seeing across the
courtyard. These latter are his point-of-view shots; they simulate what he can see
out his window. Hitchcock and Tomasini want viewers to interpret Jeffries’s facial
expressions and reactions as responses to what has occurred in the point-of-view
shots. Notice, however, that Jeffries and what he sees and reacts to are never shown
within the same shot. It is the editing that creates the association.
PARALLEL ACTION To tell sophisticated stories, filmmakers need a way of suggest-
ing (simultaneous) parallel action, that is, that two or more things are happening
at the same time. This enables them to weave together several lines of action in the
telling of their story. Parallel action is achieved through editing. The editing in Rear
Window manipulates multiple lines of action: Thorwald’s trips to and from his
apartment, the arrival home of the composer, the return home of Miss Torso, the
comical response of the couple sleeping on their balcony in the rain, and Jeffries’s
surveillance of all this and his reactions to it. The editing references each of these
lines of action to the others by establishing relationships of time and location.
Without the use of parallel editing, that is, editing that interrelates multiple lines of
action, filmmakers could not create complex narratives involving the actions of nu-
merous characters, story lines, and subplots.
One especially important form of parallel action is cross-cutting . In cross- cutting,
the editor goes back and forth, typically with increasing speed, between two or more
lines of action. The Fugitive (1993) opens with a spectacular train wreck during which
the fugitive (Harrison Ford) escapes from his jailers. The cross-cutting goes back and
forth with increasing speed between shots of the oncoming train and the frenzied,
panicked reactions of prisoners trapped inside a bus that has fallen across the tracks.
By cross-cutting shots of increasingly shorter duration, the editor creates an accelerat-
ing tempo and speed and an increasing amount of tension.
Among the inferences viewers routinely draw across cuts are inferences of
simultaneous action. The cross-cut shots of the train and the frantic prisoners prompt
the viewer to make an unambiguous interpretation: The train is about to smash the bus.
Filmmakers guide viewers in drawing these inferences by composing and editing shots
to create a strong flow of action across the cuts. How is this accomplished?
THE PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUITY EDITING
As its name implies, continuity editing is a style of cutting that emphasizes smooth
and continuously flowing action from shot to shot. Instead of noticing the abruptness
of a cut in a popular movie, the viewer pays attention to story information and char-
acter relationships. Shots are joined so that the action flows smoothly over the cut.
The remarkable achievements of the continuity editing system are sometimes dispar-
aged in discussions that describe the style as “transparent” or “invisible.” In reality,
continuity editing is a highly constructed and accomplished style that creates an im-
pression of realism and naturalism from carefully applied editing rules.
A Continuous Flow of Action
The goal of continuity editing is to emphasize the apparent realism and naturalness of
the story and to minimize the viewer’s awareness of film technique and the presence
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Editing: Making the Cut
of the camera. The remarkable achievement of continuity cutting lies in successfully
meeting this goal. When viewers see a popular commercial film in the theater, they
rarely notice details of camera position and movement. Instead, they are swept up
by the story and the characters. There is a major paradox here. As viewers watch a
movie, they see a rapid succession of individual shots on screen accompanied by an
ever-changing series of camera positions and angles. What they see , therefore, is frag-
mentary and discontinuous. A film is assembled from hundreds of individual shots. Its
structure is inherently fragmentary. What viewers experience , however, is the impres-
sion of a smoothly flowing, unbroken stream of imagery in which the story and the
characters come convincingly to life. How is this apparent contradiction between the
reality of what viewers see and the impression of what they experience explained?
The answer is that filmmakers have discovered methods of connecting their
shots that minimize the disruption of shot changes. In other words, continuity
editing makes possible the impression of narrative wholeness and completeness.
Continuity editing also has helped make cinema very popular because it can be so
easily understood. Films edited according to these principles do not pose difficult
perceptual or interpretive challenges. Films can be edited so that they will be easy
to understand and will therefore appeal to wide segments of the market.
Here lie the true achievements of the continuity system. The system emphasizes
visual coherence and ease of comprehension. These are things that must be created in
film. Because of the camera’s ever-changing angle of view, the potential in film for in-
coherence and discontinuity is always much greater, and filmmakers accordingly have
to strive very hard to achieve the opposite.
The Hollywood classic Casablanca (1942) provides
some representative sequences that display continuity
editing codes in action. Among the most important
codes of the continuity system are the following: the
use of a master shot to organize the subsequent cut-
ting within a scene, matching shots to the master, the
shot-reverse-shot series with the eyeline match, and the
180-degree rule.
Casablanca is a wartime adventure film about
heroic resistance against the Nazis, and it is also a
lush romantic melodrama. Rick (Humphrey Bogart),
a nightclub owner, has come to Casablanca to get
over a disastrous love affair with Ilsa Lund (Ingrid
Bergman). Ilsa turns up unexpectedly one night in
Rick’s cafe and sets in motion the romantic fireworks
that move the plot along to its exciting conclusion.
Matching to the Master Shot
In the first scene illustrated here, one of the atten-
dants in Rick’s nightclub awaits Rick’s approval before
Case Study CASABLANCA
admitting some customers into the room where roulette
and gambling occur. Rick is filmed from behind, in the
foreground, and the door to his casino is visible in the
background of the shot ( a ). This shot functions as the
master shot position for this scene. The master shot
shows the spatial layout of a scene, all the characters’
positions in relation to each other and to the set. The
master shot is typically filmed first, with all the action in
a scene from beginning to end photographed from this
position. Then directors typically go back to film inserts,
close-ups, and medium shots that will be cut with the
master shot to create the final edited scene and whose
compositional elements will match with the master.
Rick sees the doorman pausing in the entrance
with several guests, awaiting his approval to enter
the casino. Shot 2 ( b ) is an example of a matched
cut . The two compositions—the master shot and the
medium close-up of the doorman and guests—match.
The camera’s angle of view is similar in each shot.
The only difference is that the camera is closer to the
(continued)
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Editing: Making the Cut

(a)

(b)
characters in shot 2 ( b ). A second matching element is
the positioning of the doorman and guests. They are
oriented toward screen left, a similar position in both
shots. The match here is so strong that a casual viewer
does not notice the cut.
The Eyeline Match
The doorman glances off-frame left ( c ) (implying that he
is looking at Rick, who is off-screen), and the film cuts
to Rick in shot 4 ( d ) looking off-frame right. Each looks
in an opposing direction, one to the right, the other to
the left, creating the impression that they are looking at
each other. This match is known as the eyeline match ,
and it is an important code used to link the spaces in
separate shots. The eyeline match establishes that two
characters are indeed looking at each other and that the
spaces they inhabit, though seen in different shots, are
connected. Often in a scene, characters are interacting
with each other but are presented in separate shots. The
eyeline match helps to create continuity between the
separate images.
In organizing the cut to shot 4, the master shot
remains important. What else, besides the eyeline
match, establishes that these characters are looking
at each other? It is the information viewers remember
from the master shot about the spatial layout of the
room. From the master shot, viewers know there is a
direct line of sight from Rick’s table to the door and
that Rick and the doorman have an unobstructed view
of each other. The angles of their glances in shots

(c) (d)
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Editing: Making the Cut
(continued)
(e) (f)

(g) (h)

(i)
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Editing: Making the Cut
3 and 4 ( c, d ) match the information viewers were
given in the master shot.
The Master Shot and Viewer Perception
As viewers watch a movie, they are responding to
more than the information that is on-screen at any one
moment. Viewers interpret shots by relating them to
the larger context of an edited scene. In this regard,
the master shot furnishes viewers with a map or visual
schema of the set or locale (a room in this scene from
Casablanca). Using this schema, viewers integrate frag-
mentary details, like the composition of the shot ( b ),
with their recollected sense of the layout of the room.
Using master shots facilitates a viewer’s understanding
of the action of a scene.
The Shot-Reverse-Shot Series
In shot 5, a Nazi supporter tries to enter Rick’s casino
( e ). In shot 6 ( f ), the doorman and the German talk
outside the room, where Rick shortly joins them in
shot 7 ( g ). The cutting now goes into a brief shot-
reverse-shot series ( g–i ) as Rick and the German
exchange words. The camera is positioned over the
shoulder of one character and then, in the reverse
shot position, over the shoulder of the other charac-
ter. This series of alternating compositions is a stan-
dard method for filming dialogue scenes. It creates
something of a ping-pong effect as the composition
continually shifts into reverse shot positions. The cut-
ting is typically coordinated with the flow of dialogue
so that, as speakers change, so does the camera
position. Should the camera shift into an extreme
close-up isolating each character in a single shot, the
eyeline match would be employed. In shot-reverse-
shot cutting, editing follows the flow of dialogue,
and the shifting camera positions mark the changes
of speakers in the conversation. This emphasizes the
dialogue and facilitates the viewer’s pickup of story
information.
The 180-Degree Rule
The 180-degree rule is one of the most important
codes of the continuity system. This rule is the founda-
tion for establishing continuity of screen direction. The
right–left coordinates of screen action remain consis-
tent as long as all camera positions stay on the same
side of the line of action. Crossing the line entails a
change of screen direction.
Because filmmakers change camera positions and
angles from shot to shot, screen direction is some-
thing that must be established and maintained care-
fully. Right and left must remain constant across shot
changes, but the potential for creating inconsistent
right and left orientations from shot to shot is very
great. The 180-degree rule specifies how this may be
prevented.
Within any given scene, a line of interest or ac-
tion can be drawn between the major characters. The
180-degree rule counsels filmmakers to keep their cam-
eras on one side of this line from shot to shot within a
scene. If a filmmaker were to cross the line by cutting
to a camera position taken on the other side of the line,
the right–left coordinates on screen would be reversed.
Characters who were on screen right in one shot would
appear on screen left in the next.
The 180-degree rule operates in the next scene
in the film ( j–m ). Ugarte (Peter Lorre) comes into
the casino to tell Rick that he has some “letters of
transit” that guarantee their bearer safe passage from
Casablanca, and he asks Rick to keep them for him.
As Ugarte talks to Rick, they are seated at the table.
The line of interest extends between them. Notice
that the camera stays on the same side of the line in
all the subsequent shots ( k–m ). When both charac-
ters are in the shot, Ugarte is always on screen right
and Rick is always on screen left despite the chang-
ing camera positions. When a close-up isolates Rick,
he is facing screen right, consistent with his position
in the two-shot.
Notice also that the line of interest is consistent
with the line of interest established in the previous
scene with the doorman and guests. Rick sits at his
table in both scenes, and the camera positioning has
kept Rick on screen left. In this sense, visual continu-
ity has been maintained from scene to scene because
a consistent line of interest is used as the basis of the
180-degree rule.
Scenes are dynamic, however, and filmmakers
frequently need to define new lines of action to fol-
low changes of character positioning as the drama
unfolds. How does a filmmaker define a new line of
action by crossing the existing one? There are several
possible ways. A filmmaker may cut first to a series of
camera positions on or near the line before crossing
it. A filmmaker may use a moving camera to cross the
line within a shot. Whatever strategy is employed, the
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Editing: Making the Cut
(continued)
The Line
Camera #1
Camera #2 Camera #3
Camera #4
FIGURE 1
The 180-degree rule.
problems associated with maintaining or crossing the
line raise issues about the relationship between visual
change and perceptual constancy in the represented
action on screen.
Camera Position and Perceptual Constancies
Filmmakers typically provide viewers with continuously
changing visual perspectives on the action. They build
a scene by cutting among different camera setups. The
problem is how to create this variety without confus-
ing and disorienting the viewer, particularly when it is
important to establish a coherent sense of a fixed visual
landscape. The viewer must understand that although
the camera’s angle of view may change, the layout of the
physical world on-screen remains constant. In other words,
if a character is shown standing at the bottom of a hill,
the character must seem to remain there, unless shown
moving elsewhere, regardless of whether a high-angle or
a low-angle shot is employed, regardless of whether the
camera photographs that character from the left or right
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Editing: Making the Cut

(j) (k)
(m)(l)
side. The camera’s relative positions, which change as the
action unfolds on screen, are distinct from the perceptual
constancies (e.g., up, down, left, right) that must prevail,
that must not change, in the represented action. The
sheriff pursuing the prisoner always must be understood to
be chasing his quarry regardless of the directions in which
pursuer and pursued are shown moving on screen.
This relationship between the editing codes per-
taining to screen direction and the constancies of
the physical world that is represented on screen can
be demonstrated with an example from Out of Africa
(1985). Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) arrives in Kenya
and rides by coach from the train station to meet her
new husband. During the shots that show her riding
in the coach, screen direction is reversed. The reversal,
though, occurs in a way that is consistent with prin-
ciples of continuity.
The first shot ( a ) showing Blixen traveling by
coach is a telephoto long shot in which she appears,
through crowds of pedestrians, riding toward screen
left. The filmmakers then cut to a new camera position
framing her as she rides directly toward the camera.
Consequently, this new framing ( b ), which is on the
line of action (motion) established in the previous shot,
erases the right–left coordinates. In this shot, move-
ment occurs toward the camera, not to the right or left.
The next shot ( c ) shows Blixen riding toward screen
right and represents a reversal of screen direction relative
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Editing: Making the Cut
to the first shot ( a ). The editing, however, softens the
abruptness of the reversal by using the intervening shot
in which she rides directly toward the camera. By estab-
lishing a dominant line of action and then cutting to a
camera position on the line, filmmakers can cross it subse-
quently it and define a new line.
This method preserves screen continuity perfectly.
Directional change occurs gradually, and the viewer
understands that the layout of the physical world on-
screen has remained constant, despite changes in the
camera’s angle of view and the direction of motion on-
screen. ■
OUT OF AFRICA (UNIVERSAL, 1985)
In Out of Africa , continuity of movement is main-
tained despite a change in its right–left orientation.
The shot (b) of Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) riding
toward the camera erases the right–left coordinates
established in (a) and provides the transition neces-
sary for maintaining continuity across the change
(a and c) in screen direction. Note also the motion
blur produced by the panning camera in the first
and last shots of the series. Because the camera is
panning with the coach’s movement, stationary
pedestrians and buildings are subject to motion
blur. Frame enlargements.

(a)

(b)
(c)
Errors of Continuity
Filmmakers never achieve perfect continuity, and viewers with sharp eyes often can spot
errors. Errors of continuity are mismatched details in a series of shots. The vanishing wa-
ter jug in the shots from The Waterboy (1998) is an especially flagrant example.
Continuity errors arise because moviemaking proceeds on a shot-by-shot basis,
with everything, from character positions and costumes to lights and props, recreated
for each new shot. The possibilities of flubbing these recreations, of mismatching
their details, are enormous. The conditions of film production make it difficult for
filmmakers to avoid such errors. Take, for example, Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves (1991). When Robin (Costner) and Azeem (Morgan Freeman) land
on the shores of England, Azeem helps Robin up from the beach. In medium close-
up, Robin holds out his right arm for assistance, and in the following shot viewers
see Azeem helping Robin up by grasping his left arm.
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Editing: Making the Cut

THE WATERBOY
(TOUCHSTONE,
1998)
The disappearing water
jug—now you see it,
now you don’t. A brief
cutaway to the face
of another character
separates these two
shots of Adam Sandler.
In the second shot, the
water jug is conspicu-
ously missing. This is
a relatively glaring
continuity error. Frame
enlargements.
The error arose because the action had to be created separately for each shot and
was done so without the proper matching continuity. In such cases, the editor’s best
hope is that the viewer will not notice the discrepancy, and indeed, if the gaff is not
glaring, viewers often fail to notice because they are busy following the story.
Continuity errors can develop when portions of a scene are shot at widely
spaced intervals. For example, in Cocktail (1988), Tom Cruise passes a New York
theater whose marquee advertises the film Barfly and then, a few minutes later,
when he passes that theater again, the marquee advertises Casablanca . As many
readers know, some films have abundant continuity problems. In Pretty Woman
(1990), continuity errors ranged from scenes in which Richard Gere’s tie appears
and disappears from shot to shot to other scenes in which his shoes and socks do
the same thing, and still others in which Julia Roberts takes a bite at breakfast
from what is alternately a pancake and a croissant.
Facilitating the Viewer’s Response
The editing codes just reviewed—cutting to match the master shot and use of the
180-degree rule, the shot-reverse-shot series, and the eyeline match—are corner-
stones of the continuity system. The system emphasizes naturalism and realism to
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Editing: Making the Cut
the extent that it minimizes the amount of perceptual work that the viewer needs to
do. This work is minimized because the positioning of characters, the direction of
their movement, and the camera’s angles of view are related across shots in an or-
derly way. This enables the perspective of each shot to link up with the perspectives
in other shots, establishing for the viewer the sense of a unified landscape stretching
across all the shots, of which each offers only a partial view.
Think of film viewing as an activity like a picture puzzle in which the overall
picture—Rick’s casino or Jeffries’ apartment complex—emerges when all the little
pieces have been fit together. Each piece is a shot, and if they fit properly, the viewer
sees the overall picture and not the pieces, just as with a puzzle. In this way, continu-
ity editing helps to make the visual perspectives of each shot easy to interpret and
movies themselves very easy to understand.
Continuity editing codes are so successful at simplifying the viewer’s percep-
tual task that they actually can facilitate comprehension of story information.
Ample experimental evidence indicates that viewers understand story informa-
tion more easily when continuity editing is used than when it is not. Rather than
interfering with normal perception, continuity editing facilitates it. As a result,
it makes films more accessible and attractive for diverse audiences whose educa-
tional and cultural backgrounds vary. To the extent that continuity editing poses
few interpretational problems for viewers, it has helped establish the enormous
popular acceptance and emotional appeal of motion pictures.
Because audiences are so familiar with continuity edit-
ing, clever filmmakers can fool viewers by applying its
rules in a misleading way. An especially brilliant example
of this occurs in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). FBI
agents encircle a house in Calumet City, believing it to
be the lair of serial killer Buffalo Bill. This action is intercut
with shots of Bill in his basement tormenting one of his
victims. Outside, an agent is sent to ring the doorbell.
Other agents crouch nearby, hidden in the bushes. When
Bill opens his door, however, viewers are startled and
frightened to find not an FBI SWAT team but lone agent
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), unaware that she is face-to-
face with Buffalo Bill. Meanwhile, the SWAT team breaks
into an empty house. It turns out that the viewer is see-
ing two different locations. How did the filmmakers trick
viewers and spring this surprise on them?
The sequence opens with an establishing shot of
the Calumet City house ( a ). FBI agents swarm the
property and hide. Extensive intercutting joins this
action with shots of Bill in his basement. Outside,
one agent, disguised as a man delivering flowers,
approaches the front door and rings the bell ( b ). The
Case Study SUBVERTING CONTINUITY EDITING: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
next shot shows a bell ringing in Bill’s basement ( c )
and Buffalo Bill listening with annoyance ( d ). When
the bell stops ringing, the next shot ( e ) shows the FBI
agent taking his finger off the doorbell outside. The
shot series implies continuity of action and place, and
the viewer concludes that the Calumet City house is,
indeed, Bill’s lair.
The agent rings the bell again, followed by shots
of Bill listening. Bill goes upstairs to answer his door,
and the action cuts to an exterior view of the Calumet
City house as the agents decide they will have to break
in. In the next moment, Bill opens his door to reveal
Clarice ( f ), alone and unsuspecting. In shock, viewers
realize that they have been misled, that the Calumet
City house is not occupied by Bill. The sequence ends
with an establishing shot of the real house where Bill
lives.
The cross-cutting of the FBI’s maneuvers with Bill’s
activities in his basement prompts the viewer to make
a correct assumption of temporal continuity (the se-
quence of events is properly chronological, with no
distortions of time) but a false assumption of spatial
(continued)
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Editing: Making the Cut

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
(e) (f)
contiguity (that the locales shown in the cross-cut
shots are connected). The deception depends on the
viewer’s familiarity with parallel editing, convention-
ally used to establish linkages of time and/or place
among several lines of action. It depends also on us-
ing matching sound and visual elements to make the
viewer infer continuity of action. The agent rings the
bell; the viewer sees it ring and Bill react. The viewer
cannot know from the editing that these are two sepa-
rate bells and different locations.
When Bill opens his door to reveal Clarice, viewers
realize with shock that their schema of time–space rela-
tions, constructed by the editing, is wrong. Clarice’s
situation gives the shock its emotional power. A char-
acter for whom the viewer cares deeply, she is now in
mortal danger. ■
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Editing: Making the Cut
ALTERNATIVES TO CONTINUITY EDITING
Although it predominates in popular cinema, continuity editing is not the only method
of editing used by filmmakers. Several alternatives exist, some of which disrupt
continuities of time and space to varying degrees. Filmmakers often seek to create vivid
stylistic effects by breaking from the naturalistic rendering of time and space that conti-
nuity editing provides. To do this, they commonly employ jump-cutting and/or montage.
Jump Cuts
This type of editing produces abrupt breaks in the continuity of action by omitting
portions of an ongoing action. Imagine that an editor is examining a strip of film that
contains one shot showing a woman walking across a room and opening a door. If
the editor removes several frames from the middle of that shot, it will produce a break
in the action, which will seem to jump over the interval of missing frames. The editor
has created a jump cut .
Inspired by the use of jump-cutting in such French films as Breathless (1959), U.S.
filmmakers in the late 1960s and early 1970s experimented with the technique in Easy
Rider (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the latter edited by Dede Allen. She has
reported that the film’s director, Arthur Penn, kept telling her to make the story go
faster, and to do this, she used jump-cutting to omit portions of the action and speed
things along. The first scene of the film shows Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) in her bedroom.
She paces restlessly about the room and lies down on the bed. Allen cuts from a shot of
Bonnie walking over to her bed with her back to the camera to a shot in which Bonnie
faces the camera and is already reclining on the bed. The cut between these two shots
produces a jump, or discontinuity, in both her orientation relative to the camera and her
position on the bed. This tiny break in the action creates a small acceleration in time, pro-
pelling the story forward a bit faster than standard continuity editing could accomplish.
The editors of Easy Rider used jump-cutting extensively to give many scenes
a rough and jagged rhythm. In addition to jump-cutting, they employed a very
unusual method of scene transition. Instead of using a dissolve, a fade, or a cut,

BONNIE AND CLYDE (WARNER BROS., 1967)
This jump cut shows Bonnie standing and looking down at her bed, then reclining on the
bed. The intervening action is omitted. The result for the viewer is a brief moment of per-
ceptual disorientation. Frame enlargements.
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Editing: Making the Cut
they employed a unique technique that can best be described as flash cross- cutting.
Cross-cutting is typically used within a scene to reference and compare two or more
lines of action. As used in Easy Rider , flash cross-cutting is a method of scene tran-
sition in which the last shot of the first scene and the first shot of the next scene are
intercut very rapidly. The viewer oscillates rapidly, back and forth, between the end
of one scene and the beginning of the next.
Flash cross-cutting is a unique method of scene transition that, like the jump cut,
produces a very noticeable break in continuity. These techniques disrupt the smooth
flow of action and call attention to themselves as visual devices. While flash cross-
cutting is a rarely employed device, jump-cutting is a standardly employed method of
producing discontinuity. It tends to be used, however, within scenes that have been
constructed according to overall continuity principles. The contrast with these makes
the jump cut vivid and effective.
Montage
Montage editing builds a scene out of many brief shots, each of which typically pres-
ents a fragmentary view of action and locale. The shots are often edited to a very
rapid pace, subjecting the viewer to a barrage of visual information. With each shot
offering an incomplete view, the total picture of the event emerges from the montage
as a whole. Montage editing is typically used (1) to fragment time and space and (2)
to visually embody thematic or intellectual ideas.
THE SOVIET MONTAGE TRADITION Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s first practiced
this method of editing, and the most famous of these filmmakers is Sergei Eisenstein.
Eisenstein was very familiar with the continuity editing of U.S. pictures, particularly
the work of D. W. Griffith ( The Birth of a Nation , 1915; Intolerance , 1916), who
used it with great sophistication. Intolerance , for example, in telling four stories si-
multaneously, represents the pinnacle of parallel editing and cross-cutting. Eisenstein
resolved to break with continuity principles, and he developed a montage style based
on the creation of visual conflict between and among shots. His motivation was a
sociopolitical one. As a Marxist, he believed that conflict was the essence of history,
society, and art. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), and other films,
Arthur Penn
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
assassination of a small-time criminal under police
custody. Here, as elsewhere in Penn’s films, the
killing of John F. Kennedy provides the model and
resonant reference point for explorations of U.S.
social violence.
Penn trained as a television director and
debuted as a feature filmmaker with an unusu-
ally psychological Western, The Left-Handed Gun
(1958). Mickey One (1965) was a European-style,
existential art film whose unconventional visual
style and ambitious story were too far ahead of
Along with Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn is one
of the great poets of screen violence. Unlike
Peckinpah, though, who treated violence as an
essential and instinctual component of human
behavior, Penn places violent behavior within a
clear social context and uses it to illuminate the
political atmosphere of an era. The Chase (1966)
presciently treats the United States as a gun culture
and studies its festering climate of violence. In its
horrific climax, the town sheriff (Marlon Brando)
is savagely beaten and cannot prevent the public
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Editing: Making the Cut
Following The Missouri Breaks (1976), a big-
budget Western teaming Brando with Jack
Nicholson and widely regarded as a failure, Penn
worked infrequently and without commercial
impact. Four Friends (1981) was barely released,
Target (1985) was an efficient demonstration of
Penn’s ability to make a plot-driven thriller, and
Dead of Winter (1987) was an effective, if cold-
blooded, psychological chiller that Penn directed
as a favor to friends who would have otherwise
been unable to get their script produced.
Penn’s checkered film career demonstrates the
essential interconnection of film and society. Penn
thrived during a period of social turbulence when
the film industry welcomed innovative, cutting-
edge work and when he could connect his artistic
visions to the political dramas unfolding around
him. Disillusioned with the 1970s and disappointed
with the special-effects-driven blockbuster fanta-
sies that dominated U.S. film from the latter half
of that decade, Penn simply stopped working in
films, except on an irregular basis, and turned his
energies to a deepening involvement with the New
York-based Actor’s Studio. Returning to his roots,
he had been directing for television when he died
in 2010. ■
U.S. film culture when it was released. Penn ap-
plied the style of the French New Wave, primarily
jump cuts and other unconventional edits and op-
tical effects, to a mainstream U.S. film with Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), an important work of modern
cinema. Using slow motion and multicamera film-
ing for its scenes of violence, audaciously mixing
high comedy and brutal violence, Penn’s film
captured the rebellious spirit of the times with its
unconventional style and countercultural portrayal
of Bonnie and Clyde as youthful heroes taking on
the establishment. Alice’s Restaurant (1969) and
Little Big Man (1970) quickly followed, essential
documents of late 1960s film and society.
Penn faltered in the 1970s. With the eclipse of the
social idealism and political excitement of the 1960s,
and with Watergate the dominant metaphor of social
corruption in the next decade, Penn was disillusioned
and cut off from the social ferment that nourished his
films. However, he managed a stunning artistic expres-
sion of a bleak cultural period. Night Moves (1975), a
detective film, brilliantly captures the national dark-
ness, despair, and confusion experienced in the wake
of the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the collapse of the 1960s’
social movements. It is, perhaps, Penn’s best film.
BONNIE AND CLYDE (WARNER
BROS, 1967)
The slow-motion, bloody deaths of
Bonnie and Clyde changed American
cinema forever. Penn’s gut-wrenching
images established a new threshold of
brutality on film, yet they seem almost
tame by today’s standards. Unlike later
filmmakers interested in gore for its own
sake, Penn used violence as a way of ex-
ploring the cultural climate of violence in
American society. Frame enlargement.
Eisenstein’s elaborate montages created conflicts of movement, rhythm, tone, lighting,
and graphical properties among the shots. In many scenes, the editing has a harsh and
jagged quality, as Eisenstein pushes these conflicting visual elements to the limit.
The huge and extended massacre of civilians by Czarist troops in Battleship Potemkin
is the most famous and influential example of Eisensteinian montage. Eisenstein’s editing
fragments space and time by fracturing it into a multitude of brief shots that violate
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Editing: Making the Cut
continuity principles. Actions are repeated, omitted, viewed simultaneously from multiple
angles, slowed down, and speeded up and have their screen direction abruptly reversed.
The editing is as violent as the drama that it visualizes. In this sequence and elsewhere,
Eisenstein showed other filmmakers the power of montage as a tool for fragmenting time
and space, and in this regard, it has been profoundly influential.
Eisenstein also practiced what he called “intellectual montage,” using the edit-
ing to suggest ideas and guide the viewer’s thought process. The massacre sequence
in Battleship Potemkin concludes with a vivid example of intellectual montage. To
defend the massacre victims, a battleship fires its guns at the headquarters of Czarist
troops. As their palace explodes, Eisenstein cuts together three quick shots of different
statues of lions. The first stone lion sleeps, the second sits upright, the third roars. The
montage, however, makes it look like a single, sleeping lion has awakened with fury.
The symbolic idea is that the wrath of the people against the Czar is now aroused; the
lion of revolution stalks the land.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)
Eisenstein’s thematic montage creates a symbol for
the people’s revolution. Three separate statues of
lions, skillfully edited, become a single lion, roused
from its slumbers and roaring its defiance. Because
the shots are so brief, the editing imparts a sense of
movement to the statuary. Frame enlargements.
(a) (b)
(c)
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Editing: Making the Cut
SPATIAL FRAGMENTATION Montage editing used to create spatial fragmentation
tends to forgo the use of a clear master shot, the matching of action to that master
shot, and the systematic repetition of familiar camera setups. Moulin Rouge , for
example, breaks almost all the rules of continuity in its editing. Eyelines, camera an-
gles, and object positioning fail to match from shot to shot. The cutting is so quick,
though, that the viewer has little time to concentrate on these continuity problems.
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein was one of the greatest Soviet film-
makers working in the silent and early sound period,
and his ideas about film editing have exerted tre-
mendous influence over filmmakers throughout the
world. While most directors recognize editing as a
key element of filmmaking, for Eisenstein it was de-
cisive. He felt that cinema, more than anything else,
was an art of montage.
We know exactly what Eisenstein thought be-
cause, unlike most filmmakers who do not think and
write analytically, he wrote numerous essays about
cinema and about the art of editing. The most im-
portant of these are collected in volumes entitled
Film Form and The Film Sense . Eisenstein wrote that
meaning in film depends far more on editing—on
how shots are arranged in a sequence—than on
their content, on what is photographed. Montage
determines meaning, according to Eisenstein.
Eisenstein practiced what he called “dialectical
montage,” ordering his shots according to principles
of conflict. This might involve conflict of movement
from shot to shot, of lines, of volumes (for example,
masses of people in the frame), or of tempo. As a
Marxist, he believed conflict—or the dialectic, as it is
termed in Marxist philosophy—was the fundamental
truth of life and of history. And as a good dramatist,
he knew that conflict was essential to his stories.
Strike (1923) portrays a rebellion by factory work-
ers and the violent repression it elicits from fat-cat
businessmen and politicians. Battleship Potemkin
(1925) portrays a mutiny by sailors aboard a battle-
ship in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and October (1926)
dramatizes key events in the October Revolution.
Eisenstein builds the stories according to a Marxist
analysis of history, in which groups of people matter
far more than individual heroes, and he uses montage
to show class conflict as a motor of social change.
Unlike the continuity editing that prevailed in
American cinema, Eisenstein used editing analytically,
to clarify the class basis of the conflicts in his stories.
Strike (1923), his first film, climaxes with an attack by
soldiers on the striking factory workers. As the soldiers
slaughter the workers, Eisenstein abruptly intercuts
shots of a bull being killed by a butcher, and the idea
motivating this shocking montage is that the soldiers
treat the workers as so many animals.
Eisenstein avoided using establishing shots
or matches of direction and motion because he
wanted viewers to supply the missing information
and build a comprehensive sense of the screen
world in their minds, based on the fragmentary
views that he gave them. This gives the montages in
many of Eisenstein’s films a nervous, jumpy, aggres-
sive quality that he believed was an accurate mirror
of dynamic energies at work in the world.
In the 1930s, Eisenstein fell out of favor with
Soviet authorities who felt his work was too radical
and cutting-edge. They wanted a more realistic, nat-
uralistic style in cinema, and Eisenstein’s films were
anything but. In the sound era, therefore, he did not
work as frequently, and he worried that the addition
of spoken dialogue in cinema would diminish the
medium’s poetic force by making filmmakers more
literal and less imaginative in how they edited scenes.
Eisenstein was right to worry. Sound did take
cinema in a more naturalistic direction, and the
wildly imaginative montages of the silent era grew
less common. Eisenstein made three sound films—
Alexander Nevsky (1936), Ivan the Terrible Part I
(1944), and Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946)—in which
(continued)
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Editing: Making the Cut
he attempted to create poetic combinations of im-
age and sound. But dialectical montage was now
frowned upon by the authorities, and the editing in
these films is far less aggressive than what he had
practiced during the silent era.
The rapid, poetic, often brutal editing of Eisenstein
has exerted a strong influence over contemporary
film. Hitchcock staged the shower murder in Psycho
(1960) using Eisensteinian montage, and the rapid
montages that violate continuity principles in such
films as The Bourne Ultimatum would not exist were
it not for Eisenstein. These films, though, borrow
Eisenstein’s technique but not his worldview and
Marxist rationale. In his work—and the theories of ed-
iting he developed in his essays—Eisenstein presented
cinema as a construction rather than a mirror on the
world, as a medium constructed according to the laws
of montage, in which meaning was not something
to be recorded by a camera but was created and ar-
ranged by a filmmaker using the art of editing. ■
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
(1925)
This kind of shot is rare in
Eisenstein’s work. It provides
an expansive and clear view of
a key moment in the drama—
during the Odessa Steps mas-
sacre, a mother carrying her
wounded child (foreground)
confronts the murderous sol-
diers (background) who have
fired on the citizenry. More
typically, he built a scene by
showing fragments of its ac-
tion. Frame enlargement.
Viewers probably notice them subliminally, however, because the editing does feel
wild and jagged, not smooth and flowing.
During the dance scenes in the Moulin Rouge, the editing fragments the club’s
spatial layout by showering the viewer with visual information at a fast rate and by
showing many, many close-ups and few master shots. The club is a dizzying montage
offering glimpses of people, lights, signs, and faces. Editor Jill Bilcock said that her
experience constructing the scenes out of so many close-ups was “like being given
thousands of different kinds of colored beads and asked to make a necklace.”
The editing builds the scene by accumulating details, bits and pieces of space and
action. The editing aims to create a collage of discrete visual impressions rather than
a spatially ordered, coherent, and stable environment. The scene is organized by a cu-
mulative principle—the piling up of detail.
While the montage cutting of contemporary films descends from the Soviet model of
editing, there are other clear historical precedents. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960),
the film’s main character, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is murdered in her shower one-
third of the way into the film. The murder itself lasts for 40 seconds and is composed
of 34 shots. These tend to fall into three categories: (1) shots of Marion struggling with
her attacker, holding the killer’s knife arm with her hand, (2) shots of Marion’s face
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Editing: Making the Cut
and hands as she writhes in the shower, and (3) shots of the killer stabbing toward the
camera. By rapidly intercutting these categories of shots, Hitchcock and editor George
Tomasini create a scene of extraordinary violence, but one in which most of the actual
violence is suggested because viewers almost never see the knife actually touching flesh.
The impression of the murder is built up in the mind’s eye by virtue of the rapid editing.
As Eisenstein showed, montage can fragment space and time, and contemporary
filmmakers have used editing in vivid ways to fracture space and distort time. In Sam
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), montage editing slowed action down, inter-
rupted it with cutaways to parallel lines of action, and intercut normal speed and
slow-motion footage to create stylish distortions of time and space. During the elabo-
rate gun battle that opens the film, two snipers are shot from their rooftop perch. One
man falls from the roof to the ground in slow motion; the other falls forward and into
the rooftop ledge at normal speed. The editing intercuts these different time frames
to establish an impossible parallel. The man who falls off the roof—traveling a much
greater distance and in slow motion—strikes the ground at the same instant that the
other victim hits the ledge. The viewer accepts these manipulations as permissible sty-
listic organizations of the action despite their evident unreality.
THEMATIC MONTAGE Like Eisenstein, filmmakers may use montage to create ideas
in the mind of the viewer. The arrangement of shots cues intellectual, and sometimes
emotional, associations by the viewer.
Familiar with Eisenstein’s work, Charles Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) used
a similar bit of associational editing (though it is not a montage because it consists
of only two shots). At the beginning of the film, he cuts from a shot of sheep being
herded into a pen to a shot of workers leaving a subway and crossing the street to
enter their factory. The viewer is asked to draw the appropriate conclusions based on
the comparison of the two categories of images.
In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), director Sam Peckinpah used thematic
montage to emphasize the irony in the fate of sheriff Pat Garrett, killed by the same
politicians who hired him years earlier to kill the outlaw Billy the Kid. Peckinpah inter-
cuts two time frames, one set in 1908 showing Garrett’s assassination, the other set in

PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT, 1960)
Rapid montage editing creates the sensation of a violent murder in Psycho by assembling flash cuts of murderer
and victim. The violent pace of the editing intensifies the brutal nature of the scene. Frame enlargements.
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Editing: Making the Cut
1880 showing Billy and his gang shooting the heads off of some chickens. The intercut-
ting shows Billy firing from the 1880 time frame and seeming to hit Garrett in the 1908
frame. The historical irony is clear. By killing the Kid, Garrett unintentionally brought
about a chain of events that ultimately led to his own death many years later.
Sequence Shots
In closing this chapter on editing, it is important to note the existence in cinema history of
a stylistic tradition in opposition to montage and to the general contribution of editing in
structuring a scene. This is the use of the long take , sometimes also known as the sequence
shot . The term refers to a shot of very long duration which, in some cases, may last for
the entire length of a scene. If a filmmaker chooses to construct a scene using the long
take, this decision will substitute for the normative practice of building a scene by cutting
among different camera set-ups. In other words, the long take becomes the foundation of
the scene, not editing. In Easy Rider (1969), the harvest prayer scene is composed of an
extended 360-degree panning shot across the faces of the commune members. Because the
scene is composed of one shot, there is no editing.
Long takes do not always have to be sequence shots. Sometimes a scene can
be composed of several very lengthy takes. In Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941),
Kane’s parents strike a deal with a banker, Mr. Thatcher, in which the bank will act as
Kane’s guardian and assume control over his estate until he comes of age. The scene
is largely presented in two long takes that, together, run for almost four minutes of
screen time. Instead of relying on editing to maintain visual interest, Welles sustains
it by choreographing elaborate moves by the characters and the camera. In the work

THE WILD BUNCH
(WARNER BROS., 1969)
Two rooftop victims, two
different film speeds,
and the simultaneous
resolution of these lines
of action. The editing re-
configures space and time.
Frame enlargements.
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Editing: Making the Cut

MODERN TIMES (UNITED ARTISTS, 1936)
Associational editing invites viewers to draw intellectual connections among images.
Chaplin compares factory workers and sheep at the beginning of Modern Times. Frame
enlargements.
One of the most creative and imaginative sequences in
The Graduate (1967) uses associational montage to show
the hero, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), spending his days
floating in his parents’ backyard swimming pool and his
nights making love with the family friend Mrs. Robinson
(Ann Bancroft) in a hotel room. The montage blurs time
and place. The viewer knows that a great deal of time is
passing, days, probably weeks, but can’t say exactly how
much. Most remarkably of all, different places and loca-
tions blend into one another in a dreamlike way.
In the first shot of the montage ( a ), Ben gets out of
the pool, puts on a white shirt, and walks into his par-
ents’ house, pushing open the patio door. In shot 2 ( b-
1 ), Ben enters through a door wearing the white shirt but
has entered the hotel room where Mrs. Robinson awaits.
The match in action—Ben exiting screen left in shot 1
and entering screen right in shot 2—implies, falsely, that
these spaces are connected as part of a single location.
Ben sits with his head against the black head-
board of a bed as Mrs. Robinson unbuttons his shirt
( b-2 ). Shot 3 ( c-1 ) is a close-up of Benjamin’s head
against a black background. The viewer assumes it
to be the bed on which he was lying in the previous
Case Study THE GRADUATE
shot, especially because his facial expression matches
in both shots. Ben then gets up, crosses the room,
and closes a door, beyond which his parents are sit-
ting at a dining room table ( c-2 ). They glance at him
as he closes the door. Ben then recrosses the room
and sits in a black chair before a television set ( c-3 ).
Obviously, this cannot be the hotel room; he is at
home with his parents.
Shot 4 ( d-1 ) shows Ben’s face against a black back-
ground, this time assumed to be the chair in front of
the television. The camera then zooms out to reveal
the hotel room with Mrs. Robinson dressing ( d-2 ). She
leaves. Again the viewer has been misled. The room in
shot 4 is different than the one in shot 3. Shot 5 ( e-1 )
is another close-up of Ben’s face against a black back-
ground. The viewer thinks it to be the bed on which he
was lying in the previous shot, but the camera zooms
out to reveal that he is in his bedroom at his parents’
house (e-2). He glances out his window, puts on his
swim trunks, and goes down the stairs. In shot 6 (not
illustrated), his mother watches him dive into the pool.
Shot 7 ( f ) is a close-up of Ben swimming underwater.
In shot 8 ( g ), he leaps up onto the pool’s inflatable raft,
(continued)
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Editing: Making the Cut
(b-1)(a)
(b-2) (c-1)
(c-2) (c-3)
(d-1) (d-2)
and shot 9 ( h ) is a matched cut on action that shows
Benjamin moving on top of Mrs. Robinson in bed.
The filmmakers use continuity principles, such as
matching action, to create the disorienting, dream-
like effect in which times and places are indistinct
and melt into one another. This is a slower, more
seductive presentation of the breakdown of time–
space than in the violent, hard-edged montages of
contemporary action films. The editing invites the
viewer to draw associations across the cuts. In this
case, the associations are psychological, having to do
with Ben’s alienated frame of mind. He is in a daze,
disconnected from all of his environments, lonely
and unhappy, sleepwalking through his life, barely
conscious of his connection either to his parents or to
Mrs. Robinson. ■
183

Editing: Making the Cut
(e-1) (e-2)
(g)(f)
(h)
of Welles, and such other directors as Woody Allen, William Wyler ( The Best Years of
Our Lives , 1946), and Miklós Jancsó ( Red Psalm , 1972), the long take is a recurrent
and essential feature of style that provides an alternative to film editing.
Here, too, however digital tools are changing the manner in which a long take
can be created. Separate shots can now be joined seamlessly to create the impression
of a long take. Joining shots digitally in this manner, the cinematographer of Children
of Men (2004) created several lengthy moving camera sequences that looked like long
takes. The edits were invisible and subliminal.
SUMMARY
Almost universally, filmmakers regard editing as the decisive phase of production, giv-
ing a film its distinct shape, organization, and emotional power. There is, however, no
single way to cut a scene or a film.
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Editing: Making the Cut
Continuity editing is the predominant approach used in narrative cinema. It estab-
lishes a coherent and orderly physical world on screen, despite variations in the camera’s
placement and angle. The rules that deal with screen direction and matched visual ele-
ments are an essential means of creating this coherence and order. Continuity errors occur
when mismatched visual elements violate the perceptual constancies that a viewer looks
for in the world represented on screen. If Julia Roberts is eating a croissant for breakfast,
it should not suddenly turn into a pancake.
Realism is an elastic concept, however, and the physical and perceptual laws that
continuity editing seeks to honor can be subjected to distortion and manipulation.
Viewers accept many such manipulations, regarding them as permissible expressions
of style or artistry. Montage editing enables filmmakers to create striking distortions
of time and space, some of which are inconsistent with strict continuity principles. The
craft of editing is infinitely powerful in its ability to reorganize time and space, and
many things are permissible under the rubric of style.
Whatever approach a given filmmaker might use, if he or she is making a feature
film and telling a story, the option of completely avoiding editing does not exist. Even
where a filmmaker like Woody Allen may shoot each of his scenes in a single master
shot, he and his editor must still join these shots together and make decisions about the
points at which to do so. Hitchcock, a director for whom editing was of great impor-
tance, once tried to do without it. In Rope (1948), he cut only when the camera physi-
cally ran out of film (approximately every 10 minutes) and tried through elaborate
means to hide the cuts when they did occur. The result is an interesting experiment but
a sluggish film that lacks the dramatic rhythms and intensity that only editing can cre-
ate. To be a filmmaker is to select, manipulate, sequence, and cut!
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
continuity editing
cross-cutting
cut
dissolve
editing
editor
errors of continuity
eyeline match
fade
final cut
iris
jump cut
linear system
long take
master shot
matched cut
montage
nonlinear editing system
180-degree rule
parallel action
rough cut
sequence shot
shot-reverse-shot
series
thematic montage
voice-over
wipes
SUGGESTED READINGS
Ken Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing (Stoneham, MA: Focal Press, 1996).
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949).
Vincent LoBrutto, Selected Takes: Film Editors on Film Editing (New York: Praeger, 1991).
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Los Angeles: Silman-
James Press, 1995).
Gabriella Oldham, First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995).
Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing , 2nd ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 1995).
Ralph Rosenblum, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story (New
York: Da Caps, 1988).
Michael Rubin, Nonlinear: A Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing (Gainesville, FL: Triad
Pub. Co., 1995).
185

186

Principles of Sound Design
■ describe the development of contemporary
multichannel sound
■ describe the three basic types of sound in
cinema
■ explain the uses and functions of dialogue in
film
■ explain the functions of ADR
■ describe sound effects design and Foley
techniques
■ describe five steps for creating movie music
■ explain five basic functions music performs in
film
■ explain the nature of sound design, its
expressive uses, and how it builds on
the viewer’s real-life acoustical skills and
experience
■ distinguish between realistic and synthetic
sounds
■ explain the fundamental differences between
sound and image
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

From Chapter 6 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
187

Principles of Sound Design
Image editing employs standard rules and techniques that (1) provide editors with methods for
organizing shots, (2) establish constancies of time and space between the story world on screen
and viewers’ experiences of their physical environment, and (3) are based on correspondence
with the viewer’s perceptual experience and have become familiar to viewers through constant
repetition over many films. Like image editing, film sound has its own rules (or codes) of struc-
tural design. One can speak of sound fades, sound cuts, sound dissolves, and sound perspective.
This chapter examines the three categories of sound in film: dialogue, effects, and music. It ex-
plains the concept of sound design and examines its rules and techniques.
SOUND IN CONTEMPORARY FILM
Today, film sound is digitally recorded and edited, and it is often created digitally.
Indeed, sound went digital long before images did. As a result, sound is much more
complex and expressive than in the films of decades past. As recently as the 1980s, for
example, it was common for a film’s soundtrack to be put together from 20 tracks of
sound elements. Today, a soundtrack of 200 or more tracks is the norm.
■ explain five codes of sound design and their
expressive uses
■ differentiate direct sound, reflected sound, and
ambient sound
■ explain how sound establishes continuity in
film as well as intellectual and emotional effects
■ explain why switching between on-screen
and off-screen sound helps makes camera
positions more flexible
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 2010)
Director David Fincher thought of this film as a docudrama and wanted the audio
backgrounds to enhance a sense of place and authenticity. The story locations included
Boston and Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay Area, and environmental sounds recorded
in these areas were included as ambient information in the sound mix, in order to
accurately characterize place using sound. The film dramatizes the creation of Facebook,
and to create an audio environment for the Facebook offices in the film, located in Palo
Alto, ambient sound was recorded in numerous Silicon Valley and Bay Area offices. The
ambient audio environments created in this way are subliminal, enhancing the film’s
docudrama style in ways an audience feels without consciously noticing. Pictured, Jesse
Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with Justin Timberlake (right) as Sean
Parker, co-creator of Napster. Frame enlargement.
188

Principles of Sound Design
TOY STORY 3 (PIXAR, 2010)
This was the first film released
theatrically in Dolby Surround 7.1,
an eight-channel sound system that
spreads four channels across the rear
to create enhanced directionality
within a 360-degree sound field. When
Barbie and Ken first meet in the film,
Gary Wright’s song “Dreamweaver,”
about the appeal of dreams and
fantasy, starts out as a mono (single-
channel) recording and then it swells
and spreads in audio space, filling all
eight channels. The audio change play-
fully points to the flush of love seizing
Barbie and Ken. Frame enlargement.
SPIDER MAN 2 (COLUMBIA, 2004)
Multitrack sound mixing in contemporary film produces richly layered sound effects
composed of numerous sound sources blended together. Doc Ock’s tentacles take on a
personality of their own owing to the many different sounds that they make and the dis-
tribution of this sound information in multiple-channel playback. Frame enlargement.
Consider what sound accomplishes in contemporary film. Many sound effects are lay-
ered; that is, they are composed of numerous sounds blended together. Doc Ock’s tentacles
in Spider Man 2 (2004) were created from a blend of the sounds of a motorcycle chain,
piano wire, and a pump-action shotgun. The blend was manipulated in a software pro-
gram, Pro Tools, to create hundreds of variations, producing whooshes, screeches, ratchety
noises, servo-motor sounds, and even vocalizations to give the tentacles personality.
There were so many tentacle variations that they occupied 100 tracks, separated
by right tentacle, left tentacle, and upper and lower tentacles. This variety, and the
fact that the tentacles are always moving on screen, was perfect for surround sound.
A viewer watching the film experiences the tentacle sounds whooshing across all the
speakers, front and back. The film’s sound designer said that the character was ideal
for surround sound because the tentacles were moving in all directions, which multi-
channel sound could capture perfectly. Bass or low-frequency sounds are a key part
of the contemporary soundtrack, adding power and presence to voices or effects.
189

Principles of Sound Design
The sound design of The Passion of the Christ (2004) reserved the subwoofer for the
thudding of the cross on the ground, giving this action added power and emotional
presence as a metaphor for the sins of the world.
In earlier decades, scenes that had a lot of repetitive sounds—guns firing, for
example—often sounded a bit flat because the sound was not varied. The same
gunshot, or ricochet effect, might be used throughout the scene or even from film to
film. Today, these effects, like Doc Ock’s tentacles, are given tremendous variation.
Sounds were individually recorded for each of the iron balls and sheep bones of the
flagrum used to whip Jesus in The Passion of the Christ , and these were then mixed
in expressive combinations.
A huge variety of punching sounds was created for the boxing film Cinderella
Man (2005) to give each of the film’s fights a different tone and personality. Two pro-
fessional boxers sparred with one another over several days, punching in a variety of
styles while the sound crew recorded them. These were the sounds heard in the film.
Sound also can be used to change an actor’s performance. In one scene of Cinderella
Man , Mae (Renee Zellweger) argues with her husband (Russell Crowe) about his
going back in the boxing ring. Afraid he will be killed, she becomes nearly hysteri-
cal. During postproduction, the sound crew lowered the pitch of her voice to make it
sound less shrill, fearing that otherwise the audience would lose sympathy with her.
Sound also can be subliminal and subjective. At the beginning of Collateral
(2004), when a hired killer played by Tom Cruise appears in an airport, the sound is
nonspecific and diffused, unfocused, until he bumps into his contact man, at which
point the sounds of the airport become very clear and defined.
Later in the film, when a cab driver (Jamie Foxx) realizes that Cruise is a hit man,
the soundtrack expresses Fox’s alarm. The background city noises all convey anxiety—
one hears people yelling, the siren of an alarm, car speakers booming rap music. The
sound mix weaves a tapestry of urban noises that convey and symbolize the current of
emotions that run through the film.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (NEWMARKET, 2004)
Sound is a subliminal element of cinema. Often, a viewer feels its contribution without be-
ing explicitly conscious of it. The sound mix of The Passion did not use the bass channel very
often, reserving it for scenes where Christ carried the cross. When the cross thuds against the
ground, the bass channel anchored that sound effect and gave it considerable force. Viewers
experienced the force of the effect without being aware it was there. Frame enlargement.
190

Principles of Sound Design
EVOLUTION OF FILM SOUND
Of all the components of film structure, sound has shown the greatest improvements in
recent decades. Contemporary film uses multiple channels of sound information to en-
velop viewers in a dynamic, three-dimensional sound field (the acoustical area covered
by speaker placement in a surround setup and activated by multichannel sound coming
from the speakers). In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, film sound was essentially a
monaural, single-channel experience, with each speaker in a theater auditorium receiving
the same signal. Sound was encoded as an optical track on the strip of film, and directors
and sound mixers were invariably disappointed at the loss of volume, limited frequency
range, and distortion in the upper register that occurred when they encoded their sound
onto the optical track. Low-volume sound effects vanished into the hiss of the track.
High volumes produced a different problem. On optical tracks, the louder the sound, the
larger its visual encoding (i.e., the more space it occupies on the track). Because the track
space available between frame line and sprocket holes is fixed, volume levels that exhaust
this space edge into harsh noise, a frequent problem with soundtracks from these years.
To compete with television in the 1950s, Hollywood moved to widescreen film
formats, some of which carried multichannel stereo sound, using magnetic stripes to
encode the sound signal. To play such soundtracks, projectors had to be outfitted
with special playback heads, much like a tape recorder. Widescreen formats such as
Cinemascope (35 mm) and Todd-AO (70 mm) carried from four to six channels of
sound. (In this regard, film stereo was distinct from home stereo, a two-channel sys-
tem used for playing music.) Mag-stripe stereo on widescreen film, however, was re-
served for special appeal films, and until the mid-1970s, the industry norm remained
a single-channel optical track.
Debuting in 1976, Dolby Stereo carried two optical tracks that were encoded
with four channels of sound information. These were configured for playback as left,
center, right, and rear (surround) channels. With Dolby Stereo, multichannel sound
gained widespread acceptance in the film industry. For the consumer market of home
video, Dolby Surround debuted in 1982, enabling home viewers to play Dolby Stereo
movies as stereo videocassettes. Initially, though, Dolby Surround only decoded the
left, right, and surround channels, but Dolby Prologic decoders, marketed in 1987,
enabled center channel decoding as well.
Cinema sound became even richer when Dolby moved to a digital six-channel
system in 1992. Known as Dolby Digital, the system carried three channels across
the front—left, center, right—plus two fully independent rear channels (left and right
surrounds) and a dedicated channel for low-frequency (bass) signals. The digital
soundtrack data were placed between the sprocket holes on the film, which also car-
ried an analog stereo soundtrack.
Dolby added yet another channel in 1999. Dolby Digital Surround EX is a seven-
channel system, adding a third surround channel positioned behind the viewer, in
addition to the rear left and rear right split surrounds of the 5.1 system. This extra
channel can be used to create flyover effects, useful in films such as Star Wars Episode
III: The Revenge of the Sith. An eighth channel is now commonly used to increase
directionality. Toy Story 3 (2010) was the first film released theatrically in Dolby
Surround 7.1.
Today, the industry uses several competing digital sound formats: Dolby Digital,
Digital Theater Systems (DTS, using a CD for the soundtrack synched with time code
191

Principles of Sound Design
High Definition Audio
CLOSE-UP
discarding sections of the soundtrack that are
inaudible to human hearing or that tend to be
covered by other audio information. By contrast,
Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA offer lossless
compression and are new formats introduced for
high definition DVD. Because there is no loss of
audio information, in theory, listening to a Dolby
TrueHD or a DTS HD-MA soundtrack is like listen-
ing to the original studio master that filmmakers
created.
In addition to these lossless compression formats,
many Blu-ray discs also carry an LPCM (linear pulse
code modulation) soundtrack. LPCM soundtracks
are uncompressed and therefore take up even more
disc space than Dolby True HD or DTS HD-MA. But,
like them, an LPCM track is lossless and is akin to
hearing a studio master. Films viewed convention-
ally, in a standard movie theater, are not capable of
delivering this kind of sound quality. Thus, the audio
capabilities offered by Blu-ray are superior to what
celluloid film can deliver.
Much, though, depends on the technical setup
of the home viewing environment. While many BD
Blu-ray DVD (BD) offers tremendous improvement
in the audio performance of movies viewed in the
home. It offers high definition audio in conjunction
with high definition video. It can do this because BD
can store a greater amount of audio-visual informa-
tion than standard DVD. A dual-layer BD can hold 50
gigabytes of information as compared with 8.5 gi-
gabytes on a standard DVD. As a result Blu-ray discs
have introduced new audio formats that require
more disc space than standard DVDs can accommo-
date and are far more expressive and enveloping.
Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Digital Surround
(also 5.1) are the audio tracks offered on standard
DVD, and they can be found on many Blu-ray
discs as well. But BD also may carry the eight-
channel extensions—Dolby Digital Plus (DD+) and
DTS-HD—of these formats which expand the num-
ber of audio channels in playback. Eight-channel for-
mats are configured as 7.1 systems. Relative to 5.1
systems, they have two additional rear channels.
More exciting, however, are the lossless formats
that BD can carry. On standard DVD, Dolby Digital
and DTS 5.1 compress the audio information by
THE SAND PEBBLES (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1966)
This epic adventure starring Steve McQueen was originally released in the era of analog
audio. However, because the film was exhibited in 70mm, it carried six channels of sound.
These were digitally restored and re-mastered for the Blu-ray release, which features a DTS
HD-MA soundtrack, with lossless multichannel audio, as well as a four-channel Dolby Digital
soundtrack. Neither format existed at the time of the film’s release. The film sounds better
on Blu-ray today than it did in conventional theaters in 1966. Many older films released on
high definition DVD feature this kind of sound upgrade. Frame enlargement.
192

Principles of Sound Design
players may be capable of decoding the lossless
formats, the best results are obtained by letting a
high-end receiver do the decoding while the player
merely passes the lossless Dolby, DTS or PCM signal
to the receiver. And because the bandwidth of the
lossless signal is much higher than is standard Dolby
or DTS, HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface)
cables are needed to connect player and receiver.
Viewers watching movies on Blu-ray, then, have more
audio options than standard DVD has offered. The
BD of 300 (2007), for example, offers 5.1 channels
of sound in uncompressed LPCM, in Dolby TrueHD,
and in Dolby Digital. Pan’s Labyrinth (2007) and Rush
Hour 3 (2007) offer 7.1 channels in DTS-HD MA.
Blade Runner (1982) carries a Dolby Digital 5.1 track
as well as a Dolby TrueHD track, an audio format that
did not exist when the film was originally produced
and released. Viewed on Blu-ray, Blade Runner sounds
better than it did upon its initial release nearly 30
years ago. ■
printed on the film), and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS). Each film print, how-
ever, still carries an optical soundtrack, as a backup in case a problem arises with the
digital information and because many theaters are only equipped for optical playback.
Digital playback revolutionized the art of film sound. Filmmakers no longer had to
contend with the restrictions imposed by an optical track. Spread across three channels in
the front, the soundstage (the acoustical space established by the front speakers) is broad
and expansive and is anchored with an impressive bottom register supplied by the dedi-
cated bass channel. The thunderous explosions in contemporary action films illustrate the
potential this channel has given cinema. The rear surround channels make the sound field
dynamic and three-dimensional, enveloping the viewer in multidirectional sound. Until
the 1990s, the surround channels were used infrequently for the occasional sound effect,
but they are now used very aggressively, along with all the other channels, to spatialize
the sound field (i.e., to render it in highly directional terms) and provide the viewer with
an immersive sound experience. The Oscar-winning (for sound-effects editing) The Ghost
and the Darkness (1996) boasts an exceptionally complex and aggressive six-channel mix.
Cinema is now oddly unbalanced. In sound, it is fully three-dimensional, but its
picture remains two-dimensional. Viewers are surrounded by sound but must watch
a picture on a flat screen positioned in front of them. It seems likely that the ideal
toward which cinema is evolving is a totally 3-D experience, in picture and sound. At
some future point, cinema viewers will have an immersive visual experience, but so
far the medium has achieved this ideal only with sound.
ARMAGEDDON
(TOUCHSTONE,
1998)
Multi-channel playback of
digital film sound routes
bass signals to a separate,
dedicated channel. This
gives the modern film
sound stage an impres-
sive acoustic floor and
adds tremendous power
to special effects imagery.
Frame enlargement.
193

Principles of Sound Design
Dolby Digital brought six-channel sound to the home video environment on laser
disc in 1995 and on DVD (digital video disc) in 1997. Indeed, the successful launch
of DVD has encouraged studios and filmmakers to undertake multi- channel remixes
of older film soundtracks for release in this format. Warner Brothers’ DVD of Dirty
Harry (1972) carried an impressive Dolby Digital remix, and director Wolfgang
Peterson supervised an outstanding six-channel remix of the track for Das Boot
(1981) on DVD. The Blu-ray release in 2010 carried an eight-channel digital mix.
The film portrays submarine warfare in World War II, and its new soundtrack cre-
ates a total sonic environment that places viewers inside a narrow, cramped German
submarine deep in the Mediterranean. Other older films given multiple-channel re-
mixes include titles that were restored for theatrical release and subsequent DVD and
Center Channel
Front Left Front Right
SurroundSurround
Dolby Stereo
Four-channel sound—surrounds are one channel
FIGURE 1
Center Channel
Front Left Front Right
Rear RightRear Left
Dolby Digital, SDDS, DTS
Six-channel sound
Dedicated bass
(.1) channel
FIGURE 2
DAS BOOT (COLUMBIA
TRISTAR, 1981)
Digital, multichannel
soundtracks create a spatial,
three-dimensional sound field
by surrounding the viewer with
discrete, directional sound.
Wolfgang Peterson’s film about
submarine warfare in World
War II is one of the outstand-
ing sonic experiences in con-
temporary cinema; sound is
both the subject and structure
of this film. The U-boat captain
and his officer listen anxiously
for sonar signals warning of the
approach of Allied warships.
Frame enlargement.
194

Principles of Sound Design
Blu-ray distribution. These include Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz
(1939), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the classic musicals My Fair Lady (1964) and
West Side Story (1961).
Sound in cinema has never been better than in the contemporary period. One
cannot make similar claims for cinematography, editing, or many other elements
of cinema structure. In this regard, sound is making a uniquely improved aesthetic
contribution to cinema. Viewers today are privileged to enjoy a total sonic experi-
ence that was not available to moviegoers in earlier periods.
TYPES OF SOUND
Three basic types of sound figure in cinema. These are dialogue, effects , and music .
Dialogue
Since the late 1920s when synchronous sound became a permanent feature of the
movies, two primary kinds of dialogue have been employed in the cinema. Speech is
delivered by characters on screen usually in conversation with one another. Voice-
over narration accompanies images and scenes but is not delivered by a particular
character from within the scene. Voice-over narration typically is provided by an
all-seeing, all-knowing, detached narrator or by a character in the story, usually
from some time later than the events portrayed on screen.
SPEECH Motion pictures use a wide range of dialects and speech types.
Shakespearean adaptations faithfully transpose the Bard’s language to the screen
and frequently employ classically trained actors such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph
Richardson, or John Gielgud. Kenneth Branagh’s trilogy— Henry V (1989), Much
Ado about Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996)—are among the most cinematic of
Celluloid film carries mul-
tiple soundtracks positioned
in different places around
the frames (the picture area
on the film strip). The Dolby
Digital track is located be-
tween the sprocket holes.
The optical track is between
the sprocket holes and
the frames. The DTS track
appears as time code be-
tween the optical track and
the frames. The SDDS track
appears outside the sprocket
holes along the edge of the
film strip. (This is an ana-
morphic scope film so the
frames exhibit the character-
istic anamorphic squeeze.)
Frame enlargement.
195

Principles of Sound Design
these adaptations. By contrast, other films adopt a more playful attitude toward
Shakespeare. Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) successfully casts an actor lacking classi-
cal training—Laurence Fishburne—in the title role, and Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-style
Romeo and Juliet (1996) grafted the play’s language onto a thoroughly modernist
visual style. More recently, Shakespeare in Love (1998) used naturalistic, nonpoetic
language to portray a fictional episode from the playwright’s life.
At the other extreme from the poetry of Shakespeare lies the colloquialism of
modern life. The dynamic impact of sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s was
due largely to the electrifying presence of a new generation of screen actors. James
Cagney, for example, brought his scrappy, high-voltage personality to a series of
gritty, tough, urban dramas that allowed him to draw on his boyhood experiences
growing up in the slums of New York’s Upper East Side. The way Cagney moved
and spoke electrified audiences because it was so different from the mannerisms and
speech of stage-trained actors. In the Cagney classic Angels with Dirty Faces (1938),
he plays a good-hearted crook named Rocky who greets his friends with the saluta-
tion, “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” rattled off in rapid-fire delivery. Cagney
got this greeting from a pimp he had known when he was a youth.
The screen appeal of many stars, like Cagney, resides partly in their distinc-
tive manner of speaking. Will Smith’s lilting voice, often barbed with a wisecrack,
and Eddie Murphy’s trademark laugh have endeared them to audiences. In Face/Off
(1997), actors John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swap each other’s mannered speaking
style in an impressive display of the connection between speech and star charisma.
By speaking to audiences in a colloquial, familiar manner, movies forge a strong rap-
port and powerful emotional bonds with viewers. In the 1950s, when Marlon Brando,
playing an outlaw motorcyclist in The Wild One (1953), was asked what he is rebelling
against, he replied, “Whadda ya’ got?” and a young generation instantly understood his
insolence and contempt for established society. In Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995), the thick
street dialects of Brooklyn gangs vividly establish their authority and authenticity.
VOICE-OVER NARRATION While rarely used today, voice-over narration in earlier
periods was an essential part of certain genres. In the 1940s and 1950s, many films
noir— Out of the Past (1947), Criss Cross (1949), The Killers (1946)—told their stories
through intricate flashbacks accompanied by voice-over narration. In voice-over, the
MUCH ADO ABOUT
NOTHING (SAMUEL
GOLDWYN, 1993)
Kenneth Branagh and Emma
Thompson play bickering lov-
ers in this delightful version
of Shakespeare’s comedy.
Branagh’s Shakespeare films
respect the Bard’s language
while giving it a completely
cinematic showcase. Frame
enlargement.
196

Principles of Sound Design
tough private eye or the world-weary criminal delivered hard-boiled lines of dialogue.
At the beginning of Double Indemnity (1944), with a bullet wound slowly leaking
blood from his shoulder, a cynical insurance agent confesses his crime: he killed a man
for money and a woman and, as fate would have it, didn’t get either.
Voice-over narration can be used for ironic or playful effects. In one of the most
famous films noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), the narrator turns out to be a dead man.
The film opens with shots of a man’s body floating in a swimming pool. The police
arrive and remove the body as the narrator, a screenwriter named Joe Gillis, tells how
the murder occurred. It is not until the end of the movie that viewers realize the dead
man is Joe Gillis. He talks wistfully about how it feels when the police fish him out of
the pool and lay him out “like a harpooned baby whale.”
ANGELS WITH DIRTY
FACES (WARNER BROS.,
1938)
The electrifying impact of
rough, colloquial speech
helped propel James
Cagney to stardom. Playing
a gangster in Angels with
Dirty Faces , Cagney drew
from the vocal patterns of
the city streets where he
grew up. Holding a priest
(Pat O’Brien) hostage,
Cagney’s gangster snarls
his defiance at the police.
Frame enlargement.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
(PARAMOUNT, 1944)
Hard-boiled, tough-
guy dialogue, spoken
as voice-over narration,
coupled with dark, low-
key lighting to establish
the hardedged, cynical
atmosphere of classic film
noir. Fred MacMurray, as
the doomed Walter Neff,
provides the gripping
narration about a murder
scheme gone awry. Frame
enlargement.
197

Principles of Sound Design
Of course, in the case of Sunset Boulevard , the narration is unreliable and mis-
leading. Dead men don’t talk. Director Billy Wilder plays against an established con-
vention of voice-over narration, which is that the character doing the narration must
survive the events of the story. In this case, he doesn’t, and it enabled Wilder to pull
off one of his darkest jokes. In a similar manner, the narrator of American History
X (1998) is murdered but continues his narration, commenting on the things that his
death has taught him. American Beauty (1999) is another film that uses this device.
While voice-over narration is closely identified with U.S. films noir, it also has
been used in documentary filmmaking, especially that subcategory of documentaries
known as the newsreel. Newsreels routinely accompanied feature films, cartoons, and
serials in the nation’s movie theaters in earlier decades, and they typically employed
the so-called “voice of God” narrator. Such a narrator was male and spoke with a
deep, booming, authoritative tone.
In Citizen Kane (1941), director Orson Welles satirized the “voice of God”
newsreel narrator. The film tells the life story of Charles Foster Kane, a rich news-
paper man who rose from humble beginnings. The film opens with Kane’s death;
a newsreel follows, viewed by newspaper reporters for background on their stories
about Kane’s death. The newsreel features a “voice of God” narrator as director
Welles expertly mimics the conventions of this kind of documentary.
Beyond the fake newsreel, however, Citizen Kane offers a host of other voice-
over narrators. Citizen Kane is a classic and superlative example of voice-over narra-
tion used for complex effect and as an essential ingredient of film structure. The plot
of the film is constructed as a series of flashbacks, each one narrated by a different

SUNSET BLVD. (PARAMOUNT, 1950); DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST
(AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE, 1991)
Voice-over narration can be quite playful. Joe Gillis (William Holden) narrates Sunset Blvd.,
despite the fact that he’s a murder victim. As the film begins, the police find Joe float-
ing face down in a swimming pool, and he proceeds to tell us how he ended up there.
Billy Wilder’s film plays with the movie convention that narrators will survive the stories
they tell. An unborn child narrates Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and makes fleeting
appearances in the film as a kind of phantom. She tells the film’s story about the Gullah
people of the Sea Islands and their migration to the U.S. mainland, events that are not yet
a part of her own life-to-come. Frame enlargements.
198

Principles of Sound Design
character, which makes the emerging portrait of Charles Foster Kane into a kaleido-
scope. Characters recollecting Kane include the millionaire banker, Walter P. Thatcher,
who was given custody of Kane as a little boy; Susan Alexander, Kane’s second wife;
Jed Leland, the drama critic who worked briefly on Kane’s newspapers; Mr. Bernstein,
Kane’s chief editor and close friend; and Raymond, Kane’s personal valet.
Each of these characters narrates a section of the film, recalling events in ways
that clash with the memories of the other narrators. For example, Jed Leland recalls
the Charles Foster Kane who betrayed his ideals and principles, whereas Mr. Bernstein
emphasizes those principles, remembering how Kane used his newspaper to fight crime
and expose official graft and corruption.
The voice-over narration frames the various flashbacks and colors them with a
variety of psychological perspectives. Citizen Kane , in part, is a mystery film. The
mystery is Kane’s personality, which ultimately remains unknowable. It is difficult to
reconcile the various Kanes disclosed in the narrators’ memories because each is so
different from the others. In this way, the respective voice-over narrations deepen the
emotional and psychological mystery of film, the nature of Kane’s personality. Few
films in cinema history have used voice-over narration so skillfully and with such pro-
found structural and emotional effects.
ADR AND DIALOGUE MIXING Most of the dialogue heard in the average feature origi-
nates from the production track (the soundtrack recorded at the point of filming),
but 30 percent or more of a film’s dialogue is the result of ADR (automated dialogue
replacement). Following shooting, actors recreate portions of a scene’s dialogue in a
sound studio, and this postproduction sound is mixed in with dialogue from the pro-
duction track. The mixer must smooth out the audible differences of tone and timbre
and make sure that no audio cuts are apparent to the listener. Digital software facilitates
the ADR process, alleviating the need for an actor to speak in perfect synch with the
picture; the software can match the ADR speech with the lip movements on screen.
CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)
Jed Leland (Joseph Cotton),
one of the principal narrators in
Citizen Kane, explains why Kane’s
first marriage failed. As he begins
his speech, the image dissolves
to the past to show the first Mrs.
Kane at breakfast. The narrative
voices are not easily reconciled.
Leland describes events he
couldn’t possibly have witnessed.
Frame enlargement.
199

Principles of Sound Design
ADR is typically used when portions of the production track are unusable or
unsatisfactory, and some films, such as Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America
(1984), have extraordinarily high amounts of ADR. All the dialogue in that picture
was done as ADR; none originated from the production track.
Camera placement can facilitate opportunities for using ADR. One of the high-
lights of Pretty Woman (1990) occurs when Julia Roberts goes on a Beverly Hills
shopping spree. The ensuing montage is scored to the titular Roy Orbison song, and
a dialogue exchange between Richard Gere and the shop clerk (Larry Miller) kicks
off the start of the montage. Gere tells the clerk that she has the credit card, and the
clerk incautiously replies he’ll help her use it. The clerk’s dialogue was dropped in as
late-in-the-game ADR, an opportunity facilitated by the blocking of the scene, as the
accompanying frame enlargements demonstrate.
Sound Effects
Sound effects are the physical (i.e., nonspeech) sounds heard as part of the action and
the physical environments seen on screen. They include ambient sound , which is the
naturally occurring, generally low-level sound produced by an environment (wind in
the trees, traffic in the city). They also include the sounds produced by specific actions
in a scene, such as the rumble of the spaceship Nostromo in Alien (1979) as it passes
nearby, or the crash of broken glass as Mookie throws a trashcan through the win-
dow of Sal’s Pizzeria in Do the Right Thing (1989). Digital methods of sound record-
ing and mixing enable sound engineers to achieve an impressive aural separation of
individual sound elements. This gives the effects in contemporary film a richer texture
than in decades past and enables selective emphasis of individual effects without a
corresponding loss of the overall sonic context.
Virtually all the sound effects that one hears in contemporary film are the result of
postproduction manipulation. Sound effects recorded as part of the production track
may be electronically cleaned and optimized, but most are recorded separately and in
PRETTY WOMAN (TOUCHSTONE, 1990)
The blocking of a scene can create opportunities to add new dialogue using ADR. These
two frames from a single shot show how changing character positions facilitated the addi-
tion in postproduction of the salesman’s line of dialogue about helping her use the credit
card. The salesman is visible at the rear (a) between Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, but
when Roberts walks out of the store, she blocks the salesman from the camera’s view (b),
at which point the new line of dialogue was inserted. Frame enlargement.

(a) (b)
200

Principles of Sound Design
places other than the filming environment. Many effects are created using Foley tech-
nique . Foley technique refers to the live performance and recording of sound effects in
synchronization with the picture. As the film is projected in a sound recording studio, a
Foley artist watches the action and performs the necessary effects. A Foley artist might
walk across a bare floor using hard shoes in synchronization with a character on-screen
to produce the needed effects of footsteps. The Foley artist may open or close a door or
drop a tray of glasses on the floor to create these effects as needed in a given scene.
Foley techniques require considerable physical dexterity, often verging on the ac-
robatic, from the artists creating these live effects. Foley is often needed because many
of today’s films involve the use of radio microphones that are attached to individual
actors in a scene. Unlike mikes on a boom overhead, radio mikes fail to pick up natural
sounds in the environment, and these often have to be dubbed using Foley techniques.
Because of the nonspecific nature of sound—taken out of context, many sounds
are difficult to identify—Foley often uses objects that are not part of the scene. To
create sound effects in Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones for the skin surfaces
of alien creatures, when other aliens or objects touch them, the Foley artists used
pineapples, coconuts, and cantaloupes. The rough texture of their surfaces proved to
be ideally suited to evoking the imaginary sound of alien skin.
Whether or not Foley is employed to create a given effect, digital tools enable
sound engineers to electronically enhance effects and introduce changes in the sound-
wave characteristics of a given source. The effects track of a film is the highly processed
outcome of these electronic methods of sound manipulation. Leading the industry’s
transition to digital audio in 1984, Lucasfilm had a proprietary digital sound worksta-
tion (ASP, Audio Signal Processor) that stored and mixed sound in digital format. For
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), when Jones is surrounded by a bevy of
arrows flying toward him, ASP electronically extended the arrows’ whizzing sounds and
added Doppler effects (Doppler is a means of spatializing sound by altering its pitch).
The simple, raw recording of a given effect usually lacks emotional impact, so audio
engineers typically manipulate the effect, by layering in other components, to make it suit-
ably expressive. In Apocalypse Now (1979), during the scene where panicky Americans
machine-gun a group of Vietnamese in their boat, sound designer Walter Murch wanted
to affect the viewer’s psychological and emotional response to the machine-gun sound.
He wanted the viewer to feel that the sound was realistic even though it was not a live re-
cording of a single source but a synthetic blend of multiple, separate recordings.
Murch backed the microphone away from the gun to get a clean recording and
then, later, added supplementary elements such as the clank of discharging metal-
lic cartridges and the hiss of hot metal. By layering these additional features over the
softer sound of the gun firing, Murch artificially created a convincing realism in ways
that were compatible with his recording technology. Doing this involved “disassem-
bling” the sound rather than capturing it live and direct on tape.
In Terminator 2 (1991), for the gun battle in an underground parking garage,
sound designer Gary Rydstrom recorded guns firing in this reverberant space. But
to make the sound interesting, he also recorded the sound of two-by-fours slapping
together in the garage and layered this echoing sound into the effect to “fatten” it up.
In Backdraft (1991), Rydstrom gave blazing fires an audio presence and personality
by layering in animal growls and monkey screams. Given the film’s context—about
deadly urban fires—he knew the audience would not hear these sounds as animal
noises but as attributes of the fire. For the backdrafts, produced when a huge fire
sucks in oxygen before exploding, he used coyote howls, which gave the backdrafts
201

Principles of Sound Design
APOCALYPSE
NOW (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1979)
The sound of the
machine gun in
Apocalypse Now
was actually a
blend of mul-
tiple, separate el-
ements expertly
layered together
to produce the
psychological
impression of
a single, live
source. Frame
enlargement.
BACKDRAFT (UNIVERSAL, 1991)
Taken out of context, the meaning of an isolated sound can be very fluid and difficult
to identify. This enables sound designers to attach sounds to unrelated images to great
effect. The fires in Backdraft were mixed with animal sounds, although viewers did not
identify these sounds as such. This audio design suggested that fire was a kind of living
organism, with intelligence and personality. Frame enlargement.
a subliminal personality and intelligence. Expressive sound effects are complex, artifi-
cial creations that transcend their live sound components.
Music
Music has always accompanied the presentation of films for audiences. During the
silent period, film music was often drawn from public-domain, noncopyrighted clas-
sical selections or from the popular tunes of the era. Numerous catalogues offered
filmmakers or musical directors a guide for selecting appropriate music depending on
the tempo of the scene and its general emotional content. In addition, some original
symphonic scores were composed for silent films.
202

Principles of Sound Design
The original score composed especially for motion pictures became standard
practice in the sound period. While many different musical styles can be employed in
film scoring—jazz ( Mo’ Better Blues , 1990), rock ( Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure ,
1989), ragtime ( Ragtime , 1981), symphonic orchestral ( Star Wars , 1977)—music is
typically used to follow action on-screen and to illustrate a character’s emotions.
CREATING MOVIE MUSIC The production of movie music involves five distinct steps:
spotting, preparation of a cue sheet, composing, performance and recording, and mixing.
The first stage is spotting , during which the composer consults with the film’s director
and producer and views the final cut in order to determine where and when music might
be needed. Spotting determines the locations in the film that require musical cues, where
and how the music will enter, and its general tempo and emotional color.
Much of this is left up to the composer, although detailed discussions with a
film’s director are not uncommon, especially when the director has strong preferences
as to the style of scoring. Sometimes the director will impose a temp track —a tempo-
rary musical track derived from a score the director likes—onto the soundtrack of an
edited scene, or even the entire film, and ask that the composer create something like
the temp track. Not surprisingly, many composers find this stifling.
After the film has been spotted, the music editor then prepares a cue sheet . The cue
sheet contains a detailed description of each scene’s action requiring music plus the exact
timings to the second of that action. This enables the composer to work knowing the
exact timing in minutes, seconds, and frames of each action requiring music. As a result,
musical cues can catch the action and enter and end at precisely determined points.
Once the cue sheet has been prepared, the third step is actual composition of the
score. This is done by the composer using a video copy of the film. The video contains
a digital time code that displays minutes, seconds, and frames for all the action. Using
the cue sheet and video, the composer creates the score, carefully fitting the timing of
music and action.
Digital programs known as sequencers enable the composer to lock the score
onto the video’s digital time code. Once this is done, any scene can be played back,
and the computer can call up the score, enabling the composer to check timings.
Tempo adjustments—speeding up or slowing down the music—also can be made by
computer to precisely match music with action. The sequencer also can generate a
series of clicks that many composers use to establish a desired tempo for a given scene
and that is then used as a guide for composition.
Digital technology also has altered the phase of composition in which the com-
poser demonstrates the score for the director. Digital samplers enable composers to
electronically simulate all needed instrumentation in their scores and play the results
for the director, who can hear a close approximation of the film’s score-in-progress.
Before the age of samplers, composers demonstrated their scores on the piano, which
required that directors be able to understand how the piano performance would
translate into a full-bodied instrumentation. The disadvantage of digital sampling is
that demonstrations now give directors more input into scoring—an area most are not
qualified to handle—because, using a sampler’s keyboard, anyone can easily manipu-
late the musical characteristics of a composition. Some directors, to their composer’s
dislike, find this an irresistible temptation.
Once the music has been composed, the next step is performance and recording
of the score on a sound stage while a copy of the film is projected on a large screen
or video monitor. Timing of music to film action is facilitated by the use of clicks to
203

Principles of Sound Design
establish tempo, streamers —lines imprinted on the film or video—that travel across
the screen and mark the beginning and end of each cue, and a large analog clock with
a sweep second hand. The performance of the score is often attended by the director
and producer of the film.
The final stage in the creation of movie music is the process of mixing, which is
the blending of the various sound tracks, effects, music, and dialogue. The fact that
movie music is mixed along with dialogue and effects has influenced the attitude of
composers to the kind of music they create. Because dialogue is regarded as the most
important sound in a movie, music typically is mixed at a lower volume when it ac-
companies dialogue. Composers know this and work accordingly.
Hollywood composer Miklos Rosza pointed out that when music accompanies di-
alogue, it should be simple, without a lot of ornamentation, because this will be lost in
the mix when the music is buried beneath the dialogue. He also recommended that mu-
sic in dialogue passages be scored with strings rather than brass instruments because
he felt that strings blend better with the human voice. While there is much variation
among composers in their approach to scoring, these remarks indicate something most
would agree on—the film score is not autonomous. It should be written with the action
in mind and be capable of blending with all other sound sources in the movie.
So much for the technical steps involved in producing movie music. What of its
dramatic functions? Why is it used, and what does it accomplish in movies?
FUNCTIONS OF MOVIE MUSIC The great U.S. concert hall composer Aaron Copland
occasionally ventured into the world of filmmaking to compose scores for such pic-
tures as Of Mice and Men (1940), Our Town (1940), The Red Pony (1949), and The
Heiress (1949). Copland discussed the functions of movie music as he saw them, em-
phasizing five basic functions.
Setting the Scene Film music creates a convincing atmosphere of time and place. Movie
music characterizes the locations, settings, and cultures where the story occurs. Often,
this may involve the use of special instrumentation that reflects regional or ethnic musical
characteristics. Jerry Goldsmith, who was one of the industry’s most prolific and respected
composers, employed pan flutes in his score for Under Fire (1983), a film dealing with the
PLATOON (ORION
PICTURES, 1986)
The score for Platoon
deliberately avoids using
conventional war-film
music. Instead, com-
poser Georges Delerue
employed an already-
existing classical compo-
sition—Samuel Barber’s
melancholy “Adagio for
Strings”—and used it
to emphasize the film’s
haunted, tragic tone.
Frame enlargement.
204

Principles of Sound Design
revolution in Nicaragua in 1979. By using an instrument that was not specifically tied to
Nicaragua but was found in many peasant cultures in Central America, Goldsmith was
able to create a musical score that tied the Nicaraguan revolution, musically, to its peas-
ant origins, but in a way that included echoes of the peasant cultures of other Central
American countries, much as the revolution itself did in the 1980s.
Sometimes the time and place that a composer wishes to create do not exist in
reality. For his celebrated score for the science fiction film Planet of the Apes (1968),
Goldsmith relied on the use of unusual instruments, such as ram’s horns and brass
slide whistles, and unusual musical techniques, such as clicking the keys of wood-
wind instruments directly on the microphone. The result was a score that many
people thought was electronic, though Goldsmith has pointed out that he did not
use any electronic techniques. He used existing instruments in an unusual fashion to
enlarge the sound possibilities of the orchestra. These new and unusual sounds per-
fectly suited the film’s futuristic fantasy set in an alien and frightening world.
Unfortunately, the scene-setting function of movie music sometimes draws on and
fosters cultural stereotypes. Dimitri Tiomkin, who composed the score for Howard
Hawks’s Western Red River (1948), needed music for a scene in which Indians attack
a wagon train. He wrote music with a stereotypical tympani beat in order to telegraph
the idea that the Indians were about to attack. Tiomkin knew that this Indian music
was quite artificial and without any real historical basis, but he believed that authen-
tic tribal music would have been less effective because it was unconventional. Tiomkin
elected to use the musical stereotype because the audience was familiar with it.
Adding Emotional Meaning All motion picture composers stress the importance of this
function. Composer Hugo Friedhofer pointed out that music has the special ability of
hinting at the unseen, whereas images can only show what is visible. Music extends an im-
age’s range of meaning by adding psychological or emotional qualities not in the picture.
The tonal range of Western music, particularly the highly coloristic rendering
used in the Romantic period of the late nineteenth century, has become the model
for orchestral movie music because the emotional content of this musical style is
extremely familiar to audiences. Think of all the romantic melodramas in which the
teary lovers are about to be parted and the violins are sawing away on the soundtrack
UNDER FIRE (ORION
PICTURES, 1983)
Movie music helps es-
tablish place and locale,
often by employing re-
gional or ethnic musical
instruments and tradi-
tions. Jerry Goldsmith’s
score for Under Fire used
pan flutes, associated
with peasant cultures of
Central America, to mu-
sically characterize the
film’s Nicaraguan setting
and the popular basis of
that country’s revolution.
Frame enlargement.
205

Principles of Sound Design
or the way the strings in John Williams’s soaring score for E.T. capture the pathos of
Eliot’s goodbye to E.T. at the conclusion of that film.
Movie music emphasizes emotional effects most often by direct symbolization:
The music embodies and symbolizes an emotion appropriate to the screen action. An
alternative approach is to employ a contrast of image and music. Though less com-
mon than direct musical symbolization, it can be quite effective.
An especially impressive example occurs during the helicopter attack sequence in
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001). The Black Hawk helicopters in reality are
very loud, but the film’s sound editor minimized the realistic sound of the engines,
sometimes eliminating it entirely. Hans Zimmer’s music score substituted for the
engine sounds and musically portrayed the whooshing of the helicopter blades. The
result was subjective and psychological. The musical evocation of an absent sound ef-
fect worked to convey the stress and concentration of American soldiers about to land
in a battle zone. Their minds on the upcoming battle, they were not “hearing” the he-
licopters. The film viewer does, but only indirectly, by way of the music.
Director Stanley Kubrick famously combined picture and music in counterintui-
tive ways. In Dr. Strangelove (1963), the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, which
is scored with the lilting 1940s melody “We’ll Meet Again.” More cruelly, in A
Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick used the exuberant title song from MGM’s be-
loved musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as the accompaniment to a rape scene.
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa loved to contrast music and image. In
Drunken Angel (1948), the central character of the film, a small-time gangster, loses
control of the local neighborhood he dominated. Furthermore, he is dying of tubercu-
losis. He wanders the streets shunned by shopkeepers, coughing his life out. To em-
phasize the character’s despair, Kurosawa instructed his composer, Fumio Hayasaka,
to accompany the action with a silly and mindless cuckoo waltz. Kurosawa knew that
the mindless optimism of the waltz, in its extreme contrast with the character’s situa-
tion, would underline and emphasize the gangster’s despair and sadness.
Serving as Background Filler This use of movie music was more typical in older
films than it is in contemporary filmmaking. During the Hollywood period in the
1930s and 1940s, films were distinguished by so-called wall-to-wall music. Music
accompanied almost every scene, and it often assumed a kind of background filler
function, just as Copland noted. Contemporary films tend to use music more
BLACK HAWK DOWN
(COLUMBIA PICTURES,
2001)
The sound design eliminates
realistic sound from por-
tions of the helicopter attack
sequence and uses music to
quietly imitate the whoosh-
ing helicopter blades. The
design creates a subjective
perspective that portrays
the mental concentration of
the American soldiers in the
helicopters, about to go into
combat. Frame enlargement.
206

Principles of Sound Design
sparingly, and composers such as Jerry Goldsmith have believed that less music is bet-
ter because, when used, it becomes more significant.
Creating Continuity As with dialogue and effects, music can bridge shots in ways
that link and unify them. In montage scenes, for example, where many shots are ed-
ited together, music often supplies a unifying structure for the montage. When Julia
Roberts goes on her shopping spree in Pretty Woman , the Roy Orbison song, from
which the film derives its title, accompanies and unifies the montage.
A classic example of music unifying a montage occurs in Bernard Herrmann’s score
for Citizen Kane (1941). A famous sequence in the film shows Charles Foster Kane and
his first wife Emily in a series of brief encounters across the breakfast table. The montage
telescopes many years of marriage into these breakfasts. Each encounter registers further
decay and disintegration in their marriage. Herrmann wrote a little waltz for the montage,
A CLOCKWORK
ORANGE (WARNER
BROS., 1971)
The thug Alex (Malcolm
McDowell, center) dances
and sings “Singin’ in the
Rain” while his gang as-
saults a husband and wife
in their home. Director
Stanley Kubrick’s appropri-
ation of this cheerful song,
best remembered from the
classic MGM musical that
starred Gene Kelly, was
an act of cruel subversion,
placing the music in a new,
horribly violent context.
Frame enlargement.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS
(MGM, 1995)
For this grim story about
an alcoholic (Nicolas Cage)
and a hooker (Elizabeth
Shue) who have a brief af-
fair while he drinks himself
to death, the filmmakers
used music to counterpoint
the bleakness of the story.
The main musical theme
is the song “My One and
Only Love,” a tender and
sentimental ballad given a
lush, sweet orchestration for
the film. The song creates
a sharp counterpoint to the
drama. Frame enlargement.
207

Principles of Sound Design
established it in the first scene, and then used a series of variations for each succeeding
scene in the montage, with the music growing colder and more forbidding as the montage
progresses in order to capture the deepening alienation between Charles and Emily.
One of the most important ways that film music creates continuity is by using a
leitmotif structure. Indeed, this is one of the most common ways of scoring a motion
picture. A leitmotif is a kind of musical label that is assigned to a character, a place, an
idea, or an emotion. Once assigned, a leitmotif can be repeated each time the character
or idea or emotion reappears. This helps to make the music recognizable to an audi-
ence, especially after stretches of film where no music has been heard, and it also helps
to characterize the character, place, idea, or emotion. The leitmotif can be presented
with great invention and variation, restated in differing rhythms and colors. Leitmotif
is derived from the operas of Richard Wagner, who used it as a way of helping his au-
dience recognize and understand the characters and their emotional situations.
The Italian composer Ennio Morricone’s score for Sergio Leone’s Once upon a
Time in the West (1969) employs a very explicit leitmotif structure. Each of the four
major characters in the film has his or her own theme, and the themes reappear as the
characters do throughout the film so that one can easily follow the story and its con-
flicts simply by listening to the music. Almost every motion picture score is structured
as a set of themes and variations, and this repetition of familiar musical material is a
powerful means of creating continuity.
Music also can establish continuity by creating pacing and tempo within scenes.
As soon as music is added to a scene, the images take on a rhythm and pace they did
not otherwise possess because relationships are established musically across the shots.
Elmer Bernstein, composer of the score for the popular Western The Magnificent
Seven (1960), has pointed out that his music for this film is actually faster than the
action on screen. He wanted the music to help speed along an otherwise slow film.
Bernstein’s now-classic score adds immeasurably to the pacing of the movie, provid-
ing excitement in scenes that would otherwise lack it.
Emphasizing Climaxes Movie music emphasizes climaxes and concludes scenes or
the end of a film with finality. Music in movies tends to begin and end on specific
CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)
Composer Bernard Herrmann
provided a waltz and variations
to link musically the different
shots of Citizen Kane’s famous
breakfast montage. Frame
enlargement.
208

Principles of Sound Design
actions: doors opening and closing, cars pulling away, monsters jumping out of the
dark. In these ways, musical cues alert the audience to the climaxes and the emotional
high points of scenes. Danny Elfman’s score for Batman (1989) is exceptionally ac-
complished in catching action and emphasizing climaxes.
Music need not always be used to heighten action. Sometimes, its absence can be
very effective. In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the climactic confrontation in a
dark basement between Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and serial killer Buffalo Bill fea-
tures spooky ambient sounds and source music coming from Bill’s boom box, but no
film score. One had been composed for the scene, but the filmmakers elected to go in-
stead with the ambient sound. In the police thriller Bullitt (1968), during the famous
car chase, the music ceases early on. As detective Steve McQueen starts his pursuit of
a pair of suspected killers, the music begins in a tense and ominous fashion, but then
it stops so that sound effects—screaming engines, squealing tires—take over to carry
the sequence. Most movies use music to make car chases more exciting, but the chase
in Bullitt is historically important for avoiding this obvious strategem.
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN FILM SCORING Although movie music today performs
the basic functions noted by Copland, the styles employed and the importance of
music for the industry have changed since his era. The use of romantic orchestral
ONCE UPON A
TIME IN THE WEST
(PARAMOUNT
PICTURES, 1969)
Each character in this
epic Sergio Leone
Western has his or her
own highly distinc-
tive musical theme.
The leitmotif structure
of the score is espe-
cially explicit. Frame
enlargement.
THE SILENCE OF THE
LAMBS (ORION, 1991)
Sometimes no music at all is
more effective than a score.
One mark of intelligent scor-
ing is knowing when not to
score. Composer Howard
Shore wrote music for the
climactic scene where an FBI
agent (Jodie Foster) confronts
a serial killer in a dark base-
ment. On seeing the edited
sequence, however, he felt
it worked better, with more
suspense, without the music.
Frame enlargement.
209

Principles of Sound Design
music to score films in the Hollywood period gave way in the 1950s to more modern
approaches. Elmer Bernstein composed a jazz-oriented score for The Man with the
Golden Arm (1955), and Leonard Rosenman composed an atonal, 12-tone serial
score for The Cobweb (1955). Folk and rock scores in the late 1960s distinguished
The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). At this time, the symphonic orchestral
score fell out of style, but it made a triumphant comeback in the mid-1970s in the
work of John Williams. His scores for the Star Wars films and Steven Spielberg’s pic-
tures re-established the symphony orchestra as an essential scoring resource.
Today, film music is a key part of the movie business. Studios often market films
using contemporary music supplied by popular bands and singers and rely on sales of
recorded film music as a supplementary source of income. (The parent corporations
that own studios also own music publishing and recording businesses.) Because of
this, studios are often interested in scores that can be marketed in the format of popu-
lar songs. This trend goes back at least to David Raksin’s score for Laura (1944) and
could be found in the 1950s with films such as High Noon (1952) and in the 1960s
in The Magnificent Seven, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and Dr. Zhivago (1965).
Today, it is firmly established and is extremely common. The soundtrack of Forrest
Gump (1994) was essentially a collection of popular tunes from the 1960s, whereas
Natural Born Killers (1994) featured the work of popular 1990s performing groups.
The crafting of movie music as a series of pop hits has become a permanent fixture
of the industry and has had a detrimental effect on the art of film scoring. The artistry of
film scoring aims to create a fusion of music and image rather than detachable songs that
can be marketed on their own and have only a marginal relationship with the images on
screen. It was this development that effectively ended the long-time partnership between
director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann had composed
extraordinary music for the Hitchcock films The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man
Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by
Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964) and had served as a musical con-
sultant on The Birds (1963). Herrmann composed a score for Hitchcock’s next film, Torn
Curtain (1966), which was grim and foreboding, but the producers at Universal wanted
a pop song that could be hummed and played on the radio. Responding to their pressure,
Hitchcock threw out Herrmann’s score and substituted a more conventional composition
in its place. Miffed at this treatment, Herrmann never worked with Hitchcock again.
Like Herrmann, most serious film composers think that the pop song approach
compromises the integrity of their scores. Sometimes the application of pop songs
PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT
PICTURES, 1960)
Bernard Herrmann contrib-
uted brilliant scores for Alfred
Hitchcock’s pictures. The score
for Psycho, for example, used
only string instruments. The
shrieking strings heightened
the impact of the film’s brutal
violence. Frame enlargement.
210

Principles of Sound Design
is done in an almost schizophrenic fashion. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991),
starring Kevin Costner, employed a score that used many period instruments, but at
the end of the film, over the final credits, a pop rock love ballad provided the exit mu-
sic, roughly jolting moviegoers out of the medieval period of the movie.
The cross-marketing of movies and pop songs is now a firmly established feature
of the industry. To some extent, film scoring suffers from this emphasis. Many films
feature scores that, musically, have little to do with the action or emotions on screen.
Despite this, however, the art of film scoring remains very much alive. Exciting, ambi-
tious original scores by Hans Zimmer ( Black Hawk Down , 2001; The Thin Red Line ,
1998), James Horner ( A Beautiful Mind , 2001; Field of Dreams , 1989; Glory , 1989),
John Barry ( Out of Africa , 1985; Dances with Wolves , 1990), Danny Elfman ( Planet
of the Apes , 2001; Men in Black , 1997; Edward Scissorhands , 1990), and others con-
tinue to make a distinguished contribution to modern movies.
DR. NO (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1962)
Composer John Barry has
created some of the best-
known scores in contem-
porary film. In the 1960s,
his jazz-styled music for the
James Bond series helped to
immortalize ultracool Agent
007 (Sean Connery). His
sweeping orchestral scores
for Out of Africa (1985) and
Dances with Wolves (1990)
gave those films a lush, epic
tone. Frame enlargement.
Sound design on No Country for Old Men (2007),
directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, breaks with the
tradition in suspense thrillers of using a lot of music
and relying on it to create tension and excitement.
The Coens’ film has very little music, and when it
does appear it’s in a subliminal fashion, barely heard
underneath ambient sounds like prairie wind and
the rumble of an automobile engine. Unless really
listening for it, a viewer will not hear it consciously.
Composer Carter Burwell avoided traditional instru-
mentation and used, instead, singing bowls, used in
Buddhist meditation rituals, that produce a continu-
ous tone. He manipulated the sonic properties of this
tone in creative ways. When the hired killer, Chigurh
(Javier Bardem), menaces a gas station owner, Burwell
Case Study NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
set the frequency of the bowls’ tone to be the same as
the noise of a refrigerator.
The goal throughout the film was to let silence and
ambient noises create the tension that in more tradi-
tional films music is expected to produce. As a result,
the film’s sound effects are precisely crafted and edited.
Rather than taking a huge number of effects, laying
them on top of one another into a dense mix, and then
adding a lot of music, the Coens, Burwell, and sound
designer Craig Berkey went in the opposite direction,
toward a design that was lean and spare and highly
calibrated.
Many scenes in the film are sustained entirely by
image and by sonic design and feature no dialogue at
all. The best of these occurs in a dark hotel room, as
(continued)
211

Principles of Sound Design
SOUND DESIGN
The complexity of modern film sound, and its importance for the artistic design of
a film, has brought forth a new creative member of the production team: the sound
designer . Walter Murch’s brilliant work on Apocalypse Now (1979) elicited the credit
“sound design” because of Murch’s key contributions to the film’s total artistic de-
sign. On Apocalypse Now , Murch and his crew manipulated 160 tracks of recorded
sounds. These were mixed together to create the finished soundtrack. Since then, the
term has come into general usage.
Sound design goes far beyond the routine technical challenges of getting audible
sound and mixing effects and music with dialogue. Sound designers create a total
sound environment for the film’s images, an environment that not only supports the
images but also extends their meaning in dynamic ways. The sound design of a film
Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who has stolen a suitcase
full of drug money, awaits the approach of Chigurh,
who has been hunting him. Moss sits on the edge of the
bed, straining to hear noises that shouldn’t be there. As
in a similar scene in Hitchcock’s Rear Window , the killer’s
stealthy approach is betrayed by a few key, muffled
sounds—the scrape of a chair in the lobby downstairs,
the distant ringing of the desk clerk’s phone that goes
unanswered, the soft pad of feet on the floorboards in
the hallway outside the door, the squeaking of the light-
bulb in the hallway as it is unscrewed from its socket,
the explosive thump of the door’s lock as the unseen
Chigurh shoots it out of the door frame. The scene is a
pure example of storytelling through sound design.
The sound design that Berkey created for Chigurh’s
shotgun equipped with a silencer did not include any
recording of gun noises. It was a synthetic blend of
numerous high-pitched sounds, including screaming,
blended with an acoustical thump.
Overall, the creative sound work on No Country
for Old Men was intended to get the viewer to be-
have as Moss does in his hotel room, sitting forward
a little, listening intently to a sonic landscape that
offers clues to the action and that in many contem-
porary films is buried under too much audio infor-
mation that is too loud and unrelenting. The film is
about letting silences and discrete noises create the
tension. ■
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (MIRAMAX, 2007)
This film’s sound design is lean and spare but highly controlled. Ambient sounds
rather than music predominate in most scenes. The filmmakers elected not to use
music to carry the action and comment on it. When it does appear, the music
score is muted and subliminal. Frame enlargement.
212

Principles of Sound Design
builds a mix of realistic and synthetic sounds . Realistic sound matches the properties
of a real source. Unlike realistic sounds, synthetic sounds are invented and have no
counterpart in actual life, but they bond with the images on screen and extend their
meaning. The voice of Steven Spielberg’s character E.T. resulted from a mix of human
speech and animal sounds, incorporating up to 18 different sound elements. In Return
of the Jedi (1983), the sounds of the laser guns and the air motorcycles were created
by electronically modifying and rerecording a mixture of sound sources.
The modern film audience is privileged to experience film soundtracks of un-
precedented complexity and subtlety. Sound designers create highly sophisticated ma-
nipulations of sound information. These manipulations are rule-governed and exploit
unique properties of sound that differentiate it from a film’s image track.
Differences between Sound and Image
Sound and images uniquely differ from one another. Two kinds of differences exist:
(1) what viewers notice about pictures and sound and (2) how pictures and sound
structure time.
PERCEPTION OF IMAGE AND SOUND Obviously, images are visible and can be seen,
and sound cannot. Image edits, whether cuts, fades, or dissolves, can be seen on
screen. Sound edits are inaudible. Images can be touched. Sound cannot. As a result,
viewers notice images but tend to be less aware of sound design. Viewers tend to think
of cinema as an essentially visual medium, with sound as the backup element, there to
support the images.
Because of this, viewers think that they interpret sound in reference to images. In
most instances, however, sound shapes the image as much as the image shapes the sound.
Walter Murch created a memorable image-sound juxtaposition in Apocalypse Now
(1979) by adding a helicopter sound to a shot of a spinning ceiling fan. Viewers hear a
helicopter engine and rotor blades but see the spinning blades of the fan. In this striking
contrast, sound and image are equally assertive, equally important. Viewers may think of
images as being more important, but in this instance the helicopter sound contextualizes
the image as much as it contextualizes the sound.
Sound design is an extremely powerful but nearly subliminal element of film
structure. Furthermore, sound has a fluid nature that images do not. Taken out of
context, many sounds can be difficult to identify, which enables sound designers to
APOCALYPSE NOW
(UNITED ARTISTS, 1979)
To this shot of a spinning
ceiling fan, sound designer
Walter Murch added the
sound of a helicopter propel-
ler. This audiovisual com-
bination places equal stress
on image and sound; each
conditions the other. Frame
enlargement.
213

Principles of Sound Design
use them with great freedom, attaching them, for example, to a variety of images,
as in the sound effects used in Terminator 2 and Backdraft . Sound can stimulate the
imagination in ways images do not. In The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman
plays a surveillance expert, Harry Caul. He overhears a murder committed in an
adjoining hotel room. The violence of the killing is conveyed in the noises that come
through the wall into Harry’s room. Sound designer Walter Murch knew that what
the audience (and Harry) would imagine based on the sounds would be far worse
than what a picture might show.
STRUCTURING TIME Unless they contain explicit movement, many images are ambigu-
ous with respect to time. They can be run forward or backward with little noticeable
difference. A long shot of a forest or the exterior of a house is ambiguous in this way,
but not a shot of traffic or joggers. Viewers can tell if the latter two images were run
backwards, but not necessarily the first two.
Sound adds directional time to images. With sound, viewers perceive images as
moving forward unambiguously. George Stevens’s Western Shane (1953) provides an
interesting illustration of this principle. Stevens realized that a man dismounting a
horse looks more graceful than when climbing into the saddle. Accordingly, when the
film’s villain climbs into the saddle, the editor used a shot of the character dismounting
but played it in reverse. The sound in the scene—a gurgling stream, wind, off-screen di-
alogue from other characters—gives the shot a clear forward momentum. Viewers who
are aware of the trick can see that the shot is played backwards, but for most viewers,
unaware of the editing magic at work, the sleight-of-hand passes unnoticed because of
the way the shot is paired with sound that is clearly directional in time.
THE CONVERSATION (PARAMOUNT, 1974)
Featuring brilliant sound design by Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation
is that rare film that deeply probes the psychological components of sound. Harry Caul
(Gene Hackman) is a pathologically withdrawn man who works as a professional wiretap-
per. As he labors to discover the meaning behind a mysterious conversation he has taped,
Murch and Coppola show the subjective nature of sound. Harry psychologically projects a
meaning onto the audio information that proves to be tragically incorrect. In this scene, he
crouches in a hotel bathroom to tape a conversation in the next room. Frame enlargement.
214

Principles of Sound Design
Sound gives images forward momentum or adds to the momentum that the shots
already possess. Sound temporalizes images. This is the principle that underlies the
codes of sound continuity. But creating continuity is only one of the achievements of
sophisticated sound design, which, like image editing, is a rule-governed practice. What
are the basic rules and procedures for manipulating sounds and for establishing rela-
tionships with images?
The Codes of Sound Design
To construct the finished soundtrack viewers hear when watching a movie, designers
employ five essential codes: (1) the sound hierarchy, (2) sound perspective, (3) sound
bridges, (4) off-screen sound space, and (5) sound montage.
THE SOUND HIERARCHY Because of the variety of sounds in the audio environment
and the need to organize them to facilitate the viewer’s understanding of story infor-
mation, sound designers customarily treat them in terms of a hierarchy of importance.
When filmmakers manipulate dialogue, sound effects, and music within a scene, the
hierarchy of relationships typically emphasizes dialogue. A sound mixer understands
that inaudible or unclear dialogue can take a viewer out of the movie and break its
spell. If a viewer has to ask someone sitting next to them what a character just said,
the viewer is no longer “in” the film. Thus dialogue tends to be the determining ele-
ment in a sound mix. It is generally the first element to be mixed, and the volume of
effects and music is usually kept at a softer level to run underneath the dialogue.
Everyone has seen movies in which an important character dies during a noisy bat-
tle. Often, the character makes a little speech before dying. When this occurs, the vol-
ume of the battle sounds invariably drops below the dialogue. Once the character has
died, the battle sounds rise again to their previous level. Prevailing assumptions stipulate
that dialogue always should be clear, crisp, and understandable to the viewer.
Filmmakers do not always construct a standard sound hierarchy; some have delib-
erately sought to avoid it. In the early 1970s, one major U.S. filmmaker revolutionized
sound recording techniques in ways that challenged the dominant place of the actor’s
voice in the hierarchy of sound. Beginning with California Split (1974) and Nashville
(1975), director Robert Altman pioneered the use of multichannel, multitrack sound
recording. Rather than using a boom mike—a microphone hung on a long pole sus-
pended over a scene to record the voices of the actors—Altman employed radio mikes.
Each actor was separately miked, their voices transmitted to a recording receiver.
In the sound mix, Altman aimed to produce a profusion of voices, much as one
hears in a crowded room. In the crowd scenes in California Split , for example, many
actors speak at once, and the dialogue is multilayered, full of overlapping speech. In
addition, the radio mikes picked up ambient noises, like the rustle of clothing, that
are usually not captured by more standard recording techniques. The resulting au-
dio mix was extremely rich and multidimensional, and a single character’s voice did
not always predominate over other voices in a scene. The mix gave Altman an audio
equivalent to what his images were showing, namely, many things happening at once.
Altman’s approach frustrated critics because they were used to a more normative
sound hierarchy in which all voices were clearly modulated and balanced to give a
single speaker primacy of position in the audio mix. His films of the early 1970s were
somewhat controversial, but multitrack recording methods are today an industry stan-
dard, even though most films do not aim for the audio density of Altman’s pictures.
215

Principles of Sound Design

ON THE WATERFRONT (COLUMBIA
PICTURES, 1954)
Breaking the sound hierarchy can create startling
effects. When Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) tells
Edie (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in her
brother’s murder, the sound mix eliminates nearly
all of their dialogue, replacing it with loud, harsh
sounds from the environment, the New York har-
bor. These piercing sounds portray the characters’
anguish and stand in for the missing dialogue.
These sounds are the most important and promi-
nent ones in the scene and carry its emotion, a
function more typically performed by dialogue or
music. Frame enlargements.
The Sound Hierarchy in Early Cinema While contemporary sound design typically
features a highly articulated mix of dialogue, effects, and music, films from the early
sound period blended fewer elements to create the soundtrack. Rather than working
with many tracks each of dialogue, effects, and music, early sound films mixed a cou-
ple of dialogue tracks, a mono music track, a few sound effects, and an ambient track.
In contrast to the profusion of sound detail in contemporary film, the audio design
of early sound films included less information. Occasionally, one finds an incomplete
sound hierarchy in these films, a mix of dialogue, effects, and music that runs counter
to the practices that would soon become normative in the industry.
In Sergei Eisenstein’s first sound film, Alexander Nevsky (1938, about a Russian
folk hero who repulsed a German invasion in the thirteenth century, music and dialogue
tend to predominate in the sound structure of the film, with background ambient sound
and sound effects used less extensively. Some scenes or shots completely lack the ambient
sound and effects that are clearly denoted by the images and action.
At the beginning of the movie, for example, a group of Mongol warriors visits
Alexander Nevsky’s fishing village. Viewers hear the sounds of their horses and armor
as they arrive, but leaving, they make no sound at all. Their exit is completely silent.
216

Principles of Sound Design
Later in the film, during the visually impressive sequence that details the burning of
the city of Pskov and the slaughter of its inhabitants by the invading German army,
viewers hear only music and dialogue without any sound effects. Close-ups of scream-
ing, crying children lack these sound effects.
During the climax of the film, the epic battle on a frozen lake between Nevsky’s
armies and the invading Germans, music and sound effects alternate one at a time. The
music plays for a while and then stops, and viewers hear sound effects (swords clashing,
men shouting). Then the sound effects stop, and the music begins again. These manipu-
lations of sound may strike a modern moviegoer’s ears as rather crude and unrealistic
because of the peculiar manner in which effects and music have been edited so that they
are never present together and because of the lack of detail in the film’s audio space
when compared to its often striking images.
While most films establish a clear hierarchy of sound relationships that gives the
voice a privileged pride of place and surrounds the voice with music and important
sound effects, Altman’s work and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky are significant al-
ternatives to this practice. Their deviant structure demonstrates, by its omission, the
prevalence of the conventional hierarchy in which voice, effects, and music are present
together but in carefully regulated volumes.
SOUND PERSPECTIVE Sound perspective designates the ways that sound conveys prop-
erties of the physical spaces seen on screen. Sound perspective in film is based on corre-
spondences with the viewer’s acoustic perception of space in everyday life. The sound
of an approaching or receding object, for example, changes its pitch in a predic way
depending on its direction of movement, a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect .
Sound designers routinely use Doppler effects to acoustically convey the movement of
a sound-producing object through three-dimensional space. Recall that the sound en-
gineers at Lucasfilm added Doppler effects to the arrows whizzing at Indiana Jones to
give them a convincing three-dimensional presence in the scene. In the Star Wars films
and other science fiction pictures, Doppler spatializes the approach of CGI or minia-
ture-model spacecraft and helps sell these special-effect images to viewers.
ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1936)
The soundtrack of many films in the early sound period have a minimal range of effects and ambient noise,
even when images, such as these shots showing a screaming child, suggest highly specific sounds. Frame
enlargements.
217

Principles of Sound Design
Ben Burtt
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
River character. The scream is very distinctive, and
Burtt affectionately used it in several Star Wars mov-
ies. It’s now a kind of legendary audio effect and can
be heard in Inglourious Basterds (2008), Monsters vs.
Aliens (2009), and Iron Man 2 (2010)
When George Lucas hired Burtt to design the
sounds of Star Wars (1977), he wanted the film to
have an original audio profile, not recycled sound
effects. He broke with existing studio practices. As
a result, Star Wars sounded unlike earlier science
fiction films. The Federation’s beat-up space ships,
for example, sounded like Model T automobiles
rather than having the electronic hum so common
in 1950s-era sci-fi. Sound was uniquely assertive in
defining the experience, emotions, characters, and
settings of Star Wars. Burtt’s creative sound design
on that film helped to usher in a new era of audio
invention in motion pictures in which sound was
conceived as an active part of the moviegoer’s ex-
perience.
Because many of the characters and situations
for which Burtt had to invent sound were novel and
imaginary, he tried to map them onto sound experi-
ences familiar to viewers, ones they would associ-
ate with particular emotions. To create the sounds
of large spaceships in the Star Wars movies, Burtt
blended audio of thunder, animal growls, and jet
airplanes. Animal sounds are also part of the mix for
the engines on military vehicles appearing in Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981).
Because sounds taken in isolation are often
hard to identify, sound design is an art of elegant
substitution, and a designer needs to be able to
Ben Burtt has created some of the most famous
sounds in modern movies—the mechanical breath-
ing of Darth Vader, the crack of Indiana Jones’ whip,
the voices of E.T. and R2D2, the resonant hum of
Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. His long association with
George Lucas and Steven Speilberg helped to change
modern movie sound by emphasizing the invention of
original sounds for a production.
Before the 1970s, film studios compiled stock
libraries of audio effects that they used and re-used
in their films. Warner Bros.’ movies sounded different
than Paramount’s films because each studio drew
from its in-house audio archive. Many of the gunshots
heard in years of Warner Bros. gangster movies were
created originally for G-Men (1935), and the studio
recorded numerous bullet ricochets for The Charge
of the Light Brigade (1936). Audiences continued to
hear these ricochets in movies for decades. They even
were altered to become the cartoon sound of the
Road Runner dashing away. Burtt points out that one
ricochet was played backwards to supply the sound of
Superman landing on the 1960s-era television show.
These practices meant that sound effects often were
repetitive, familiar, and unsurprising.
The “Wilhelm scream” is a famous example of
recycled audio. The scream—recorded for a scene
in Distant Drums (1951) where a man is bitten by an
alligator—was archived at Warners and used in many
of the studio’s films, including The Charge at Feather
River (1953) where it was used when a character
named Wilhelm is shot with an arrow. Researching
sound at studio libraries, Burtt noticed this recurring
scream and named it “Wilhelm,” after the Feather
THE EMPIRE STRIKES
BACK (20 TH CENTURY
FOX, 1980)
Darth Vader’s lack of humanity
was unforgettably characterized
by the mechanical sound of his
breathing, a sound designed
by Ben Burtt to embody the
essence of the character. Frame
enlargement.
218

Principles of Sound Design
simply record wind? Because literal, realistic sound
sources often are insufficiently dramatic. Other
sources can be blended and manipulated to evoke
the necessary emotional tone or personality. The
sound of EVE’s laser gun in the film is produced
by stretching a slinky out to full length, placing
a microphone at one end and tapping the other
end. Because of the slinky’s length, high-frequency
tones reach the microphone first, then the mid-
tones, and then the low. The resulting sound is
metallic and resembles an explosive discharge,
making a good fit with the images of EVE shooting
her laser gun.
Burtt’s work on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones
films, and Walter Murch’s inventive work for Francis
Coppola on Apocalypse Now (1979), helped to make
the 1970s the first great era of sound design in motion
pictures. The inventive, singular, and unique audio
profiles of these films established the essential role that
original sound, expressly designed for a film, would
play in the art of cinema. ■
think analytically about sound in order to get the
right combinations of elements. Burtt created Darth
Vader’s heavy breathing by putting a microphone
inside a scuba tank regulator. Light-sabers were the
combined sounds of Simplex movie projectors, the
electric hum of television sets, and a moving micro-
phone re-recording the combined sounds to convey
a sense of object movement. Raccoon noises helped
supply the voice of E.T. and the skittery sounds of
the cockroach that appears in WALL-E (2008).
Because WALL-E is a computer-animated film, no
audio was recorded as part of a production track.
All of the images were created without sound, re-
quiring Burtt to invent the mechanical sounds of
the robots WALL-E and EVE, their planet and space-
craft. He created more than 2000 individual sounds
for the film. The noise of wind, for example, was
produced by running audio of Niagra Falls through
an echo chamber, and when the wind is heard
from inside WALL-E’s trailer, the sound is produced
by dragging a canvas bag across the floor. Why not
WALL-E (Pixar, 2008)
Robots in love—WALL-E
and EVE are personified
through highly articulated
and individuated sounds. A
low-tech robot, his sounds
are very mechanical, while
hers are more electronic and
airy. Sound design plays a
major role in bringing this
sci-fi world to life. Frame
enlargement.
Sound perspective also can be created by using reverberance and changes in vol-
ume. Direct sound is sound that comes immediately from the source. It is spoken or
recorded directly into the microphone, and because of this, it typically carries minimal
or no reverberance and conveys little environmental information. By contrast, reflected
sound carries reverberance. It reflects off of surrounding surfaces in the environment
to produce reverberation. Differing surfaces reflect sounds in differing ways, and these
differences convey important information about the kind of physical environment in
which the sound is occurring. Hard surfaces such as glass or metal tend to bounce
sound very quickly and very efficiently, whereas softer surfaces such as carpeting or
cushioned furniture are less reflective. They tend to absorb sound and, in extreme
cases, may deaden sound. In The Conversation (1974), the noises of the murder that
Harry Caul hears through an adjoining hotel room wall are muffled and deadened.
219

Principles of Sound Design
Sound environments, then, can be characterized in terms of their sound-reflective
or sound-deadening properties. Sound designers pay close attention to these features
so that the audio environments they create for a film match the physical conditions of
the scene or shot. Sound needs to reverberate in Edward Scissorhands’s huge, vacant
castle but not on the western plains in Dances with Wolves .
Another, very important characteristic of sound in the audio environment is am-
bient sound. As explained earlier, this term refers to generalized noises in the record-
ing environment. If shooting takes place out-of-doors, ambient sounds may include
the airplane traveling overhead, the cries of children playing in the distance, or the
sound of wind in the trees. Ambient sound is found in all recording environments,
even in an empty room. When a scene occurs in an empty room, the soundtrack will
not be dead or silent. It will carry room tone , the acoustical properties of the room
itself, the imperceptible sounds that it makes. Room tone is a very low level of ambi-
ent noise, and it indicates that the audio environment created by contemporary sound
design is never silent or dead but always conveys some audio information.
Sound perspective often correlates with visual perspective. If the action is pre-
sented in long shot, viewers also hear the sound as if in long shot. As the sound source
gets more distant from the camera in a reverberant environment, the properties of
reflected sound increase. As the sound source comes closer to the camera, the amount
of reflected sound decreases. By varying the amount of reflected sound, filmmakers
establish the location of a sound source within the visual space on screen.
If the action is presented to the viewer in close-up, direct sound should predomi-
nate over reflected sound. The actors’ voices should be intimate and sound as if they
are spoken closely to the microphone. Sound designer Walter Murch has stated that
he records not just sounds in the environment but also the spaces between the listener
THE OTHERS (MIRAMAX, 2001)
Digital, multichannel sound can create tremendously vivid sound perspective. When Grace
(Nicole Kidman) is terrorized by what she believes are ghosts, disembodied voices fly
around the room, jumping from channel to channel, speaker to speaker, across the front
soundstage and into the rear surrounds. As the unseen spirits flutter about the character,
the sound reproduces this action in three-dimensional audio space. The effect becomes
subjective, immersing the film viewer into the character’s experience. Frame enlargement.
220

Principles of Sound Design
and those sounds. In actual practice, however, microphone placement does not ex-
actly parallel camera placement. While the difference in camera placement between a
close-up and a long shot may be very great, the difference in actual microphone place-
ment may only be a matter of several feet. Moreover, many contemporary films invert
visual and sound perspectives by filming actors in long shot and miking them for
direct sound. Peter Weir’s Dead Poets’ Society (1989) deals with the relationship be-
tween an unconventional English teacher (Robin Williams) and his students in an elite
prep school in 1959. One of the boys discusses with his friend his excitement over
getting the lead role in the school play. The two boys stand on a pier next to the wa-
ter and are filmed in extreme long shot. Their voices, however, are miked in intimate
terms. The audio space is very close. The visual space is very distant.
Sound Perspective in Early Cinema As with other attributes of film structure, film-
makers did not grasp the complexities of sound design all at once. Sound technology
came to the movies in the late 1920s, and filmmakers gradually discovered the cre-
ative possibilities of sound and how to use it in a rich and naturalistic fashion. As a re-
sult, and because early sound technology was quite limiting, the soundtracks in many
early films tend to be less detailed and less reflective of the realities of sound space.
French director René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), for example, is a
mixture of pantomime, music, and dialogue. Much of the film was shot silent, with
a few talking sequences added later. At the beginning of the film, the camera booms
down from the rooftops to the streets of Paris where a song salesman is performing
a new tune for a group of onlookers. Viewers hear the song throughout the camera
movement, and as the camera draws closer, the song’s volume increases. There is,
however, no apparent change in reverberation.
At the end of the scene, the camera booms back up to the rooftops. This time
the volume of the song does not decrease as much as it should given the amount of
physical space the camera crosses. Again, there is no change in reverberation. The
perspectives established by visual space and audio space do not correlate very well.
UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS
(TOBIS, 1930)
Correct sound perspective is
not a feature of every film. The
relationship of audio space and
camera perspective often proves
to be quite flexible. In Under
the Roofs of Paris, as the camera
travels from the rooftops to the
street below, the appropriate
changes in audio space do not
occur. Frame enlargement.
221

Principles of Sound Design
As with all rules and conventions of film structure, sound
perspective can be satirized and played with by smart
filmmakers. French director Jacques Tati was one of
the masters of sound cinema. Tati was a pantomime
comedian whose films bear some relationships to silent
comedies. Dialogue in his films is minimal, and the sound
space is dominated by a multitude of carefully organized
environmental sounds. Tati postdubbed his soundtracks
to achieve a maximum of control over their sound design.
In Tati’s masterpiece, Playtime (1967), he playfully
distorts standard sound perspective. Early in the film,
the main character, Mr. Hulot (played by Tati himself),
is trying to keep an appointment with an official named
Mr. Giffard. When Hulot tries to meet the official, he is
instructed by the building’s doorman to wait beside a
bank of elevators while Mr. Giffard is paged. Hulot waits
patiently, framed at screen left, while, onscreen right, a
vast, receding hallway extends into the distance. Hulot
is seated around the edge of the wall, however, so he
cannot look down this hallway. But the viewer can.
As Hulot waits, loud footsteps occur off-screen.
Because of their loud volume, the viewer assumes the
person these feet belong to must be very near. In the next
Case Study JACQUES TATI
moment, however, a tiny figure appears in the distance at
the end of the hallway. This is joke number one, reversing
the expectation viewers developed based on the prob-
able sound space–image space relation. The glass, metal,
and tile hallway conveys the reverberant footsteps very
effectively; they remain loud and only grow slightly in
volume as the man approaches. This is joke number two.
The third joke in the scene occurs as Tati, hearing the man
but unable to see him, keeps trying to get up, assuming
that he must be close given the loudness of his steps.
The doorman, however, who can look down the hallway,
keeps gesturing for Hulot to stay seated.
This scene is composed of a single shot, and the
three distinct jokes that occur in it are based on Tati’s
playful manipulation of the sound space– image space
relation. In this case, sound perspective is an unreliable
indicator of visual space and of the physical relations
in the scene. It illustrates the cinema’s transformational
property, its ability to alter and play with perceptual
realities in ways that viewers readily accept. The cinema
records and transforms audiovisual information, and
filmmakers are constantly negotiating the creative pos-
sibilities of these functions. ■
PLAYTIME (1967)
Director Jacques Tati
satirizes sound perspec-
tive by making it an
unreliable indicator of
visual space. The sound
of Mr. Giffard’s foot-
steps remains extremely
loud and distinct de-
spite his changing loca-
tion in a long hallway.
Frame enlargement.
Pointing out this feature of Under the Roofs of Paris does not imply that René
Clair is an inferior filmmaker. Clair, in fact, was one of the most important early
practitioners of sound and a filmmaker whose career straddled the silent and sound
periods. He devised many inventive gags in his films where the humor depends on
a particular manipulation of sound. Moreover, his work was a decided influence
on the U.S. master Charlie Chaplin. Clair’s film, À Nous la Liberté (1931), was the
222

Principles of Sound Design
inspiration for Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The point here is to emphasize that
these codes of sound design are learned applications of style that filmmakers gradu-
ally discovered as a way of creating credible audiovisual relationships on screen. The
design differences between an early film like Under the Roofs of Paris and more con-
temporary films shows the development and maturation of sound aesthetics.
SOUND BRIDGES Sound may be connected to a source on screen or disconnected
from an on-screen source. In the latter instance, the sound-producing source is off-
camera. It is source-disconnected sound because, though viewers hear the sound, they
cannot see its source. In any given scene, sound designers employ both categories.
Source-connected sound occurs if viewers see Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye in The
Last of the Mohicans (1993) tell a British officer that he will not serve in the English
army. If, by contrast, the camera stays on the British officer while Hawkeye speaks
off-screen, the sound is source-disconnected.
Switching between on-screen and off-screen sound gives filmmakers enormous
flexibility in the editing of their films. Not everything that is heard needs to be shown.
This frees the camera from being a slave to dialogue or other sounds and enables it to
reveal aspects of the scene independently of what viewers hear on the soundtrack. All
a filmmaker need do is return periodically to source- connected sound in order to sus-
tain the viewer’s sense of the important audiovisual relationships. Filmmakers often
“cheat” in the editing of dialogue scenes by using reaction shots of a character’s face
taken from other points in the scene or film. The editing encourages viewers to read
the expression as a reaction to the immediate dialogue, which is heard off-camera.
Filmmakers use sound to establish continuity across shots by alternating between
on-screen and off-screen sound. Because sound gives images a clear direction and ori-
entation in time—with sound, film images clearly move forward—sound can establish
continuity of time across the shot changes in a scene. This often occurs through the
use of a sound bridge in which dialogue or effects carry over, or bridge, two or more
shots, unifying them in time and/or space. Sound bridges are one of the most powerful
and important ways of creating continuity in film. In Glory (1989), Col. Robert Shaw
(Matthew Broderick) must tell his African-American regiment that the War Department
has ordered that black soldiers in the Union army will receive less pay than their white
counterparts. As Shaw speaks, the editor cuts to reaction shots of the black soldiers,
showing their dismay at this insulting decree. Shaw continues to speak off-screen dur-
ing these shots, establishing the sound bridge and creating continuity among the shots.
The sound information tells viewers that all the shots, which show completely different
groups of characters, are part of a common space and within a single moment of time.
In the early German sound film The Blue Angel (1930), as the schoolmaster (played
by Emil Jannings) removes his handkerchief to blow his nose, the action cuts to a reaction
shot of the schoolboys. While looking at them, viewers hear the sound of Jannings blowing
his nose. The editing switches from source-connected to source-disconnected sound. Sound
flows over the cut, establishing a continuity that links up the different images. In dialogue
scenes using the shot-reverse-shot technique, passages of spoken dialogue will flow over the
cuts to establish continuity across the shot changes.
In contemporary films, filmmakers often employ a modified sound bridge in
which the switch to source-disconnected sound occurs before the cut rather than after
it. In other words, the sound cut precedes the visual transition. In Mike Nichols’s The
Graduate (1967), a striking sequence expresses the social and emotional alienation
of the young hero, Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman), when he dons a scuba suit
223

Principles of Sound Design

GLORY (COLUMBIA TRI-STAR, 1989)
The voice of Col. Robert Shaw (Matthew
Broderick) provides the sound bridge
unifying these reaction shots of
African-American soldiers. The sound
bridge connects the space and time
of these shots, which contain almost
no visual elements in common. Frame
enlargements.
and seeks refuge at the bottom of his parents’ swimming pool. The camera films him
alone and isolated in the depths of the pool. As the camera tracks slowly away from
him, viewers hear sound from the next scene (which occurs in a phone booth) for 13
seconds before the image cuts to that scene. It is Benjamin talking on the telephone to
invite Mrs. Robinson, the family friend, to meet him at a local hotel.
The sound of Benjamin on the phone, asynchronous with the shot of him in the
pool, technically violates the time and space of the pool scene, but viewers accept the
sound editing as a novel, interesting, and offbeat way of signaling the transition to the
224

Principles of Sound Design
next scene. When The Graduate was released in 1967, this was an innovative way of
making the transition, but it has become a fairly standard technique today.
OFF-SCREEN SOUND Just as the distinction between source-connected and source-
disconnected sound is relevant for understanding principles of sound continuity, it
also helps to explain how sound can extend the viewer’s perception of visual space.
Off-screen sound is part of the dramatic action of a scene, but its source is off-camera.
This kind of sound enlarges the coordinates of the world represented on screen. That
world is not coextensive with the images on screen. Instead, through sound informa-
tion, it extends into an indefinite, acoustically defined area of off-screen space.
Filmmakers quickly grasped the creative possibilities. Produced only a few years into
the sound era, Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931) brilliantly uses off-screen sound to signal the
lurking, unseen presence of a serial killer. The murderer compulsively whistles the theme
from the Peer Gynt suite, and his rapid, repetitive whistling occurs off-camera in many
scenes throughout the film as a means of building suspense, anxiety, and mystery. As a
little girl looks in a store window and then runs down the street, the off-screen whistling
conveys his stalking presence and desperate hunger for a new victim. Lang had quickly
grasped the power of sound to fire the audience’s imagination. The unseen, conveyed
through sound, is far more frightening than how the killer proves to look when the
camera finally shows him. This sonic extension of the frame into off-screen space would
become an essential technique in horror films in which monsters lurk just out of sight.
The famous ending of All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) shows the hero—a
German soldier in the trenches of World War I—killed by a sniper as he reaches ten-
derly for a butterfly that has alighted on the fields of carnage. In close-up, the viewer
sees the hero’s hands reaching for the butterfly and then hears an off-screen gunshot
and sees the hands drop lifelessly to the ground. At this moment, the ambient (and off-
screen) sounds of battle cease, as the soundtrack deadens to convey the hero’s passing.
The distinction between diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound can provide a
useful way of thinking about relationships between sound-producing sources and the
story world represented on screen. Diegetic sound originates within the story world,
THE GRADUATE (AVCO-EMBASSY, 1967)
A creative noncorrespondence between image and sound in The Graduate . The sound
bridge to the next scene begins well before the end of the final shot in this, the previous
scene. As the camera pulls away from Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in the swimming pool,
viewers hear him talking on the telephone in the next scene. Frame enlargement.
225

Principles of Sound Design
and can include sources, like character dialogue or sound effects, that are on-screen
as well as off-screen. Diegetic sound can be heard by characters in the story. Non-
diegetic sound originates outside of the story world, and a good example is movie
music. If a character plays music within a scene from a radio or a phonograph, that’s
diegetic sound. When the music is provided by the score composed for the film, that’s
non-diegetic sound. The terms are helpful in describing situations where the distinc-
tions to be drawn about the use of sound involve being inside or outside of the story
world rather than on-screen or off-screen.
SOUND MONTAGE Contemporary multitrack sound design is based on montage, the
editing of sounds into highly intricate and complex patterns that create meaning and
M (1931)
Director Fritz Lang’s classic film
vividly demonstrated the power of
off-screen sound space. The whistled
leitmotif of the serial killer (Peter
Lorre) suggests his lurking pres-
ence as he stalks his victims from
off-screen. Here, frustrated in his
hunt, he pauses by a store window.
Rows of knives reflected in the glass
encircle his body, suggesting that
he is a prisoner of his lethal desires.
Frame enlargement.
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN
FRONT (UNIVERSAL, 1931)
As the hero (Lew Ayres) reaches
tenderly for a butterfly, a sniper’s
bullet, fired off-screen, abruptly
ends his life. To simulate his pass-
ing, the soundtrack goes dead,
all ambient noise ceasing. Frame
enlargement.
226

Principles of Sound Design
emotion. Apocalypse Now (1979) features an exceptionally creative sound montage
during the opening scene as Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) lies on his bed in a Saigon
hotel. Willard longs to be back in the jungle where he can safely satisfy his violent ap-
petites in combat and by working as a paid assassin. As he lies in the hotel, Willard
imagines himself in the jungle. The soundtrack carries an audio representation of this
inner fantasy. Sound designer Walter Murch systematically replaced city sounds with
a series of jungle sounds. Urban noises—a policeman’s whistle, the engines of cars and
motorcycles—give way on the soundtrack to the squawk of jungle birds, the buzzing of
insects, and the cries of monkeys. Murch pointed out that these sound manipulations
convey the idea that, although Willard’s body is in Saigon, his mind is in the jungle.
Visual montages arrange shots to express meanings not contained in any single
shot taken in isolation. This scene from Apocalypse Now uses the same principle,
transposed to sound. The total arrangement of sounds expresses the reality of
Willard’s fantasy in a way that the individual sounds, taken in isolation, cannot.
The multi-channel systems used for playback in theater auditoriums and con-
sumer home video have accentuated the montage structure of contemporary sound de-
sign. By spatializing sound—sending discrete elements to different speakers positioned
about the viewer—multi-channel playback emphasizes the richness and density of
sound montages. The expanded dynamic range provided by digital sound has enabled
filmmakers to construct ever more complex audio montages and has helped make this
an essential feature of contemporary sound aesthetics.
SUMMARY
Though moviegoers may not be explicitly aware of sound design, its contribution
to film cannot be overstated. The next time you watch a favorite movie, turn off the
sound and see how impoverished the pictures become. Without sound, a movie loses
much of its emotional impact.
Sound design works with the three types of sound—dialogue, music, and effects.
Dialogue in film tends to be either voice-over narration or character speech. Sound ef-
fects are created using Foley techniques or more elaborate electronic manipulations as
part of a comprehensive sound design. Music in film tends to be composed within a late
APOCALYPSE NOW
(UNITED ARTISTS,
1979)
The beginning of
Apocalypse Now shows
Captain Willard (Martin
Sheen) in a Saigon ho-
tel room. A complex
sound montage replaces
Saigon’s city sounds with
jungle sounds to suggest
Willard’s desire to return
to the jungle. Frame
enlargement.
227

Principles of Sound Design
romantic style, whose musical conventions and range of coloring are familiar to most
moviegoers. Movie music helps set the locale and atmosphere of time and place in the
story, adds psychological and emotional meaning to a scene, provides background filler,
establishes continuity, and calls attention to climaxes and conclusions of scenes.
Sound design creates a complex audio environment to accompany film images,
establishing dynamic audiovisual relationships and shaping in subtle and almost sub-
liminal ways the viewer’s interpretation of those images. Sound design is orderly and
rule-based, following a set of basic codes, some of which establish perceptual corre-
spondences with the viewer’s real-world audio experience.
Dialogue, music, and effects are controlled to establish a hierarchy of sound rela-
tionships with dialogue being given primary importance. Direct, reflected, and ambi-
ent sound levels are carefully related to camera position to create sound perspective.
Editors alternate between establishing on-screen and off-screen sound–image relations
to keep camera perspective flexible and to maintain continuity. Sound editing estab-
lishes continuity across cuts, primarily by allowing sound to flow over the cut, as in
the use of sound bridges. Sound is also used to prepare viewers for visual transitions,
as when a sound cut precedes a visual cut, and to establish off-screen space that ex-
tends the viewer’s physical sense of the image. Finally, sound montages may establish
intellectual and emotional associations that go beyond the content of the images.
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
ADR
ambient sound
cue sheet
dialogue
diegetic sound
direct sound
effects
Foley technique
leitmotif
music
non-diegetic sound
off-screen sound
postdub
production
track
realistic sound
reflected sound
room tone
soundstage
sound bridge
sound design
(designer)
sound field
sound perspective
speech
spotting
synthetic sound
temp track
voice-over
narration
SUGGESTED READINGS
Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision , ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
Fred Karlin, Listening to Movies: The Film Lover’s Guide to Film Music (New York: Schirner
Books, 1994).
Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Vincent LoBrutto, Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1994).
Michael Schelle, The Score: Interviews with Film Composers (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press,
1999).
Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
228

The Nature of Narrative
in Film
■ explain why a script serves as the foundation
for a film
■ explain why the storytelling function came to
film early in its history
■ explain the relationship between narrative and
the mass production of film
■ explain the three basic elements of narrative
■ differentiate between story and plot and
explain how filmmakers may creatively
manipulate this distinction
■ explain the concept of authorship in cinema
and why it is a problematic concept
■ distinguish between real and implied authors
■ explain how point of view operates in film
narratives
■ describe the classical Hollywood narrative
■ distinguish explicit causality from implicit
causality and explain their different narrative
effects
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

From Chapter 7 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
229

The Nature of Narrative in Film
■ define the nature of film genre
■ describe the types of stories found in the
major film genres
■ explain the counter-narrative tradition in
cinema
■ describe the viewer’s contribution to narrative
Stories are found in all cultures. Narrative is a universal human activity used for entertainment,
instruction, and socialization. It is also an essential way that people think about themselves
and their world. To explain how things change or how they got to be, people tell stories.
Given the universality of narrative, it is not surprising that cinema, in its popular forms, has
been a narrative medium.
Commercial filmmakers use the camera, light, color, actors, sound, and editing to tell
stories. Fiction films are distributed internationally, and fans of Westerns, science fiction
films, and other genres turn to them for pleasure and enrichment. Narrative is also central
to the tradition of documentary filmmaking. Many documentary filmmakers will say that
they cannot define the structure of their film until they find the story that they are going
to tell.
The importance of narrative for popular movies cannot be overestimated. What, then, is
narrative, and what are its structural elements in film? This chapter explains when and why
narrative came to the movies, examines some of the basic elements of narrative structure, and
concludes by examining what the viewer contributes to the experience of narrative.
STORY AND SCRIPT
Though cinema is an audiovisual medium, it begins with the written word. The initial
step in the production of a film is completion of a script. Much like a play, the script
tells the story in a scene-by-scene fashion, with dialogue and character interactions
written out in detail. The script furnishes the basic structure of story and dramatic ac-
tion that filmmakers will transform into picture and sound. There is no substitute for
these attributes at the scripting stage; filmmakers find it difficult to develop them once
a production has commenced and is before the cameras. Shekhar Kapur, the direc-
tor of Elizabeth (1998), joined that project when the script was in its third revision,
and nothing went before the cameras until the script was in its thirteenth draft. The
resulting film is uncommonly rich and well designed, in large part because of its solid,
scripted foundation.
The elegance of structure found in such exquisitely told narrative films as
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo originated in outstanding scripts. (For
Vertigo , Hitchcock went through three screenwriters before he got what he wanted.)
Because of the structural complexity of filmmaking, a great deal about the medium
must be preplanned and predetermined. As a result, filmmakers cannot simply
improvise shots and action and expect their finished film to have a sophisticated
and intricate visual and narrative design. This design must be planned in advance.
Filmmakers use the camera, sound, and editing to shape stories and bring them to
life as cinema. But all this begins with a script, even though the screenwriter, in
practice, will specify few details of camerawork. (That is an area left to the direc-
tor.) The audiovisual design of a film falls outside the domain of the screenwriter.
The script, however, furnishes the narrative, dramatic action, and dialogue that a
director then has the job of visualizing, using all the tools that the craft of filmmak-
ing offers.
230

The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE TURN TO NARRATIVE IN EARLY FILM HISTORY
The storytelling function in cinema arrived quickly. Public exhibition of projected
motion pictures dates from 1895, when the photographic equipment manufacturers
Auguste and Louis Lumière held a public screening of their short films. Called “actu-
alities,” they focused on everyday life and did not assume a narrative format. Subjects
included parents feeding a baby, workers knocking over a wall, a train pulling into a
station, and workers leaving a factory.
One film on the early program, however, The Gardener Gets Watered (1895),
anticipated the use of film as a storytelling medium. A gardener watering his lawn is
tormented by a mischievous boy who kinks the hose and then straightens it, spray-
ing the gardener’s face. He retaliates by chasing and spanking the boy. The film thus
shows a series of events that were clearly staged for the camera and which present an
episode of narrative action ordered in time, with a beginning and an end.
In the United States, movies were an early attraction on the vaudeville stage,
where motion picture presentations coexisted with slapstick comedians, singing
TIME CODE (SCREEN GEMS, 2000)
In this unusual film, a split-screen technique divides the frame into four grids, with each
conveying a separate storyline, but all centering on the same events and characters. The
plots even move from grid to grid, and the narrative becomes a kaleidoscopic mosaic.
Changes in the sound mix “tell” viewers which grid to concentrate on. Director Mike
Figgis shot on digital video in extended takes running almost 90 minutes. The only “edit-
ing” is that which occurs when the viewer compares the picture information across the
four grids. Frame enlargement.
231

The Nature of Narrative in Film
performances, dramatic recitations, and animal shows. By 1902, however, narrative
films, particularly comedies, began to appear and were greeted enthusiastically by
the public.
They coexisted, however, with a vast amount of nonfiction film material, including
travelogues (films showing beautiful, exotic, or faraway places) and films focused on topi-
cal events such as a yacht race or political parade. Narrative film, though, quickly became
the predominant form, displacing these nonfiction formats. The public was enthusiastic
about story films, including comedies, dramas, chases, or trick films (films favoring such
special optical effects as characters appearing and disappearing or moving in fast or slow
motion). Nickelodeons—storefront theaters where the public could see an entire program
of films for 5 or 10 cents—sprang up in great numbers, by 1910 attracting about 26 mil-
lion Americans per week (a little less than 20 percent of the national population).
The nickelodeon boom demonstrated the explosion of popular interest in the
movies, and it challenged producers to optimize film production so that it could meet
the growing popular demand for motion picture entertainment. In this regard, story
films offered decisive advantages over nonfiction production. Stories could be written
as fast as films were needed, and they could capitalize on the scenic features of a given
production company’s locale. By contrast the documentary filmmaker was a hostage
to events. Production had to wait for the interesting yacht race or parade to occur.
The only limit on the production of story films was the imagination of the writers and
the physical resources of the production companies.
Historian Robert Allen has argued that the shift to narrative films can be ex-
plained in part by these advantages and points out that by 1909, fiction films repre-
sented 97 percent of the industry’s total output. Public interest and the needs of the
expanding industry decisively shifted film production into the narrative mold. The
narrative sophistication of early film rapidly matured. The work of director D. W.
Griffith, beginning in 1908, displayed a special narrative brilliance and an unprece-
dented sophistication of visual design. Since the first decade of the medium’s history,
then, narrative has been an essential ingredient in the popular appeal of cinema, and
it furnished the key basis on which the industry could flourish.
THE GARDENER GETS
WATERED (1895)
The use of film to tell stories fol-
lowed soon after the invention
of cinema. This early Lumière
film, The Gardener Gets Watered ,
staged events for the camera and
sequenced them as narrative.
Frame enlargement.
232

The Nature of Narrative in Film
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
D. W. Griffith
In early film history, D. W. Griffith perfected (though
he did not invent) the essential techniques of mo-
tion picture narrative. Griffith’s understanding of
the principles of film structure and the methods of
cinematic storytelling was uncommonly sophisti-
cated. Viewed today, the camerawork and editing in
his films seem thoroughly modern, even though the
melodramatic stories appear somewhat dated.
Griffith was born in Kentucky in 1875, into a fam-
ily ruined and impoverished by the Civil War and
Reconstruction. Determined to become an actor and
playwright, Griffith loved the theater and considered
it to be a legitimate art. By contrast, he thought the
movies were a bastard offspring, and he came to
them reluctantly after failing to launch a successful
theatrical career. In 1908, Griffith made his first film
at the Biograph Studio in New York, where he contin-
ued to work until 1913. In his Biograph films, Griffith
developed an increasingly complex and expressive
visual style that he used to punch his stories across
with maximum emotional impact. He perfected this
style by directing a huge number of films. He directed
86 films in 1910, for example, and 70 films in 1911.
Their subjects fell into categories that would define
the basic Hollywood genres: gangster films, Westerns,
biblical films, and war films.
At Biograph, Griffith strained against the narrative
restrictions imposed by the one-reel format (one reel
was approximately 10 minutes). In 1911, he made
Enoch Arden in two reels, and in 1913 he made the
biblical epic, Judith of Bethulia , his final Biograph film,
in four reels. By moving to longer forms, Griffith was
able to tell increasingly complex stories. After leav-
ing Biograph, Griffith made two epics, The Birth of a
Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), which master-
fully wove together multiple plotlines and featured
huge casts of characters. At silent speeds, each film
ran approximately three hours.
Griffith’s films are a virtual catalogue of modern
motion picture technique. By using multiple camera
positions and fluid editing, he fractured a scene
into its constituent shots, intercutting freely to cre-
ate smooth continuity. Each shot was dramatically
incomplete, recording just a fragment of the action
and acquiring meaning in relation to the other shots
that made up the scene. He drastically varied cam-
era position and angle, freely incorporating low- and
high-angle shots, as well as long shots, medium
shots, and close-ups. In Enoch Arden , Griffith used
a psychological image to show what a character is
thinking. The camera draws close to the character’s
face, then Griffith cuts to another scene that repre-
sents the character’s mental image.
Griffith skillfully placed his cameras to frame shots
in highly expressive ways. In The Birth of a Nation ,
when the Little Colonel returns home from the Civil
War, he is greeted by his mother. Rather than show-
ing the mother’s face, Griffith discreetly shows only
her arms reaching out from inside the house to em-
brace him. This discreet framing, with its use of off-
screen space, intensifies the emotions of the reunion
by emphasizing their private nature.
By 1915 and 1916, when Griffith completed his
epics, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance , he had
perfected the essential building blocks of modern mo-
tion picture narrative: rapid changes of camera posi-
tion and angle, close-ups used to intensify the drama
and reveal emotion, complex editing used to fracture
a scene into a series of dramatically incomplete shots,
camera movement used to extend the frame and fol-
low action, and cross-cutting of multiple story lines.
Unfortunately, Griffith’s brilliant grasp of film
structure accompanied racist and reactionary
attitudes. Most notoriously, The Birth of a Nation
portrayed the Civil War and Reconstruction as catas-
trophes that destroyed the happy plantation life of
the South and, by freeing southern slaves, unleashed
a tide of black villainy against virtuous white aris-
tocrats. In the film’s climax, the Ku Klux Klan saves
southern honor and white virtue by restoring order
throughout the South. Because of its virulent racism,
The Birth of a Nation remains as inflammatory today
as when it was first screened. Its explosive nature is
evidence of Griffith’s filmmaking skill. Its visual power
and emotional manipulation of audiences make its
racism all the more vicious and repugnant.
Griffith tried to rebut charges that he was a
racist and calls for censoring the movies with
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233

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Intolerance , a complex film weaving together a
modern story of crime and gangsters with stories
about the fall of Babylon, the massacre of the
Huguenots in medieval France, and the crucifixion
of Christ. Griffith drew an epic portrait of social
intolerance by telling these stories simultaneously,
cutting back and forth among them to create dra-
matic and emotional connections. Its elaborate nar-
rative structure made Intolerance a film far ahead of
its time. Even today, it remains a challenging film.
Griffith continued to make several more outstand-
ing films ( Broken Blossoms , 1919; True Heart Susie , 1919;
Way Down East , 1920; Orphans of the Storm , 1922),
but during the 1920s his melodramatic stories seemed
increasingly old-fashioned, and except for two produc-
tions, the coming of sound put an end to his career.
His last picture was the undistinguished The Struggle
(1931). On his death in 1948, at age 73, he was a
lonely, forgotten man who spent his last years living on
the fringes of a Hollywood that had passed him by. ■
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(1915)
Griffith was a director of remarkable
visual brilliance. In this moment of
quiet intimacy from The Birth of a
Nation , a soldier returning from the
Civil War is greeted by his mother
and sister. Their arms encircle and
draw him into the house. The image
is eloquent in its restraint and sim-
plicity. Frame enlargement.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(1915)
By 1915, cinema had reached
artistic maturity and attained
great narrative sophistication.
The Birth of a Nation presented
an epic (and intensely racist)
narrative of unprecedented
structural complexity. The cir-
cular masking on this shot is an
iris—commonly used in silent
cinema—which director D. W.
Griffith employs to focus the
viewer’s attention on the Little
Colonel (Henry B. Walthall) as
he defiantly rams a flag into
the barrel of an enemy can-
non. Frame enlargement.
234

The Nature of Narrative in Film
ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
Narratives have three fundamental characteristics: (1) an understanding between
viewers and the filmmaker about how the story should be judged, (2) a story and plot
sequencing events into a particular order that forms the narrative, and (3) a narrator
and narrative point of view.
The Fictive Stance
Audiences evaluate fictional stories differently from nonfictional ones, and they
generally want to know to what degree a story is fiction or nonfiction. With fiction,
the audience willingly suspends its disbelief in order to experience the pleasures of
an imaginary world. The audience agrees to accept the contents of the story as real
at one level of make-believe while knowing, at another level, that it is only a story.
Critic Peter Lamarque has termed this agreement the “fictive stance.”
If a story is clearly fiction, the audience does not hold the filmmaker accountable
for its truth or veracity. Instead, the audience applies a different set of criteria dealing
with the artistic structure and organization of the story. Is it compelling, convincing,
thrilling, entertaining, or amusing? By contrast, with nonfiction, audiences measure the
tale according to notions of factual truth and honesty.
This seems like a clean and clear distinction, yet many stories and movies occupy
gray areas. Are they fiction or nonfiction? How does one decide? In a movie such as Star
Wars (1977), viewers clearly have a fictional story. The events in George Lucas’s film do
not exist in this world or in any easily imaginable world of the near future. By contrast,
Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) seemed to want to play both ways with its audience, mixing
fact and fiction in ways that were often hard to detect. On the one hand, the film presents
an exhaustive summary of the facts surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy,
supported by real, archival news footage. The film uses this fact-based history to critique
and debunk the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone
SPIDER-MAN 3 (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 2007)
Spider-Man is a clearly fictional story, based on the adventures of a comic book character.
The setting is an alternative world to our own, the characters have no real-life counter-
parts, and the story events are entirely imaginary. Viewers of this film have no difficulty
deciding whether to evaluate it and experience it as fiction. Frame enlargement.
235

The Nature of Narrative in Film
assassin. On the other hand, Stone intermixes the archival footage with re-enactments
filmed so that they would look like part of the documentary record, and he concocts an
entirely speculative explanation for the assassination based on the unproved premise that
Kennedy intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam and was killed by those com-
mitted to escalating the war. There is virtually no evidence to support this contention,
and Stone said that he was offering a countermyth to oppose what he regarded as the
dominant mythology of a lone assassin. Where did that leave the film: fiction, nonfiction,
myth, history? JFK is an uncomfortable mixture of these modes that leaves the audience
unable to tell where the filmmaker believes their differences lie.
Audiences want very much to know the truth value of the tales they are told.
When filmmakers like Stone fudge the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction,
they often stir up controversy. When Robert Zemeckis used real footage of President
Clinton speaking about the Oklahoma City bombing victims in a fictional context
in Contact (1997)—the film makes it seem as if Clinton is addressing a space shuttle
explosion—many people criticized what they regarded as the unethical use of the
news footage. Filmmakers, though, can work in the other direction quite successfully,
presenting a clearly fictional story as if it were the record of real events. The Blair
Witch Project (1999), for example, is a horror movie about the disappearance of a
film crew that left footage of its terrifying last moments, and the film is constructed as
a documentary that examines this footage and tries to reconstruct the story it tells.
Narrative Structure: Story and Plot
How the story is told is every bit as important as its content. Story and plot are
fundamental characteristics of every narrative, and their relationship determines its
JFK (WARNER BROS., 1991)
Kevin Costner as District Attorney Jim Garrison in JFK . Oliver Stone’s film created controversy
because of its fluid mixture of real archival footage of the Kennedy years, faked footage
made to look archival, and fictional characters who had no counterpart in the historical
record. Director Stone meticulously sifted through the factual record surrounding the
assassination, questioned the official findings that a lone assassin killed Kennedy, but often
described his film as a myth. As a result, viewers could not tell where the film’s factual
ambitions turned into the fictions of myth; nor could they be sure the filmmaker knew
where the differences lay. In comparison with a film such as Spider-Man , the fictional status
of this film is more ambiguous and harder to evaluate. Frame enlargement.
236

The Nature of Narrative in Film
structure. Plot refers to the sequencing of events as shown in a given film. It desig-
nates the way narrative events are arranged in the film. Story designates the larger
set of events of which the plot is a subset. Any given narrative points beyond itself
to imply a set of events that are not directly portrayed, as well as those that are
shown. Story refers to the comprehensive set of all events, shown or implied, that
make up the narrative.
Unlike the events of one’s daily life, which often appear to be somewhat unstruc-
tured, random, and in flux, events in a narrative have a clear shape and sequence.
Not all story events need to be included in the plot, and this is where the distinction
between story and plot arises. Many events can be implied or do not need reference at
all. In the case of mystery or suspense films, events are withheld from the audience to
be revealed at a later time. Viewers enjoy mysteries, for example, because they try to
figure things out before the detective does.
In many films there is little structural distinction between a film’s plot and a film’s
story. Often, a plot is linear, presenting a story from start to finish. The vast majority
of commercially produced movies are told in a linear, chronological fashion. However,
many films make use of flashbacks, a narrative structure that was especially common
in Hollywood films of the 1940s ( Casablanca , 1942; Double Indemnity , 1944; Sunset
Boulevard , 1950). Passage to Marseilles (1944), starring Humphrey Bogart, boasted
an uncommonly intricate flashback structure, with flashbacks inside of flashbacks.
The plot of Citizen Kane (1941) is structured as a series of flashbacks, which portray
overlapping events narrated by different characters. In all these cases, the flashbacks
change the sequencing of story events in the films’ plots.
Many contemporary films cleverly exploit the story–plot distinction. Quentin
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) constructs a narrative composed of three relatively
separate plots, each peopled by the same gallery of characters (primarily two profes-
sional killers, played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, and a washed-up boxer,
played by Bruce Willis). These characters and their separate plots cross paths at several
strategic points in the film, most significantly when the boxer murders one of the hired
guns (Travolta). Writer–director Tarantino stages this killing midway through the film,
BRUTE FORCE (UNIVERSAL,
1947)
Hollywood films of the 1940s
used flashbacks—often lengthy
and extended ones—to add rich-
ness and complexity to their nar-
rative design. Brute Force portrays
the frustrations of prison inmates
by using flashbacks to show their
former lives, outside prison. Each
of the film’s main characters is
allotted an extended flashback
sequence. Frame enlargement.
237

The Nature of Narrative in Film
during the second plot segment, and then brings Travolta’s character back in the third,
concluding plot. The viewer realizes, with a jolt, that this last episode is occurring earlier
in story time than the second and watches Travolta with some sadness, already knowing
how that character will die.
Sliding Doors (1998) shows how differently the life of Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow)
would turn out, depending on whether she took a subway train home early one day
PULP FICTION (MIRAMAX, 1994)
John Travolta’s hit man in Pulp Fiction is killed off midway through the film only to reappear
in the concluding plot segment. Quentin Tarantino’s film playfully exploits the story–plot dis-
tinction by re-arranging its narrative events in a nonchronological way. Frame enlargement.
MULHOLLAND DR. (UNIVERSAL, 2001)
The narrative in David Lynch’s mysterious film is like a dream that becomes a nightmare.
Betty (Naomi Watts) is a chirpy, aspiring actress, and Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is a mys-
tery woman tormented by amnesia. They may or may not be the same person, and the
entire story may represent Betty/Rita’s last moment of consciousness before death. Lynch
demolishes the classical Hollywood narrative in order to achieve a surreal poetry. Frame
enlargement.
238

The Nature of Narrative in Film
or missed it. The film intercuts these two scenarios and shows how this seemingly
minor difference sets in motion chains of events that produce alternate fates for
the character. Intercutting the alternate storylines suggests the existence of
parallel worlds.
In a similar fashion, Run Lola Run (1998) shows a desperate 20-minute sprint
by Lola to retrieve a stolen bag of cash to save her boyfriend. If she can’t retrieve it,
gangsters will kill him. The plot shows the episode of her run three separate times,
with seemingly chance events each time altering the outcome and changing the fates
of the characters. The plot of Irreversible (2002) moves backward from a vengeance
killing to the rape that motivated it and then to the romantic couple (she the future
Director Christopher Nolan is fond of clever, complex
narratives. Inception (2010) has a multi-layered nar-
rative, constructed of characters who are dreaming
inside of other people’s dreams. The plot structure
works like a puzzle in which viewers must figure out
what is real and what is dream. Nolan’s earlier film,
Memento (2001), presents a story that is told backward,
beginning with the end and working in reverse to the
beginning. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) suffers from
a brain disorder that robs him of short-term memory.
He knows who he is (or once was—he was married and
worked as an insurance investigator), but he can’t re-
member any details of his present life or recent past.
Leonard is obsessed with finding his wife’s killer, but
to do so he must struggle with his memory disorder.
When he finds a clue, he tattoos it onto his body, pho-
tographs it, or writes it on the back of the photo so that
it will not be forgotten. The movie becomes a mystery
in reverse, opening with Leonard’s execution of a man
he believes is the killer and then moving backward to
explain how he found his victim.
This main story line is woven together with three
other narrative frames: scenes of Leonard alone in his
hotel room, flashbacks of his married life, and flash-
backs of an insurance case he investigated involving
a man named Sammy Jenkis, who lost all short-term
memory following a traffic accident. The case fore-
shadows Leonard’s fate. Intercutting these narrative
frames throughout the film produces a plot structure
that is rich and kaleidoscopic, but the film’s main line
of action—Leonard’s efforts to find his wife’s killer—is
a linear one (though in reverse order). No scenes could
be removed from it, or placed in a different order,
Case Study MEMENTO
w ithout damaging its clarity. Each scene is a crucial link
in the narrative chain of events.
The film’s story is further enriched by the ambigui-
ties that accumulate as the plot moves backward and in
and out of Leonard’s memories. He is, it turns out, an
unreliable narrator because he cannot remember the
things he has already done or said. He has killed other
men, believing them to have been his wife’s killer,
but he doesn’t recall doing so. Natalie (Carrie-Anne
Moss), the girlfriend of a drug dealer, and Teddy (Joe
Pantoliano), a cop, offer him help but may, in fact, be
manipulating him for their own purposes. Memories
can deceive and distort. Where does the truth lie?
Director Nolan gives the ingenious narrative struc-
ture a careful visual design. The opening credits appear
overtop a Polaroid photo that begins to undevelop and
fade to white, and the first scene—Leonard’s killing of
Teddy—plays in reverse action. These strategies tell the
viewer about the way the film will be organized.
Furthermore, the visual design of the different narra-
tive frames always makes it clear which one the viewer
is in. The main story line is in color, and the scenes of
Leonard in his hotel room (these form the present tense
of the story) are in high-contrast black-and-white and
are filmed with a handheld camera. The Sammy Jenkis
flashbacks are also in black and white, but these are
more brightly lit and less grainy and do not feature a
hand-held camera.
The narrative design is clever, highly organized, and
visually marked to assist the viewer in making sense of
it. The pleasures of Memento lie in how the story is told,
revealing the mysteries and ambiguities of the worlds that
we believe our memories contain. ■
(continued)
239

The Nature of Narrative in Film

MEMENTO
(NEWMARKET,
2001)
This ingenious film
mixes a linear narra-
tive running in reverse
with flashbacks and
with a present-tense
time frame that shows
Leonard Shelby (Guy
Pearce) in his hotel
room. Tracking his
wife’s killer and with no
short-term memory, he
relies on photographs
to recall important
details. The story de-
velops great mystery as
it progresses. Natalie
(Carrie-Ann Moss)
may be manipulating
Leonard for her own
ends; without a work-
ing memory, he is an
easy victim and an
unreliable narrator. To
accentuate Leonard’s
isolation from people
and places, the film-
makers shot in anamor-
phic widescreen 2.35:1,
taking advantage of
that format’s shallow
depth of field to focus
on Leonard and make
the backgrounds soft.
Frame enlargements.
rape victim, he the future murderer) in happier times. The plots of Annie Hall (1977)
and Memento (2001) jump around in many different time frames, leaving it to the
viewer to assemble events in proper chronology.
Authorship and Point of View
One of the peculiar characteristics of cinema is that it is often difficult to determine
the author of a film. In literature, the author of a novel is generally understood to
be a single individual, the writer. Films, by contrast, are made by groups of people,
240

The Nature of Narrative in Film
and it is often difficult to say with any certainty which member of the produc-
tion team— director, cinematographer, editor, sound designer—is responsible for
a particular effect on screen. In this sense, films have multiple authors. Films do
have writers, but the author of a screenplay typically furnishes dialogue, narra-
tive, and dramatic action but not a film’s visual or audio design. Cinematography,
editing, sound—these vital areas of filmic design fall outside the domain of a
screenplay.
Some years ago, the critic Pauline Kael attempted to argue that the real “author”
of Citizen Kane (1941) was Herman J. Mankiewicz, the author of its screenplay.
While Mankiewicz’s script was undeniably brilliant, he had nothing to do with the
film’s extraordinary audiovisual design. The cinematography (by Gregg Toland), the
art direction (by Van Nest Polglase), the music score (by Bernard Herrmann), and
the editing (by Robert Wise) are all world-class accomplishments, and director Orson
Welles was the key person organizing and integrating the contributions of these in-
dividuals. Kael’s intentions to honor the film’s writer were noble, but her case for
Mankiewicz’s authorship of the film failed to account for many of the features that
have made Citizen Kane an outstanding and classic work of cinema.
Because the director typically has the controlling creative authority on a given
production, the convention has evolved of treating the director as the author of a film.
This should be done, however, in a cautious and conservative manner, with the un-
derstanding that no director is ever a film’s sole author, as the writer of a novel is.
REAL AND IMPLIED AUTHORS The collaborative nature of filmmaking gives the dis-
tinction that has existed in literary theory between the real and the implied author a
special intensity. Literary critic Wayne Booth developed the notion of a real versus an
implied author as a means of avoiding the biographic trap that sometimes ensnares a
critic. In discussing the novels of Ernest Hemingway, for example, one cannot reduce
their stylistic and literary structure to the facts of biography.
In other words, for Booth, “Hemingway,” the literary persona (and the im-
plied author) seemingly present in the writings, is relatively distinct from Ernest
Hemingway, the man, who was born in Illinois in 1899, served as a reporter on the
Kansas City Star , fought in World War I, settled in Paris after the war, and died in
Idaho in 1961. The novels have their own emotional logic and power, and one can
speak of “Hemingway,” the literary persona that hovers in the shadows of the writ-
ings, as being relatively distinct from Hemingway, the man.
A film critic might study the work of such filmmakers as “Hitchcock,” “Ford,”
“Spielberg,” “Godard,” “Bertolucci,” or “Kurosawa” and treat these as implied
rather than real authors, the names as labels given to bodies of film and used to de-
scribe the characteristics of those films rather than the characteristics of those indi-
vidual people. In this way, “Hitchcock” designates a narrative world characterized by
a certain Catholic conception of sin, guilt, transgression, and punishment and a visual
design marked by such recurring features of style as high-angle shots used in moments
of dramatic crisis.
The difficulty with maintaining a hard and complete distinction between the
implied and the real author is that many directors do draw on personal experi-
ence in crafting their films so that a correlation does exist between who they are
as people and the content of the films. Directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Steven
Spielberg, and Alfred Hitchcock undeniably have based aspects of their films on
personal experiences. Knowing something about their personal history can help to
241

The Nature of Narrative in Film
clarify structural features of their films. But biographic correlations can be mislead-
ing and are easily overemphasized. Because of this, the distinction between real and
implied authors is useful to maintain, not in any fixed or absolute sense, but as a
way of keeping clear the many ways in which film structure, produced as a collab-
orative enterprise by teams of filmmakers in a medium that has multiple authors,
may transcend the facts of an individual filmmaker’s biography.
POINT OF VIEW IN CINEMATIC NARRATIVES As with authorship, narrative point of view
has special conditions in cinema that differentiate it from its literary context. Literary
narratives customarily use the first-person or third-person point of view. If point of
view is in first-person, then the narrator employs the first-person pronoun: “I went
there.” “I did that.” Third-person pronouns help to produce a third-person narrative:
“He went there.” “She did that.” While novels may use either, movies almost always
use third-person narration. In most films, the camera assumes a point of view that is
detached and separate from the literal viewpoint as seen by each of the characters.
However, there are times when filmmakers wish to suggest a character’s literal
point of view. To do so, the filmmaker would use a subjective shot or point-of-view
shot, in which the camera literally views through the eyes of the character. This kind
of shot creates a brief interlude of first-person perspective. Generally, the shift from
third to first person in film is signaled by showing the character reacting to something
TO CATCH A THIEF (PARAMOUNT, 1956)
Character meets author. On the run from the police, jewel thief John Robe (Cary Grant)
hops aboard a bus and, glancing toward the window, discovers the film’s director
(Alfred Hitchcock) seated next to him. As a director, Hitchcock transformed his personal
experiences, interests, and anxieties into brilliant film images and narratives, but the
richness of these films transcends any biographic basis they might have. Moreover,
Hitchcock depended on collaboration with his regular cinematographer (Robert Burks),
editor (George Tomasini), and composer (Bernard Herrmann), as well as screenwrit-
ers like John Michael Hayes. As an implied author, “Hitchcock” designates the creative
result of these partnerships—an unparalleled series of elegant, witty, and suspenseful
films. Frame enlargement.
242

The Nature of Narrative in Film
off-screen, then cutting to a view of what the character sees, the subjective view, and
then closing the subjective moment with a cut back to the character from a third-
person perspective.
In cinema, first-person point of view is more commonly present in an implicit
way. In Memento (2001), although we see Leonard Shelby on camera, the story is
told from his point of view. We share his confusion and difficulty piecing events to-
gether, and our knowledge of the story is restricted to what he knows. We learn new
information only when he does.

(c)

(a) (b)
(d)
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (WARNER BROS., 1951)
First-person perspective typically occurs in cinema for brief intervals through the use of a
subjective shot, representing what a character sees. Hitchcock often used subjective shots
in remarkable ways. Guy (Farley Granger) and Bruno (Robert Walker) quarrel, in a camera
setup (third-person perspective) that represents neither character’s viewpoint (a). When
Guy punches Bruno, however, Hitchcock abruptly inserts a subjective shot (b, c), showing
this action from Bruno’s perspective. Thereafter, he returns to a more normative, third-
person framing (d). Frame enlargements.
243

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Through performance, production design, lighting, color, editing, and the use of
sound and camera, directors can suggest the emotional or psychological perspective
of a character in a scene. George Stevens’s Shane (1953) deals with the arrival of a
mysterious gunfighter in a farming community in Wyoming. He stays at the home of
farmer Joe Starrett and is revered by Starrett’s young son, an impressionable little boy
whose father is somewhat distant and who yearns for an attractive male authority fig-
ure to worship. He finds this in Shane, and it is implied very strongly that the story of
the film is filtered through the point of view of young Joey Starrett.
There are, however, few subjective shots from Joey’s perspective. Instead, the sys-
tematic visual presentation of Shane as an extremely romantic and idealized figure, clad
in golden buckskins, establishes an implicit first-person narration, one that correlates
with Joey’s point of view. Shane’s idealized visual and emotional presentation makes
him precisely the sort of hero a young boy, starved for attention, might desire.
Extended First-Person Narration Although extended and explicit first-person point of
view is rare in film, there are a few spectacular examples. Lady in the Lake , a detective
film made in 1946 from a Raymond Chandler novel, is distinguished by the novelty of
having the camera take the detective’s first-person point of view throughout. Viewers
see the detective when he pauses in front of a mirror or examines his reflection in a
store window. At other times his hand or an item of his clothing might intrude into
the frame.
More recently, 84 Charlie MoPic (1989) presented its narrative entirely through
a subjective camera as MoPic, a combat cameraman, follows and films a dangerous
seven-man reconnaissance mission to the central highlands during the Vietnam War.
The action is presented as he sees it through the lens of his camera, and the gimmick
works well in making the viewer a participant on the mission.
Filmmakers rarely employ subjective point of view so extensively, and the reason
is clear. It becomes awkward and interferes with a flexible presentation of narrative
information. First-person perspective ties the camera to a character’s physical position,
SHANE (PARAMOUNT
PICTURES, 1953)
Shane’s (Alan Ladd) smooth, hand-
some face, golden buckskins, and
refined manner establish an implicitly
first-person perspective in Shane . It is a
boy’s view of a romantic and idealized
Western hero. Frame enlargement.
244

The Nature of Narrative in Film
and filmmakers customarily want to film scenes from a variety of camera positions.
Filmmakers therefore find it more effective to employ third-person camera positions
but to use light, color, sound, performance, and composition to imply the emotional
and psychological points of view of characters in a scene. Taken together, these
elements of structure help create the cinema’s distinctive narrative point of view:
explicit third-person narration with implied first-person components.
THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD NARRATIVE
A plot is not a random collection of events. It places events in a time sequence that
usually imparts a clear sense of purpose. The story seems to be moving in a certain
direction, and in most cases, the viewer understands that it will come to a deliber-
ate end, and reach a purposeful and satisfying conclusion. Causality is the glue that
holds the various events and episodes in the story together. One event in the story
causes another event. Some plots are tightly constructed with events chained in a
strong causal sequence. By contrast, other plots are loose, open-ended, or almost
shapeless, with causality present in a minimal or implicit way.
The classical Hollywood narrative , named after the films produced by the
Hollywood studios in the 1930s to 1950s, is still prevalent in popular cinema. Titanic
(1997), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and Avatar (2009) are classical
Hollywood narratives, as are almost all popular film entertainments.
Such films feature a main line of action and one or more subordinate lines of ac-
tion (subplots) tied to it. The plot is directional—activated by a main character pursu-
ing a goal—and one event follows another in tight causal relationships, as links in a
chain. The goals of the action are announced early in the film, and the plot follows a
line of rising interest and tension as the characters confront impediments to their goals.
The conclusion of the film sees the characters either achieving or failing to achieve their
goals in a way that brings the narrative to a satisfying conclusion that resolves all out-
standing story issues. It is this sense of completeness, resulting from the resolution of
all lines of action, that gives the classical narrative its satisfying quality. In the cases of
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the story lines arc across several films before achieving
complete resolution.
Alternatives to the Classical Narrative
While classical Hollywood narratives have proven to be very popular with audiences, and
a great many films each year are produced in this format, alternative narrative forms have
been an important and vital part of cinema. The example cited earlier in the chapter of
narrative structure in Memento shows a case of nonclassical narrative.
Films made outside of mainstream Hollywood production often use alternative nar-
rative structures. In these cases, causality may be minimized in favor of ambiguity. No
clearly dominant line of action may emerge. The sequence of events may be loosely or-
ganized, giving the viewer a weaker sense of the direction in which the story is moving.
Many European films, for example, prize ambiguity over causality in structuring
their narratives. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) is a French-Italian
co-production that portrays the emotional devastation of an American named Paul
(Marlon Brando), living in Paris, whose wife has just committed suicide. Her suicide is
the fundamental motivating event for all the film’s action, but the film does not reveal
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), a renowned and
prestigious Western, illustrates the goal-directed, highly
motivated action of the classical Hollywood narrative. At
the beginning of the film, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne)
returns from the Civil War to his brother’s cabin in Texas.
Ethan has been away for a number of years, engaged in
activities that remain mysterious. He arrives at Aaron’s
and Martha’s homestead, where relations between the
brothers are tense, and where it is hinted that Ethan and
Martha share an unspoken love. Shortly after Ethan’s ar-
rival, Indians attack the homestead, burn the cabin, and
wipe out the family, except for Aaron’s and Martha’s two
daughters, whom they abduct. Driven by a powerful ha-
tred of Indians, Ethan becomes obsessed with returning
his nieces to the white community.
This is the goal-directed activity that generates the
remainder of the film’s narrative and takes the charac-
ter on a five-year search. The opening act of the film
served to define the essential conditions—Ethan’s love
for Martha, his rootless and stubborn nature, and his
pathologic hatred for Indians—that motivate the en-
suing action. As the plot progresses, however, Ethan
encounters impediments to his goal, chief among them
being his own savagery. Ethan’s hatred for Indians poi-
sons his feelings for Debbie (the one abducted niece
who survives) once he realizes that she is living among
the Comanche as a member of their culture. His origi-
nal goal of rescuing Debbie is replaced by another and
darker quest: to destroy her.
In its last act, The Searchers generates considerable
excitement as Ethan finds Debbie and chases her down a
ravine to the mouth of a cave. He lifts her in his arms and
the viewer is afraid that he is going to bash her brains
out, but in a last-minute turn of events, he forgives her,
forgives himself, and honors his original quest, returning
her to the white community of Texas settlers.
Ethan’s quest for Debbie is the main line of action in
the film, but it is conjoined with a subplot showing the
Case Study THE SEARCHERS
relationship of Marty, a relative accompanying Ethan,
with a family of settlers, whose domestic lives hold more
attraction for him than they do for Ethan. The subplot is
interrelated with the main line of action—Marty decides
that his real task will be to prevent Ethan from killing
Debbie when he finds her—and both lines of action
are resolved at the end. Debbie is rescued. Marty joins
the family of settlers and will (it is implied) marry their
daughter. In the last scene, he enters the family’s home,
whereas Ethan chooses not to do so, walking away from
the cabin into the desert and back to the rootless exis-
tence from which he appeared at the film’s beginning.
The classical Hollywood narrative makes use of
explicit causality. One event clearly causes another in
the chain that forms the narrative. The Comanche attack
on the cabin prompts Ethan’s quest. Ethan swears to
return Debbie to her rightful community. He undertakes
a five-year search. During the course of the search, he
comes to hate Debbie. What will he do when he finds
her? The tension surrounding this latter question gener-
ates the climax of the film and its surprising last-minute
turn of events in which the character redeems himself in
a way that allows him to honor the original goal, the one
that had driven the narrative from its beginning.
Because of its explicit causality, classical Hollywood
cinema features a clear hierarchy of narrative events.
Certain episodes stand out as the most important links
in the narrative chain, whereas others are less decisive
and less important. If viewers are asked to summarize
this kind of highly motivated film narrative, they can
easily identify the most important narrative events.
Asked to summarize The Searchers , a viewer might say
that a band of Commanche attacks a Texas homestead,
and one of the survivors vows revenge, searches for
many years for a young girl, and finally locates and
rescues her. These events could not be subtracted from
the film without radically altering or damaging
the story. ■
what has happened until well into the narrative. As a result, considerable ambiguity
surrounds Paul’s behavior.
Unlike Memento , where the plot rearranges the chronology of story events,
Bertolucci does not alter the chronology of events in Last Tango. But he omits key
scenes and delays giving the viewer important information needed to understand
the story. Thus the viewer cannot at first comprehend the reasons for Paul’s extreme
emotional distress. The reasons for his distress (namely, his wife’s suicide) are not made
246

The Nature of Narrative in Film
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
THE SEARCHERS (Warner Bros., 1956)
The highly motivated and goal-oriented classical Hollywood narrative. Ethan (John Wayne) returns from
years of wandering to visit his brother’s family and Martha, whom he loves (a–c). Comanches massacre
the family and abduct the children. Ethan views the carnage with horror (d) and resolves to find and res-
cue the children. After years of searching, he returns with one child (e). In the last image (f), he stands
alone, now without purpose in his life, turns and walks away, into the desert. Frame enlargements.
(e) (f)
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
clear until 30 minutes into the film. This gives many scenes during the intervening
period an unclear and ambiguous status. In one, Paul stands in a bathroom as a maid
cleans a tub full of blood. He waits silently as the maid describes how she was ques-
tioned by the police. At this point in the narrative, though, the viewer doesn’t know
what happened here, why the police are involved, or what relationship this has to Paul.
The important questions in the narrative—who Paul is, where the blood in the bath-
room has come from, why he is in such distress—are answered slowly and incompletely.
As a result, the narrative in Last Tango presents the viewer with serious interpretational
challenges. Bertolucci’s viewer must sort out the particulars of Paul’s distress and his
wife’s suicide and their marital relationship by working through a plot structure that is
not organized to facilitate the answering of these questions.
Independent filmmaking is another mode of production in which classical
Hollywood narrative is often conspicuously absent. The narrative in many indepen-
dent films is often very episodic, with events joined in a loose fashion, with minimal or
implicit causality . John Sayles is one of the most successful independent filmmakers, with

LAST TANGO IN
PARIS (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1972)
The narrative structure
of Last Tango in Paris
withholds key pieces
of story information.
As a result, first-time
viewers have great dif-
ficulty piecing the story
together. Paul’s an-
guish is, at first, unex-
plained. When he visits
the scene of a suicide,
viewers struggle to
grasp its significance for
him. The film’s narra-
tive design deliberately
poses interpretive chal-
lenges for its viewers.
Frame enlargements.
248

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Three Acts or Four?
CLOSE-UP
their goals. The climax resolves the various conflicts.
Thompson suggests that these acts are roughly equal
in length, around 20–30 minutes each, and that the
film overall has a mid-point, a plot development that
occurs about midway through the running time. This
is a turning point in the plot that marks the onset of
the development section. She suggests, for example,
that the scene in Alien, during which the baby monster
bursts through the stomach of one of the astronauts
and then runs off to hide on board the ship, is the
central turning point of the film. It marks the onset
of the development section, which is all about the ef-
forts of the surviving crew members to hunt down the
monster and kill it. This scene occurs almost exactly
midway through the film.
One way, then, to understand the organization
of narrative in Hollywood movies is to perform a
structural analysis, which aims to break the films into
their basic segments. You can easily do this by think-
ing about where the turning points in the narrative
occur, and whether they work to break the film into
three or four acts. ■
One way to understand the structure of a classical
Hollywood narrative is to break it down into major
structural units. Syd Field is an influential author of
numerous books aimed at aspiring screenwriters. His
books provide advice on how to write screenplays,
and Field has argued that a Hollywood narrative is
composed of three acts. Act One, which he calls the
set-up, introduces the story, characters, and setting.
Act Two, the confrontation, focuses on the conflicts
that come between the main characters and their
goals. Act Three, resolution, settles these conflicts and
ties up the various plot lines. Field argues that a “plot
point” occurs at the transitions between these acts,
and this plot point introduces something that hooks
into the action “and spins it around in another direc-
tion,” creating a transition to the next act.
In contrast to Field, film scholar Kristin Thompson
has suggested that there are four acts in Hollywood
movies. The set-up establishes the action and charac-
ter goals. The complicating action introduces a new
situation that the characters must respond to. The
development shows the characters attempting to reach
a long and respected filmography ( Return of the Secaucus Seven , 1980; Lone Star , 1996;
Men With Guns , 1998). Although he has used linear classical narrative in Matewan
(1987), in other films he has moved far from it. City of Hope (1991) contains one of his
more radical narrative structures. The film portrays a decaying urban economy and com-
munity in the 1990s. The narrative is not driven by the personal goals of a protagonist
or a main line of action. Sayles instead follows an ensemble—a group—of characters as
the narrative winds through the city to reveal a cross section of its inhabitants: a corrupt
city contractor, his disillusioned son, an idealistic city councilman, a group of cynical po-
licemen, and citizen groups of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Summarizing the
story of this film is much more difficult than with The Searchers because narrative events
are not tightly chained together, and no single line of action predominates. The narrative
focus is diffuse, unified by the common theme of showing a multitude of responses to
urban decay. Alejandro Inarritu’s Amores Perros (2000) and Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004)
offer similarly episodic narratives focusing on an ensemble of characters.
THE COUNTER-NARRATIVE TRADITION The most extreme alternatives to classical
Hollywood narrative can be found in the counter-narrative tradition. Radical attempts
at narrative deconstruction—at making films that decompose and take apart their own
narratives—have been popular among more philosophically inclined directors. In their
work, narrative is treated as a problem, as something to be refused or attacked.
(continued)
249

The Nature of Narrative in Film
ALIEN (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1979)
The narrative mid-point introduces a new, complicating line of action that preoccu-
pies characters in the development section, according to scholar Kristin Thompson.
The alien monster bursts through the chest of an unfortunate astronaut and goes on
a rampage in the spaceship, compelling the remaining characters to confront it in a
life-and-death struggle. This mid-point action occurs almost exactly in the middle of
the film, measured by its running time. Frame enlargement.
French director Alain Resnais, in the classic modernist
film Last Year at Marienbad (1961), presents a narra-
tive that deliberately refuses to organize itself. Last Year
at Marienbad deals with a murky, cloudy, unclear set
of events taking place at a luxurious hotel. During the
film, an unnamed man attempts to persuade an un-
named woman that they have met the year before at
a fancy spa. Whether they actually did or not is never
resolved.
Resnais’s editing prevents the emergence of clear
space and time relationships between scenes. For ex-
ample, a number of shots are joined with matched cuts
and continuous dialogue, which imply that no time has
elapsed, but the characters’ costumes change, as do the
locales. These are contradictory cues that indicate time is
both passing and not passing.
Last Year at Marienbad self-consciously studies the
creation of narrative. In the film, a story tries to orga-
nize itself but never quite does. The movie opens in a
kind of prenarrative state without characters and with-
out a clear setting. The camera tracks through empty
hotel hallways, past doors, friezes, columns, paintings,
Case Study LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
and tapestries. Voice-over narration, of unidentified
origin, poetically states that this is an environment of
soundless rooms where voices sink into rugs so deep
that no step can be heard, where halls and galleries are
from another age, where hallways cross other hallways
that endlessly open onto deserted rooms.
During the course of the camera’s movements
through this poetically and mysteriously defined en-
vironment, a group of people appears in frozen, still-
life postures, characters existing as sculptures in this
strange hotel. Gradually the characters unfreeze, begin
to move, and start delivering dialogue during which
the mysterious man attempts to convince the unnamed
woman that they have met the year before. The narra-
tive comes to life.
Last Year at Marienbad is a film that deliberately sets
out to provoke, puzzle, challenge, and undermine as-
sumptions about what narrative is and how it operates
in film. There is no sense of direction to the plot, and
no real conclusion is reached either. Instead, endless
repetition—of images, camera movement, dialogue—is
the defining structural characteristic. In this respect,
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)
Antinarrative in Last Year at Marienbad . Characters move through richly detailed set-
tings, but the narrative fails to emerge. The film’s use of narrative to play with and tease
the viewer was a major influence on such later films as Inception and Memento . Frame
enlargement.
Last Year at Marienbad stands as an extreme departure
from the terms of narrative in popular, mass-market
movies, and it can be classified as a modernist film in
that it does not wish to tell a story so much as to talk
about what stories are and how they may be struc-
tured on film.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir (1969) is another
example of counter-narrative filmmaking. Here, two
characters gather in an empty French television studio
to inquire into the nature of images and to understand
better how television and other visual media commu-
nicate. They meet for seven nights, and their comings
LE GAI SAVOIR (1969)
Godard’s Le Gai Savoir offers
poetry and philosophy in
place of a narrative. Many
modern, stylistically radical
directors believe that all the
stories have already been
told in cinema, and they
reject or deform the me-
dium’s storytelling function.
Frame enlargement.
(continued)
251

The Nature of Narrative in Film
and goings, and their philosophical reflections about
the nature of pictures, constitute what plot there is. The
soundtrack is punctuated by the noise of static and by
Godard’s own voice in a kind of running, anxious com-
mentary about the nature of images and his own film.
Le Gai Savoir reduces narrative to a minimum in order
to construct a film that functions more on the lines of
an essay than a story. In this respect, like Last Year at
Marienbad, Le Gai Savoir illustrates the impatience with
stories felt by many modern, stylistically radical directors.
Such filmmakers regard narrative as an obstacle to
their creative interests. Telling a story gets in the way.
It obligates them to create, delineate, and motivate
characters and to emphasize the story, treating other,
nonnarrative elements as background components.
Filmmakers whose interests are essayistic, poetic, or di-
dactic often take the medium in a nonnarrative direction
when they consider narrative to be incompatible with
their artistic goals. Viewers of popular movies may find
this antinarrative orientation difficult to understand or
seemingly perverse because the basic pleasure offered
by popular cinema is precisely the storytelling function.
Such viewers may find the antinarrative films to be a
strange experience or to offer little of the familiar plea-
sures they are accustomed to finding in movies. But the
antinarrative tradition in cinema is very real, and it has
influenced many important filmmakers whose work has
enlarged the creative boundaries of cinema. ■
The French New Wave
CLOSE-UP
but with the names of cities associated with losses
in World War II. “Hiroshima. Hiroshima. That’s your
name,” she tells him.
The New Wave directors loved film, and they
filled their movies with self-conscious references
to cinema and with riffs on Hollywood. Such ex-
tensive winks and homages were unprecedented
in the period, although they are more common
today largely because of the New Wave’s influ-
ence. Frankie (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Godard’s
Breathless (1959) gazes adoringly at a poster of
Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart and models
himself on Bogart. Godard’s Contempt (1967) casts
famed director Fritz Lang ( Metropolis , 1927) as a
filmmaker struggling with a crass American pro-
ducer. Prominent Hollywood director Sam Fuller
has a cameo at a party in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou
(1965). Asked what is cinema, he replies famously,
“A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action,
violence, death. In one word, emotions.” Maoist
guerillas in Godard’s Weekend (1967) communicate
by radio using movie titles as call signs: “Johnny
Guitar calling The Searchers;” “Battleship Potemkin
calling Gosta Berling.” A cut-out of director Alfred
Hitchcock appears in the background of a shot in
Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
Truffaut made The Bride Wore Black (1968) in
the style of an Alfred Hitchcock film, and director
Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais were filmmak-
ers who were part of the French New Wave—a new
generation of directors who established careers in
the 1960s and rebelled against the traditional for-
mulas of studio filmmaking by experimenting boldly
with narrative and film style. Existing visual designs
and story templates were twisted, stretched, and
re-imagined, transforming the heritage of French
cinema and redefining its future. Francois Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows (1959), for example, takes a natu-
ralistic approach to its story of a young delinquent
but ends with a freeze-frame that abruptly halts the
story and leaves the fate of the main character unre-
solved and ambiguous. The freeze-frame creates an
open ending that avoids the tidy resolutions com-
monly found in movie narratives. The freeze frame
boldly announced to viewers that the film’s narrative
was refusing traditional forms of closure.
Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour (1959)
uses flash cuts to blend the war-time memories of
an actress (Emmanuelle Riva) with her present life,
making the narrative a subjective one with images
that capture the free flow of thought itself as the
character (identified as SHE in the script) reflects on
earlier traumas and on her present love affair with
a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). The narrative con-
cludes in an enigmatic and poetic way, with the two
lovers addressing each other not by personal name
252

The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE 400 BLOWS (Les Films du Carosse, 1959)
The film’s concluding freeze frame shows Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) staring back
at the camera, facing an uncertain future in his life. The concluding image is both defiant
and ambiguous. The shot looks very grainy because the close-up was enlarged on an optical
printer, causing generational loss of image quality. Frame enlargement.
Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(1964) is a stylized musical modeled on Hollywood
movies, with flamboyant color design and charac-
ters who sing all of their dialogue instead of speak-
ing. Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) opens
with a color sequence and then switches to black-
and-white for the remainder of the film, reminding
viewers of style and structure. At the beginning of
Claude Chabrol embarked on an entire career’s
worth of Hitchcock-style thrillers. Truffaut’s Day for
Night (1973) portrayed a film crew at work on a
production, a movie within the movie, with Truffaut
appearing as the film’s director. The title— Day for
Night —refers to movie magic, the filming during
broad daylight of scenes scripted as taking place at
night.
PIERROT LE FOU (Janus Films, 1965)
Maverick Hollywood director Sam Fuller, with sunglasses and an ever-present cigar, drops
in to Godard’s film to explain the nature of cinema. Frame enlargement.
(continued)
253

The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Madeleine Films, 1964)
Hollywood musicals inspired Jacques Demy to make this stylized variation in which all
dialogue is sung, not spoken. Intense color design evokes a world of heightened emo-
tion while the story stays close to psychological realism, unusual for musicals. Frame
enlargement.
Godard’s Tout va bien (1972), he offers a montage
showing all of the checks that need to be written to
pay for the film and its crew, emphasizing the film’s
status as a manufactured object and not a window
on reality. And Godard himself appears in Cleo from
Five to Seven in a short, silent film within the movie,
along with the actress Anna Karina who frequently
starred in Godard’s own films.
The New Wave directors were passionate devo-
tees of cinema (some had begun their careers as film
critics) and in their playful approach to narrative and
their self-conscious cinematic designs, they invited
viewers to share in this passion for movies. Their
influence has been huge, re-shaping the nature of
cinema and what viewers have come to expect from
it. Contemporary filmmakers have winked in return
to acknowledge their debt to this tradition. Quentin
Tarantino, for example, named his production com-
pany A Band Apart, in honor of Godard’s early film
about bumbling gangsters, Band a part (1964). ■
THE VIEWER’S CONTRIBUTION TO NARRATIVE
Viewers participate in the storytelling process, and filmmakers design narratives in
ways that encourage this participation. In his choice of narrative technique, Hitchcock
preferred suspense over surprise because the former condition drew viewers into the
story as participants, whereas surprise tended to exclude them. Suspense as a narra-
tive technique depends on giving viewers information, whereas surprise depends on
withholding it. If Hitchcock began a scene by showing viewers a ticking bomb under
a table around which a group of friends were playing cards, he could then film the
254

The Nature of Narrative in Film
card game for five or ten minutes of excruciating suspense, during which the audience
is saying to the cardplayers, “Stop playing cards, there’s a bomb under your table!”
Conversely, if he did not show the bomb and it then exploded, it would produce a
brief moment of shock and surprise.
Filmmakers use the elements of narrative structure to encourage the viewer’s ac-
tive contribution. The action of the popular thriller The French Connection (1972)
deals with a New York cop’s obsessive hunt for a powerful French drug smuggler. At
the end of the film, the cop corners the smuggler in a warehouse. The cop chases him
into a back room, but the camera stays outside the room, leaving both characters off-
screen. After a pause, a gunshot is heard off-screen, and the image fades out. The film
is over, and the viewer is left wondering who fired the shot and whether the cop got
his man. As the end credits roll, that final gunshot reverberates in the viewer’s mind.
What did it mean, and why was it presented in such a mysterious way? How does the
story end? Its structure challenges the viewer to make sense of the film’s puzzling con-
clusion, its final withholding of information, and its lack of explicit narrative closure.
As the ending of The French Connection illustrates, storytellers can hook the au-
dience by deliberately omitting important pieces of story information. The audience
infers and fills in this information as its contribution to the story, binding storyteller
and audience in a close creative relationship. In a mystery film, viewers will try to
guess the identity of the murderer before the detective or the narrative reveals it. The
final shot of the ice pick under the bed in Basic Instinct (1992) teases the audience
THE SIXTH SENSE (HOLLYWOOD PICTURES, 1999)
This uncommonly clever ghost story sprung an unforgettable twist ending on its view-
ers, many of whom felt compelled to return to the film for a second viewing to see how
it was done. The story is psychologically rich and has a slow, meditative pacing. These
are not the typical characteristics of a box-office blockbuster, and they demonstrate that
the pleasures offered by a well-told story do not go out of fashion. Compositions show-
ing Malcolm (Bruce Willis) and Cole (Haley Joel Osment) together in the frame are quite
rare in the film. Most often they are framed in separate shots, a strategy director M. Night
Shyamalan uses to subliminally suggest that the characters inhabit different realms—the
living and the dead. Frame enlargement.
255

The Nature of Narrative in Film
with the possibility that the real killer in the narrative is still at large and may strike
again.
The Sixth Sense (1999) vividly illustrates this storytelling partnership between
filmmaker and audience. Its narrative is uncommonly clever, and in its closing mo-
ments, it springs a last-minute surprise on the viewer that completely changes every-
thing the viewer has assumed about the characters and story. The film’s phenomenal
box-office success was due to the pleasure that its remarkable twist gave viewers and
to repeat business. Viewers came back to see the movie again, intrigued by its clever
design, curious to see how the twist was accomplished and whether there were any
clues to the ending that they had missed. The Others (2001), a ghost story starring
Nicole Kidman, works in a similar fashion.
The viewer’s participation in a narrative activates a basic operational principle of
the human mind—the search for pattern. Perception and interpretation are not me-
chanical responses to information but are active, goal-directed processes. Narrative
activates these processes by inviting the audience to search for the overall pattern within
a given narrative structure, the story to which the plot points. The desire to see the com-
pleted pattern is experienced by viewers as the need to find out “what happens next” in
a story. The clear causality and motivation in a classical Hollywood narrative such as
The Lord of the Rings stimulates this desire by organizing the story in a linear fashion
that moves forward, with increasing momentum, toward its conclusion. The more frag-
mented structure of Memento or Last Tango in Paris stimulates this desire by burying
the master pattern—the story—inside a narrative structure—a plot—that hides it. In
each case, the act of storytelling binds the audience to the narrative as participant and
co-creator, strengthening the bond between audience and storyteller as they both help
create the story.
These considerations point to an important conclusion: Meaning is not in the film
but is formed by the interaction of the film’s audiovisual and narrative design with the
INCEPTION (WARNER BROS., 2010)
Meaning is not in a film but arises through the interaction of viewers with movies.
Inception capitalizes on this interaction by creating an ambiguous narrative that invites
viewers to provide a resolution. The ending, for example, teases viewers by holding out
two possibilities that are mutually exclusive. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) believes he
has returned to reality from the dream-world that he has inhabited. But has he? The film’s
ambiguous ending provokes viewers to interpret, and thereby to create, its meaning.
Frame enlargement.
256

The Nature of Narrative in Film
viewer’s own horizon of perceptual and social experience—the viewer’s interpretive
contribution. The implication of this is enormous. It means that filmmakers cannot
control the meaning of their films because the experiences, values, and assumptions
that viewers bring to those films and that establish their frameworks of interpretation
are incredibly diverse and variable.
Obviously, viewers use a variety of criteria to evaluate the aesthetic qualities of a
narrative. Is it coherent? Is it pleasurable? Is it convincing? Does it make sense? These
are evaluations of narrative structure—how the story is aesthetically organized
and told.
In a story where events are linked in a tight causal chain, with few digressions,
viewers tend to expect an ending that ties up the loose ends by resolving all outstand-
ing story issues. If they are given, instead, an ambiguous ending, as occurs in The
French Connection (1972), some viewers may feel frustrated, whereas others find the
ambiguity exciting and are stimulated to fill in the missing information. Viewers rou-
tinely evaluate how the story is told and whether, given the type of film it is, the story
is told in a satisfying way.
Because so many movies establish screen worlds that are recognizably similar to
their own, viewers also evaluate narratives using standards borrowed from personal
and social experience. Here, it is not so much the narrative design that is evaluated
as the way the narrative portrays people or situations. Arab-Americans protested
the Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller True Lies (1994) because of its portrayal of
Arabic groups as terrorists. Some African-Americans felt that the hyenas in Disney’s
The Lion King (1994) were unpleasantly close to a caricature of black people. The
mannerisms and Caribbean accent of Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace (1999)
aroused similar complaints. Viewers assess the narrative portrayals against their own
understanding of the issues, situations, or groups. Does the narrative square with their
own sense of things, or does it seem unreasonably biased or distorted in a way that
style cannot justify?
The standards viewers apply when evaluating narratives, then, are quite diverse,
and they range from judgments about the artistic design of the story to judgments
about its success in representing familiar things or people. Filmmakers can influence
but they cannot control these evaluations. Filmmakers can control the audiovisual de-
sign of their films, but viewers are the essential co-creators of the meanings that arise
from those designs.
FILM GENRES
Many popular films fall into genres , which are sets of interrelated stories and their
associated images. The most popular and historically significant American film
genres include the Western, the gangster film, the horror film, the musical, film noir,
the war film, and the science fiction film. One of the most important characteristics
of genres is that the stories are repeated again and again, with rules, or conventions ,
about what can happen within the genre. Moreover, many conventions are unique
to a given genre. What viewers accept in a musical film might appear ridiculous in a
gangster film.
The repetition of story situations throughout a genre produces two effects: It en-
ables viewers familiar with the genre to anticipate likely narrative developments and
outcomes, and it enables filmmakers to achieve highly concentrated meanings within
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
the genre. Consider these simple terms common to Westerns: gunfighter, Indian, cow-
boy. Each word conjures up a host of associated images and potential story situations
for viewers who are familiar with the genre.
A viewer critical of genres, who objects that all Westerns or all horror films are
the same, is missing the point. Film scholar Robert Warshow has pointed out that
“one does not want too much novelty” from a genre film. Fans of a genre derive plea-
sure from the small variations that are worked out within the pre-established order
of story and setting. Repetition of familiar material is very important, and too much
novelty or originality can place a film outside a genre’s framework.
The Western
The Western is one of the oldest screen genres. Indeed, the Western as a cultural category
predates the cinema. It emerged near the end of the nineteenth century and was estab-
lished in a variety of pre-cinematic forms: the dime novel, the Puritan captivity narra-
tives, the Leatherstocking tales (1823–1841) of James Fenimore Cooper, theatrical plays
and shows (e.g., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show), and painting (ethnographic studies of
Indian cultures, as well as Frederic Remington’s action scenes).
The Western, then, already existed when the cinema was invented at the turn of
the century. The cinema supplied movement and exciting visual images to flesh out
existing cultural stories about westward expansion and conflict between settlers and
Native Americans. The Western rapidly established its popularity in cinema. By 1910,
21 percent of all U.S. pictures were Westerns. During the next decades, Hollywood pro-
duced Westerns in great quantities, and many of the industry’s most popular stars were
closely identified with the genre: Gary Cooper ( The Virginian, The Westerner, High
Noon ), John Wayne ( Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Hondo ), Clint Eastwood
( High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven ). John Ford, perhaps the
THE TOLL GATE (1920)
The Western is one of the old-
est screen genres and quickly
achieved enormous popularity.
William S. Hart was one of the
most popular Western stars in
the silent period. Hart aimed to
portray the West with realism
and with a serious, adult outlook
that contrasted with the adoles-
cent appeal of stars such as Tom
Mix. Frame enlargement.
258

The Nature of Narrative in Film
finest director of the Hollywood period, made many of the genre’s enduring classics:
Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the genre’s popularity notably diminished, and
since then, it has never recovered the close relationship with a mass audience that it
once enjoyed. Important and fine Westerns continue to be made— Tombstone (1993),
Unforgiven (1992), Open Range (2003)—but the genre’s high period of creativity and
appeal to a wide audience seems to have ended. It remains, though, the quintessential
American genre, the one most closely tied to the theme and mythology of the nation’s
experience and identity.
The Western is defined by period, setting, and theme. The period is that inter-
val of time between the Civil War and World War I, and the setting is west of the
Mississippi River, on the plains or in the desert or the mountains. Films that fall
outside these specifications may lie on the periphery of the genre, but they are not
Westerns. This period and setting contain the great historical stories that have fur-
nished the genre with its material: waves of migration via the overland trails, the
Indian wars, the building of the railroads, the cattle drives, the gold rushes, the fron-
tier marshals and town tamers, the gunfighters.
While the genre has many themes, the one at its heart is the conflict between cul-
tural ideas about civilization and the wilderness in stories that explain why violence
is necessary for the preservation of community. The theme is linked to an enduring
pattern of imagery. In the highly conventionalized opening typical of many Westerns,
the central character, a man of violence, rides in to a town or settlement from the
wilderness. A narrative situation—the approach of a violent individual to a commu-
nity—is linked to a particular setting and image, the wilderness of desert or moun-
tain. The long shots integrate the character with the surrounding wilderness, and
by showing how large and expansive the wilderness is, they stress the fragility and
vulnerability of the settlement or community. The struggle between violence and law
UNFORGIVEN (WARNER BROS., 1992)
Clint Eastwood is the Western’s last big star, and his work as director–producer
demonstrates genuine mastery and feeling for the genre. In Unforgiven , he probes the
destructive consequences of violence and offers a revisionist treatment of his star image.
Frame enlargement.
259

The Nature of Narrative in Film
is embodied in this visual contrast. As a figure of violence, the gunman comes from
the wilderness to the community, and frequently at the end of the films, he must
leave the settlement to return to the mountains or plains.
The Western is among the most rule-bound of film genres. It links specific story
situations to particular settings. In many Westerns, the violent skills of the protagonist
are tested in a public arena. This arena often is a saloon, where armed and violent
confrontations occur in close proximity to the bar. The genre has coded this location
for violence. By contrast, schoolrooms and churches are impermissible locations for
violent confrontations. Gunfights or brawls almost never occur there.
The regularity of story in the Western is most apparent in the necessity for a
gunfight at the conclusion of the film. The gunfight resolves the narrative conflicts by
granting that at this moment of primitive social development, violence is needed on

3:10 TO YUMA (LIONSGATE, 2007) and THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES
BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (WARNER BROS., 2007)
Contemporary filmmakers continue to make Westerns, although production in the genre
remains small. In his remake of 3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold used fast-paced action to
give the genre a more contemporary feel. In contrast, The Assassination of Jesse James was
slowly paced and more poetic, with Roger Deakins’ cinematography lending the film a
very stylized and pictorial design, evident in the sepia tone and selective blurring of the
frame found in this shot. Ford (Casey Affleck, center) gazes adoringly at Jesse (Brad Pitt,
left), whom he is destined to kill. Frame enlargements.
260

The Nature of Narrative in Film
behalf of the community. Because genres are so rule-bound, too much variation from
the formulas can produce deviant plot structures that viewers may deem unsatisfy-
ing. Howard Hawks’s 1948 production of Red River is a case in point. It deals with
the first cattle drive over the Chisholm Trail. Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leads his
cattle on this perilous trek, assisted by his adopted son, Matthew Garth (Montgomery
Clift). During the drive, Dunson grows tyrannical and becomes a borderline psycho-
path obsessed with preventing cowboys from quitting the drive and threatening to
hang those who do. Eventually, he becomes unbearable, and the men revolt. Matthew
Garth takes the herd and leaves Dunson behind. Dunson swears revenge and tells
Matt that he will kill him when they next meet.
The plot moves in traditional Western fashion toward the promise of a cli-
mactic gunfight. But it never occurs. Instead, a comical fistfight between Matt and
Dunson leads to their reconciliation. Many viewers have felt somewhat cheated by
this ending, which is at odds with the genre. (From the standpoint of the director’s
other films, however, this ending seems less deviant because in most of his work
Hawks tended to prefer comedy and comradeship over tragedy.)
The Western makes an excellent tool of study for students who wish to under-
stand how genre works. It has a long history, is extremely rule-bound and precise
in the application of those rules, and yet it shows an impressive diversity of style
and subject matter. This is the essential and fascinating aspect about a genre: It
shows diversity within constraint, variations within an abiding master pattern.
The Gangster Film
The gangster film is nearly as old as the cinema, having clear precursors in the early
silent era. The genre emerged as a powerful force in U.S. film, however, at the time of
the Great Depression. In the years 1930–1932, three films— Little Caesar, The Public
RED RIVER (UNITED ARTISTS,
1948)
The abrupt conclusion of Red
River , in which John Wayne and
Montgomery Clift trade punches
rather than bullets and then be-
come friends again, strikes many
viewers as an implausible turn
of events. The formulaic nature
of genre films, such as Westerns,
conditions viewers to expect
certain kinds of narrative events.
Because of this, genre film-
makers are often more tightly
bound in their work by what
an audience expects and what
a genre requires than are film-
makers whose work places them
outside genre boundaries. Frame
enlargement.
261

The Nature of Narrative in Film
LITTLE CAESAR (WARNER BROS., 1931)
One of the biggest in a long line of movie gangsters, the snarling Rico Bandello (Edward
G. Robinson) in Little Caesar . Pictured here, he is at the height of his power and wealth,
but in a classic rise-and-fall story, the gangster eventually must lose. Rico is so smug and
self-centered that when death finally comes, he can scarcely believe it. Riddled by a police
machine gun, he asks in disbelief if his life has reached its end. Frame enlargement.
Enemy , and Scarface —defined the essential narrative patterns, settings, images, and
types of social conflicts that would characterize the genre during the next decades.
In the classical gangster structure, the narrative focuses on the rise and fall of a
career criminal, from his early, humble, frequently immigrant origins to the zenith
of his success, and then to his decline from power and violent death. This narrative
pattern characterizes Little Caesar, The Public Enemy , and Scarface , as well as many
later gangster films, including the Godfather films, the 1983 remake of Scarface by
Brian De Palma, and Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991). Other gangster
films, of course, deviate from the classical narrative. Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco
(1997) forgoes the epic style of a rise-and-fall story in its low-key account of the
last days of a small-time New York hood (Al Pacino). Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas
(1990) has elements of the rise-and-fall story in its tale of a young Brooklyn man’s
aspirations to join the local mob, but its main focus is a kind of ethnography of mob
behavior and ritual.
In the classical structure, the gangster hero represents a perverse version of the
American myth of success. He is an inverted and dark embodiment of the Horatio
Alger myth, which stipulated that opportunities to advance were open to everyone,
no matter how humble their origins. His determination and persistence enable him
to achieve great economic success, but he must use harsh and violent tactics to do
so, and his appetite for power, wealth, and violence is boundless. The gangster Tony
Montana (Scarface, 1983) dreams of possessing the world and all in it.
262

The Nature of Narrative in Film
The roots of the gangster film in U.S. culture include this Horatio Alger myth of
success, as well as the example of the nineteenth-century robber barons, who, like
the film gangster, amassed great fortunes through frequently ruthless methods. The
genre’s cultural roots also include the impact of the Great Depression and its demon-
stration of economic injustice and the influence of Prohibition, which eroded respect
for law-and-order and generated popular sympathy for the rum-running gangster.
Each of these cultural factors helped to make the movie gangster what he was
and ensured that the genre offered a sustained critique of society. If society, after all,
created gangsters like Little Caesar or Scarface, how healthy could it be? Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) opens with a dark screen, as a voice intones, “I believe
in America.” As the lights come up, Don Corleone confers with an Italian man who has
come to him because the courts have not provided justice. His daughter has been raped
and assaulted, and the legal system failed to convict her assailants. He seeks from Don
Corleone a more primitive kind of justice, one that involves violent retribution.
With his ability to exercise this kind of justice and his rejection and repudia-
tion of established society, with his attainment of wealth and power, the gangster
character appeals to an implicit dissatisfaction on the part of movie audiences with
their social and economic status. By succeeding and becoming wealthy, the gangster
fulfills the culture’s deepest ideals, but he does so by violating its norms. This appeal
is nowhere more apparent than in the conventions that surround the death of the
movie gangster. As dictated by the rules of the genre, the gangster’s death must be
spectacular, and it often contains a powerful social critique. In High Sierra (1941),
Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is a romantic and sympathetic gangster with great com-
passion and empathy for the poor and downtrodden. The film presents his death as a
cowardly act by the legal authorities.
Earle is not simply killed; he is shot off a mountaintop and falls from a great
height, a hero of legendary stature brought down by callous authority. Shot in the
DONNIE BRASCO (COLUMBIA TRISTAR, 1997)
Much distinguished work in the genre lies outside its classic narrative structure. Small-
time hood and hanger-on Lefty Ruggerio (Al Pacino) is not the stuff of a rise-and-fall story.
Rather than an epic hero like Little Caesar or the Godfather, he’s a nobody, a foot soldier
in the neighborhood mob. But he is a compelling character who illuminates the low end
of gangsterdom, and the film invests the story of his last days with compassion. Frame
enlargement.
263

The Nature of Narrative in Film
back, he is felled by a police sniper. His death is witnessed by Marie, the woman he
loved, and in the closing moments of the film she murmurs, “Freedom,” equating
Earle’s death with a final escape from unjust social authority. The end credits are
presented on a scroll that moves toward the top of the frame in a visual design that
echoes the distant High Sierra mountains and symbolizes the idea of transcendence
and escape that Earle’s death embodies in the narrative.
At the conclusion of White Heat (1948), the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarrett
immolates himself atop a huge chemical storage tank. In one of the most famous mo-
ments in all U.S. cinema, he screams, “Made it, Ma, top of the world!” just before he
and the tank explode. The erupting mushroom cloud, which is the film’s final image,
situates Jarrett’s crazed violence within the postwar atomic age and its nuclear anxiet-
ies. Jarrett is a violent psychopath, yet the energies of violence embodied in modern
society and represented by the atomic weapon and the mushroom cloud are infinitely
greater. The ending of the film suggests a nuclear apocalypse. Jarrett has made it to
the top of the world, and now the world ends.
The famous montage that concludes The Godfather (1972), in which editor Peter
Zinner cuts back and forth between the baptism ceremony for Michael Corleone’s in-
fant nephew and the execution of Corleone’s enemies, suggests Michael’s own violent
and corrupt nature and also the violence and corruption at the heart of established
society. Michael has attained a position of eminence, wealth, and political power and
commands sufficient social prestige to ensure a proper baptism for his nephew in one
of the city’s largest and most prominent churches, even as he wipes out his enemies.
At the conclusion of Brian De Palma’s Scarface , Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is
gunned down by a small army of South American narco mercenaries, but not before he
engages them in a prolonged, hyper-violent gun battle. Although Tony has the appetites
and moral sensibility of a shark, the ferocity with which he fights lends his death, when
it comes, a stature befitting the genre, even though as a character he lacks the romantic
appeal of Roy Earle or the sentimental rendering given Cody Jarrett or the Godfather.

HIGH SIERRA (WARNER BROS., 1941)
Cornered in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) dies a noble
death, and the film’s credit design, with titles rolling toward the heavens, suggests that in
death Earle has at last found freedom and transcendence. Frame enlargements.
264

The Nature of Narrative in Film
The film ends by invoking the social critique inherent to the genre: The camera moves
past Tony’s body to a statue bearing the inscription, “The World is Yours.”
Each of these films presents the gangster’s death in a spectacular manner that
contains an implicit social critique. The genre stipulates that the gangster must
have a great deal of charisma. The gangster’s appeal invites the viewer to ask
about the kind of society that produces such seductive forms of corruption and
violence. Like the cowboy, the movie gangster is a highly charged cultural sym-
bol. (In other ways, though, he is the opposite of a Western hero. The gangster
works hard, dreams big, and talks nonstop; the Western hero rarely holds a job,
WHITE HEAT (WARNER BROS.,
1948)
Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) sec-
onds before his explosive death
in White Heat . Jarrett’s fiery end is
a cautionary note for the nuclear
age. Jarrett’s spectacular death
is a moment of such visual bril-
liance that it has become part of
cinema’s folklore, comparable
with King Kong’s last stand atop
the Empire State Building. Both
monsters, Kong and Jarrett, find
an unforgettably poetic death.
Frame enlargement.
SCARFACE (UNIVERSAL, 1983)
Defiant to the end, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) finds a flamboyant death in a hyper-violent
gun battle with South American narco bandits. One of the most unredeemable of movie
gangsters, he nevertheless gains a savage stature in the manner of his death. Frame
enlargement.
265

The Nature of Narrative in Film
cares only about his horse and what possessions he can carry with him, and is
silent and stoic.) The gangster embodies the danger of chaotic lawlessness as well
as popular resentment of legal authority. The movie gangster represents a highly
complex social fantasy about the prize and price of success. As such, in its uniquely
American rendering, the gangster is a figure tied closely to a capitalist economy
and is an expression of social ambivalence toward such an economy. In this
respect, unlike the Western, the gangster genre remains timely and contemporary,
its appeal never fading or going out-of-date.
The Musical
Unlike the Western and gangster films, which appear in cinema during the silent era,
musicals owe their origin to sound filmmaking. Indeed, the film that is popularly cred-
ited as being the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), is a musical built around the
singing of star Al Jolson. Sound made the cinema a receptive medium for the talents
of the singers and dancers who would proliferate in musicals, and the genre flourished
from the 1930s to the 1960s.
In the 1930s, Busby Berkeley choreographed and/or directed a string of hit
musicals— Footlight Parade (1933), 42nd Street (1933), and Gold Diggers of 1935
(1935)—that were enlivened with extravagant sets and his trademark manner of film-
ing a chorus line as if it were a visual kaleidoscope. Dance partners Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers epitomized grace and elegance in a long film series including Flying
Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcée (1934), Top Hat (1935), and Swing Time
(1936). In the 1940s and 1950s at MGM, producer Arthur Freed established a pro-
duction unit that turned out a steady stream of the genre’s classics, many of which
starred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Judy Garland: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me
in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The
Band Wagon (1953). These decades, and Freed’s work in particular, may be regarded
as the genre’s golden age.
THE DEPARTED (WARNER BROS., 2006)
Gangsters remain enduringly popular figures in American cinema, and in this Martin
Scorsese film Jack Nicholson joined the ranks of screen actors with memorable gangster
characters to their credit. His Irish mob boss is corrupt, sinister, and violent, yet also
vividly human. Frame enlargement.
266

The Nature of Narrative in Film
During this period, the genre’s essential stories centered on the courtship ritu-
als of a romantic couple who sang and danced to express their desire for each other.
Viewers knew that the characters played by Astaire and Rogers were right for one
another because they moved so uniquely well together. At the same time, the genre
broke its visual style into two domains. Dialogue scenes were shot in a realist style,
whereas the musical sequences take filmmaker and viewer far from realism. These
scenes include the wild geometric forms of Busby Berkeley, popular in the 1930s, and
the aggressive color design of the ballet sequences from The Band Wagon (1953) and
An American in Paris (1951). In the latter film, the compositions and color schemes
evoke the style of French Impressionist painters. For filmmakers who wanted to ex-
periment with radical color and image styles, the musical was an ideal genre, offering
them possibilities unmatched by any other film format.
Contemporary audiences frequently have trouble accepting the genre’s bifurcated
style. The transitions from everyday reality to the musical scenes with their extrava-
gant song, dance, color, lighting, and camerawork often seem jarring to modern view-
ers, who may react nervously when a character in a classic musical suddenly breaks
into song and dance.
Once again, though, it is important to understand the connection between these
visual and narrative conventions and the underlying social values they express. The
classical musicals— Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Band
Wagon (1953), and An American in Paris (1951)—belong to a less cynical age, and they
express a cultural optimism and innocence that contemporary viewers find quite for-
eign. The musical is a joyous celebration of life, romance, and desire, whereas modern
audiences may be more accustomed to cynical representations of life on movie screens.
Furthermore, the musical is an antirealist, relatively antinarrative format. A sem-
blance of realism only prevails during the dialogue scenes. By contrast, the musical
SWING TIME
(RKO, 1936)
With their joyous
optimism and happy
romance, the musical
couple is in love with
love and each other.
Dance expresses this
celebration. Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire
are the most famous
couple in musical
film history. They
courted each other
on the dance floor
in ten films. Frame
enlargement.
267

The Nature of Narrative in Film
interludes are about the possibilities for stylizing color, sound, and movement in
cinema, freed from the necessity to ground those styles in anything that smacks of
realism. The story line in a musical is often the least important of its elements. The
stories are typically very slight, without much elaboration, and serve mainly as a way
of connecting the musical sequences, which is where the heart of the genre really lies.
The musical genre is about the pure poetry of image and sound, freed from all literal
consideration. As a narrative art, it celebrates the rituals of courtship, in which music
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
(MGM, 1952)
The relatively naturalistic
presentation of dialogue
scenes in the musical gives
way to elaborately stylized
musical sequences, which
gave filmmakers oppor-
tunities to explore color,
light, and movement with
complete imagination. The
musical’s antirealism is the
most extreme of any film
genre, and narrative is rela-
tively unimportant. Frame
enlargement.
MOULIN ROUGE (20TH CENTURY FOX, 2001)
Director Baz Luhrmann added tremendous style to the movie musical with this fanciful,
energetic tale of Satine (Nicole Kidman), a popular singer at the famous nineteenth-
century French club. The movie’s frantic pace and self-conscious use of wildly different
musical sources, including Madonna, Elton John, and The Sound of Music , make this a very
untraditional musical and show how flexible genre can be. Frame enlargement.
268

The Nature of Narrative in Film
serves to herald love and heartbreak. Like the Western, this genre has notably dimin-
ished in recent years. The cinema is a poorer medium for its loss.
The Horror Film
Like Westerns and gangster films, horror has roots in the early silent period and
existed as a literary and theatrical genre long before the invention of cinema. In the
silent era, Lon Chaney (known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces”) used horrific
makeup to create memorably grotesque characters in The Phantom of the Opera
(1925) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Actor John Barrymore played a
strikingly repellent Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Using distorted sets
and compositions, the German expressionists created hauntingly bizarre worlds, such
as that in F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu (1922).
Beginning in the 1930s, Universal Pictures gave the cinema its classic monsters:
Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941).
The brilliant makeup and set design and the classic visual conceptions given to the
monsters have made these Universal productions the golden age of movie horror,
and they have exerted an enduring influence on popular conceptions of Dracula, the
Frankenstein monster, and werewolves. During this period, producer Val Lewton at
RKO made a series of poetic and atmospheric horror films— Cat People (1942), Isle of
the Dead (1945), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)—in which horrible or uncanny
things were suggested rather than shown. Since then, horror has been big box office,
an enduring genre that has never been long out of favor with audiences.
Critic Robin Wood defines the basic narrative situation in horror films as one
whereby “normality” is threatened by the monster. Monster films from Frankenstein
(1931) and Dracula (1931) to Halloween (1978) and The Fly (1988) often define
normality in terms of the romantic, heterosexual couple or the family, particu-
larly parent–child relationships ( The Exorcist , 1973; The Omen , 1976). This is
THE MUMMY
(UNIVERSAL, 1932)
269

The Nature of Narrative in Film
not, though, an invariable pattern. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (1982),
for example, is set amid an all-male community of scientific researchers based in
Antarctica. But in virtually all cases, normal life, however it is portrayed in a given
film, is under threat from something unspeakable, horrific and/or supernatural.
THE MUMMY (UNIVERSAL, 1999)
In its golden age, the horror genre created its enduring monsters using brilliant makeup
designs applied to the face and body of actors Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney.
Lacking a comparable generation of monster movie actors, today’s films use high-tech ef-
fects and digital animation. Karloff’s classic mummy used makeup and lighting to give the
actor a sinister look; by contrast, the remake featured a monster created and animated in
the computer. Frame enlargements.
SAW (LIONSGATE, 2004)
Graphic violence returned to the horror film with the onset of the Saw and Hostel series of
films. In the gruesome but clever Saw, a psychopath subjects his victims to outlandish tor-
tures and deaths, and continued to do so in the film’s many sequels. Frame enlargement.
270

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Aside from the obvious physical danger it typically poses to ordinary, normal
characters in the films, the monster poses a larger and more profound threat to
the classification systems that define reality and on which culture and society rest.
Whether a vampire, a mummy, a werewolf, or a vengeful psychopath, the monster
represents a confusion—a violation—of social categories that specify boundaries be-
tween normal and abnormal, human and animal, living and dead. The monster typi-
cally occupies an uncertain middle ground between these distinctions, neither living
nor dead, neither fully human nor fully an animal, abnormal but bearing disturbing
traces of the human. Stories in the horror genre address the fragility of human identity
by showing, through the monster, the loss, destruction, or violation of humanity.
The screen’s most famous monsters—Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s
Frankenstein’s monster, Lon Chaney Jr.’s wolfman, Freddie Kreuger, Jason Voorhees—
demonstrate that the monstrousness of the monster lies in its display of both human and
inhuman characteristics. As such, the horror film questions the viewer’s most deeply
cherished notions about what it means to be a human being. By centering on imaginary
creatures who dwell in the margins of human life and consciousness, the horror film ter-
rifies viewers by undermining their secure sense of where human identity lies in relation
to the world of the dead, of animals, or of things.

DRACULA (UNIVERSAL, 1931); FRANKENSTEIN
(UNIVERSAL, 1931); THE WOLF MAN
(UNIVERSAL, 1941)
The greatest and most enduring monsters are
those that remain recognizably human while being
undeniably monstrous. This recognition that hu-
man identity and monstrosity are one is the genre’s
deepest secret and most profound source of terror.
Frame enlargements.
271

The Nature of Narrative in Film
The monsters in the Alien series, for example, are genre classics, genuinely creepy
creatures, from which audiences recoil with primordial fear and disgust. The “face
huggers,” blending arachnid and crustacean anatomy, seed their human hosts, and the
baby aliens gestate inside the human victim, destroying their host as the human gives
birth to the monster. The narrative arc of the first three films brings the creatures ever
closer to Ripley, the series heroine, until it transpires that she, too, has been seeded
and is no longer fully human. The third film ends with her destruction.
The appeal of such films shows that in cinema negative emotions—fear, anxiety,
dread, experiences that in life are often quite unpleasant—can become sources of plea-
sure. The safety of the movie theatre or viewing room enables spectators vicariously
to experience negative emotions without the real consequences that follow from such
things in actual life. Staying within the imaginative domain of a fictional story enables
viewers to experience these states as symbolic emotions rather than as real responses
to actual, life-threatening situations. Many viewers, though, do not enjoy the experi-
ence of negative emotions in cinema, and for them the horror genre is one they avoid.
EVOLUTION OF THE HORROR FILM The evolution of the horror film demonstrates
how genre conventions change. Old conventions become exhausted, and filmmak-
ers search for new ones in their never-ending challenge to retain the interest of the
audience. Horror films of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the monster using an actor
in (often brilliant) makeup, whereas contemporary films often use computer-based
visual effects to visualize the creatures. Moreover, horror films during their golden
age tended to end on a very comforting note. The monster was destroyed, and the
romantic couple reached safety unharmed. Horror often was left to the viewer’s
imagination in contrast with the graphic gore of modern films, which use contem-
porary effects technology to visualize the elaborate violence that is now basic in the
genre. (In this respect, The Blair Witch Project [1999], The Sixth Sense [1999], and
The Others [2001], all of which work through suggestion rather than graphic vio-
lence, are a return to the golden age of horror.)
ALIEN 3 (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1992)
One of the monsters inspects Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and then gives her a tender ca-
ress because she is no longer fully human. Gestating inside her is a baby alien. The horror
genre terrifies by violating the conditions that define human identity. Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
By the 1970s and 1980s, in such films as Halloween and the never-ending
Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, the monster became inde-
structible and undefeatable. These monsters—Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers of
the Halloween films, and the aliens in the Alien series—remain alive at the end of
each episode, and viewers know they will come back again to haunt and terrify.
Contemporary horror films, therefore, can be more disturbing and unsettling than
horror was in previous decades, when narrative conventions insisted that normality
be restored and secure at film’s end. Perhaps because the modern viewer’s sense of
what is normal is more precarious and more easily undermined, the destruction of
order and security may strike contemporary audiences as a more authentic vision of
life. The monsters today are everywhere, and they cannot be defeated, a perception
that the narrative design of contemporary horror emphasizes.
Science Fiction
This genre and its close ally, the fantasy film, are the most popular of contemporary
film genres, and arguably, they have made the strongest impact on popular culture by
way of such series as the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings , and Matrix films.
The genre has its cinematic roots in the “trick” films that appeared with the
birth of cinema. A Trip to the Moon (1902), The Whole Dam Family and the Dam
Dog (1903), and many others used double exposures, miniature models, stop-
action jump cuts, and in-camera mattes to simulate fantastic worlds, unexpected
optical effects, and alterations of time and space. The Lost World (1925) used
rear projection of animated dinosaur models blended with live actors matted in as
foreground elements. Such early classics as Metropolis (1927) and Things to Come
(1936) created visions of fantastic, often futuristic cities, establishing a tradition
that continues today in Blade Runner (1982), Dark City (1998), The Fifth Element
(1997), Sin City (2005), and the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films, where
fabulously inventive cities are a key part of fantasy décor.
METROPOLIS (UFA, 1927)
Science fiction movies had been
made before Metropolis but never
in such grand, epic, and imagi-
native terms. This film, with its
futuristic city, has exerted a huge
influence on over a century of
science fiction and fantasy films.
In terms of this influence, one
could say that the science fic-
tion genre in cinema begins with
Metropolis . This scene shows the
master creation of the evil inven-
tor Rotwang, a humanoid robot.
Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
Low-budget Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon sci-fi serials were plentiful in the
1930s, but other genres, such as the Western and gangster film, were hugely popular.
Science fiction did not emerge as a major genre until the 1950s, when the Cold War
emphasis on space exploration, coupled with anxieties about nuclear weapons, stimu-
lated a tremendous amount of film production. Rocketship X-M (1950), Destination
Moon (1950), and Forbidden Planet (1956) offered early depictions of space travel,
whereas nuclear anxieties were displaced onto a gallery of mutant creatures spawned
by radiation in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Them! (1954), Tarantula
(1955), and others.
Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1957) expressed the Cold War paranoia of the period, with
alien invaders standing in for the fear of communist attack. In Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers (1956), alien invaders destroy monuments and government buildings in
Washington, D.C., in a manner that anticipates the action of Independence Day
(1996).
The formative literature of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells influenced a number
of distinguished adaptations in this period: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954),
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Time Machine (1960), and Mysterious
Island (1961).
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Time Machine are especially distin-
guished, with the former a lavish Technicolor Disney extravaganza and the latter
a thoughtful, careful adaptation of Wells’ novel with outstanding special effects
by George Pal. Compare it with the sorry remake (2002), which turned Wells’
THE TIME MACHINE (MGM, 1960)
Director–producer George Pal was a master of science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s.
His films were imaginative and literate and did not go overboard on special effects, using
them instead to advance the story. The Time Machine is one of the best adaptations from
sci-fi literature ever made. Pal’s other work includes When Worlds Collide (1951) and War
of the Worlds (1953). Frame enlargement.
274

The Nature of Narrative in Film
speculative novel into action adventure. (Wells’ The Time Machine has inspired many
time-travel films over the years, some of which are more fantasy than science fiction—
Time After Time (1979), The Final Countdown (1980), Somewhere in Time (1980),
Time Bandits (1981), and 12 Monkeys (1995).
For the most part, science fiction diminished in the 1960s as a popular genre,
although that decade saw one of its masterworks, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968), as well as Planet of the Apes (1968), the first and best of a series.
Kubrick’s film is a deliberately mysterious, perplexing meditation on humankind’s
encounter with alien intelligence, and it departs from film conventions by showing
space as a silent void (no space ships here sounding like souped-up race cars). With its
mystical visions of the cosmos, 2001 connects with the intellectual focus of much sci-
ence fiction literature, which the Star Wars series discarded when it seized on the Buck
Rogers–Flash Gordon serials as its model. But it was Star Wars in 1977 that revived
the genre’s vitality. The Star Wars saga (1977–2005) reawakened popular interest in
science fiction, and the genre has remained extraordinarily popular ever since.
During the era spawned by Star Wars , the long-running Star Trek series (1979,
1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2009) helped to keep alive the in-
tellectual elements of the science fiction enterprise. But unlike the low-tech television
series on which the movies were based, the films offered state-of-the-art visual effects,
as did other high-profile productions, such as the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997,
2001). In addition to Star Trek , other distinguished films that have used the genre to
explore ideas, in contrast to action adventure, include Brazil (1985), Gattaca (1997),
and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Although science fiction lends itself to utopian visions of the future, in practice,
very few films fall into this category. Many take a darker outlook; in the process,
they reflect back to us our anxieties and fears about the present. Even though the Star
Wars saga ends (in Return of the Jedi , 1983) in a utopian world, the series climaxes
(in terms of the production sequence of the films) with Revenge of the Sith (2005), in
which Anakin Skywalker joins the dark side and becomes Darth Vader.
In this respect, science fiction gives filmmakers a powerful means for exploring
anxieties about where our world is heading, and many films take a grim and pes-
simistic view, seeing a decaying environment, antidemocratic governments, and ruth-
less corporations controlling the world— Escape from New York (1981), Robocop
(1987), Blade Runner (1982), the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2004), the
Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003), Starship Troopers (1997), and Minority Report
(2001). I, Robot (2004) offers reflections on the erosion of civil liberties and threats
to democracy in the United States following 9/11. Even a comic film such as Men in
Black (1997) finds the earth continuously poised on the edge of annihilation.
Epic struggles with titanic evil inform the Star Wars films, and their success influ-
enced similar depictions in the Matrix and Lord of the Rings series. The latter series,
though, belongs to fantasy and locates its battles between good and evil in an ancient
mythic world. As such, it draws from a somewhat different set of influences. These
include the battle epics of directors Akira Kurosawa ( Seven Samurai , 1954) and Sergei
Eisenstein ( Alexander Nevsky , 1936), as well as earlier epics of ancient world mythol-
ogy (Fritz Lang’s Siegfried , 1924, and Kriemhild’s Revenge , 1924).
The Lord of the Rings films are also deeply influenced by the fantasy creatures
designed by effects wizard Ray Harryhausen in ancient-world pictures such as The
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Jason and
the Argonauts (1963), and One Million Years B.C. (1967).
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (MGM, 1968)
Whereas Metropolis is the towering classic of the silent period, 2001 is the genre’s great-
est masterpiece of the sound era. Stanley Kubrick’s mystical and spectacular epic of
human discovery follows the intellectual tradition established in sci-fi literature. Frame
enlargement.
DISTRICT 9 (TRISTAR, 2009)
Contemporary science fiction often projects visions of the future or of alternative worlds
based on speculations about contemporary problems and fears. District 9 uses the era
of racial segregation and oppression in South Africa, known as “apartheid,” to depict a
world in which a race of aliens trapped on Earth is confined to slums and detention camps
and kept under military surveillance. The story situation also resonates with a post-9/11
world. Dramatizing contemporary problems in disguise enables science fiction to remain
relevant to the lives of its viewers. Frame enlargement.
276

The Nature of Narrative in Film
As The Lord of the Rings series premiered over a span of three years, many
people remarked that the creative torch in science fiction/fantasy seemed to have been
passed from George Lucas (and Star Wars ) to Peter Jackson (and Lord of the Rings ).
Like so much of science fiction, though, the Jackson films envision a world in crisis
while enabling the filmmakers to use cinema effects with imaginative delight. Here lies
the essential appeal of the science fiction genre—giving form to contemporary doubt
while conjuring magic tricks unlike any seen before.
THE WAR FILM
With classics such as The Big Parade (1925) and All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930), the war film extends back to the silent and early sound eras. The Birth of a
Nation (1915) has a Civil War sequence of startling realism. But it was the World
War II era and its immediate aftermath that saw the Hollywood studios produce this
genre in its greatest numbers. Hollywood joined the war effort, and in such pictures
as Objective, Burma! (1945), Flying Tigers (1942), They Were Expendable (1945),
and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), American film showed the home audience why the war
had been fought and celebrated the patriotism and sacrifice of its soldiers.
But World War II was the last war about which America held a clear consensus
of opinion, and the films about subsequent wars have been much more ambivalent
and critical. Korea in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and Pork Chop Hill (1959),
Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986), the Persian Gulf War in
Three Kings (1999), and the Iraq War in The Hurt Locker (2008) are depicted as con-
flicts without a clear rationale or moral foundation.
As these examples suggest, narrative in the war film is often reflective of the po-
litical and social context that surrounds a given war. When that context is generally
free of controversy, as in World War II, the celebration of heroism in a picture such as
Saving Private Ryan (1998) is much easier to achieve.
SANDS OF IWO JIMA
(REPUBLIC, 1949)
Hollywood’s films about World
War II were part of the war ef-
fort and were meant to instill
patriotic feelings in their viewers.
John Wayne appeared in many of
these films as a hero engaged in
a good fight about which neither
he, nor the viewers, had doubts.
No war since has been shown by
American film in so untroubled a
fashion. Frame enlargement.
277

The Nature of Narrative in Film
By contrast, it has proven much harder to portray Korea or Vietnam or the Iraq War
on film with the moral clarity and heroism of Hollywood’s World War II films. In fact,
Hollywood avoided making films about Vietnam until the late 1970s and 1980s, and con-
temporary depictions of the Iraq War often are bleak and without heroic affirmation.
War films tend to come in three formats. Battle epics provide a large-scale over-
view of the strategies and objectives that are involved in major military confronta-
tions. The story in these films moves from high-level military decision-making to
front-line action, providing a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding battle. The Longest Day
(1962), In Harm’s Way (1965), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1968), and Pearl Harbor (2001)
exemplify this format, which is closely associated with World War II. But it is also a
format that lends itself very well to depictions of the ancient world, as in Alexander
(2004), Troy (2004), and Spartacus (1960).
Combat films take a close-in view of the fighting and often concentrate on a small
unit of soldiers engaged in ferocious and sustained battle. Unlike the battle epics, com-
bat films tend not to show the high-level decision-making that has resulted in the fight-
ing. This close-up focus often makes the politics of a given war more distant and less
relevant to the immediate tasks faced by the characters of staying alive and prevailing
against forbidding odds. Thus combat films tend to be about heroism under fire, re-
gardless of what controversies may surround the war itself. This format has proven to
be enduringly popular, and examples can be found from a wide variety of conflicts—
World War II ( Bataan , 1943), Korea ( Pork Chop Hill ), Vietnam ( Platoon; Hamburger
Hill , 1987; We Were Soldiers , 2001), and Somalia ( Black Hawk Down , 2001).
THE HURT LOCKER (VOLTAGE PICTURES, 2008)
Recent wars have lacked the moral and political clarity that surrounded World War II,
and the genre has reflected this with more ambiguous or critical portraits of modern
war. The Iraq War that followed 9/11, for example, has been depicted in many films as
an ill-considered campaign lacking clear objectives. The Hurt Locker takes a close-in view,
portraying the experiences of a bomb demolition expert (Jeremy Renner, right) whose
addiction to the adrenaline rush of combat alienates him from the other soliders in his
squad. Frame enlargement.
278

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Home-front dramas concentrate on the difficulties faced by families at home
while loved ones fight overseas or on the problems faced by veterans who return
home after combat. The home-front drama generally avoids much depiction of com-
bat, preferring to concentrate on domestic sacrifice. This format was especially effec-
tive during World War II, as such powerful films as Since You Went Away (1944) and
Mrs. Miniver (1942) demonstrate. Coming Home (1978) is a Vietnam era home-front
drama. Grace Is Gone (2007) examines the impact of the Iraq War on the husband
and children of a soldier killed in combat.
An interesting subgenre of the war film is the submarine picture, which deals with
the stress of manning a submarine in dangerous waters. Sometimes these films portray
war, as in U-571 (2000), Destination Tokyo (1943), The Enemy Below (1957), Up
Periscope (1959), and Das Boot (1981), the greatest film about submarine warfare
ever made. Other films, however, put more stress on the hazardous nature of subma-
rine duty and may incorporate a crisis in the chain of command with a threatened mu-
tiny, with war or global conflict as a background element— K-19: The Widowmaker
(2002), Crimson Tide (1995), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Gray Lady Down
(1978), Ice Station Zebra (1968), and The Bedford Incident (1965).
As these films illustrate, a genre does not have a fixed and firm boundary, and
many films may exist on the edge of a genre, blending genre and nongenre elements.
While many war films have celebrated glory and patriotism, the horror and sav-
agery of war have produced a much darker tone in many others. In fact, many war
films can be described as antiwar because they concentrate on the brutalizing effects
of combat or on the oppressiveness of the military itself. The Big Parade (1925) is a
powerful indictment of the slaughter in World War I, as is All Quiet on the Western
Front (1930), a classic antiwar picture. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and
Full Metal Jacket (1987) are powerful critiques of the mechanism of war, the military
PLATOON (ORION, 1986)
Combat films focus up-close on the experience of battle, often portraying small units
engaged in ferocious fighting. Platoon redefined the treatment of the Vietnam War on
film with its close attention to jungle combat. No film about Vietnam had shown jungle
warfare so intensively before. Frame enlargement.
279

The Nature of Narrative in Film
system, and the sacrifice of young lives. So too is Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron
(1977). Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line
(1998) indict the brutality of command and the dehumanizing effects of combat.
The critical tone of these films is counterbalanced by the stirring portraits of heroism
offered in pictures such as Glory (1989) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The war film,
therefore, encompasses affirmation and critique, as well as liberal and conservative points
of view. One of the most powerful and complex of human behaviors, war has fascinated
filmmakers and drawn them to it, and they have responded from a variety of moral and
political perspectives. The great war films are about the specifics of a particular conflict, as
well as the timeless issues that war raises.
U-571 (UNIVERSAL, 2000)
Many war films have focused on conflict involving submarines, giving rise to a popular
and enduring subcategory of the genre. These films emphasize the hazards and stress of
serving on board a submarine in a theater of war. Many, but not all, are set during World
War II, as is U-571 . Frame enlargement.
PATHS OF GLORY (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1957)
Numerous films in the genre
have an antiwar point of view or
are highly critical of a particular
conflict or of the military. One
of the genre’s antiwar classics,
Paths of Glory shows three sol-
diers in World War I framed for
cowardice by a corrupt officer
intent on covering his mistakes,
put on trial, and then executed.
Stanley Kubrick’s film shows the
machinery of war as a vast, pow-
erful institution against which the
individual is relatively powerless.
Frame enlargement.
280

The Nature of Narrative in Film
FILM NOIR
Film noir emerged much later than many of the other genres, which have roots in the
silent era. Noir began in 1941 with Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon. Citizen
Kane ’s visual design featured shadows and low-key lighting, which created a dark,
ominous-looking world on screen, and this look became an enduring part of film noir.
The Maltese Falcon ’s story of crime, betrayal, and corruption helped establish the
themes and type of story that would be central to noir.
Noirs are dark, pessimistic films, telling stories about crime, often with an urban
setting emphasizing shadows and darkness. The classic period of noir lasted until
1958, but the genre has influenced so many contemporary directors that the term neo-
noir is used to describe the films they make in the genre today.
A huge number of noir films were made in the classical period. Their titles very
often express the defining noir mood of anxiety, paranoia, corruption, and violence—
Raw Deal (1948), Brute Force (1947), The Dark Corner (1946), Criss Cross (1949),
In a Lonely Place (1950), Night and the City (1950), They Live by Night (1949), and
Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
The hero is often a victim in these stories, caught in a web of crime and be-
trayal, and the mood of fatalism is strong, the sense that his acts and choices are
foredoomed. The films often tell the story using flashbacks and voice-over narration,
which add to the sense that all will go wrong for the characters. Walking the streets at
night in Double Indemnity (1944), the hero, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), realizes
that he cannot hear his own footsteps, that his is the walk of a dead man.
The hero is often menaced by a seductive but dangerous woman, known as a femme
fatale , or “deadly woman.” This character type is one of noir’s most famous and can be
found in Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd. (1950), Kiss Me Deadly , and many others.
The classical period of noir is tied to World War II and the Cold War, and these
eras certainly helped to influence the sense of anxiety in the genre. But noir also
has roots in crime fiction, particularly the hard-boiled crime and detective novels of
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
(PARAMOUNT, 1944)
Even in daylight, the world of
noir was dark. The slanting shad-
ows of Venetian blinds fall on
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray)
in a room barely illuminated by
the afternoon sun. The Venetian
blind imagery was used widely in
the genre. Frame enlargement.
281

The Nature of Narrative in Film
Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett, many of which were
made into film noirs—Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946) and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key (1942).
Chandler created noir’s most enduring private investigator, the character of Philip
Marlowe, who has appeared in numerous movies adapted from Chandler novels—
Farewell My Lovely (1944 and 1975 remake), The Big Sleep (1946 and 1978 remake),
Murder My Sweet (1944), The Lady in the Lake (1946), Marlowe (1969), and The
Long Goodbye (1973).
Noir also was influenced by paintings and photographs of the city stressing lone-
liness and alienation (the paintings of Edward Hopper and the photographs of Arthur
Fellig, known as “Weegee”). But whereas the gangster film defines the city as a place
of excitement, glamour, and power, film noir used these influences from painting and
photography to portray it as a place of danger and fear.
The genre also found a key influence in the visual style of German expressionist
cinema, particularly its low-key lighting and exaggerated camera angles portraying a
world that is off-kilter. Many of the German directors and cinematographers who had
created these films immigrated to Hollywood and began making film noirs.
Numerous influences, then, combined to create film noir, and the genre’s striking
visual design attracted some of the best cinematographers of the period. John Alton,
for example, created some of the deepest and blackest shadows to be found anywhere
in American film in such pictures as T-Men (1947), Raw Deal , and The Big Combo
(1955). He also shot with wide-angle lenses to exaggerate his shadowy lighting. The
last shot of Big Combo is one of the definitive and most famous images of noir, show-
ing the film’s two principal characters, backlit as silhouettes, walking away from the
camera and into a mysterious, region of fog and mist.
The shadows and low-key lighting of noir achieved their power in the black-and-
white cinematography of that period. For the most part, noir in its classical phase is
a black-and-white genre, and this is as it should be. The contrast of light and dark
achieved in low-key lighting is far more powerful and expressive in black-and-white.
MURDER, MY SWEET
(RKO, 1944)
The world of film noir is one of
anxiety, paranoia, darkness, and
crime, given memorable visual
expression in moody black-and-
white cinematography. The crime
novels of Raymond Chandler and
others furnished many of the
genre’s stories. Here, Chandler’s
hero, private investigator Philip
Marlowe (Dick Powell), is startled
by the sudden appearance of
a thug, reflected in his office
window. Frame enlargement.
282

The Nature of Narrative in Film

THE BIG COMBO (ALLIED
ARTISTS, 1955)
John Alton was the genre’s most
radical cinematographer, with
the deepest shadows and most
extreme compositions. Here,
a table lamp dominates most
of the frame, with the three
characters placed in shadows
in the background. In the film’s
last shot, Alton uses fog and
silhouette lighting to create a po-
etically environment.
Frame enlargements.
Color cinematography tends to soften shadows, to weaken the contrast of light and
dark, by supplying the additional information about coloration that is lacking in black
and white. Color cinematography can use low-key lighting, but the result lacks the
sharp contrasts that black-and-white achieves.
NEO-NOIR For this reason, perhaps, the classical phase of noir ends about the time
that color cinematography replaced black-and-white as the norm of film production.
The last classical film noir is generally considered to be Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil
(1958), with brilliant black-and-white cinematography by Russell Metty.
But the genre proved to be an enduring one, revived by contemporary filmmakers
drawn to its visual style and its moral pessimism. Neo-noir films are shot in color but
283

The Nature of Narrative in Film
use a low-key lighting style to evoke some of the visual qualities of noir in its classical
period. The noir revival began in the 1970s and is still ongoing. Chinatown (1974),
more than any other film, revived the genre for the contemporary era, and modern
filmmakers were immediately attracted to noir’s stylish stories of greed, temptation,
and defeat. Taxi Driver (1975), Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple (1984), At Close
Range (1986), The Grifters (1990), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), Gun Crazy (1992),
Red Rock West (1993), L.A. Confidential (1997), Palmetto (1999), Femme Fatale
(2002), and Sin City (2005) are just a few of the recent neo-noirs.
Sin City includes many of the elements of classic noir—a detective hero, a gritty
and dangerous urban locale, a visual look defined by shadows and darkness. And yet
it owes as much to the Frank Miller comics from which the film’s three stories have
been drawn. Moreover, the urban settings are entirely digital; they were never actually
photographed the way that cities were in classic noir.
In this respect, Sin City illustrates one of the enduring questions about noir—Is it a
genre or is it really a visual style that can be attached to different kinds of film? Scholars
of film have debated this question for years because many films, which are not noirs,
have used the style. Blade Runner (1980), for example, is a science fiction film whose
central character is a detective straight out of film noir. The Christmas classic It’s a
Wonderful Life (1946) has a nightmare sequence that becomes a film noir. And Batman
Begins (2005) visualizes the comic book character in terms of a noir visual design. All
these films include noir elements, but none would be considered film noir.
Ultimately, noir is both a style and a genre. Stylistically, it defines a look that
many films can emulate of whatever genre. But as a genre, it has clear origins in the
hard-boiled school of crime fiction that flourished in the 1920s–1940s, and filmmak-
ers in that period knew that they were making film noirs, even though the name itself
wasn’t coined until later. A dead-on parody of film noir appears in 1947. My Favorite
Brunette, starring Bob Hope as a nebbish who wants to be a hard-boiled detective
like he’s seen in the movies, satirizes noir slang, flashback plotting, and voice-over
CHINATOWN (PARAMOUNT, 1974)
Noir has endured long past its classical phase. Neo-noir films revive the genre in color. In
Chinatown , set in the 1940s, Jack Nicholson plays a Philip Marlowe–like private investiga-
tor who uncovers a scheme to control Los Angeles’ water supply. Neo-noirs also may be
set in the present day, such as Palmetto or Femme Fatale . Frame enlargement.
284

The Nature of Narrative in Film
narration and includes an uncredited cameo appearance by a big noir star of the pe-
riod, Alan Ladd. Such a thorough parody suggests strongly that noir was a clearly
recognized genre of film.
Film noir is one of American cinema’s most famous, distinctive, and enduring cre-
ations. Today’s directors will continue to make neo-noirs because they love the look and
the stories and because doing so connects them to a great heritage of Hollywood film.
SUMMARY
In their most popular form, movies tell stories, yet the film medium also can inform
and instruct by observing real events (these movies are called documentaries), or it
can represent pure shape, line, color, and form rather than real things (these are ex-
perimental, “underground,” or avant-garde films). Yet it is narrative films that have
captured the popular audience. The turn toward narrative emerged very early in film
history and has been present ever since.
Present in all cultures, narrative thinking is an essential human ability. Fictional
narratives, the kind movies typically employ, grow out of a particular context in
which the storyteller and the audience agree to play make-believe in a way that grants
the fictional story a special status: Its truthfulness is not counted to be as important as
its artistic organization and its power to delight and to compel belief.
Filmmakers create narrative structure by establishing discrepancies between plot and
story. Using flashbacks, the omission of detail, or other devices, filmmakers can re-ar-
range the proper order of story events and/or create obstacles to the viewer’s assimilation
of story information. If skillfully done, this will arouse the viewers’ interest and make
them keenly interested in seeing the full outcome of events. Among the most popular of
plot structures is the classical Hollywood narrative, which offers a clearly dominant line
of main action and one or more interrelated secondary lines of action. This narrative type
is clearly motivated, forward moving, and establishes explicit causal relationships among
BLADE RUNNER (LADD CO., 1982)
Scholars and critics have debated whether noir is a genre or simply a visual style.
Whatever the answer, it is certainly true that the style of noir has been tremendously
influential, appearing in numerous films outside the genre. Blade Runner , for example,
a science fiction film, uses noir’s low-key lighting and 1940s-style fashions to evoke its
world of crime and anxiety. Frame enlargement.
285

The Nature of Narrative in Film
its story events. Alternatives to the classical Hollywood narrative may feature implicit or
minimal causality or, in extreme cases, an antinarrative orientation.
All stories are told by someone, although the collaborative nature of cinema
makes it difficult to identify a single or sole author. In film, narration is produced by
the complex of structural elements—the camera, lights, sound, color, set design, cos-
tumes, and other elements of structure. While these can be used to imply a character’s
subjective perspective, point of view in the cinema is usually third person, with im-
plicit first-person components.
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
antinarrative
classical Hollywood
narrative
convention
counter-narrative
deviant plot
structures
explicit causality
genre
implicit causality
implied author
neo-noir
plot
point of view
real author
story
subjective shot
surprise
suspense
SUGGESTED READINGS
Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999).
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1978).
John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
1974).
Syd Field, The Screenwriter’s Workbook (New York: Delta, 2006).
Avrom Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1992).
Barry K. Grant, Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
Andrew Horton, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative
Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
George M. White, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986).
286

■ distinguish between male and female
mattes
■ describe the role of forced perspective
■ explain what an optical printer does
■ explain rendering and multi-pass compositing
■ describe how stereoscopic cinema works
■ explain the role of a stereographer
■ describe the roles that visual effects play in
cinema
■ explain what a composited image is and its
relation to visual effects
■ describe a travelling matte
■ describe the Schufftan process
■ distinguish between rear and front projection
■ explain what a Z-depth map is used for
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Visual Effects

From Chapter 8 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
287

Visual Effects
Many of cinema’s most artistically significant and many of its most popular films feature an in-
tensive use of visual effects— Citizen Kane (1941), Metropolis (1927), The Wizard of Oz (1939),
Gone With the Wind (1939), North by Northwest (1959), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Visual effects are an essential structural component of cinema, enabling filmmakers to
create worlds of the imagination and to overcome the limitations of time, budget, and place.
A filmmaker must visualize the world described in a story and place it upon the screen. Very
often, the places and characters of that story cannot be directly filmed because they never
existed or they no longer exist or they are inaccessible. The majesty of the ocean liner Titanic
belongs to a bygone world, but it can be visualized using models, mattes, and digital anima-
tion. An imaginary planet, Pandora, can be created for Avatar (2009). San Francisco no lon-
ger looks as it did in the 1960s, but it can be digitally built for a historical drama like Zodiac
(2007). The actor Andy Serkis can be transformed into the wizened Gollum or the giant ape
King Kong.
To a popular audience, these are examples of “special effects,” and, indeed, for
several decades this was the industry’s term for the special photographic effects that were
added to a film. The first Academy Award for Achievement in Special Effects was bestowed
in 1937. In 1964, the wording was changed to Achievement in Special Visual Effects; in
1972 it became Special Achievement in Visual Effects; and in 1981 it became Achievement
in Visual Effects.
The industry still uses the term “special effects,” but it now carries a very narrow and re-
stricted meaning—it designates mechanical effects, such as explosions or physical stunts such
as cars flipping over. Everything else that a popular audience would call a “special effect” is
today referred to in the film industry as a visual effect , and, accordingly, that is the terminol-
ogy that will be used here.
This chapter explains fundamental visual effects techniques, surveys their use
throughout the history of cinema, and explains the artistic designs they help to
accomplish.
TITANIC (20TH CENTURY FOX, PARAMOUNT, 1997)
Visual effects enable filmmakers to overcome the limitations of time, budget, and place
that otherwise would restrict the stories they could film. Matte paintings, miniature mod-
els, animation, and other tools allow moviemakers to film imaginary worlds and bygone
eras from the past. Without visual effects, there often is no cinema. Frame enlargement.
288

Visual Effects
A COMPOSITED MEDIUM
Cinema is a composited medium, assembled from many pieces of picture and sound.
A composite image or sequence is one that is composed of elements created separately
and then combined together. Visual effects are composites; the final image is a layered
blend, conjoining different elements—for example, live action, miniature models,
matte paintings or animation. Understood in these terms, editing is a visual effect. An
edited sequence creates a composite reality by joining together shots that were filmed
separately from one another. For example, in Rear Window Jeffries (James Stewart)
watches his neighbors across the apartment courtyard when, in fact, actor Stewart
saw none of the things that the editing suggests his character can see. In a historical
context, editing was one of the first tools filmmakers used to create visual effects.
The first known example occurs in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
(1895). Just before the executioner’s axe falls, the cameraman, Alfred Clark, stopped
filming. All of the actors on set froze and held their positions while a dummy was
substituted for the actress playing the queen. Filming was resumed, the axe fell, and
the head rolled off; when projected on screen, the action flowed in an unbroken and,
for the time, shocking fashion.
Stopping the camera to create a hidden cut in the action fast became a popular vi-
sual effects technique. Georges Melies used it frequently in his films, such as A Trip to
the Moon (1902), enabling lizard-like moon people to appear and disappear in puffs
of smoke. R.W. Paul’s An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903) uses stop-action substi-
tution to visualize a man run over by a horse-drawn carriage, and Edwin S. Porter in
The Great Train Robbery (1903) uses it to switch out an actor with a dummy that is
then thrown from a moving train.
Filmmakers quickly devised a repertoire of techniques that enabled a new genre
of “trick films” to emerge. These were movies that offered viewers astounding images
that contradicted physical reality. In Upside Down, or The Human Flies (1899), a set
A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)
Georges Melies was a magician
who turned to cinema for its abil-
ity to create magical effects. He
built his own studio and made
more than 500 films full of trick
effects, perfecting stop-motion
substitution, painted backgrounds,
mirror distortions, perspective
cheats, deceptive camera posi-
tions, and matted images. Melies
today is the most famous visual
effects filmmaker who worked dur-
ing cinema’s infancy. Here, brave
French astronomers gaze at the
city — a painted backing with live
smoke effects — before embarking
on their trip to the moon. Frame
enlargement.
289

Visual Effects
constructed upside-down and filmed with an inverted filmstrip inside the camera made
a group of houseguests seem to cavort and party on the ceiling. In The Cheese Mites,
or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901), previously filmed footage inserted into
a scene makes doll-sized people appear on top of a restaurant table before the incredu-
lous eyes of the diner. In The Clown Barber (1899), a man gets a novel shave when the
THE ? MOTORIST (1906)
Producer Robert W. Paul
made documentaries and his-
torical re-creations as well as
trick films. This delightful fan-
tasy is among his best work.
In the climax, the motorists
circle the rings of Saturn,
courtesy of an animated
miniature and a painted
backdrop. This fast, witty,
and charming film shows
how visual effects stimulated
filmmakers to reach for new
heights of creative expression.
Frame enlaragement.
A RAILWAY
COLLISION (1900)
This R. W. Paul pro-
duction shows how
visual effects served
filmmakers in creating
portraits of a real rather
than imaginary world.
Paul visualizes a train
wreck using miniature
models of locomotives
and the mountain-
ous landscape. Frame
enlargement.
290

Visual Effects
barber removes his head, cuts the whiskers, and then re-attaches the head. R.W. Paul’s
The ? Motorist (1906), one of the greatest of the trick films, uses miniature models,
animation, painted backdrops, and stop-action substitution in a delightful story of two
motorists who drive their car so fast that it flies off into space, circles the sun, and lands
on the rings of Saturn.
But it wasn’t only the trick films that used visual effects. Dramatizations and rec-
reations of newsworthy events were very popular with early audiences. Filmmakers
used miniature models of buildings, landscapes, and ships to recreate The Battle of
Santiago Bay (1898), Windsor Hotel Fire (1899), and Eruption of Vesuvius (1906)
and to visualize A Railway Collision (1900).
MATTES
Mattes enabled filmmakers to selectively expose a portion of the frame and furnished
one of the most important methods for creating composite images. A matte is a type
of mask, a dark or opaque area that blocks light from a film negative and prevents an
image from being formed or exposed there. Matting selected areas in the frame enabled
filmmakers to combine separately created images to form a composite visual effect.
Using mattes for composites helps prevent double-exposures, super-imposed images
where both are visible on top of and through each other.
The earliest mattes were performed in-camera. In The Great Train Robbery ,
Edwin Porter used mattes to show moving landscapes visible through the windows
of indoor sets. In one instance, a passing locomotive can be seen through the window
of a telegraph operator’s office. A matte and counter-matte created the composite of
the office set with the train in the window. The counter-matte masks the frame in an
inverse manner to the matte. The matte/counter-matte system quickly became an es-
tablished means of creating composite images.
Porter shot the scene’s action—outlaws burst into the office and hold the tele-
graph operator hostage—with a matte blocking the window area and preventing this
part of the film from being exposed. The film was rewound in the camera, and a pass-
ing train was filmed using the counter-matte, which blocked the entire frame except
for that portion corresponding to the window opening. The composite image that re-
sulted from these two exposures placed the train inside the window of the set without
allowing the separate exposures to overlap and create ghosting or a double-image.
Although in-camera matting became less common as filmmakers developed more
elaborate methods of producing composites, some spectacular examples can be found in
modern cinema. The second section of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
portrays a landing on the moon by astronauts and their discovery of a mysterious, giant
black monolith that suggests the presence of an intelligent, alien life form. Shots of the
lunar excavation area around the monolith combine live action (the astronauts) with
a miniature model of the moon’s surface. The live action was shot first, and the 65mm
negative was left unprocessed for more than a year as Kubrick and his crew worked
on other sections of the film. When it came time to film the miniature, it was filmed us-
ing the undeveloped live action footage bi-packed in the camera with a counter-matte
blocking the previously exposed area (the live action component). A bi-pack camera is
capable of running two strips of film, so in this case one strip contained the live action
and another the counter-matte. The result was an extremely sharp, clear, in-camera com-
posite image combining the miniature model with the live actors on a set.
291

Visual Effects
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903)
Edwin S. Porter used an in-camera matte to place footage of a passing locomotive in the
window of the set depicting the telegraph operator’s office. Filmmakers rapidly seized on
the matte/counter-matte system for creating composited images. Frame enlargement.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (MGM, 1968)
Astronauts investigate a lunar excavation site where a mysterious giant monolith has been
found. The actors and the excavated site were shot on a studio stage in England and mat-
ted in-camera with a miniature model of the rocky, mountainous lunar surface. Frame
enlargement.
292

Visual Effects
TRAVELLING MATTES
Cinema is a medium of motion pictures, and matting techniques need to be capable of
accommodating moving action. Travelling mattes enable filmmakers to insert moving
foreground figures into a landscape or other type of background that has been filmed
separately. Accordingly, travelling mattes are an extremely valuable and widely used
tool of visual effects. They involve the application of a matte and counter-matte in or-
der to prevent double-exposures. In our example of Superman flying to the rescue, the
composite image could be produced using rear screen projection (a technique explained
later in the chapter), but we will treat the scene as if produced using a travelling matte.
Christopher Reeve as Superman is the foreground element and has been filmed separately
in a controlled studio environment. If we simply printed the foreground and background
elements together, they would be double-exposed; Superman would look transparent be-
cause the desert landscape could be seen through him. Using mattes to selectively expose
portions of the composite image, we can prevent this kind of double-exposure.
A male matte is created from the foreground element (Superman, in this
case). A male matte, also known as a holdout matte, is a black silhouette of the
foreground element with all other areas of the film frame being transparent. The
opaque silhouette will block light from being transmitted through the film in this
area during printing (or, if working digitally, during compositing). A female matte
(also known as a cover matte) must also be created as the inverse of the male. The
female matte is an opaque frame in which the foreground figure is transparent. The
opaque area of the female matte will block light during printing.
Several steps are needed to produce the final composite image. The background
element (the desert landscape) is printed together with the male matte. The new strip of
film that results shows the landscape now with a “black hole,” an area without an im-
age that corresponds with the foreground figure. Using the female matte, we can now
print our foreground figure of Superman onto the landscape footage that was printed
with the male matte. The foreground figure fits into the black hole, and the female
matte prevents additional light from hitting the previously exposed area of background.
The resulting composite image shows Superman flying across a desert landscape.
Filmmakers developed numerous methods for generating male and female
mattes. The earliest was the Williams Process, patented in 1918, which involved
filming the foreground element against a black background and then copying the re-
sulting image onto high contrast black-and-white film to generate a male matte. The
process did not at first employ a female matte, but Williams refined it to include
one, at which point it was known as the Williams Double-Matting process. It was
used extensively in King Kong (1933) to combine the miniature model of Kong, ani-
mated using stop-motion, with live action footage. An example is Kong’s dramatic
appearance inside the enormous gates of the compound on Skull Island. Kong is
the moving foreground element (though in the shot’s composition he appears in the
background) matted into the live action set and crowd of extras.
Most travelling matte processes used colored light to generate the male and
female mattes because color can act as a filter, useful for blocking or transmitting
light. The first of these, developed in the late 1920s, was the Dunning-Pomeroy
Self-Matting Process. It used orange and blue light to create an in-camera matte for
compositing foreground and background and was employed on Tarzan the Ape
Man (1932) as well as King Kong (1933). Subsequent processes using blue-screens to
293

Visual Effects
SUPERMAN II (WARNER BROS., 1980).
Principles of travelling mattes. A. Foreground element is shot in a studio against a colored
backing and is then extracted from that backing. B. Male matte is produced from the
foreground element. C. The male matte is composited with the background image to
produce a “black hole” (an area with no picture information) into which the foreground
element will be inserted. D. The male matte is inverted to produce a female matte. E.
Using the female matte, the foreground element (A) is composited into the background
footage (C) to produce the final composite (E). Frame enlargement.
(e)
separate the foreground element or, alternatively, a yellow screen, developed from the
1930s onward.
All of these travelling matte systems tended to leave artifacts in the composited
image. Visible matte lines, such as a black or colored line around the foreground fig-
ure, pointed to the join between composited elements. Registration was sometimes
imperfect, visible as a noticeable jiggling or wiggle between the elements. Color fring-
ing might occur around fine areas of detail such as hair, produced by colored light
from the background screen bleeding through porous or sheer areas of the foreground
object.
Digital tools today enable much cleaner matte extraction and virtually perfect
registration among the composited elements. In a digital image, each pixel is allocated
(c) (d)

(a) (b)
294

Visual Effects
KING KONG (RKO, 1933)
King Kong forces open the compound gates to attack the villagers of Skull Island. Kong is
a miniature puppet animated with stop-motion photography. He was then matted into
the shot using the Williams Process. Frame enlargement.
THE AFRICAN
QUEEN (UNITED
ARTISTS, 1951)
Optically printed trav-
elling mattes some-
times exhibit artifacts
where image elements
have been extracted
or joined together.
Matte lines are visible
here around actors
Katharine Hepburn
and Humphrey Bogart,
and her hair shows
some color fringing.
Frame enlargement.
295

Visual Effects
four channels, three of which are the red, green and blue components that together
comprise its color. The fourth channel—the alpha channel —specifies the pixel’s de-
gree of transparency, and this channel can be used for generating male and female
mattes. A visual-effects artist working with the alpha channel can easily and automati-
cally extract or “pull” a matte from any element in a digital image. Once a male matte
is pulled, its alpha values can be inverted to produce a female matte. Moreover, the
interaction of matted moving elements can be more complex in a digital composite be-
cause Z-depth mapping enables precise calculations about the distances of all objects
in the frame from the camera. The Z-axis refers to the depth in the image along which
objects are arranged or through which they move. A Z-depth map uses gray-scale
values to visualize these distances, ranging from white (objects nearest the camera)
to shades of gray to black (objects farthest from the camera). The optical composites
used in earlier generations of Hollywood films did not allow for the complex, three-
dimensional interactions among moving matted elements that digital tools facilitate.
GLASS PAINTINGS, FOREGROUND MINIATURES,
AND MIRRORS
Paintings produced on sheets of glass were an early and extremely effective visual ef-
fects technique. Norman Dawn, Edward Rogers and Ferdinand Pinney Earle were
creating glass shots in the teens, and by the 1920s glass shots were being combined
with the matte-and-counter-matte system to create high-quality, complex visual effects
shots. A glass painting could be produced on location. Using a sheet of glass set up
between the camera and the set or location, a painter would supply vistas, buildings,
trees, or other elements as needed for a scripted scene. Glass shots are early instances
of matte paintings in cinema. Areas to be filmed as live action would be left unpainted
on the glass and filmed through this opening. Alternatively, live action could be mat-
ted into the painting.
The silent version of Ben-Hur (1926) includes numerous extraordinary glass
shots created by Earle, whose epic paintings add a sense of grandeur to many scenes.
Ben-Hur also brilliantly incorporated hanging foreground miniatures used as set
extensions. The Coliseum where an elaborate chariot race occurs was built only as
a one story structure; the upper stories were a foreground miniature outfitted with
small wooden figurines that could be moved to suggest the responses of a crowd of
spectators.
Foreground miniatures are suspended in the air at the top of the frame and be-
tween the camera and a distant set that has been partially built. The hanging minia-
ture is much closer to the camera than is the set, and it supplies the missing sections
of set. If it is positioned properly and is built to the correct scale, from the camera’s
viewpoint it will appear on film to be an actual part of the set.
Because hanging miniatures create illusions of scale and depth, camera movement
must be restricted in such shots, lest the disconnection between set and miniature
become apparent. Limited pans and tilts are possible using a nodal tripod , one that
pivots or tilts around the optical center of the lens and therefore produces no motion
perspective. Normal tripods pivot and tilt a camera on an axis well behind the lens,
and the distance between this area and the lens (which captures the image) produces
motion perspective. This, in turn, will reveal the presence of a miniature, which will
appear to move more quickly past the camera than will the more distant set. The
296

Visual Effects
chariot race in Ben Hur includes a pan across the miniature, and the absence of mo-
tion perspective preserves the illusion.
Hanging foreground miniatures are among the most magical of visual effects, and
they have been used throughout film history. In Gone With the Wind (1939), when
Scarlet (Vivian Leigh) returns to Twelve Oakes Plantation, now devastated by the

BEN-HUR (MGM, 1926)
This visual effects mas-
terpiece features a bril-
liant blend of glass shots,
foreground miniatures, and
color tinting. Top: A matte
painting on glass compos-
ited with actors visible in
the lower right of frame.
Bottom: Foreground minia-
tures complete the stadium
as set extensions. Frame
enlargements.
297

Visual Effects
war, she stands in the ruined mansion at the foot of the grand staircase. The lower
part of the set was constructed in scale, and the upper portion, showing the staircase
and second floor of the mansion, was created as a hanging miniature. The studio,
Selznick International, had a nodal tripod for their Technicolor cameras which en-
abled them to do modest pans and tilts in shots with miniatures. As Scarlett looks at
the ruined mansion, a pan and tilt follow the implied line of her gaze and reveal more
of the set and the hanging miniature and establish a visual bridge connecting the two.
The final sequence in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator takes place after Howard
Hughes lands his Hercules H-4 transport airplane and is celebrated by fans in a large
tent next to the pier where the plane is docked. In the shot reproduced here, nearly
everything in the foreground is a hanging miniature—the airplane, the rocky seawall,
the concrete seawall, the tent, the oil derricks, and the automobiles in front of the tent
and the aircraft’s pontoon. The actors performed the scene sixty yards away from
the miniatures, and as the frame enlargement demonstrates, the illusion is perfect.
Scorsese remained fond of hanging miniatures, and in the final shot of Shutter Island ,
the lighthouse is a foreground miniature.

THE AVIATOR (MIRAMAX, 2004)
Elaborate foreground miniatures — the airplane and wing, the rocky sea-break and con-
crete seawall, the tent, garbage cans and automobiles, the oil derricks — were positioned
in front of the camera, and the actors performed the scene some sixty yards away. The
illusion is perfect. Everything looks real, and the differences of scale and distance remain
invisible. Frame enlargement.
298

Visual Effects
Foreground miniatures create illusions of perspective, making something close by
seem much farther away. Many visual effects tools work by creating perspective il-
lusions, and miniatures generally are built in ways that create deceptive perspectives.
Forced perspective , for example, takes informational cues about depth and distance—
such as the way parallel lines seem to converge in the distance or the way objects seem
to grow smaller as they get farther away—and exaggerates these to convey on the
small scale of a miniature model an impression of great size or distance. Many of the
miniatures in The Lord of the Rings movie work this way, and many sets and props
GONE WITH THE
WIND (SELZNICK
INTERNATIONAL,
1939)
This production uses
elaborate visual effects
to create its portrait
of the Civil War era.
Scarlett (Vivian Leigh)
gazes at the ruined
mansion of Twelve
Oakes. The staircase is a
foreground miniature.
Frame enlargement.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (NEW LINE, 2001)
Visual effects often create perspective illusions. Sets built with forced perspective create
the illusion that actors Ian McKellen and Ian Holm are different sizes. Frame enlargement.
299

Visual Effects
in those movies were built to different scales to convey illusions about the size of the
hobbits relative to other characters. When Gandalf (Ian McKellen) sits at a table with
Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), Bilbo’s small size is conveyed by placing the actor, Ian
Holm, farther away from the camera than McKellen and making Bilbo’s section of the
table larger so that, being farther away, the camera would see it as being the on the
same scale as McKellen’s section of table.
Alfred Hitchcock loved visual effects and made sure that his movies included
plenty of them. Saboteur (1942) was especially ingenious. Hitchcock’s art direc-
tor, Robert Boyle, used a small indoor studio set to create the illusion of a lengthy
circus caravan traveling along a dusty desert road. The film’s hero, Barry (Robert
Cummings), is running from police and takes refuge in the caravan. Several point-
of-view shots show the line of trucks halted as police with flashlights search them.
The caravan and the cops seem to stretch from the foreground way into the distance,
but this was an illusion created with forced perspective. The road was painted on the
concrete studio floor and outlined with dirt and was raised up in the rear of the set
to simulate distant space. Real trucks in the foreground were succeeded by painted
toy trucks in the background, and cops played by actors in the foreground became
tiny cut-out figures with lights in the distance. Speaking about the methods of forced
perspective used in the shots, Boyle said, “You’re achieving a large space in a limited
space. You bring the background up, and you force everything smaller.”
Miniature models can be combined with live action using mirrors, and the
Schufftan process is a famous example of this technique. Eugene Schufftan was a cine-
matographer who invented a method of filming live action with the reflected image of
a miniature model or a matte painting. By placing a mirror, that reflects the image of
the miniature or painting, at a 45-degree angle to the camera, live action elements can
be filmed through portions of the mirror that have been scraped away to leave trans-
parent glass. The camera sees the live action through the glass and sees the miniature
SABOTEUR (UNIVERSAL,
1942)
This highway and circus
caravan stretching into the
distance were built on a
small, indoor studio stage.
Normal-sized vehicles in
the foreground give way
to miniatures in the back-
ground and a raised floor to
suggest increasing distance.
The forced perspective is
ingeniously designed. Frame
enlargement.
300

Visual Effects
reflected in the glass. The actors and the miniature or painting are thereby filmed
simultaneously. The Shufftan process famously was used throughout the science fic-
tion epic Metropolis (1927) to place live action inside miniature sets of the futuristic
city. Alfred Hitchcock used the process in Blackmail (1929) to combine actors with
miniatures of the London Museum. The Schufftan process facilitated a shot in Aliens
(1986) that required a larger set than what could be constructed on budget. The film-
makers needed a shot of two characters entering a bar in the off-world boom town
but didn’t have a full set. So they built a full-size door the actors could enter, and the
rest of the building and surrounding area was a miniature reflected to the camera by a
mirror.
THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO ERA
From the late 1920s until the 1960s, it was very rare for American films to be shot on
real locations. Instead, films were shot on indoor studio sets and outdoor studio prop-
erties, a practice that has become known as “backlot filmmaking.” Rather than travel-
ing to Paris to film An American in Paris , for example, MGM, the studio producing
the movie, built the city with sets, miniatures, and matte paintings. Environments built
in this fashion on studio backlots relied on visual effects to simulate story settings.
Warner Bros.’ great adventure film, The Sea Hawk (1940), provides an exam-
ple. Errol Flynn stars as Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a 16 th -century English raider
targeting Spanish ships. Thorpe leads his men on a guerrilla raid into Panama to
seize Spanish treasure. The Panamanian jungle, of course, is no such thing, having
been created with fog machines and tropical plants dressed on a studio sound-
stage. When Thorpe and his men escape from the jungle to the shore and row out
METROPOLIS (UFA,
1927)
This futuristic sports sta-
dium was created with the
Schufftan process. The ac-
tors were positioned on a
one-story set; the upper ar-
eas are a miniature reflected
by a mirror to the camera.
Frame enlargement.
301

Visual Effects
to their ship to head for England, they walk from the jungle backlot into beach
shots filmed on the Pacific coast in Ventura County, and from there to a partial
model of a rowboat placed in a studio rear projection set, and then to shots in
which they climb aboard a full scale model of a 135-foot ship placed in a specially
constructed studio maritime soundstage and surrounded by a muslin cyclorama
painted with a skyscape. Their brief trip from jungle to ship takes place in these
Optical printers were the vi-
sual effects workhorses of the
Hollywood studio era. Featuring
an interlocked camera and
projector, they enabled visual
effects artists to build compos-
ited shots by separately photo-
graphing each of their elements.
Optical printers were also used
to create credit sequences in
films and basic editing transi-
tions, such as fades, dissolves,
and wipes. They facilitated the
use of split-screen effects, as in
this sequence from An American
in Paris , introducing the char-
acter of Lise (Leslie Caron) by
playfully contrasting her many
moods and personalities. Frame
enlargement.
302

Visual Effects
composited environments, in which the sea and sky are, alternatively, real, a pho-
tographic projection and a painted backdrop.
Two important effects tools used extensively in this period were the optical
printer and rear-screen projection. Optical printers were used to photograph and
physically combine the elements of a composited effects shot. Optical printers were
made of a synchronized process camera and a process projector that was called the
printer head. Master positive footage of effects elements—models, travelling mattes,
animation—was loaded into the printer head and run through and photographed
frame by frame in the process camera. (A process camera is one used in the labora-
tory for effects work, in distinction to a production camera used to film live action.)
The final composite (the finished effects shot) was created gradually by this process
of re-photographing each of its components. The composite negative in the process
camera had to be re-wound each time so that each component of the shot could be
photographed. Here lay one of the drawbacks of optical printing—it works with dupe
footage (dupe footage is several generations away from the camera negative) and
ultimately creates a dupe negative, a copy of a copy. It’s very common to see genera-
tional losses of image quality in optically printed shots. The more elements an effects
shot contained, the more elaborate the printing process became. Two- and four-head
optical printers enabled the photographing of multiple image elements in one pass,
speeding the work of compositing.
Linwood Dunn, who became head of RKO’s photographic effects department,
designed the Acme-Dunn Special Effects Optical Printer which was widely used
throughout the studio era. Editing transitions in generations of Hollywood films, such
as wipes, fades and dissolves, were created on optical printers, as were split screen ef-
fects and the opening and closing credits for a film. Many photographic effects could
be achieved in optical printers by moving the printer head to simulate a move by the
production camera or by enlarging a shot to simulate a zoom or camera move. Dunn
estimated that 50 percent or more of the shots in Citizen Kane had been composited
on an optical printer. These included some of the film’s famous deep focus shots,
with the optical printer being used to exaggerate the depth of field captured on set by
Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, and camera moves, such as the famous tracking
shot through the glass skylight of the El Rancho nightclub.
Rear-screen projection was used so extensively that it became perhaps the most
common visual effects tool of the Hollywood period. Rear-screen projection, or back
projection, combines live action in the foreground with a background projected as a
moving image upon a screen positioned behind the actors and set. The background
images are projected behind the screen, which is, therefore, translucent. Many out-
door locations were simulated as rear projections, filmed with actors on indoor studio
sets. Driving scenes, for example, where characters are shown riding in automobiles,
were invariably done as back projections.
An ingenious variation of back projection is miniature rear projection , which
enables filmmakers to place live actors in a miniature model or set. The method
was used extensively throughout King Kong (1933) because all of the shots in
which Kong interacts with human characters necessitated the use of miniature
models and sets. Another variation was developed by visual effects artist Ray
Harryhausen for his creature movies combining stop-motion animation and live
action. In such films as 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and The 7 th Voyage of
Sinbad (1958), the live action components of scenes were back projected behind
Harryhausen’s creatures.
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Visual Effects
Less frequently used, front projection systems projected the background image
in front of and on top of the actors and set. 3M’s invention in 1949 of Scotchlite, a
highly reflective surface used in road signs, helped make front projection viable for
motion pictures. Projection screens made of Scotchlite reflect light in a straight path
directly back to its source and with almost no loss in brightness. In a front projection
system, the camera faces the actors and set, and a Scotchlite screen is behind them. Set
at a ninety degree angle to the camera’s line of sight is a projector which throws its
image onto a two-way, beam-splitting mirror positioned at a 45, degree angle in front
of the camera. The mirror reflects the projector’s footage onto the Scotchlite screen
and, from there, back to the camera. Because the mirror is two-way, the camera can
see through it to film the scene. The bright set lighting on the actors washes out the
projector footage covering them, and the camera photographs them normally.
2001: A Space Odyssey was the first major film to use front projection. The open-
ing sequence, showing the dawn of the apes in Africa, was shot on an indoor set in
London. The background landscapes were front projections of high-resolution photo-
graphs taken in Africa, and the illusion is perfect. A viewer watching the film cannot
tell that the shots are in-camera composites. Other films to use front projection include
Where Eagles Dare, Superman, The Fugitive, Moonraker, Outland , and Cliffhanger.
CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)
Many shots in Citizen Kane are optically printed composites. These often create extended
depth-of-field effects, complementing the deep-focus cinematography of Gregg Toland.
In this regard, the film’s famous deep-focus style is a joint product of cinematography and
visual effects. In this shot, Raymond the butler (Paul Stewart) opens a door and sees Kane
(Orson Welles) standing in another doorway at the end of a long corridor. Actor Stewart
and the doorway next to him are the live action elements. Welles, backlit and silhouetted,
is matted into the shot, and the intervening hallway with Kane’s reflection on the tiled
floor is a matte painting. Frame enlargement.
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Visual Effects
Composite shots achieved with rear or front projection offered an alternative to op-
tical printing because the effects were achieved in-camera, but rear projection, too, left
visual artifacts in a scene. Because the rear projections used dupe footage, generational
differences in image quality were often visible between the live action components and
the back projections. Differences in lighting and color and the grain structure of the film
stocks often prevailed as well. But in general back projection provided a very serviceable
illusion of being on location and was widely used until, in the 1960s, shooting on loca-
tion became a predominant practice.
Already well-established in the teens and 1920s as a vital effects tool, matte
painting flourished during the studio era. Each of the major studios had a matte
painting department and used optical printers to composite painted and live action
images. A common misperception about visual effects is that they are found mainly in

TO CATCH A THIEF (PARAMOUNT, 1955)
Back projection in the Hollywood era was a standard method of depicting driving scenes.
Actors Cary Grant and Grace Kelly play characters driving along the French Riviera. In real-
ity, they are in a partial model of an automobile shot in a studio in front of rear projected
imagery. Frame enlargement.
305

Visual Effects
genres like science fiction and fantasy to provide spectacle. In fact, however, the great
majority of feature films, irrespective of genre, make use of visual effects. Thus in
Hollywood movies during the studio era, matte paintings and other effects might be
found in Westerns, musicals, horror films, war films, dramas, and comedies.
Gone With the Wind , for example, is a visual effects-intensive film. Producer
David O. Selznick said, “I could not even hope to put the picture on the screen properly
without an even more extensive use of special effects than had ever before been at-
tempted in the business.” The film’s epic historical landscapes were composites, formed
from split-screen effects used to double the size of crowds, front and rear projection,
miniature projection, and especially matte painting. Clarence Slifer, who worked with

KING KONG (RKO,
1933); THE 7TH VOYAGE
OF SINBAD (COLUMBIA,
1958)
Variations on basic rear pro-
jection include miniature
back projection, used in King
Kong to insert live actors into
miniature sets. Actor Bruce
Cabot, as a projected im-
age lower frame left, plays a
character hiding in a cave,
where he is menaced by
Kong. Visual effects artist Ray
Harryhausen specialized in
stop-motion animation and
devised a system combining
the live action element as a
rear projection, composited
with animated puppets.
Here, Kerwin Matthews as
Sinbad, back projected,
battles a skeleton brought to
life by an evil wizard. Frame
enlargement.
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Visual Effects
Jack Cosgrove, the head of Selznick’s special effects department, estimated that ap-
proximately 100 matte paintings were used in the film. The paintings are blended sub-
liminally with live action and miniatures and were used to create set extensions, fill out
landscapes, add skies above sets and actors, and provide dramatic vistas.
Slifer had designed an aerial optical printer that enabled him to achieve new ef-
fects with matte painting. With aerial image printing , an image (such as a matte paint-
ing) is projected to a focal plane in space (rather than onto a surface) where it can be
photographed by the process camera in the optical printer. That footage can be com-
bined with live action footage and other optical elements. Cosgrove and Slifer used
aerial printing throughout the film to add smoke or fire effects to matte paintings. In
a shot showing the Atlanta train station, smoke pours from a locomotive parked in
front of the station. Footage of smoke against a clear background was placed in the
projector head of the optical printer. Another projector threw an aerial image of the
painting behind the smoke footage. The printer then photographed both. By photo-
graphing the painting in this manner, the smoke seemed to naturally cover the painted
train station roof as it would in a real 3D world.
Aerial imaging was also used in the famous pull-back of Scarlet and Gerald
O’Hara against a dramatic sunset in the scene where he tells her that he will leave
Tara to her after his death and that land is the only thing that endures. The pull-
back by the camera shows the characters as silhouettes standing next to a tree with
Tara visible in the distance. The shot composites live action footage of the characters
(stand-ins doubling for stars Vivien Leigh and Thomas Mitchell) with two matte
paintings, depicting the sky and a distant view of Tara (projected into the composite
as an aerial image). The tree in the foreground is a miniature model. The complexity
of the shot is apparent in the less than perfect registration—the pull-back (which ap-
pears to be a crane shot but was, instead, created in the optical printer as a visual ef-
fects move on the paintings) occasions some jiggle among the image elements.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSSEY (MGM, 1968)
Front projection throws a background image overtop of performers and set. Set lights
prevent the camera from seeing the projection on the actors, and a highly reflective
screen behind them returns the projected image to the camera. The African landscapes in
the first sequence of Kubrick’s film are high-resolution photographs front projected onto
actors in ape suits and a minimal set. Frame enlargement.
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Visual Effects
GONE WITH THE
WIND (SELZNICK
INTERNATIONAL,
1939)
Wounded Civil War
soldiers pour into
the Atlanta train sta-
tion. The station is a
studio set. The sta-
tion roof is a matte
painting projected
as an aerial image
behind footage of
smoke against a
clear background.
Composited in this
way on the optical
printer, the smoke
looks quite real, cov-
ering the painting as
actual smoke would
do a real roof. Frame
enlargement.
TORN CURTAIN (UNIVERSAL, 1966)
Actor Paul Newman walks into a matte painting and then a series of them in a bravura
sequence lasting two minutes on screen. In the sequence, director Alfred Hitchcock and
Albert Whitlock create a series of virtual environments for the actor, and they dare the
audience to notice. Few viewers do. Frame enlargement.
308

Visual Effects
Alfred Hitchcock was very fond of matte paintings and worked often with the
great matte artist Albert Whitlock, who produced extraordinary painted environ-
ments for numerous Hitchcock films including some very famous shots in The Birds
(1963). One of Whitlock’s greatest achievements is a bravura, two-minute sequence
in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), where the main character, Michael Armstrong
(Paul Newman), walks through an East German art museum. Because it was the Cold
War, Hitchcock couldn’t shoot on location, so he had Whitlock create the museum’s
exterior and interior as a series of six matte paintings into which the character is
composited. Although the term “virtual environment” is identified today mainly with
digitally created images, virtual environments have always been a part of cinema,
achieved with visual effects. The art museum sequence in Torn Curtain gives viewers
an entirely convincing series of virtual environments.
MOTION CONTROL
Camera movement provides filmmakers with a very important tool for blending and
joining the optical elements in an effects shot. Nodal tripods were used to create lim-
ited camera moves when matte paintings were filmed on glass in front of a live action
set or location. But for much of the studio era, when matte paintings were created in
the studio and composited on an optical printer with live action, the traditional prac-
tice was to lock the camera down and composite the shot without camera movement
on any of its elements.
The pull-back from Scarlett and her father in Gone With the Wind was a simu-
lated camera move. To introduce camera movement into effects shots, filmmakers
needed a mechanical system of motion control, enabling them to exactly reproduce
a camera movement on all of a composited shot’s optical elements. Motion control
systems became available in the late 1940s and changed the look of visual effects. The
Dupy Duplicator, developed at MGM by Olin Dupy, provided a means of recording
camera movement in a live-action shot and then match-moving in the same way as a
process camera shooting a matte painting. When both elements were optically com-
posited, the film’s viewer seemed to see on-screen a single, unbroken camera move.
The system debuted with a shot in Easter Parade (1948) that tilts up from a studio set
depicting Fifth Avenue to a matte painting of Manhattan buildings. The opening and
closing of An American in Paris (1951) used the Dupy Duplicator to join partial sets
with matte paintings depicting set extensions. In a shot introducing Jerry (Gene Kelly),
the camera pans from a sidewalk café (the real set) up the three-story building where
he lives, revealing him looking out of a top story window. Above the second-floor
level, the image is a painting, including roof and sky, and the motion-control blend of
the image elements is perfect. Even if a viewer knows where the join is, it cannot be
seen. Paramount Pictures had a proprietary motion repeater system, which it used in
Samson and Delilah (1949) to replicate camera moves on live action and miniature
model elements in a composite.
The famous Slitcan sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey used motion control
to create an abstract play of light and color. With its shutter held open, the cam-
era moved along a fourteen-foot track toward a slit behind which were various
pieces of backlit colored art. It took up to a full minute for the camera to finish
its move, and each frame of film was exposed twice while the camera’s focus was
continually changing, creating an impression of infinite depth of field, a sensation
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Visual Effects
EASTER PARADE (MGM,
1948)
The Dupy Duplicator
enabled motion control
cinematography at MGM,
allowing filmmakers to
match-move a laboratory
camera over a matte paint-
ing or miniature and com-
posite that footage with a
camera move on set. The
Fifth Avenue Easter parade
that concludes the film was
staged on an MGM backlot.
A camera tilt begun on the
set finishes with another
move in the laboratory over
the matte painting depicting
Manhattan buildings. The
two elements were compos-
ited on an optical printer.
Frame enlargement.
that the astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) was plunging into an infinity of
space and consciousness.
Computerized motion control systems arrived with Star Wars (1977). The space-
ships were miniature models made to fly by slowly, moving the camera past them
while filming. The moves had to be repeated numerous times to build up the layers of
an effects shot, and computer control of the camera enabled extremely precise match-
moving. Digital motion control systems are now the norm for producing match-moves
in effects sequences.
STAR WARS (20 TH CENTURY FOX, 1977)
Computerized motion control enabled new levels of precision in building composited
shots featuring camera movement. This X-wing fighter comes to life as a miniature model
thanks to multiple-passes of a motion-controlled camera. Frame enlargement.
310

Visual Effects
THE IMPACT OF STAR WARS
Star Wars revived and reinvigorated visual effects in cinema, and its impact on effects
and the popular culture surrounding them cannot be overstated. In the late 1960s, the
studio system had broken apart, and no studios retained the extensive technical crews
of matte painters and model builders that they once had. Most studios, in fact, apart
from Disney, had shut down their matte painting departments because filmmaking
had moved beyond the backlot practices of earlier decades. In the 1960s, movies were
shot on location, and screen environments were not as extensively fabricated with
effects tools as they were in the backlot era.
George Lucas loved matte paintings and miniature models and the magic these
create on screen, and in Star Wars he embraced these traditions of film production.
Moreover, until Star Wars , the Hollywood studios had remained tight-lipped about
visual effects, keeping them relatively secret and unpublicized. Norman O. Dawn,
who pioneered the use of glass paintings and matte shots, worked at Universal for five
years beginning in 1916, and recalled that studio heads “didn’t believe in telling any-
body about effects . . . They considered anything that was a drawing or a glass shot a
fake. So they didn’t want to let the exhibitors know that this was a cheap picture full
of fakes. They kept all that quiet . . . no matter if it was nothing more than an ordinary
double exposure.” More than any other single event, the release of Star Wars in 1977
changed these attitudes. George Lucas had enthusiastically embraced visual effects,
and the huge popular response to the film opened a new era in which visual effects
were extensively publicized. Cinema effects today have a huge fan following, as well
as serious journals devoted to them, like Cinefex which chronicles the history, tech-
nology, and aesthetics of visual effects.
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
George Lucas
Though he has directed few films, George Lucas’s
influence on contemporary cinema is enormous. He
has been one of the industry’s technological visionar-
ies, fixed on the digital future of cinema and helping
transition the industry toward all-digital production
methods. A graduate of the University of Southern
California Film School, Lucas took one of his student
projects and expanded it into his first feature as direc-
tor. THX-1138 (1971) is a grim, science fiction vision
of a totalitarian future. Its somber tone is galaxies re-
moved from the spirited hijinks of his subsequent Star
Wars series.
Lucas followed THX-1138 with the hugely pop-
ular American Graffiti (1973), portraying the bitter-
sweet antics of high-school graduates at summer’s
end on the threshold of the sixties. Its complex
sound design resulted from Lucas’s collabora-
tion with sound designer Walter Murch, who also
worked on THX-1138. Committed to optimiz-
ing cinema sound, Lucas teamed with another
top sound designer, Ben Burtt, on the Star Wars
trilogy and built a state-of-the-art postproduction
sound facility at Skywalker Ranch, his corporate
headquarters.
Lucas wanted to streamline film production using
digital methods, and he began funding systematic
research into digital applications in film production.
In 1978, he recruited Edwin Catmull from the New
York Institute of Technology to start a computer
graphics program at Lucasfilm.
(continued)
311

Visual Effects
Lucas had three objectives. He wanted a nonlin-
ear editing system that could speed up the work of
editing, a complementary system for digitally pro-
cessing and mixing sound, and a digital film printer
to replace existing optical printers. There was no
point in developing computer graphics unless the
results could be scanned to film for exhibition.
Although digital effects were not part of Lucas’
original vision, the effects created by the artists at
his company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM),
became widely identified with the filmmaker as
his primary influence on cinema. In light of this,
ironically, Lucas was relatively slow to incorporate
digital effects into his own films. Star Wars (1977)
included a brief 3D computer graphic visualizing
the planned attack on the Death Star. The other
computer screens shown in the film display hand-
animated graphics. The innovative computer work
on Star Wars lay not in digital effects but in motion
control cinematography. A computer-controlled
camera made multiple, exactly repeatable passes,
photographing miniature models numerous times
to create the image layers needed for a composite.
On The Empire Strikes Back (1980), ILM considered
using CGI to animate an X-wing fighter, but in the
end the film contained no computer graphics. The
sequel, Return of the Jedi , used only a small amount
of digital animation to simulate graphics displays.
Lucas shot the next set of Star Wars movies on
high definition video. The Phantom Menace (1999)
originated partly on film because high speed
HD video needed for effects work wasn’t yet vi-
able. Lucas persuaded Sony to build a customized
hi-def camera for his needs, and using the Sony
HDW-F900, Lucas shot all of Episode II in the second
trilogy, Attack of the Clones (2002), on HD video.
He used an improved version of Sony’s camera on
the next installment, Revenge of the Sith (2005). In
doing so, he demonstrated for the industry the vi-
ability of digital capture. Capturing images digitally
facilitated effects work because there was no need
to scan from film to digital video.
In the meantime, ILM became an industry pow-
erhouse in the area of visual effects, producing work
for Lucas’ films and for many other filmmakers.
Steven Spielberg had planned to make Jurassic Park
as he did Jaws , with animatronic models. But the
artists at ILM convinced him that it was possible to
do the dinosaurs digitally, and although Spielberg
retained some animatronics in the film, it was the
digital dinosaurs that made the movie a must-see
event for audiences. ILM’s work on Jurassic Park
STAR WARS (20 TH CENTURY FOX, 1977)
Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) battles Darth Vader (David Prowse) as Imperial storm-
troopers gather in the background. Like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey , Lucas’s film is a definitive visual effects classic. In its embrace of matte
paintings and miniatures, Star Wars embraced cinema’s enduring traditions of movie
magic. Frame enlargement.
312

Visual Effects
THE DIGITAL ERA
In the 1960s and 1970s, a tremendous amount of research conducted at universities
and corporate and government laboratories focused on computer graphics (CG), the
creation and display of pictures in computers. Research scientists and visual artists
had to learn how to simulate the properties of light and how to model solids, liquids
and gases and spatial relationships among them in ways that would be convincing
and would look naturalistic. These were extremely difficult tasks, and as they were
solved computer graphics became increasingly photorealistic.
Computer graphics began appearing in feature films in small ways in Westworld
(1973) and Future World (1976) and then more significantly in Tron (1982), Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), Young Sherlock
Holmes (1985), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2 (1991), and Death Becomes Her
(1992). But the jury was still out, as far as the film industry was concerned. Many of
these movies performed poorly at the box office, and it was not yet clear that digital
effects could make a real difference for a film’s box-office success.
With its $1 billion global box-office gross, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993)
became the film that showed the industry the financial and creative potentials of
digital effects. Jurassic Park’s digital dinosaurs were more vivid than any prehistoric
beasts seen on screen before, and Spielberg brilliantly blended old and new effects
techniques. There are only about 50 digital effects shots in the film, and most scenes
with dinosaurs blend the digital beasts with animatronic models (a model that is
motorized and moves) and old-fashioned man-in-a-monster-suit performers. In many
shots, Spielberg subliminally shifts among the suited performers, the models and the
digital creatures, and unless a viewer knows exactly what to look for, the changes
remain invisible.
Jurassic Park ushered in a new generation of digital effects that gave filmmak-
ers an expanded toolbox for designing images. Digital tools did not alter the role of
visual effects in cinema; instead, filmmakers used digital tools to build on and further
develop existing stylistic traditions.
persuaded Hollywood that digital visual effects
would henceforth be a vital part of contemporary
film.
Following Star Wars , Lucas stepped out of the
director’s chair and turned his attention to getting
ILM and his production company, Lucasfilm, into
good financial condition and to producing films for
other directors. In this capacity, he oversaw comple-
tion, and co-wrote, the other two films in the trilogy
( The Empire Strikes Back , 1980; Return of the Jedi ,
1983) and each of the three Indiana Jones films di-
rected by his pal Steven Spielberg ( Raiders of the Lost
Ark , 1981; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ,
1984; and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , 1989).
Lucas returned to directing, and to his Star Wars
project, with The Phantom, Menace (1999), Attack of
the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). He
believes that celluloid film is now a relic of history and
that the medium will be moving in an all-digital di-
rection. Through ILM, Lucas has exerted a profound
influence over visual effects in contemporary film.
And in the mix of adventure, fantasy and visual ef-
fects he perfected in Star Wars , he helped shape the
very definition of a Hollywood blockbuster.
There is no denying the enormous popular ac-
ceptance of his work or its trend-setting importance
for mainstream filmmaking. Lucas’s digital paradigm
is, in all probability, the future of cinema. ■
313

Visual Effects
Digital composites replaced optical printers. Rather than photographing image
elements on an optical printer to create a blend, digital composites worked directly on
pixels and blended image layers by transforming pixels. A matted object could be pro-
duced, for example, by adding or subtracting pixels in an image. Digital rendering re-
placed optical printing. Rendering is the process during which a synthetic digital image
is created from the files and data that an artist has assembled. Multi-pass compositing
creates a final, rendered image from separate operations carried out upon different im-
age layers. Multi-pass compositing had been carried out on optical printers. Some of
the optical printer effects shots in Return of the Jedi were so complex that they required
more than a hundred passes.
But doing multiple passes digitally allows for much greater precision and control
of image elements. A depth pass can be carried out on the Z-depth channel to ma-
nipulate focus and depth of field. A specular pass controls the size and positioning
of specular highlights (shiny surfaces). An ambient pass builds general, directionless
levels of light in the environment. An ambient occlusion pass generates soft shadows.
A beauty pass builds the shot with its greatest levels of color and detail. Unlike optical
printing, digital passes introduce no image degradation. Everything remains first gen-
eration in visual quality.
Moreover, importing images to an electronic realm makes them infinitely vari-
able. Digital tools can simulate many features of camera perspective and lighting, and
all-CG films, such as WALL-E, can be given a specific photographic look. Andrew
Stanton, WALL-E’s director, wanted the movie to look as if it had been shot as a
1970s-era sci-fi movie in anamorphic widescreen. The images were digitally rendered,
JURASSIC PARK (UNIVERSAL, 1993)
ILM’s dinosaurs re-defined the nature of visual effects by taking them into the digital
domain in ways that electrified audiences and made the Hollywood industry take note.
It wasn’t the first digital effects film, but it was the most important. The digital dinosaurs
co-exist on screen with animatronic models and performers in dinosaur costumes. Steven
Speilberg brilliantly combined digital and non-digital effects tools in ways that were
largely seamless and invisible. Frame enlargement.
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Visual Effects
FORREST GUMP (PARAMOUNT, 1994)
In the wake of Jurassic Park , digital effects assumed a new importance for feature film-
making. The digital erasure of actor Gary Sinise’s lower legs, so that he could play a
paraplegic Vietnam veteran, became a famous and much talked-about effect when the
film was released. Many viewers knew this was a digital effect, but this knowledge did not
undermine the credibility of the images. The filmmakers believed strongly that the effect
brought them closer to a realistic style than had been the case in past films where an ac-
tor playing a paraplegic would hide a limb in costume. Frame enlargement.
therefore, to emulate many of the characteristic flaws and idiosyncrasies of anamor-
phic cinematography, such as horizontally spiked lens flares.
When digital tools started being adopted in films, many filmmakers and critics
feared that digital applications would replace traditional effects tools. To date, that has
not happened. Digital tools co-exist with the traditional techniques of models, stop mo-
tion, animatronics and location filming, as movies like The Lord of the Rings trilogy (in
which miniature models and matte paintings were used extensively) and Inception dem-
onstrate. Inception ’s director, Christopher Nolan, blended location filming, practical
effects created in-camera, and physical sets and props with digital images. The real loca-
tions included Paris streets where stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page were filmed.
The real location was then treated digitally for a spectacular scene in which the urban
environment folds up into a cube containing the actors. Nolan felt these blends would
enhance the perceived realism of the film’s more fantastic moments.
Although digital methods have changed matte paintings, painting remains an es-
sential effects tool. Many contemporary films— The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Day After Tomorrow —rely intensively upon
matte painted images. Today matte paintings are created using programs like Autodesk
Maya and Adobe Photoshop, and painters work with mouse and keyboard rather than
paint and brush. In the analog era, a matte painting was a flat, 2D image element placed
at the rear of a shot, and apart from the pans or tilts facilitated by a motion control
system like the Dupy Duplicator, the painting could not be integrated dynamically into
shot movement on screen. A digital matte painting, by contrast, can be camera-mapped
onto the 3D geometry of a CG scene or set. This involves wrapping the painting around
the wireframe objects that form the underlying geometry of the scene and specifying
perspective as established by the camera’s position and lens focal length. The wireframe
objects can be rotated in computer space to simulate the changing perspective of a
315

Visual Effects
moving camera. When this is done, the camera-mapped painting exhibits the motion
perspective produced by the moving camera. Digital matte paintings, therefore, are
2 ½-D elements—not fully 3D because they are texture wrappings on 3D wireframe ob-
jects—and as such can undergo dynamic spatial changes within a shot. This is a major
difference compared with the way paintings functioned in the analog era.
WALL-E (PIXAR, 2008)
Digital animation does not require a camera to film live action. Almost nothing was filmed
in this animated sci-fi movie, but its director Andrew Stanton wanted the movie to look
as if it might have been filmed in anamorphic widescreen during the 1970s. Accordingly,
Hollywood cinematographer Roger Deakins consulted with Pixar’s animators on issues of
lighting, showing them how a cinematographer would work. The Pixar artists emulated
the characteristic features of anamorphic lenses, building these artifacts into the film.
The artifacts include lens flares that spike in a horizontal direction, as in the shot pictured
above. Anamorphic lens perspective organizes the aesthetic design of WALL-E , and this
was achieved not with a camera but as a digital graphic design. Frame enlargement.
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (20TH CENTURY FOX, 2004)
Digital matte paintings are extremely common in contemporary film and can be spatially
dynamic in ways that earlier generations of paintings could not. The Statue of Liberty
freezes over due to global warming, and the matte painting supplies an appropriately
apocalyptic composition. Frame enlargement.
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Visual Effects
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
(DISNEY, 2010)
Digital methods can offer
new performance oppor-
tunities for actors. Helena
Bonham Carter played
the wicked Red Queen in
costume on a greenscreen
soundstage. Effects artists
then enlarged the size of
her head and gave her a
tucked, narrow waistline.
The character was then
composited into environ-
ments dressed with digital
props and objects. Frame
enlargement.
Digital tools have not replaced actors but have helped to create dynamic exten-
sions of performance. Obviously, many creatures in film today can be digitally cre-
ated; when they are, they typically begin life as a maquette , a small, 3D sculpture that
forms the basis for subsequent digital animation and demonstrates the continuing
role that miniatures play in the digital era. Using motion capture, a live actor’s per-
formance can furnish the basis for a character that is digitally animated (as with the
blue-skinned Na’vi in Avatar ) or digitally transformed in ways that go beyond what
traditional makeup can supply. An example is the digital head replacements in The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button that enabled Brad Pitt to play a character who ages
in a backwards fashion. Costumes as well can be created digitally. In Iron Man 2 , ac-
tor Robert Downey wore an incomplete costume as Iron Man. The full costume was
motion tracked onto Downey as a digital element in postproduction.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (WARNER BROS., 2008)
Digital environment creation returns contemporary film to the backlot traditions of the
studio era. The digital backlot offers an alternative to location shooting. All of the scenes
in which Benjamin (Brad Pitt) sails aboard the tug Chelsea along the eastern seaboard are
virtual environments, created from a blend of digital matte paintings, miniatures, and
CGI. Nothing was filmed at sea. Frame enlargements.
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Visual Effects
Digital tools have built on existing effects traditions. A clear example is today’s
counterpart of studio backlot filmmaking—the digital backlot . Locations that can-
not be filmed can be built or augmented digitally. Numerous films today— Change-
ling (2008), Zodiac (2007), Master and Commander (2003), The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button (2008)—simulate locations on digital sets, using painting,
animation, and miniatures in combination with live action.
STEREOSCOPIC (3D) MOVIES
The widespread adoption by Hollywood of digital imaging has produced a resurgence
of 3D movies. 3D today is a digital visual effect and is typically used in movies that
are intensively oriented toward effects— Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, Thor.
The term “3D” is actually a poor one because conventional cinema is already 3D.
Watching a movie in a theater activates most of the same informational cues about
depth and distance that operate in real life. These are monocular depth cues , that is,
they do not depend on seeing with two eyes but can be perceived with one eye only.
Examples of these cues are overlap (near objects hide more distant objects along a sin-
gle line of sight), relative size (objects appear smaller with increasing distance), height
in the picture plane (farther off looks higher up), and motion perspective (differences
in the apparent rate of an object’s motion depending on its distance from the camera
or observer). These cues provide information about a three-dimensional world, and
conventional cinema has always used them because they work perfectly well on a flat
picture surface like a movie screen.
CORALINE (FOCUS FEATURES, 2009)
Stereoscopic cinema uses two images to produce a left-eye and a right-eye view of scene
action. The two views are displaced from one another in ways that position objects in
stereoscopic space, in front of and behind the screen. Unlike conventional cinema, ste-
reoscopic cinema uses binocular disparity and convergence to provide viewers with an
enhanced experience of depth and distance. Frame enlargement.
318

Visual Effects
A better term for a 3D movie, therefore, is stereoscopic cinema . Stereoscopy is
perception with two eyes, and it includes all of the monocular depth cues as well
as several that require two-eyed viewing. The two relevant to stereoscopic cinema
are binocular disparity (each eye has a different angle of view on the world) and
convergence (movement of the eyes toward each other to sight a near object). Where
stereoscopic cinema differs from conventional cinema is in using information about
binocular disparity and convergence to create for the viewer an enhanced impres-
sion of spatial depth, one that extends behind the screen as well as in front of it.
Stereoscopic cinema works by creating simultaneous left-eye and right-eye (binocular)
views, whereas conventional cinema offers a monocular (single-eyed) perspective.
Stereoscopic movies today are digitally shot and digitally projected, and they are
often visual effects-intensive, making them a purely digital medium. Scientific knowl-
edge about stereoscopy and stereoscopic devices preceded the invention of photog-
raphy, and continuing attempts throughout cinema history were made to create and
project stereoscopic motion pictures. Celluloid film, though, was a flawed medium for
this purpose and proved unable to create perfectly aligned and matching right-eye and
left-eye views. Digital capture and digital projection largely solved these problems,
which is why stereoscopy today has returned to feature filmmaking.
How is the stereoscopic illusion created? Binocular images can be created either
at the point of filming or in postproduction. If produced during filming, then two
cameras are used to shoot the film in order to get separate right-eye and left-eye
views. But two cameras are not necessary; a second view can be created digitally in
post-production. The separation between our eyes— interocular distance (IO) —
averages 65mm and, as a result, each eye receives a differently angled view of solid
objects. This difference increases as we converge our eyes to view very close objects.
Stereoscopic space in cinema is created by manipulating these variables—interocular
distance corresponds with the distance between two camera lenses, and convergence
corresponds with the size of the angles at which the cameras are pointed. IO set-
tings determine how large or small an object appears to be in stereoscopic space.
Convergence settings determine how near or far it seems relative to the viewer.
Ideally, IO will replicate the average 65mm separation of the viewer’s eyes, but in
practice filmmakers vary this setting depending on the screen action or the focal length
of the lens used in a shot. IO settings on Avatar , for example, ranged from one-third-
inch to slightly more than two inches. Wide-angle lenses may require a smaller IO setting
because of the manner in which they scale perspective information. Objects close to the
camera in a wide angle view will appear much larger, requiring less stereoscopic volume
for effect and therefore a smaller IO setting.
A camera move from an object in close-up to a wider view will be orchestrated
with continuous changes in IO so that the viewer perceives a physically continuous
space on screen and does not feel like s/he is growing larger or smaller in relation to that
space. This is one of the paradoxes of interocular settings—their variation can induce
a sensation in the viewer of growing larger or smaller in relation to the screen world. A
camera move in Coraline (2009), an animated film with puppets as the characters, be-
gan with a puppet’s face in extreme close-up and pulled back to show a house and yard.
The move was orchestrated with an IO change from 0.5mm to 18mm because spatial
volume could be minimized in the extreme close-up and maximized for the wider view.
The IO settings were smaller than 65mm, the distance between people’s eyes, because
of the need to scale space according to the size of the puppets and the sets and mod-
els they inhabit. Coraline’s puppet eyes were 19mm apart. Using a human IO setting
319

Visual Effects

Filmmakers position
objects in front of or
behind the screen by
adjusting negative
and positive parallax.
Crossed-eye images
(negative parallax)
require the viewer to
converge her/his eyes
in order to fuse the
images into one, with
the result that objects
appear to be in front of
the screen. Uncrossed
viewing places objects
behind the screen.
Objects at the screen
surface exhibit no bin-
ocular disparity.
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Visual Effects
would produce the phenomenon of dwarfism in relation to the 1/6 scale puppets and
sets. Dwarfism results in stereoscopic displays from excessive IO distances. It can make
the observer feel hundreds of feet tall and make distant environments look abnormally
small. The visual reality of Coraline ’s puppet world depended on making the viewer
feel like an inhabitant there rather than like a giant looking at a miniature world. The
smaller IO settings created an appropriately scaled space for this illusion.
Convergence settings determine how close objects in stereoscopic space seem to be
in relation to the viewer. They vary according to how much the left-eye and right-eye
views are displaced from one another. A filmmaker can place an object or character in
front of the screen (between screen and viewer) by adjusting convergence settings so
that they have negative parallax —the left-eye image is on the right, and the right is on
the left, requiring that viewers converge their eyes to fuse the images. Objects or char-
acters behind the screen surface have positive parallax ; the right and left eye images are
not crossed. The screen itself is a zero parallax area; no displacement of right- and left-
eye images exists there. The two images are aligned. Filmmakers, therefore, can position
objects in front of the screen or behind it by setting negative or positive parallax values.
One of the biggest differences between the gimmicky use of 3D in earlier eras and today
is the conservative use of parallax. Unlike the garish fly-out effects of the 1950s, exces-
sive parallax is minimized or avoided today so that viewers will not be presented with
discomforting image fusion tasks.
In stereoscopic cinema, the screen itself can move around. Filmmakers can re-
position its apparent location by using what is called a “floating window” to make
TOY STORY 3 (PIXAR, 2010)
Stereoscopic cinema is naturally biased toward deep focus compositions, maximizing
positive and negative parallax. Stereoscopic cinema also emphasizes longer shot lengths,
rather than fast cutting, so that viewers have time to visually explore the extended depths
and spaces that the format supplies. In these ways, stereoscopic filmmaking reconfigures
some of the stylistic features (principally, shallow focus and fast cutting) of contemporary
film. Frame enlargement.
321

Visual Effects
the screen surface seem nearer or farther from the viewer. This is often done in order
to choreograph framing and depth of field to minimize the image fusion tasks that a
viewer is presented with.
Stereoscopic movies tend to require different compositional and editing styles
from conventional cinema. Stereoscopy privileges depth of field, deep space framings,
wide-angle lenses, and a slower cutting rate so that viewers have time to visually
explore the stereoscopic frame and are not presented with fast changes of perspec-
tive that can be jarring in 3D. To design all of this, a new member of the production
crew—the stereographer —consults with the director about the orchestration of bin-
ocular space. The stereographer creates a depth score , a kind of thematic pattern in
the way that stereoscopic space is configured throughout the film in relation to the
characters and their conflicts. For Bolt 3D (2008), stereographer Robert Neuman
used negative parallax (placing characters in front of the screen) in order to heighten
the viewer’s emotional connection and involvement with them. In Tron: Legacy
(2011), the depth score distinguished between the film’s two narrative worlds—the
everyday world of ordinary reality was shot in a monocular fashion, whereas the
computer world of Tron was stereoscopic.
Stereoscopy is sometimes dismissed as a fad or a gimmick, an intrusion onto
cinema for purely commercial ends. And some viewers don’t like 3D movies. But
the long history of stereoscopic devices and the continuing use of binocular display
systems in cinema suggest that there is a natural connection between cinema and ste-
reoscopy. In the hands of gifted filmmakers, such as James Cameron ( Avatar ), Steven
Spielberg ( The Adventures of Tintin, 2011), and Werner Herzog ( Cave of Forgotten
Dreams, 2010), stereoscopy reconfigures the nature of the medium and extends and
enhances cinema’s artistic potential.
NARRATIVE AND SPECTACLE
Surveying early film history, scholar Tom Gunning suggested that one of cinema’s
primary appeals for viewers was its ability to provide startling, eye-popping imagery.
He emphasized that cinema’s ability to provide startling and pleasurable illusions of-
ten was more important than storytelling, that spectacle offered its own pleasures and
that these could be greater than those of narrative. He identified trick films and visual
effects as examples of what he called “the cinema of attractions.” By this term, he
meant entertainments that were based around spectacle.
Visual effects often are identified with spectacle, and many films, such as
Transformers (2007), appeal to viewers based on eye-popping imagery. But visual
effects perform many functions in cinema; while these include spectacle, often the
functions are narrative ones. Visual effects may create settings and locations in a
story, describe characters and visualize dramatic conflicts, and in general enable
filmmakers to tell stories about places and situations that they cannot directly film
but can create using effects tools.
Most visual effects artists agree that story is critically important for the quality
of a film and that good effects cannot save a badly told story. As effects artist Stan
Winston said, “ Jurassic Park wasn’t successful because of the effects. Terminator
wasn’t successful because of its effects. Lord of the Rings wasn’t successful because of
its effects. They were all great stories.”
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Visual Effects
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
aerial image printing
alpha channel
animatronic model
binocular disparity
camera-mapping
composite
convergence
counter-matte
depth score
digital backlot
digital composite
female matte
forced perspective
foreground miniature
front projection
interocular distance
(IO)
male matte
maquette
matte
miniature rear
projection
monocular depth cues
multi-pass
compositing
negative parallax
nodal tripod
optical printer
positive parallax
rear-screen projection
rendering
Schufftan process
stereographer
stereoscopic
cinema
travelling matte
visual effect
Z-axis
Z-depth map
SUGGESTED READINGS
Ron Brinkman, The Art and Science of Digital Compositing , second edition (New York:
Morgan Kaufmann, 2008).
Linwood G. Dunn and George Turner, eds., The ASC Treasury of Visual Effects (Hollywood,
CA: ASC Holding Company, 1983).
Lenny Lipton, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema: A Study in Depth (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Co.. 1982).
Shilo T. McClean, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (New York:
Wallflower Press, 2008).
Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (Rutgers University
Press, 2011).
Richard Rickitt, Special Effects: The History and Technique (New York: Billboard Books,
2007).
Michael Rubin, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution (Gainesville, FL: Triad
Publishing, 2006).
Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002).
Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1996).
Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952 (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 2007).
Cinema has never existed without visual effects. They are a core component of
the medium, an essential part of cinema structure. And like so many other elements of
cinema, what counts, finally, in determining the quality of a visual effect is the intel-
ligence and skill of the filmmaker.
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324

■ explain how this double capacity for
recording and transforming relates to the
basic modes of screen reality
■ explain the importance of production design
for the mode of fantasy and the fantastic and
how fantasy settings achieve credibility
■ distinguish two modes of cinematic self-
reflexivity
■ explain why multiple modes of screen reality
are possible in cinema
■ explain the basic modes of screen reality
■ describe the principles of narrative, character
behavior, and audiovisual design that operate
in each mode of screen reality
■ differentiate ordinary fictional realism,
historical realism, documentary realism, and
fictional documentary realism
■ describe how the cinema functions as a
medium that can record properties of the
visual world before the camera as well as
transform the appearance of that world
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Modes of Screen Reality

From Chapter 9 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Modes of Screen Reality
This chapter examines how filmmakers use the elements of structure (lighting, editing, camera
position, etc.) to create versions of representational reality on screen. Audiences routinely view
a wide variety of films, ranging from comedies and Westerns to serious dramas, science fiction,
and gangster films. The worlds represented on screen vary considerably among such films. Each
possible screen world establishes its own validity, and a filmmaker must convince the audience
that what they are seeing is plausible and is, taken on its own terms, real.
The concept of screen reality pertains to the principles of time, space, character behavior,
and audiovisual design that filmmakers systematically organize in a given film to create an ordered
world on screen in which characters may act and in which a narrative may unfold. Obviously, dif-
ferent kinds of films create different representational realities on screen and relate in different ways
to the actual social worlds inhabited by their flesh-and-blood spectators. A film’s screen world is a
systematic, artistic transformation of the viewer’s personal and social frames of reference. This pro-
cess of transformation is complex and multileveled. This chapter explains the basic modes or types
of screen reality and why there are several different but equally acceptable modes.
The cinema can configure physical, social, or psychological reality in many different ways
or modes. Cinema persuades film viewers to believe in the validity of various uniquely consti-
tuted on-screen worlds. There are five fundamental modes of representational reality on screen:
realism , expressionism , fantasy and the fantastic , cinematic self-reflexivity , and animation .
(For the purposes of the discussion, each mode will be treated as an ideal type. In practice,
however, a given film may draw on elements from several modes.) How do these modes oper-
ate and how are films constructed from within them?
REALISM
This is one of the most commonly encountered modes of screen reality, but one must
be careful in discussing it. The term realism is probably the most overused and over-
worked item in critical discussion and daily conversation about film. Realism is a slip-
pery term, with meanings that can be difficult to pin down or with connotations that
ill-fit the medium of cinema. Nevertheless, it is an essential term for describing some of
the attributes and functions of cinema, provided one is clear and cautious in using it.
The difficulty that the cinema poses for the term realism is that the medium in-
volves so much artifice. What these chapters have termed the transformational func-
tion of cinema is its ability to go well beyond the viewer’s visual and social experience,
to create novel images that have no counterpart in life, and to do so using structural
elements—wide-angle lenses, for example—that transform normal vision. On the other
hand, though, the camera is a recording mechanism that produces images of the things
that once were in front of its lens, and these images can correspond very closely to the
viewer’s experience and sense of the world. Recording the things and events that were
before the camera connects the cinema in a powerful way to the real world. The camera
can take pictures of that world. Thus the realistic components of cinema are generally
those that accord with the medium’s abilities to record and correspond with experience.
Since these are very important attributes, one or more concepts of realism become essen-
tial to understanding the medium. Three broad types or categories of realism clearly exist
in film: ordinary fictional realism , historical realism , and documentary realism .
Ordinary Fictional Realism
In this mode, the world on screen closely resembles the one that the viewer inhabits.
Time and space operate much as they do in viewers’ ordinary lives. Characters belong to
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Modes of Screen Reality
readily recognizable social worlds and communities (though these may differ from the
viewer’s), and they do not have magical powers or behave in ways that are exotic, strange,
or incomprehensible. In other words, films in this category seem to have an ordinary,
everyday kind of realism. This mode characterizes a large number of films. Among them
is A Beautiful Mind , the 2001 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Russell Crowe
portrays John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose mind was clouded by schizophrenia.
Three fundamental components of ordinary fictional realism operate in A Beautiful Mind ,
as in other films belonging to this mode.
Naturalistic Visual Style
The first of these components is the lack of overly pictorial, expressive interventions
in the visual style of ordinary fictional realist films. Explicit, readily recognized stylis-
tic manipulations are generally absent. These might include extreme lighting effects,
elaborate camera movements, editing for discontinuity, or elaborate production de-
sign. Such elements will call the viewer’s attention to a film’s formal design, emphasiz-
ing surface and texture. By contrast, the visual style of ordinary fictional realism is
relatively unobtrusive. As a film’s formal design becomes more elaborate and insis-
tent, the film begins to move out of this mode.
The camerawork in A Beautiful Mind serves the characters, the dialogue, and
the story, providing viewers with compositions that focus attention on the emotional
meaning of scenes and on important events and turns in the narrative. Doing so,
the camerawork does not announce its presence with stylistic flourishes. Instead, it
observes the characters and their doings, and most viewers would find it difficult to
recall details of the cinematography, though not details of the story that the cinema-
tography has illuminated.
Like most films in this mode, A Beautiful Mind employs continuity editing to rep-
licate, on screen, basic perceptual cues that viewers use to infer relations of time and
space in their daily lives. The film uses the eyeline match, shot-reverse-shot cutting, in-
serts matching the master shot, the 180-degree rule, and transitional material to prepare
for changes of screen direction. As a result, the editing creates very strong visual and
narrative continuity. The action flows over the cuts, and the screen world built from
shot to shot links up in a physically coherent way.
The editing creates a realistic impression of time and space in which the physi-
cal constancies in the world on screen do not depart in fundamental ways from those
that viewers observe in their own lives. The physical positioning of characters does not
change arbitrarily from shot to shot. In a similar fashion, the lighting, set, and costume
design all aim for an unobtrusive naturalism. Visual design and shot construction in A
Beautiful Mind achieve an impression of ordinary realism by avoiding cinematic designs
that look excessively artificial or elaborately arranged.
Linear Narrative Structure
Films in this mode often employ a linear narrative in which the sequence of events has a
clear logic, that is, in which events are chained together as a series of causes and effects.
The action at the beginning of the film sets in motion events that lead to the final outcome.
The narrative thus moves forward in one predominant direction. The story traces Nash’s
life from the onset of his schizophrenia, when he is a student at Princeton in 1947, to his
winning of the Nobel prize in 1994. The story has a linear and chronological structure, and
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Modes of Screen Reality
A BEAUTIFUL MIND (UNIVERSAL/
DREAMWORKS, 2001)
Balanced compositions and camera posi-
tions that facilitate continuity editing—
note how the close-ups match the master
shot and use the eyeline match—help give
A Beautiful Mind its naturalistic visual style.
The visual design serves the characters
and dialogue and calls little overt atten-
tion to itself. In this scene, Nash’s wife
(Jennifer Connelly) visits him when he is
confined to a psychiatric hospital. Frame
enlargements.
it shows the viewer how Nash battled his psychological disorder and ultimately triumphed
over it. His victory, and his winning of the Nobel prize, gives the story a satisfying and up-
beat resolution.
NONLINEAR DESIGNS Narratives that are nonlinear tend to move films out of the
mode of ordinary realism. Nonlinear designs emphasize a film’s style and structure,
and in cases where the designs are especially elaborate, they may require the viewer
to work actively to make sense of the story. The kaleidoscopic structure of Woody
Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), for example, presents the story of Alvy Singer’s relationship
with Annie in a nonchronological fashion, leaping in and out of different time periods
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Modes of Screen Reality
in the lives of the characters. This doesn’t prevent the audience from enjoying the
movie, laughing at the gags, or feeling sad when Annie and Alvy finally break up. But
the film’s complex design sets some challenges for the audience. Because it is so frag-
mented, the story is not as easy to follow as it is in A Beautiful Mind. Furthermore,
viewers notice the fragmented narrative as a design ; the film’s structure announces
itself in an assertive manner.
Multiple flashbacks are a common way of breaking up what would otherwise be a
linear narrative. One of the most famous films to employ multiple flashbacks is Akira
Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). The film’s story is set in Japan’s twelfth century and cen-
ters on the details surrounding the rape of a noblewoman and the death of her samurai
warrior husband. The events of the crime are recalled differently by four separate narra-
tors: the bandit accused of the rape, the noblewoman herself, the spirit of the dead samu-
rai accessed through a medium, and a woodcutter who was an unseen witness to the
tragedy. As each narrator presents a different version of the events under question, the
film flashes back to the crime, but each time the story told in the flashback changes. In
the case of Rashomon , the multiple flashbacks signal a didactic intent on the part of the
filmmaker and encourage the viewer to extract the following lesson: that truth is relative
and that people will perceive those versions of reality that best suit their own self-images.
Plausible Character Behavior
Characters should behave in believable ways. This is one of the most important con-
stituents of the viewer’s sense that films in this mode are realistic. When characters act
in ways that are unmotivated or improbable, the viewer’s level of belief in the fiction
suffers, and such a viewer is likely to say that the film was not very realistic. Viewers are
scrupulous judges of character behavior. If that behavior is not dictated by the demands
of genre or story formula, viewers expect that it will conform with their own sense of
what is right and appropriate under the circumstances.
Nash’s schizophrenia becomes worse—he becomes delusional and sees people who
aren’t there—when he stops taking his medication. Although it has very destructive con-
sequences, his decision not to take his pills seems entirely plausible because the pills dull
his mind, which he cannot accept when it becomes difficult to work out scientific prob-
lems. Even worse, the pills have made him physically unresponsive to his wife.
Because images and stories in this mode seem so accessible, critics and view-
ers sometimes regard ordinary fictional realism as an easy accomplishment or as
synonymous with no style at all. On the contrary, the elements of linear narrative,
unobtrusive visual design, and plausible character behavior do not denote the absence
of cinematic style. They should not be misunderstood as indicating a zero-degree level of
style, nor should one assume that a filmmaker can readily achieve these attributes. Like
the others, this mode is a highly constructed one, involving the deliberate design and
manipulation of elements of structure. The appearance of ordinary realism is one that is
constructed and created. That this is a paradox in no way diminishes the achievement.
Historical Realism
Ordinary fictional realism generally represents a time or place not too far removed
from the social world of the film’s audiences. Many films in the realist mode, however,
aim at the recreation of a more distant past. Such films include Martin Scorsese’s The
Age of Innocence (1993), set in late nineteenth-century, aristocratic New York society;
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Modes of Screen Reality
Italian Neo-realism
CLOSE-UP
consciousness in their viewers because, by empha-
sizing glamour, wealth and romance, they offered
distorted views of society. Zavattini urged filmmak-
ers to use the cinema as a medium for documenting
and recording authentic social reality, rather than for
creating glossy, if entertaining, fantasies. He wanted
filmmakers to show the everyday rather than the ex-
ceptional, to show things as they are rather than as
they seem, to show the relation of the people to their
society rather than to their dreams, and to show the
common people, workers and peasants, rather than
idealized heroes and wealthy, upper-class aristocrats.
In 1943, critic Umberto Barbara coined the term
“neo-realism” to describe this approach to cinema.
Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), a dramatization
of a U.S. crime novel, signaled a decisive break with
Cinecitta style by capturing the bleakness and pov-
erty of the contemporary Italian countryside, and it
is often regarded as the first neo-realist film. Roberto
Rossellini’s Open City (1945) received international
acclaim for its shot-on-location portrait of resistance
fighters in the Nazi-occupied city of Rome. Equally
powerful is Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948),
Filmmakers who value realism often try to achieve
it by shooting on real locations and by minimizing
stylistic flourishes, such as elaborate lighting designs
or camera movements. By minimizing stylistic ma-
nipulation, filmmakers may feel that they get closer
to a realistic portrait by getting farther from cinematic
artifice and embellishment. Using real locations and
non-professional actors can help to strip away com-
mon forms of stylistic adornment.
One of cinema’s most important traditions of
realism, in this regard, was practiced by Italian film-
makers in the 1940s and 1950s and became known
as neo-realism (the new realism). The neo-realists
produced many film classics ( Open City, Bicycle
Thieves, Umberto D ), and their work has been tre-
mendously influential.
Neo-realism developed as a reaction against the
style of studio-made films that typified Italian cin-
ema before and during World War II. In 1942, critic
and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini called for a new
kind of filmmaking and argued that studio-made
entertainment films (like those produced by Italy’s
Cinecitta studio and by Hollywood) produced a false
BICYCLE THIEVES
(PRODUZIONI DE SICA,
1948)
Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani)
and his wife, Maria (Lianella
Carell), struggle to keep their
family together when Ricci
loses his job. Their struggle
takes place amid widespread
unemployment, and De Sica’s
use of locations visualizes their
economic desperation. As Ricci
searches for his bicycle, De
Sica’s camera takes the viewer
on a visual journey through
post-war Rome.
Frame enlargement.
(continued)
330

Modes of Screen Reality
Hollywood cinema in the 1940s because it required
expensive studio resources and because it communi-
cated the glossy production values that neo-realism
aimed to avoid. As with lighting, composition, and
camera movement, the neo-realists used editing
with restraint. They avoided montage as a way of
achieving effects, believing it to be an inherently un-
realistic structural device and overly manipulative of
the viewer’s response.
Using these simple approaches, neo-realist
directors concentrated on what was in the frame
rather than on the properties of the image itself.
Neo-realist directors did not wish to create images
so complex and self-conscious that they called
attention to themselves as artificial creations.
Instead, they wanted to portray authentic subjects
rooted in the conditions of postwar Italian soci-
ety. The results were often uncompromising and
powerful. Bicycle Thieves ends with Ricci, driven by
desperation and the inability to find his bike, at-
tempting to steal one. The attempt fails; he is de-
tained by a crowd and humiliated before his son,
who has witnessed his father’s crime. The crowd
allows Ricci to go, and as the film ends, father
and son disappear into the city, jobless, penniless,
without prospects. In a Hollywood movie, Ricci
would be a hero, and he’d find his bike. De Sica
about the desperate search by an unemployed laborer
and his son for the stolen bicycle that the laborer
needs in order to work.
Neo-realist Techniques
Neo-realists like Rossellini and de Sica preferred to
shoot on location rather than using artificial sets and
to employ non-actors or semi-professional actors.
Lamberto Maggiorani, for example, who plays Ricci,
the owner of the stolen bicycle, had been a factory
worker before De Sica cast him in the film. He gives
an affecting, honest performance, fresh and powerful
because it does not rely on a trained actor’s carefully
developed techniques.
The neo-realists aimed to avoid intricate plots
and fancy narratives. They believed that elaborate
plotting and intricate storytelling (as in, for example,
Citizen Kane) tended to create movies with artificial
designs. Neo-realists also employed a casual, open
style of composition instead of deliberate and com-
plex framings. Camera set-ups tended to be func-
tional and basic. The neo- realists avoided elaborate
equipment like booms and dollies and the extrava-
gant camera movement these make possible.
Lighting set-ups tended to be very spare and
unadorned. The neo-realists avoided the elabo-
rate high-contrast and low-key lighting popular in
THE 400 BLOWS (LES FILMS DU CARROSSE, 1959)
A new generation of portable, lightweight cameras and sound recording
equipment enabled director Francois Truffaut to shoot this autobiographical
film about his childhood on location in Paris. The city’s presence in the film is so
extensive that is becomes a kind of character and enhances the authenticity of
the childhood world that Truffaut dramatizes. Frame enlargement.
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Modes of Screen Reality
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (RIALTO PICTURES, 1966)
Italian neo-realism exerted a powerful influence on this landmark film about the
Algerian war for independence, waged against French forces occupying the country.
Director Gillo Pontecorvo shot the film in Algeria using nonprofessional performers,
some of whom were guerillas who had fought the French. In the film’s many crowd
scenes, Algerians played themselves, enacting emotions—nationalist pride, anger at
French colonialism—that were still deeply felt. The results were extraordinary. Although
the film recreates events, it feels completely authentic, as if Pontecorvo’s cameras were
witnessing history, catching events as they occurred. Frame enlargement.
concludes the movie in a way that is true to the
situation and avoids a melodramatic triumph.
Neo-realism disappeared as a distinct film move-
ment in the 1950s, but its methods have been highly
influential. Many of the French New Wave films broke
with studio traditions by shooting on location, and
the city of Paris appears so extensively throughout
Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Jean-Luc
Godard’s Breathless (1959), and Agnes Varda’s Cleo
from 5 to 7 (1962) as to become a character in these
movies. Steven Spielberg worked mainly on loca-
tion for Schindler’s List (1993) and avoided expensive
equipment, using mostly hand-held cameras to
achieve a more observational, less calculated style.
Much of the power of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront
(1954) was created by shooting on the streets and
dockyards of New York City. These are not neo-realist
films, but they are influenced by the tradition and
what it demonstrated. Stripping away the medium’s
customary tools and visual embellishments and
emphasizing real locations—these have become es-
sential methods used by filmmakers for creating what
they feel are honest and truthful depictions of the
world. ■
James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993), set among the British aristocracy circa
World War II; and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Schindler’s List (1993), which
aims at a visual and cultural re-creation of Poland and Germany during the Nazi era.
The most prolific filmmakers to work consistently in this mode have been director
James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, a team whose literate and nuanced films
include The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1985), Howard’s End (1992),
The Remains of the Day (1993), and Jefferson in Paris (1995).
The historical realist mode works by accumulating authentic period detail.
Meticulously decorated sets and costumes evoke now-vanished eras. Production
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Modes of Screen Reality
BARRY LYNDON (WARNER BROS., 1975)
Production design is a key element of style that helps establish the period setting of films
in the mode of historical realism. Director Stanley Kubrick conducted extensive research
into 18 th -century European society, and the production design by Ken Adam and Roy
Walker brings this period to life with exacting detail. Frame enlargement.
design, therefore, is extremely important in this mode. Nominees for Academy
Awards in the categories of art direction and costume design are often dominated by
historical realist films. In 1994, for example, these included The Age of Innocence,
The Remains of the Day , and Schindler’s List.
To achieve this detail, filmmakers often conduct extensive historical research.
Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer for Schindler’s List , based the visual design
of his images on the photography of Roman Vishniac, who photographed European
Jewish communities in the 1920s and 1930s and published these photographs in a
book called A Vanished World. Seeking to recreate these communities for the film,
Kaminski emulated Vishniac’s photographs. To do so, Kaminski tried to work as if
he were photographing the film using the technology of 50 years ago, with no fancy
lights, dollies, or tripods.
Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) portrays the codes of social etiquette that
bind a house full of English aristocrats in the 1930s with the service staff that waits
on them and tends to their every need. An American filmmaker, Altman knew little
about this historical period and the behaviors appropriate to it, but he wanted to get
it right. He therefore hired a former butler, a housemaid, and a cook, all of whom,
now in their eighties, had entered domestic service in the 1930s. They became techni-
cal advisors on the film, instructing the actors and filmmakers on the precise ways to
prepare meals, clean shoes, set a dinner table, and for the actors to carry themselves
properly as service staff in this period. Arthur Inch, the butler advisor, for example,
corrected errors of costuming. He pointed out that a livery footman always wore a
white bow tie, not a black one. This and other advice helped the filmmakers capture
the small, accurate details of dress and behavior that helped the film achieve its vivid
historical realism.
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Modes of Screen Reality
The weight of such detail, in conjunction with characters whose behavior must
conform to different social norms than those that prevail today, works to persuade
viewers of the authenticity of the screen world. Many such films— Sense and Sensibility
(1995), Howard’s End, Titanic (1997)—depict the confining nature of social class by
showing the conflict between what a person desires to do and what his or her station
in life demands. Construed according to the dictates of a historical period, character
behavior furnishes an important index of historical realism, provided the norms of the
era are clearly understood and the behavior is plausible within those norms.
An especially powerful depiction of such a conflict, Elizabeth (1998), portrays the
accession to the throne of Queen Elizabeth I in sixteenth-century England, from which
she commenced a 40-year rule known as England’s golden age. The film was shot on
location in a variety of historical settings throughout the United Kingdom, including
Durham Cathedral, Haddon Hall, and Bamburgh Castle, providing the film with regional
authenticity. Director Shekhar Kapur envisioned the core of the film as Elizabeth’s journey
from youth and love to ruthlessness, power, and the renunciation of her personal needs
and feelings, and he stylized the film so as to bring out this core meaning. He used white
light—as in several fades to white—to suggest the transcendent religious meanings on
which she would model her image as queen. To embody the ruthlessness and cruelty of
the political world she inherits, Kapur chose sets made of stone. English castles at the time
included wood in their design, but Kapur felt that stone would better convey the coldness
and harshness of power and would imply that these structures—castles and halls—would
outlast the people living in them. To emphasize the forces of history and destiny, he also
shot from extremely high angles, with the camera looking sharply down on the figures
below. The climactic sequence late in the film, in which Elizabeth consolidates her throne
by assassinating her political enemies, is modeled on a comparable, famous sequence in
The Godfather (1972), wherein Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) violently rids himself of his
enemies. These choices of light, set, camera position, and narrative structure demonstrate
that filmmakers who aim for historical realism need not be shackled by an overly literal
GOSFORD PARK (USA FILMS, 2001)
To recreate the social world of English high society in the 1930s, the filmmakers hired
special consultants to advise on details of setting, dress, and behavior. The consultants,
then in their eighties, had been domestic servants in the period that the film por-
trays. Their advice helped bring to life a now-vanished period in English history. Frame
enlargement.
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Modes of Screen Reality
ALI (COLUMBIA, 2001)
This film biography of the world champion boxer includes very stylized camerawork but
weaves elements of historical realism into its account of Ali’s life. For the scene depict-
ing the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, the filmmakers modeled their
composition on a well-known news photograph showing King’s associates clustering
around his body and gesturing to a rooftop where the gunfire that killed King originated.
The movie image (shown here) acquires its impression of realism through its close visual
relationship with the news photograph. The filmmakers intend for viewers to make this
comparison. Frame enlargement.
depiction of the past. They are free to invent and to stylize their materials in ways that
clarify the core meanings that are inherent in the past being depicted. Historical realism,
therefore, is compatible with inventive methods of visual stylization.
Documentary Realism
Concepts of realism in the cinema are closely tied to traditions in which the camera is
used as an instrument of reportage and documentation. Films that fall into this tradi-
tion are frequently termed documentaries , although such films may employ a wide
range of styles. While the topic of documentary filmmaking is an extremely broad
one, and generally falls outside the confines of this text, a word on the subject is in
order in relation to concepts of realism.
While the camera can be used as a recording instrument to capture events, situ-
ations, and realities that may be transpiring independently of the filmmaker, the
camera is also an instrument of style. A filmmaker’s choices about lenses, film stocks,
and camera positions and angles alter the raw material of the event unfolding before
the camera so that it becomes a cinematic event that has a stylistic organization and
design. It is naive, then, to believe that documentary filmmaking is the equivalent of
raw reportage. A filmmaker’s structural choices transform the raw material before the
camera into an organized cinematic design.
BASIS OF DOCUMENTARY REALISM Documentary films exist in a state of tension,
caught between the camera’s recording and transformative functions. The docu-
mentary filmmaker aims to report on an event that has occurred, yet, to do so, he
or she must transform that event into cinema. How, then, does the concept of real-
ism operate within the documentary tradition? How can realism be squared with a
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Modes of Screen Reality
filmmaker’s need to shape structure? Are documentary films essentially like fiction
films in that they speak a language of structure and style that is unique to the cinema?
To some extent, documentaries are like fiction films. In each, a filmmaker con-
fronts the same array of choices: where to put the camera, where to cut the shot, how
to join several images together, whether and how to impose a narrative logic on the
events to be depicted. Despite these similarities, however, two unique characteristics
distinguish documentary realism from ordinary fiction films. First, audiences and
most documentary filmmakers assume the existence of a noncinematic referent, some
person, event, or situation that exists prior to, and independently of, the film that is
being made. This assumption does not hold for fiction films in which the characters
are clearly made up for the purposes of the story.
9/11 and Documentary Film
CLOSE-UP
The images furnish a rare glimpse inside the remains
of the ruined buildings.
102 minutes elapsed between the instant that
the first plane hit the North Tower of the World
Trade Center and when the tower fell (the South
Tower, hit later, fell first). During that interval,
onlookers in Manhattan and New Jersey trained
hundreds of cameras on the burning buildings and
the surrounding streets, filming the unfolding catas-
trophe.
These professional and amateur photographers
and videographers produced a massive amount
of footage that filmmakers have used to create
documentaries composed of candid views of the
events caught on film as they were happening.
9/11 (2002) was improvised on the spot by two
French filmmakers, Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who
were in Manhattan making a documentary about
New York’s Fire Department. Jules was on the street
filming a routine incident when he looked up and
caught American Airlines Flight 11 striking the North
Tower. He accompanied firemen into the lobby and
filmed the destruction that had occurred there from
burning jet fuel. And when the South Tower came
down, he kept the camera running as he ran for
safety.
In Memorium: New York City (2002) portrays the
interval during which the buildings were burning
by cutting among viewpoints provided by amateur
cameras stationed throughout the city and into New
Cinema often attains great power when it is placed
in an observational mode, recording and docu-
menting events. The attacks of September 11,
2001, elicited an outpouring of documentaries,
made within a wide range of styles and points of
view. There were partisan films that argued and
advocated for particular ways of interpreting the
meaning of the disaster. These included Michael
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and a film made
in response to Moore’s, Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004).
There were also paranoid conspiracy films, like
Loose Change (2007) and The Great Conspiracy:
The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw (2005), that
claimed 9/11 was an inside job, an attack by the
U.S. government on its own citizens.
But the best and most significant documentaries
were those that avoided partisan argumentation
and aimed to observe and by doing so to provide an
archival record of what happened, how the events
looked and sounded, and how people responded.
WTC: The First 24 Hours (2001), for example, breaks
with documentary tradition by avoiding narrative
entirely and also by not using a narrator or any in-
terviews with subjects and witnesses. The film is an
eloquent and poetic compilation of video footage
taken in the rubble of the smashed Trade Center
during the evening, night, and morning following
the collapse. The ruined architecture is poetic and
powerful, especially as captured on digital video
with only ambient sound and without commentary.
(continued)
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Modes of Screen Reality
102 MINUTES THAT
CHANGED AMERICA
(A&E, 2008)
The North Tower of the
World Trade Center burns
during the interval before
the second plane hits the
South Tower. The attacks
of September 11 were
among the most photo-
graphed events in history.
Many documentaries have
used the candid footage
captured by witnesses to
create a visual history of
events as they unfolded
that morning. The filmic
style is observational and
attains great power. Frame
enlargement.
saying, “Come on. Don’t take pictures of that. What’s
the matter with you?”
Taking such pictures was not necessarily wrong.
Such details were part of the truth of what was
happening. But photographing events can be an
ethical and moral act, with positive as well as nega-
tive value. By taking a picture, a photographer
or filmmaker enters into a relationship with the
people or events being recorded. It is important for
documentary filmmakers—and for candid witnesses
with cameras—to reflect on those values. These re-
flections, too, became part of the meaning of what
happened that day.
Many viewers resented it when filmmakers created
fictional or docudrama recreations of 9/11, believ-
ing that nothing was to be gained by re-enacting
those events for a movie. In this sense, fiction and
docudrama struggled under a burden of proof—such
movies needed to justify their existence, according
to many Americans. But documentary escaped this
burden of proof. Documentary is an assertive mode,
unlike fiction. About historic events, documentary
asserts this is —these things occurred, and they
looked and sounded and felt like such. And that as-
sertion is commonly recognized by viewers as being
important. ■
Jersey, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait composed
of multiple, simultaneous views. 7 Days in September
(2004) examines the debates, vigils, and memorial
services that proliferated in Manhattan following
the collapse of the towers, and 102 Minutes That
Changed America (2008) uses the candid footage
to provide a linear narrative of events, anchored by
a digital time clock that displays when things were
occurring.
Because the events were so terrible, many people
taking pictures found themselves reflecting on ethi-
cal issues posed by filming atrocity. Jules Naudet, for
example, turned his camera away from burn victims
in the North Tower lobby, feeling strongly that no
viewer of his film should see those victims. Some on-
lookers with cameras spontaneously filmed jumpers
falling from the towers and then felt that doing so was
wrong. Taking the pictures made these photographers
feel that they were complicit in the deaths. In 7 Days
in September , an amateur videographer impulsively
films one of the bodies falling and zooms in on the
detail. But then he turned off his camera, remarking in
a subsequent interview “I didn’t want to have anybody
else’s death on my hands.” In In Memoriam: New York
City as a camera operator films a falling body, the cam-
era’s sound card captures someone standing nearby
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Modes of Screen Reality
The second basis on which documentary realism rests is the perceived absence
of fictionalizing elements. These might include the presence of actors performing a
role or a narrative structure that alters the time chronology of the event. Audiences
and most documentary filmmakers assume that fictionalizing tendencies begin with
the presence of actors and an invented narrative structure. Critics charged that the
documentary about the collapse of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan, Roger and
Me (1989), violated documentary ethics because it re-arranged and re-ordered the
chronology of events leading to the demise of the General Motors auto plant. The
film condensed events that occurred over a long period of time so that they seemed to
happen virtually overnight. Assumptions of a noncinematic referent and the absence
of key fictional elements are central to the mode of documentary realism, but in prac-
tice, there is considerable flexibility for individual films to negotiate their own unique
approaches with reference to these issues, particularly when a filmmaker wants to
offer a stylistic commentary on the events or people the film depicts. Documentary
filmmaker Errol Morris, for example, in such films as The Thin Blue Line (1988) and
Standard Operating Procedure (2008), routinely uses actors to re-enact key events,
but he employs music or visual cues to mark these episodes for the viewer.
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING—FAIR AND BALANCED?
Many viewers believe that there is a clear line dividing documentary films from fiction
films, that the categories are quite distinct from one another. In fact, there is much
similarity and overlap.
Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is one of the earliest documen-
tary features and a classic of the form. Flaherty spent ten years studying and filming
the Eskimo communities of Canada’s Hudson Bay area, and he built his film around
the charismatic hunter, Nanook. He filmed Nanook with his family, on hunting and
NANOOK OF THE NORTH
(PATHE, 1922)
Robert Flaherty spent a decade
filming in Canada’s Hudson Bay
region and eventually found
Nanook, a renowned hunter of
the Itivimuit Eskimo, to be the
central character of his film.
Backed by a French distributor
after Hollywood turned it down,
Flaherty’s film was a critical and
box office hit. With this success,
the documentary feature film
was born. Frame enlargement.
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Modes of Screen Reality
fishing trips, and while building igloos and repairing boots. The footage provides a
vivid record of Eskimo life.
Flaherty, however, altered and embellished many of the things that he filmed. For a
sequence where Nanook and others hunt a walrus, Flaherty insisted they use a harpoon,
a traditional weapon but one that the men had discarded long ago in favor of rifles.
The harpoon would be more dangerous for the men—the enraged and wounded walrus
could drag them into the sea—but it would make a more dramatic and visually exciting
film sequence, and this was Flaherty’s chief objective.
In this scene and others, Flaherty changed the conditions of the lives he was film-
ing so as to produce a more vivid portrait. While a documentary filmmaker today
might feel more restraint than Flaherty did at the time, the essential truth is this—
documentary filmmakers must satisfy the requirements of cinema, and sometimes this
leads them to manipulate the situation or their footage.
Many viewers may believe that documentary films must be fair, objective,
unbiased, and completely factual. Journalism, television documentaries, and
Hollywood’s old “March of Time” newsreels probably influenced this ideal, but it
does not begin to account for the wide variety of film styles and approaches that we
call documentary.
Let’s examine three fundamental types of documentaries that differ from this
ideal—films of advocacy, visual poetry, and direct cinema.
The best-known documentary of recent years probably
is Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a passion-
ate attack on the Bush administration’s stated reasons
for going to war in Iraq. Moore uses all the filmmaker’s
tools—montage, music, humor, even switching to ani-
mated cartoon footage—to make the film a lively one,
and he injects his own persona into the film. Moore’s
specialty is using humor to be obnoxious and rude to
politicians and institutions of power, such as when he
interviews a congressman on the street and tries to per-
suade him to send his own children to fight in Iraq. This
was a situation that he set up and provoked rather than
one that he found and filmed, but he believed that the
responses he caught on film would reveal a truth that
was otherwise hidden from view.
Moore also included in the film a great deal of footage
and news information that had been suppressed or mini-
mally covered by mainstream media. This included the
infamous seven minutes of video showing President Bush
continuing to read with a group of school children after
learning of the World Trade Center attack, the protests
that surrounded President Bush’s first inauguration, the
U.S. government’s efforts to fly prominent Saudi Arabian
executives and politicians out of the United States
Case Study ADVOCACY: FAHRENHEIT 9/11
following the World Trade Center attack, and graphic
footage of persons wounded or killed in the Iraq War.
In all of this, Moore’s point of view was crystal clear.
He was advocating the ideas that the Iraq War was a
criminal enterprise, that the government had lied about
its reasons for going to war, and that the war was a
diversion from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the
actual people who had attacked the United States.
Many viewers who disagreed with these ideas
felt that Moore’s film lacked the objectivity that they
believed documentary requires. Others, filmmakers
among them, responded in kind. Fahrenhype 9/11
(2004), for example, critiqued Moore and his film by
using his own style against him.
However, whether one finds Moore’s film credible
or not, there is little in it that is inconsistent with the
documentary tradition because that tradition includes a
clear line of advocacy filmmaking. In the 1930s, British
filmmaker John Grierson supervised a series of classic
films that championed the cause of working-class life.
In pictures such as Drifters (1929), Housing Problems
(1935), Coal Face (1936), and Night Mail (1936),
Grierson used film, as he said, like a hammer and not a
mirror. “I look on cinema as a pulpit,” he said.
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Modes of Screen Reality
In that same period, Pare Lorentz made two classics
about the Dust Bowl and the farming crisis in Depression-
era America, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and
The River (1937), that criticized the government policies
which, in his view, had helped create these problems.
The Iraqi War was a direct stimulus for Fahrenheit
9/11 , and wars have motivated many of the advo-
cacy classics of documentary. Frank Capra’s Why We
Fight (1943–1945) series used footage of the German,
Japanese, and Italian enemy to advocate the cause of
U.S. participation in World War II. John Huston’s The
Battle of San Pietro (1944) vividly showed the violence of
the Italian campaign in World War II from the standpoint
of the infantrymen caught in it. Because the film was so
candid in its portrait of battlefield death, it was criticized
by the Pentagon as being “against war.” Huston replied,
“Well, sir, whenever I make a picture that’s for war—
why, I hope you take me out and shoot me.”
More recently, Hearts and Minds (1973) offered a
strong indictment of the Vietnam War, and from the
other side of the political spectrum, the “Swift Boat
Veterans” critiqued the war record of presidential can-
didate John Kerry in a series of short films that helped
cost him the election.
Political advocacy, then, is a vital and enduring part
of the documentary film tradition. Objectivity does not
play a role in this tradition of filmmaking. Instead, the
filmmaker tries to persuade and to arouse viewers; many
classic documentaries have aimed, in Grierson’s words,
to use film as a hammer. ■
FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (MIRAMAX, 2004)
Political and social advocacy is a historical part of the documentary film tradition. Michael
Moore’s film—a criticism of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11—is a recent ex-
ample of this enduring tradition. In this scene, Moore badgers members of Congress with
questions about whether they will send their own children to serve in the Iraq War. Frame
enlargement.
Visual Poetry
The documentary tradition includes another line of filmmaking in which the emphasis is
on the poetic properties of cinema, on the expressive possibilities that color, light, texture,
movement, editing, and the elements of sound hold for the filmmaker.
One of the most popular documentaries of recent years is Winged Migration
(2001), a study of the flight paths of migratory birds in different areas of the world.
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Modes of Screen Reality
Although the film features voice-over narration informing the viewer about the different
birds on display, the real heart of the film is the flying sequences, composed of amazing
shots that track the birds on their flight paths. Gliding through the air with the birds,
the camera seems to come so close that a viewer could touch their feathers. The visual
poetry in these shots is astonishingly beautiful, and they convey the sensation of flight
more strongly and sensually than anything put on film before. In fact, the poetry of
flight here is so powerful and pleasurable to experience that the film could have done
without the voice-over narration.
Comparable films that use nature photography or outdoor action to modify one’s
perception of reality include deep-sea documentaries like Aliens of the Deep (2005),
which display novel and exotic colors and shapes in the form of rarely glimpsed ocean
creatures. A recent series of surfing documentaries— Step into Liquid (2003) and
Riding Giants (2004)—uses special camera rigs and slow motion to take the viewer
inside the experience of surfing a giant wave, slowing down time and magnifying
space in ways that enhance the visual spectacle. These films are less about providing
information on what surfers do than about picturing the physical thrills of riding a
huge wave.
On a more abstract level, one that does not visualize a specific location or
activity, are the “life out of balance” films that Godfrey Reggio has been making
since the 1980s— Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance, 1983), Powaqqatsi (Life in
Transformation, 1988), and Naqoyqatsi (Life as War, 2002). Reggio’s films are a diz-
zying montage of footage showing landscapes, cities, people, and cultural practices
across the world. Connecting the shots is a poetic logic that explores oppositions
between rural and urban life, premodern communities and industrial ones, pristine
nature and the ravages of pollution. The imagery expresses an underlying theme that
the modern world is out of balance and is exploiting, consuming, and despoiling the
environment on which all life depends. These ideas are explored in purely visual and
musical terms (with music by composer Phillip Glass), without narration, spoken dia-
logue, or interview footage.
The visual poetry of these films is part of a long tradition in documentary, which in-
cludes the “city films” of the silent and early sound era. Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a
Movie Camera (1929) is a montage of life in the Soviet Union, showing people working,
WINGED MIGRATION
(BAC FILMS, 2001)
The documentary tradition
includes numerous works
that aim for visual poetry,
that seek rich, artistically
appealing manipulations of
image and sound. The ex-
traordinary cinematography
of this film celebrates majes-
tic images of birds in flight.
Frame enlargement.
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Modes of Screen Reality
playing, and sleeping and the city environment itself, traffic, monuments, and bridges.
The film documents its era with poetry and self-consciousness. An impressionistic logic
connects the shots, there is no narration, and through it all we see the film’s cameraman,
moving through traffic and climbing buildings to get the shots. We see the film’s editor at
work, and in a stop-motion animated sequence, we even see the camera assembling itself
and walking off on its tripod.
Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of the City (1927) provides a dawn-to-
dusk montage of the city awakening, coming to life in its daily bustle, and then
slowing down again as the day ends. There is no plot, narration, or characters;
instead, the visual rhythm formed by the editing of often abstract shots (e.g., a
stroboscopic series showing railroad tracks and telephone lines) provides the film’s
organizing design. Alberto Cavalcanti’s Only the Hours (1926) explored Paris in
an identical fashion.
Filmmakers take tremendous delight in using the tools of their medium, and the
documentary tradition enables them to do this. Documentary is not incompatible with
poetic expression, and many of its classics aim to provide viewers with an intensely
stimulating audiovisual experience.
Direct Cinema
The ideal of documentary as an “objective” medium may seem, at first, to be consistent
with direct cinema , a style of documentary that minimizes the filmmaker’s overt ma-
nipulations of the material. The style emerged in the 1960s, characterized by films that
seemed to be merely observations, without advocating a set of politics or point of view,
and in which the filmmaker’s editorial role seemed relatively neutral.
The most famous direct cinema filmmaker is Frederick Wiseman, whose films have
focused mostly on social institutions, which are identified in the title— High School
(1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), and Juvenile Court (1975). Much of
Wiseman’s work has been funded by and shown on public television.
THE MAN WITH A MOVIE
CAMERA (1929)
Dziga Vertov’s documentary
about Russian life in city and
country is a dazzling montage of
shots that show ordinary people
as well as the cameraman travel-
ing around to get his shots and
the film’s editor assembling the
footage. The poetics of Vertov’s
montage include these references
to the machinery of cinema. The
film begins with this image of the
cinematographer atop a huge
camera. For Vertov, documentary
realism is a matter of what the
camera sees and how it sees it.
Frame enlargement.
342

Modes of Screen Reality
Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003) is an
extraordinarily powerful recent example of direct cin-
ema. Jarecki’s film portrays the destruction of a family
when the father and one of the sons are arrested on
charges of child molestation. Incredibly, the family
made its own home movies of the terrible, raging argu-
ments that followed the arrests, as the husband, wife,
and children exchanged bitter recriminations. Jarecki
used much of this footage in the film, providing a dis-
turbingly candid portrait of family breakdown.
By seeming merely to observe what had happened,
Jarecki allowed the situation to remain very ambiguous.
On the one hand, the father did have child pornog-
raphy stashed in the house. On the other hand, the
children who made the accusations were counseled by
therapists whose specialty was uncovering repressed
and unconscious memories using techniques that, since
then, have been discredited. Some of the children later
recanted their charges.
The film is explosive in its emotional power—and
much of this power is due to Jarecki’s reluctance to
make any overt commentary on the events. This policy
Case Study CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
sustains ambiguity and uncertainty about whether the
abuse as charged actually occurred. It is very common
for two people who see the film to come to very differ-
ent conclusions about the father’s guilt.
At the same time, Jarecki skillfully manipulates his
material. The father was a gay man living a closeted,
heterosexual life. Jarecki reveals this point slowly over
the course of the film, and he withholds knowledge
that the father’s brother is gay, until a very calcu-
lated camera move late in the film reveals that the
brother, interviewed throughout in a tight close-up,
is in fact sitting next to his lover. The addition of this
context late in the film forces the viewer to reassess
the emotional dynamics of the family’s life as they’ve
been shown until now.
These aspects of the film’s design point toward a basic
truth about direct cinema, namely, that it does not pro-
vide an unfiltered, objective portrait of reality. No film can
accomplish such a task, nor would one wish it to do so.
A filmmaker inevitably exercises editorial control over the
material. Direct cinema is a style in which this seems min-
imized, but it is always, in fact, a part of filmmaking. ■
CAPTURING THE
FRIEDMANS (MAGNOLIA
PICTURES, 2003)
The mysteries and ambiguities
of reality are explored in disturb-
ing fashion by filmmaker Andrew
Jarecki. The film examines a
family’s disintegration when the
father and son are arrested and
charged with terrible crimes.
Frame enlargement.
Wiseman’s films dispense with a “story” or plot, and by shooting many hours of
material and carefully editing it down, he manages to show the complexity of these
institutions and the ways that they wield power over people.
Wiseman’s work, and direct cinema in general, was made possible by new devel-
opments in the late 1950s that led to highly mobile cameras and synchronized sound
343

Modes of Screen Reality
recorders. These enabled documentary film for the first time to make extensive use
of interviews and recorded dialogue in natural, relatively uncontrolled settings. Thus
Wiseman could capture and show the remarks of people, naturally and in action, in
the institutions he studied.
Documentary Today
Documentary is more alive and vital today than perhaps at any point in its long his-
tory. Moreover, in the last few years, a significant number of films have “crossed
over” into mainstream distribution, attracting audiences that are much broader
than is typical for the form. March of the Penguins (2005) is an impressive example,
grossing $117 million worldwide after eight months in release. Warner Independent
Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films acquired a French film entitled
The Emperor’s Journey, directed by Luc Jacquet. Warner and National Geographic
retitled the film, added a new music score, and eliminated the talking penguins
of the original, replacing their voices with spoken narration by Morgan Freeman.
The resulting film’s popularity and Academy Award recognition showed how
powerful documentaries have become in today’s film culture. In addition to such
pictures as Capturing the Friedmans, Fahrenheit 9/11 , and Step into Liquid , oth-
ers include Spellbound (2002), a highly dramatic portrait of children’s spelling bee
competitions; The Fog of War (2003), an evocative series of interviews with Robert
McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the
Room (2005), about the crash of the Enron Corporation and its fraudulent prac-
tices; and Murderball (2005), about a bone-crunching sport played by quadriplegics.
The Internet provides documentary filmmakers with a new means of sales and
distribution. Producer–director Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s
War on Journalism (2004) and Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004) were principally
sold and distributed via the Internet, bypassing the traditional distribution routes of
theaters and television.
Many have remarked that the best stories on film in the last few years have been
found in documentaries. Certainly, it is the documentary that most connects film with
the conditions of our lives, and the form is quite flexible, enabling filmmakers to use
cinema at the height of their artistic powers.
SUPER SIZE ME (HART
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
MOCKUMENTARIES S uppose that a filmmaker deliberately uses a style of documen-
tary 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 mocku-
mentary , 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 fic-
titious 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 docu-
mentaries.
The film opens with Reiner, as DiBergi, seated by a camera and lighting equip-
ment 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 real-
ism, it serves to authenticate the special nonfiction status of the film by communicat-
ing 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
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.
345

Modes of Screen Reality
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 com-
peting 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.
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.
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 abnor-
malities. 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 natu-
ralism, emphasizing instead strange or bizarrely poetic designs using lighting, color,
lenses, camera position, and set design. Expressionism in its pure form, as it charac-
terized 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, rectilin-
ear 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 ex-
pressive forms and were integrated seamlessly with the shapes and textures of the
set design.
Expressionist filmmakers often used odd camera angles to enhance the decenter-
ing of the screen world. The camera’s positioning, 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 pro-
duction 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
Contemporary Expressionism
While the pure expressionism characterizing German cinema of the 1920s is rarely
found in contemporary filmmaking, modern directors often employ the visual distor-
tions of expressionist style.
OTHER RECENT CASES More recent productions have drawn on the expression-
ist 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
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.
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
Alfred Hitchcock was probably the best-known filmmaker
to use expressionism as an ongoing feature of his work.
In Psycho (1960), a striking low-angle shot of Norman
Bates, the psychopathic killer, dehumanizes his face. By
emphasizing the working of his gullet as he chews on
some candy, it transforms him visually into a birdlike
creature. This is appropriate because Norman is a taxider-
mist by hobby and keeps his office stuffed with birds of
prey, which he has mounted on the walls. Hitchcock said
that these birds are perfect symbols of Norman himself.
They are birds of the night—predators—and he sees his
own guilt mirrored in their eyes.
In Strangers on a Train (1951), a demented fan of a
famous tennis player kills the athlete’s greedy and self-
ish wife, believing that he is doing the celebrity a favor.
Hitchcock films the killing from a memorably distorted
perspective, in an image refracted by the wife’s eye-
glasses, which have fallen to the ground in her strug-
gles with the killer. After she is dead, the killer reaches
for the glasses, and the refracted image gives him giant
Case Study ALFRED HITCHCOCK
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.
lobster hands, dehumanizing him in a poetic manner
(in the film’s first scene, he wears a vulgar, lobster-print
necktie).
In Notorious (1946), about a woman who is coerced
into spying for the U.S. government, an early scene
shows her waking up with a hangover. She looks up and
sees a government agent hovering in the doorway of
her bedroom. Hitchcock employs a subjective expres-
sionistic shot to represent her point of view and to make
the agent seem very threatening and sinister. The agent
appears as a silhouette. As he walks toward her and she
turns her head to look up at him, tracking his move-
ments, his figure pirouettes upside down across her field
of vision.
In Vertigo (1958), to suggest the approaching
despair and madness of the detective hero (James
Stewart), Hitchcock included a completely artificial
sequence. The detective’s nightmare hallucination is
represented, in part, through animation. A bouquet
of flowers, held by a ghostly character in the film,
(continued)
350

Modes of Screen Reality
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.
suddenly splits apart and the petals fly menacingly
toward the viewer. Hitchcock departs from realism
here so thoroughly that it sometimes confuses mod-
ern viewers, uncertain whether they are seeing an
example of inferior visual effects or a genuinely radical
visual design.
As these examples from Hitchcock’s cinema illus-
trate, the director learned from the expressionists about
the power of a distorted visual image and employed
such designs systematically throughout his career when
he needed to suggest intensified states of emotional
disturbance. ■

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.
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 expression-
ist 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 expression-
istic 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 fam-
ily 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 ex-
posed. 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.
A dissolve links the end of the credit sequence to a close-up of the eyes of the law-
yer’s young daughter, viewed as a negative image. Here, Scorsese revived an expres-
sionist technique from Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu. To suggest the phantom
world, Murnau showed Dracula’s coach and horses as film negatives. Scorsese pulls
viewers out of the expressionist title sequence and inserts them into the world of the
352

Modes of Screen Reality
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (UNITED ARTISTS, 1955)
For this story about a psychotic preacher (played by Robert Mitchum, right), director Charles
Laughton used many visual elements drawn from silent cinema. These included the expres-
sionist tradition of set design and chiaroscuro lighting. Note how Mitchum’s pose and raised
arm harmonize with the sloping walls of the set, integrating character and architecture in the
visual manner that expressionists preferred. In this scene, set design and lighting make the
bedroom look like a chapel. The slashing blades of light mimic the knife that Preacher Harry
will use to murder Willa Harper (Shelly Winters, on bed, right). Frame enlargement.
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (PARAMOUNT, 2004)
The set design of Count Olaf’s house recalls classic German expressionism in its use of
diagonals and sloping graphic elements. The appearance is unsettling and disorderly, an
effective visual portrait of this villain’s lair. Frame enlargement.
353

Modes of Screen Reality
narrative proper by using negative imagery, suggesting, at a visual level what the nar-
rative will establish, a world in which human behavior and values are dangerously
inverted.
Used by filmmakers as diverse as Hitchcock, Burton, and Scorsese, expressionism
constitutes a powerful mode of screen reality permitting a filmmaker to break with
realism and skew images and characters in ways expressive of social or psychological
abnormality. In this regard, the style has transcended the context (silent German cin-
ema) in which it first flourished to become an essential and ongoing mode of screen
reality.
FANTASY AND THE FANTASTIC
This mode of screen reality sometimes overlaps with expressionism (as, for example, in
the case of Batman Returns , 1992). There are, however, important distinctions between
them. Expressionism can be employed within a relatively naturalistic framework, as in
the films of Alfred Hitchcock, where the expressionistic elements are of relatively brief
duration and occur within scenes whose overall style is more naturalistic. By contrast, in
films employing a fantasy or fantastic mode, settings and subjects, characters, and narra-
tive time are often displaced from the viewer’s own realm into other realms, sometimes
futuristic ones, where normal laws of time and space may not apply. Characters might
have superpowers, like Superman, or advanced technology that lends them superpowers,
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
(DREAMWORKS, 2007)
Director Tim Burton often incorporates the expressionist mode into his films, such as
Batman Returns (1992) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). For this set representing the room that
Sweeney (Johnny Depp) rents from Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), Burton asked his
production designer to incorporate the large slanting window because it would be remi-
niscent of classic German expressionism. Frame enlargement.
354

Modes of Screen Reality
like Robocop. Adventurers can pilot starships to new galaxies as in Star Wars , and arti-
ficial beings, created by mad inventors, can become suburban hairdressers, like Edward
Scissorhands. Angels can assume material form and fall in love with humans, as in City
of Angels.
This mode is as old as cinema. One of the earliest films was Georges Melies’s A
Trip to the Moon (1902), which took viewers on the titular journey and depicted the
moon as inhabited by a species of lizard people who chase their visitors from Earth
merrily about. A Trip to the Moon is a science fiction fantasy, but the mode of fan-
tasy in cinema transcends genre. Fantasy is essential to science fiction but it also can
characterize romance ( Always, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, City of Angels, Ghost ),
drama ( Stairway to Heaven ), the war film ( A Guy Named Joe ), and Arthurian legend
( Excalibur, First Knight ).
The success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy has made fantasy into one of the
currently most popular modes of filmmaking. Rings -style films about magical lands,
sorcery, mythical creatures, and children embarking on epic adventures have prolifer-
ated in recent years. They include The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe (2005), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), Nim’s Island
(2008), The Bridge to Terabithia (2007), The Golden Compass (2007), Beowulf
(2007), and Eragon (2006).
Ways of Making Fantasy Credible
Viewers are willing, even eager, to suspend disbelief in order to enter an enchanting,
amusing, or thrilling fantasy world. Filmmakers, though, have to work to sustain this
willingness and make the unreal seem credible for the duration of the film. One way
of doing this is to set the fantasy within recognizably real surroundings, as in City of
Angels (1998), where well-known Los Angeles settings (and some in San Francisco)
provide a convincing locale for the action. So intent were the City of Angels filmmak-
ers on evoking the realities of an urban setting that they placed the actors (Nicolas
A TRIP TO THE MOON
(1902)
One of the cinema’s fundamental
roots lies in fantasy. Since the
inception of the medium, film-
makers have used it to picture
the imagination. Early filmmaker
Georges Melies filmed a band of
intrepid astronomers traveling
to the moon and dreamed up
this memorable image, picturing
their spaceship landing in the eye
of the man in the moon. Frame
enlargement.
355

Modes of Screen Reality
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
(DISNEY, 2005)
The success of The Lord of the Rings films has led to many more productions in the mode
of fantasy. Among the most successful have been adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of
Narnia novels, about the adventures of four children in the magical, mythical kingdom of
Narnia. Frame enlargement.
Cage and Dennis Franz) high atop a real skyscraper construction site for a dialogue
scene that has the characters sitting on a girder overlooking the city. Having evoked
place in this detailed manner, the film shifts easily into its moments of explicit fan-
tasy—angels defying time and space to move with lightning speed, angels guiding the
dying into a transcendent realm of light, an angel’s hand unharmed by a knife that
has sliced through his finger.
Another effective way to establish the credibility of a fantasy world is through the
sheer accumulation of narrative detail. The more thoroughly a filmmaker can render
the fantasy world, the richer its tapestry of detail— characters, places, events—the
more convincing it will come to seem to viewers. George Lucas is a master at working
in this manner. The hugeness of his Star Wars project— encompassing to date six
films produced over more than two decades—and the expanse and wealth of story
information that he gave to his mythopoetic world are quite unprecedented in modern
cinema. By beginning his saga in the middle of the story ( Star Wars is “Episode IV”),
Lucas abruptly plunged his viewers into a well-defined fantasy universe, and each sub-
sequent film elaborated on the intricate network of characters and locations that the
films were constructing, installment by installment. By the end of Return of the Jedi ,
this imaginative universe contained a galaxy of uniquely differentiated and vividly
rendered planets where critical episodes of the story line occur. The Empire Strikes
Back opens on the ice world of Hoth and a deadly clash between the Empire and the
rebel forces, which have gone into hiding after launching (from the planet of Yavin 4)
their assault on the first Death Star in Star Wars. The heroes, Luke, Han, and Princess
Leia, escape the battle, with Luke journeying to the jungle world of Dagobah, where
he encounters the Zen-like but diminutive Yoda. Han and Leia seek refuge on Bespin
in the Cloud City run by Lando Calrissian. Darth Vader, though, sets a trap, freeze-
dries Han, and sends him to Tatooine, the desert world where Luke grew up and
where the toad-like gangster Jabba the Hut has his headquarters. The climax of the
Empire–rebel struggle occurs in Return of the Jedi on Endor, a forest planet that is
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Modes of Screen Reality
home to the Ewok, a race of furry, cute, but fierce rebel allies. Filling out this remark-
ably detailed gallery of places and characters are bounty hunters (Boba Fett, Greedo),
monsters (the sand-dwelling Sarlacc), and Wild West cantinas (Mos Eisley). The elab-
orate effects that Lucas and his artists created for the films are certainly a major part
of their appeal. But the intricately layered narrative details extending across six films
arguably have done more to establish the fantasy and make it convincing.
A third way of establishing credibility in this mode is by using production design
to make unreal settings seem tangible and convincing. Consider the work of Tim
Burton, one of the most popular filmmakers currently working in fantasy. His films
include Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman
Returns (1992), Mars Attacks! (1996), and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999) and,
as producer, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Batman features a brilliant pro-
duction design by Anton Furst that evokes Gotham City as a dark, congested metropo-
lis rife with crime. As in other films about dark cities of the future— Blade Runner
(1982), Dark City (1998), and The Matrix (1999)—the metropolis of Batman is one of
the stars of the film, taking a commanding visual presence alongside the major charac-
ters. Rendered with sets, mattes, and miniature models, Gotham is a wholly imaginary
creation, but its visual design is so powerful that it comes convincingly to life.
In Edward Scissorhands , production designer Bo Welch daringly drops Edward’s
medieval castle into the middle of suburbia, even showing it perched ominously at
the end of a street of trim houses with manicured lawns. It’s an ostentatious design
concept, almost daring the audience to react with disbelief. Yet, when a saleswoman
(Dianne Wiest) calls on its occupant, the castle proves to be adorned with so much
Gothic detail that it becomes unquestionably real.
In fantasy, the real is limited only by a filmmaker’s imagination, and whatever
an audience can be persuaded to believe in becomes real for this mode. In this regard,
fantasy offers filmmakers tremendous flexibility of style and freedom of invention
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1990)
All things are possible in fantasy, even a gothic castle perched in the middle of suburbia.
Frame enlargement.
357

Modes of Screen Reality
because audiences do not require plausibility in the way that they ask it from a film-
maker working in the realist mode. An enduring cliché of science fiction films dem-
onstrates the freedom to invent that fantasy offers its filmmakers. Except mainly for
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which showed spacecraft gliding
silently through space, most science fiction spacecraft emit loud, powerful rumblings
from their engines. In Star Wars’ first scene, for example, a series of spaceships ap-
proaches the camera, and then, in a reverse angle cut, the group flies away. The roar of
the engines gives these visual-effects creations an impressive physicality. Multichannel
sound, with the dedicated bass channel, has accentuated this cliché because now
spacecraft can emit wall-shaking low-frequency sound as they pass by. Doppler effects
are routinely employed to create the changes in pitch (higher pitch for approaching
objects, lower for receding ones) correlated with movement.
While the Doppler effects are accurate for Earth-bound experience, in the
outer-space context they are impossible. In space there is no sound because there
is no medium, such as the air or atmosphere on earth, to transport sound waves.
Consequently, spaceships should make no perceivable noise at all. But this would be
dramatically flat and uninteresting. Thus the cliché has developed—which viewers
happily endorse—that spaceships traveling through a void make noise.
Fantasy and Cinema Technology
The fantasy mode is tremendously popular throughout the world. The Harry Potter,
Lord of the Rings , Spider-Man, and Star Wars series have generated billions of dollars
in global markets. To take advantage of this popularity, fantasy films now showcase
the industry’s most important technological advances. Digital multichannel sound
debuted in three high-profile fantasy films. Dolby Digital premiered its system in
Batman Returns (1992). Digital Theater Systems (DTS) unveiled its CD-playback sys-
tem with Jurassic Park (1993). Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) came online in
The Last Action Hero (1993).
George Lucas is a major figure in modern movie fantasy and in pushing the in-
dustry to develop the next generation of effects technology. These two attributes are
interconnected. In 1975, he created Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which became
the industry’s premiere effects house, creating effects for dozens of major productions—
the Star Trek series, the Indiana Jones series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and
Jurassic Park (1993)—and doing research on the next generation of effects tools, those
that would be supplied by digital imaging and digital methods of production. By the
mid-eighties, Lucasfilm had a computer-assisted electronic editor (EditDroid) online
and an all-digital sound editor (SoundDroid) used to mix and create effects for Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom. To achieve cutting-edge sound in the films that he pro-
duced, Lucas constructed the industry’s state-of-the-art postproduction sound facility,
the Technical Building at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s corporate headquarters in Marin,
California.
As with sound, the revolution in digital imaging developed in cinema for films
in the fantasy mode. Computer-animated sequences first appeared in Future World
(1976), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Star Trek II: The Wrath of
Khan (1982), but the box-office failure of the first three pictures delayed the wide-
spread application of digital imaging for several years. But, by the late eighties and
early nineties, digital imaging had attained new levels of sophistication, and the
next generation of digital effects films created tremendous interest in the technology
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Modes of Screen Reality
throughout the industry and excited audiences with fantasy creatures that seemed
impossibly real: the slithery water alien in The Abyss (1989), the gleaming, shape-
shifting Terminator 2 (1991), and the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park series (1993,
1997, 2001).
The vividness of Spielberg’s dinosaurs—created by ILM—convinced George
Lucas to return to his Star Wars series since digital effects offered a new arsenal
of powerful tools for envisioning anything a filmmaker could imagine. Lucas had
long wanted to shift the industry toward all-digital methods of filmmaking, and he
pursued this ambition with the new Star Wars films. Attack of the Clones (2002)
was shot on digital cameras that were custom-built for Lucas by Sony, and the
film was exhibited theatrically in digital format at selected locations around the
country. Lucas’s ambitions are big ones, and the industry is transforming itself to
meet them. The long-term result will be comparable with the coming of sound in
the late 1920s; that is, it will change everything. It will cut the industry off from
WHO FRAMED ROGER
RABBIT (DISNEY,
1988); THE MASK
(NEW LINE, 1994)
Fantasy has been on the
cutting edge for new
developments in cinema
technology. Traditional
(nondigital) methods of
compositing visual effects
images reached their
zenith in Who Framed
Roger Rabbit , an expert
blend of live action with
animated characters. The
widespread application
of digital imaging in the
years following Roger
Rabbit took the visual
potential of cinema into
new dimensions. Fantasy
films showcased these
breakthroughs. Frame
enlargements.
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Modes of Screen Reality
the photomechanical technology to which it has been wedded since its inception
and take it into an all-electronic realm.
The fantasy mode has been a key player in this drama. It is now synonymous
with state-of-the-art cinema technology. In this regard, fantasy is tremendously impor-
tant for contemporary cinema. It generates huge box office success and is propelling
the industry into its all-digital future.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
CLOSE-UP
stepfather and her mother’s husband, is hunting
guerillas that are fighting against the country’s mili-
tary dictatorship.
Vidal is a cruel man who delights in murder and
torture, and he values Ofelia’s mother only for the
son she will bear him. At the post, Ofelia encoun-
ters the faun who tells her she is the reincarnation
of a princess who lived with her parents in the
Underground Realm. Princess Moanna grew curi-
ous about the human world, left her parents, and
went above, where she grew old, forgot her past,
and died, and all traces of her vanished from the
Fantasy constructs alternative worlds to our own.
What is the relationship between the two? What role
or purpose does fantasy fulfill? Pan’s Labyrinth, an in-
ternational award-winning film written and directed
by Guillermo del Toro, examines these questions by
creating a parable about a young girl’s encounters
with a mysterious faun that lives inside an old maze
or labyrinth.
The story takes place in Spain during the fascist
era of World War II, and Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)
travels with her mother, Carmen, to a military
post where Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez I Ayats), her
(continued)
PAN’S LABYRINTH (WARNER BROS., 2006)
The faun comforts Ofelia after the death of her mother and promises her she can enter the
safety of the Underground Realm if she performs a final task. Del Toro’s extraordinary film
explores the role fantasy plays in a world of darkness and cruelty. Frame enlargement.
360

Modes of Screen Reality
death, and the experiences with the faun pre-
sented as a flashback at the moment of her death.
As a narrator explains the legend of Princess
Moanna, a close-up of Ofelia’s lifeless face shows
time moving backward, her blood flowing back
into her body rather than out of it.
Del Toro thus poses a question about the
Underground Realm—is it real? Does Ofelia find an
immortality with her lost parents that is denied ordi-
nary people, each of whom is fated to die and van-
ish from the earth? Are the faun and the mythical
kingdom true? Or are they a psychological fantasy
that provides Ofelia with some comfort in the final
moments of her life but has no authenticity beyond
this function?
Del Toro shows that Ofelia’s fantasy is a response
to unbearable cruelty in a world of pain and violence
that overwhelms her. The Underground Realm pro-
vides her with a safe and protected space. Is this the
role that fantasy plays in human life—by creating
imaginary worlds as alternatives to the real one, does
it make life less unbearable?
The film’s power lies in its ambiguity. Del
Toro leaves open both possibilities—that the
Underground Realm is real and, alternatively, that
it represents the final flicker of consciousness in a
dying mind. The ambiguity gives the film its poetic
force and its haunting power. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Del
Toro constructs a beautiful but scary parable about
fantasy and the human longing for an escape from
pain and mortality. ■
world, a fate that befalls all people. But her parents
believed always that her spirit would return and live
forever in the Underground Realm.
The faun tells Ofelia she is the princess and that
she must perform three tasks to prove herself worthy
of returning. Del Toro intercuts this plot line with
Vidal’s harsh treatment of Carmen and his brutal
interrogations of captured guerillas. Carmen’s preg-
nancy goes bad, and she dies while giving birth.
Fearing for the life of her infant brother, and on
the faun’s instructions, Ofelia abducts him from
Vidal’s quarters and rushes into the maze, pursued
by Vidal. He seizes the child and callously shoots
Ofelia with his pistol before the anti-fascist guerillas
capture and execute him. Mercedes, Vidal’s house-
keeper who became friends with Ofelia, finds her
body and weeps beside it.
As she dies, and in a colorful sequence
with glowing imagery, Ofelia appears in the
Underground Realm where she is joyously
welcomed home by her parents and by the faun.
Del Toro has counterpointed the film’s two narrative
lines. Ofelia’s adventures with the faun and her visit
to the underworld kingdom have been entwined
with the brutal political drama of Captain Vidal’s
efforts to torture and kill the anti-fascist resistance
fighters. They’ve been entwined as well with Ofelia’s
experiences of violence, cruelty, and loss.
Furthermore, the film begins with imagery
of Ofelia bleeding and dying from the gunshot
wound, with the visit to Vidal’s post, her mother’s
CINEMATIC SELF-REFLEXIVITY
However unusual or fantastic their settings and design, the other modes of screen re-
ality aim to persuade the viewer that the world depicted on screen is real, that it is, for
the purposes of the narrative, a valid world whose premises are not questioned within
the body of the film. The fantasy world that George Lucas creates in the Star Wars
films is, taken on its own terms, a self-enclosed and internally valid one.
By contrast, the self-reflexive mode makes no pretense that the world represented
on screen is anything other than a filmic construction. Films in this mode remind
viewers that what they are watching is, after all, a movie. Self-reflexive films tell the
viewer that the reality on screen is a movie reality. These acknowledgments take a va-
riety of forms. Typically, they fall into two categories. They tend to be either comic or
made with didactic intent.
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Modes of Screen Reality
ANNIE HALL (UNITED ARTISTS, 1977)
Woody Allen, as Alvy Singer, turns toward the camera and speaks to the film’s viewers in
this scene from Annie Hall . Allen breaks the illusion of make-believe in a moment of comic
self-reflexivity. In popular films, self-reflexivity is quite common in comedy but rare in
drama. Frame enlargement.
Contemporary screen comedy often makes use of a
self-reflexive style. Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2 , for ex-
ample, play with the viewer’s familiarity with the horror
movie conventions that are being satirized. Like Woody
Allen, Mike Myers has made playing to the camera an in-
tegral part of his ironic comic persona. His Austin Powers
films (1997, 1999, 2002) include numerous moments
of self-conscious comedy, in which Myers jokes with the
camera, making humor by acknowledging its presence.
He winks at it, grins broadly to it, and uses it to make a
formal introduction of key scenes, such as when he leans
forward, smiles, and says into the camera, “Ladies and
gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach,” introducing cameo
appearances by the composer, who then performs se-
lections from his songs. Bacharach’s songs were very
popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and their catchy melo-
dies are major emblems of the popular culture of those
periods. Myers’s introductions of Bacharach, then, are
moments of nostalgia and affection, and his use of a self-
reflexive camera emphasizes them.
Case Study AUSTIN POWERS AND KILL BILL
A secret agent from the 1960s, Austin Powers is
based on the many screen spies who had popular film
series in that era. These include James Bond, Derek
Flint, and Matt Helm. Myers weaves numerous refer-
ences to those movies into his own. Austin Powers in
Goldmember (2002), for example, costars Michael Caine
as Powers’s father. Caine is an actor closely identified
with the sixties spy craze, having played secret agent
Harry Palmer in several pictures (including The Ipcress
File , 1966). His presence in Goldmember evokes this his-
tory. Furthermore, Goldmember plays with the title and
character of one of the most famous James Bond films,
Goldfinger (1964).
While not a laugh-out-loud comedy like the Austin
Powers films, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill , released in
two parts (2003, 2004), contains a lot of dark humor
and outrageous wit. Veering from one mode of screen
reality to another, the films have a flashy, in-your-face
style that makes reference to many of Tarantino’s favor-
ite films.
(continued)
362

Modes of Screen Reality
He audaciously switches from color to black-and-
white for a climactic sword fight (this also helped the
film keep its R rating) and, without warning, goes
from live action to an extended animé sequence for a
flashback showing a character’s childhood.
With swordfights and graphic blood spurts, the story
focuses on a female assassin seeking revenge on those
who betrayed her. It is derived from (and it makes refer-
ence to) Lady Snowblood (1973), a Japanese film that is
one of Tarantino’s favorites. Along the way, he also makes
many visual and musical references to Sergio Leone’s spa-
ghetti Westerns, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(1966), to the Shaw Brothers martial arts movies of the
1970s, and to Japan’s Streetfighter film series. The star of
those films, Sonny Chiba, has a major role in Kill Bill , as the
master swordsman who makes the heroine’s sword.
The pleasures of Kill Bill , then, lie in its self- reflexive
style, as Tarantino calls the viewer’s attention to his
playful movie in-jokes and to his audacious manipula-
tions of picture and sound.
AUSTIN POWERS
(NEW LINE, 1997)
Austin Powers (Mike
Myers), the interna-
tional man of mystery,
jokes and confides
with the camera and
viewers, thereby ac-
knowledging the pres-
ence of each. Here, he
offers an affectionate
introduction to a
cameo appearance
by composer Burt
Bacharach. Frame
enlargement.
KILL BILL (MIRAMAX, 2003, 2004)
Like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, Kill Bill is very self-conscious about its relationship
to other movies. Tarantino references his favorite films and filmmakers, and he playfully
manipulates picture and sound in striking, attention-grabbing ways. Frame enlargement.
363

Modes of Screen Reality
The self-reflexive mode works extremely well for
comedy because it promotes the intimate relationship
with an audience that is integral to effective humor.
Austin Powers and Kill Bill invite the audience to play
along and be as hip as they are by enjoying the jokes.
The comic possibilities of the self-reflexive mode
assume that the viewer will understand the social
norms, movies, and movie characters that are being
referenced. Only viewers who “get” the references
will enjoy the humor these films offer. ■
GRINDHOUSE (DIMENSION FILMS, 2007)
Directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez teamed up to evoke the style of 1970s
exploitation pictures. Their film is a double feature composed of Deathproof (Tarantino
directed) and Planet Terror (Rodriquez directed) and includes fake trailers directed
by other filmmakers including Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. Throughout, the footage is
scratched and torn and has frames missing to evoke the experience of watching an old
print that has been run many times through a projector. The entire project is an extended
wink at the audience. Here, villain Kurt Russell pauses to grin at the camera just before he
does something really nasty. Frame enlargement.
Comic Self-Reflexivity
The tradition of self-reflexivity most commonly found in popular mass-market
movies employs a comic design. Throughout Annie Hall (1977), director and
star Woody Allen continually interrupts the narrative with a series of humorous
asides and confessions made to the camera. By speaking to the camera, of course,
he speaks directly to the film’s audience. Looking at the camera lens, he looks
directly at the eyes of the viewer. During one scene, when Alvy Singer (Woody
Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) quarrel over whether she said going to psy-
choanalysis will change her life or change her wife, Alvy breaks off the argument,
turns to the camera, and reminds the film’s viewers that they know what was said
because they have been there all along, listening to the quarrel. Likewise, in a
subtle way, the tradition established by director Alfred Hitchcock of making guest
appearances inside his films reminds viewers of his controlling presence as director
and, therefore, of the film’s status as a film.
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Modes of Screen Reality
Didactic Self-Reflexivity
The second category of self-reflexive film style is used for didactic purposes and falls
within the aesthetic tradition identified with the theater of playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Brecht was an active playwright and poet from the 1920s until his death in 1956, and
his plays include such classics as The Threepenny Opera, Galileo , and The Caucasian
Chalk Circle. As a Marxist, Brecht sought in his art to have a direct impact on his
social world and historical period, and to do so, he developed a unique and very influ-
ential approach to drama.
Impatient with the conventions of the theater of his day, Brecht created his own
theatrical forms that he termed epic and that tried to break down the barriers that
separated spectators from the play they were watching. Brecht considered the illusion
of naturalism or realism, as created in theater or film, to be an obstacle preventing
playgoers or film viewers from reflecting on the connections between their own lives
and the events depicted on stage or screen.
Brecht’s work in the theater continues to exert an
enormously powerful influence on filmmakers. French
director Jean-Luc Godard is probably the most famous
Brechtian filmmaker currently working. Godard’s films
offer a virtual catalogue of Brechtian cinematic tech-
niques, that is, techniques that break the illusion that
the spectator is watching a real, authentic world on
screen rather than a movie. These techniques enable
Godard to speak directly to his audience as author
rather than indirectly through the characters and ac-
tion of a film. Weekend (1967), Godard’s savage satire
of modern consumer society, employs three kinds of
didactic, self-reflexive techniques. These are the use of
printed titles, nontraditional camera techniques, and
the incorporation of imaginary characters and mo-
ments of performance self-disclosure.
Titles
Title cards break up the narrative action of Weekend ,
which follows the comic and violent misadventures of a
middle-class couple journeying across France on holiday.
The printed titles offer ironic and poetic commentaries on
the narrative. During the opening credits of the film, two
title cards proclaim, with some irony, that this is “a film
adrift in the cosmos” and “a film found on a dump.” A
long musical sequence in the middle of the film, during
which a pianist performs a Mozart sonata as the camera
tracks three times around the perimeter of a farmyard,
is introduced by flash-cut inserts of the title “Musical
Action.”
Case Study THE BRECHTIAN LEGACY IN FILM: WEEKEND
Throughout the film, title cards serve to (1) intro-
duce and set off a given scene from the surrounding
context of the narrative, (2) tell viewers what it is they
are about to see, (3) remind viewers of the filmmaker’s
intrusion on the narrative, and (4) emphasize the way
the filmmaker has chosen to shape and organize the
structure of the film. By calling attention to the film’s
methods of constructing its images and narrative, each
of these functions is consistent with the Brechtian goal
of breaking the illusion of reality exerted by the screen
world.
The title card “Totem and Taboo” prefaces the
film’s most horrific sequence, dealing with the can-
nibalism and mutilation of English tourists at the hands
of a guerrilla army based in the countryside. This title
derives from a famous book by Sigmund Freud dealing
with primitive social organization and behavioral taboos
in human ancestry. Here, the self-reflexive qualities are
multiple. In addition to the four functions described
above, the title card tells the viewer that the scenes that
follow will contain shocking and taboo imagery, as in-
deed they do, and for viewers who know the reference,
this acknowledgment positions the scenes in relation to
Freud’s famous work.
Nontraditional Camera Techniques
These are a second method used by Godard to create
self-reflexive style in Weekend. Two sequences stand out
for their use of radical camerawork. The tracking shot
along the row of stalled cars and the circular tracking
365

Modes of Screen Reality
(continued)
movements around the farmyard during the musical
interlude extend the length of these shots and scenes
to a point many viewers find unbearable, especially
because no new narrative information is being dis-
closed. However, the tracking shots go on for so long
that the visual device—camera movement—becomes
the subject of the shots. By elaborating camera move-
ment at such length, the style becomes self-reflexive
by making the viewer acutely aware of the visual
design. As in comic uses, however, self-reflexiveness
depends on the viewer’s knowledge of the norm that
is being violated. In this case the norm is that camera-
work is subordinated to the action of a scene rather
than vice versa.
Imaginary Characters and Performance
Self-Disclosure
Weekend is filled with imaginary storybook characters.
These establish a third area of self-reflexive technique.
During one episode in the middle of the film, the vaca-
tioning couple, Corinne and Roland, encounter poet Emily
Brontë and a companion dressed in storybook costumes.
Corinne and Roland ask for directions to their des-
tination, Oinville, but Brontë and her companion reply
with metaphysical riddles. When Roland asks for the
directions, Brontë inquires if he is interested in poetical
or physical information. When Roland tells her that they
only want to know how to get to Oinville, Brontë tells
him that physics doesn’t really exist, only individual
sciences, prompting Roland to mutter that the film they
are in (and the viewer is watching) must be rotten—it’s
full of crazy people. His remark is a moment of perfor-
mance self-disclosure in which the actor steps out of
character to evaluate the quality of the film in which he
appears. Of course, Godard does not believe he’s mak-
ing a rotten film and so the evaluation is ironic.
For the Brechtian tradition, this is precisely the at-
titude to be combated, and it is what motivates the use
of self-reflexive techniques. By breaking the spell of re-
ality cast by film or play, these techniques point to the
enormous differences between life and the constructed
spectacles on stage or screen.
The scene culminates in a moment of horror. Roland
drives away Brontë’s companion and then sets her on
fire. As the poet burns and cries, a shaken Corinne says
that this is bad, that they shouldn’t have torched her,
prompting Roland to remark that is doesn’t matter be-
cause they are imaginary characters.
Brontë’s fiery destruction by Roland illuminates the
emotional paradox of cinema. Though the film pres-
ents Brontë as a storybook character dressed in a fairy-
tale costume, her violent death strikes the viewer as a
terrible crime. Despite her obviously fictional status,
her death is disturbing. This paradox—a film’s ability to
compel emotion and belief from the viewer despite the
fictional artifice of its characters—is the phenomenon
that the Brechtian tradition seeks to control, under-
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.
366

Modes of Screen Reality
The Legacy of Godard
Godard’s self-conscious, radical cinematic techniques
have exerted an enormous influence on other filmmak-
ers, as has the Brechtian tradition that nourished his
work. Spike Lee is a contemporary director who freely
mixes modes of screen reality in his films, incorporating
ordinary fictional realism, fantasy sequences, and modes
of self-reflexivity. The black-and-white narrative of She’s
Gotta Have It (1986), for example, is punctuated by one
striking color sequence, a musical fantasy, that departs
greatly in tone and style from the surrounding narrative.
In Do the Right Thing (1989), Lee displays a precise
understanding of how Brechtian techniques can be
used to contain and control the emotions generated
by the story on screen. During the famous racial slur
sequence, a gallery of characters hurls obscenities
and insults at targeted social groups. A young Italian
man (John Turturro) insults African-Americans, Mookie
(Spike Lee) insults Italian-Americans, a Hispanic gang
member insults Koreans, a cop insults Hispanics, and
a Korean merchant condemns Jews. Each character is
filmed in an identical fashion: The camera quickly tracks
from long shot to medium close-up to add visual em-
phasis to the verbal invective.
The sequence is emotionally powerful and inflam-
matory because it gives full-throated voice to various
racisms. Spike Lee realized that he needed to break
down and contain the emotions unleashed in the scene
and that were likely to be aroused in the film’s audi-
ences. Accordingly, he breaks the hypnotizing power of
the racist rhetoric with an explicitly didactic, Brechtian
conclusion. A black radio deejay breaks into the mon-
tage, telling the characters to cool down, shut up, and
break that nonsense off. The deejay heartily condemns
the racial antagonisms of the characters, restoring calm
and sanity.
Filmmakers such as Lee or Godard use self-
reflexive techniques in a didactic manner to maintain
a measure of control over the social impact of their
films and the messages inside those films. These
techniques enable the filmmakers to insert editorial
remarks into the film, offering the viewer explicit
guidance about how a scene should be interpreted
or understood. The Brechtian tradition is a major
aesthetic influence on filmmakers who want to speak
directly to their audience and who wish to assert
maximum control over the impact of their social
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 natural-
ist 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 move-
ments, and the moments of performance self-disclosure, the basic spectacle of Corinne
and Roland’s comic and increasingly violent car journey across France is exception-
ally 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
Right Thing , one nevertheless remembers the scene 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 char-
acters. 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 film-
makers admit to viewers that it’s all just a movie.
ANIMATION
Because it is susceptible to the optical illusions on which cinema depends—beta move-
ment 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
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 inflam-
matory 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.
368

Modes of Screen Reality
an animated film is not focused on live actors and real sets or locations that get pho-
tographed 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 car-
toon 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 combina-
tion 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
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.
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 ma-
jor 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 ef-
fects. 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, capi-
talized 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, dur-
ing 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 cartoon 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 re-
sponsible 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 ani-
mators 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
COMBINING LIVE ACTION WITH 2D ANIMATION The combination of live action (real
people and places as traditionally photographed in cinema) with cartoon footage was
an irresistible creative temptation for filmmakers. The rotoscope is a combination
camera–projector that makes this possible. It projects previously filmed footage onto
a series of cells that animators then use to create the cartoon elements. Because they
can see the film footage on their cells, they can precisely align the animation with the
live-action elements. The cells are then filmed and composited with the live action.
The MGM musical Anchors Aweigh (1945) featured an impressive and funny ro-
toscoped scene in which star Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the mouse, a cartoon char-
acter. The dance choreography was carefully worked out, and the result was a highly
convincing illusion.
But the most elaborate blend of live action and animation, achieved with non-
digital means, is unquestionably Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The
film features more than 1000 shots in which live action and animation are joined,
and the story premise is remarkably clever. Taking place in the 1940s and modeled
on Hollywood’s own films noir of that period, the story features private eye Eddie
Valiant (Bob Hoskins) investigating the murder of a cartoon character. His quest
eventually takes him to Toontown, where all the film industry’s cartoon characters
live and which is a kind of alternate universe where cartoon laws apply (a character,
for example, who falls out of a window will hang in the air for a moment before
dropping).
Director Robert Zemeckis, cinematographer Dean Cundey, and effects artists
from Industrial Light and Magic took elaborate steps to maximize the illusion that
Eddie really co-exists with Roger Rabbit and the other ’toons. To blend the two do-
mains, they used elaborate camera moves and atmospheric texture such as filming
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.
372

Modes of Screen Reality
the ’toon characters through smoke or fog. Full-figure cutouts stood in for Roger
and Jessica Rabbit and other ’toons, and lighting, camera moves, and the live actors’
performances were rehearsed in relation to these cutouts, which were then removed
for filming. Finally, everything was shot on wide-gauge VistaVision film to maximize
clarity and resolution, important because all the effects shots were done with tradi-
tional optical compositing, which involves multiple-rephotographing of the blended
elements.
It’s not just the amazing blend of live action and animation that makes
Who Framed Roger Rabbit a great film. It is also extremely well-written and
well-performed and is filled with a love for cinema and its great cartoon characters,
many of whom make guest appearances—Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Dumbo, Porky
Pig, Pinocchio, Donald Duck, Yosemite Sam, Mickey Mouse, and Betty Boop. And
it’s a picture that has given us one of the great movie lines—“I’m not bad. I’m just
drawn that way.”
3D Animation
3D animation involves the use of puppets or other real models or animation within
three-dimensional (3D) computer space. The animation of puppets or models is a tra-
ditional tool of cinema and has been used widely in various methods of stop-motion
animation . This involves posing a model, exposing one frame of film, then re-posing
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, 2008)
Animation is a very flexible mode of screen reality because it departs from the tradition of
photographic realism that has been so powerful and pervasive throughout cinema. But
this does not mean that an animator cannot investigate the real world. Waltz With Bashir,
for example, is an animated documentary, conjoining two modes of screen reality that
are almost never combined with one another. Filmmaker Ari Folman uses animation to
explore the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinians gathered in a refugee camp
during the 1980 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Frame enlargement.
373

Modes of Screen Reality
the model, exposing another frame of film, and so on, with a matte or mask used to
block that portion of the frame in which live actors will be inserted.
Many classic special-effects films used this technique. Willis O’Brien’s The Lost
World (1925) brought its dinosaurs to life as animated miniature models, with live ac-
tors matted into the shots. King Kong (1933), about the giant ape who lives on Skull
Island, is probably the most famous example of this type of animation. In this film,
O’Brien inserted the live actors into the effects shots as film footage projected behind
the puppets and miniature models.
Ray Harryhausen was another genius at stop-motion animation, perfecting his
own system called “Dynamation” in a series of films based on Jules Verne novels,
on Greek myths, and on tales of the Arabian Nights ( The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad ,
1958; Mysterious Island , 1961; Jason and the Argonauts , 1963; and Clash of the
Titans , 1981).
One of Harryhausen’s most famous and brilliant sequences is Jason’s battle with
a group of skeleton warriors. Because Harryhausen had to move all their arms and
legs, animating the seven skeletons required him to make 35 separate movements for
every frame of film, or 840 movements every second (35 × 24 frames per second), all
of which had to be choreographed with the live actor in order to simulate a convinc-
ing sword fight.
More recently, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) used stop-
motion techniques to animate its puppet figures, as did Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s
Team America: World Police (2004).
Since the 1990s, visual effects have moved inside the computer, and animation
has benefited from this revolution. Popular cartoon features today— Toy Story,
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (DISNEY, 1988)
Rotoscoping enables filmmakers to combine live action and animation. It has a long his-
tory in cinema, and it reached its pinnacle of accomplishment in Roger Rabbit , where
real actors and cartoon characters combine to create an animated film noir. Frame
enlargement.
374

Modes of Screen Reality
Shrek, Finding Nemo —tend to employ digital animation , with characters created
as models inside three-dimensional computer space. This gives animators all the
impressive visual-effects tools that live-action features have been using to impress
audiences. Digitally created lighting effects can be very elaborate and, when used
with texture mapping of skin and other surfaces, can create remarkable illusions of
depth.
Unlike traditional 2D animation, which employs a real camera, the all-digital
films are shot with a virtual camera , which is a program that simulates the many
ways in which a camera might view the scene, mimicking the optical effects of dif-
ferent lenses, depth of field, rack focusing, and panning-and-tracking movements.
As a result, the illusion of depth and motion perspective is much more powerful in
digital animation, and these films capture far more of the visual qualities of live-
action features than 2D animation could accomplish.
Furthermore, digital animation can be more efficient because the animator only
needs to create key frames , those points at which the characters’ positions change
substantially. Once the key frames are specified, the computer will then fill in all the
intervening frames of motion.
The efficiency and creative power of digital have led to a significant increase
in the production of animated features. Until the 1990s, animated features were
relatively rare and hardly existed outside of Disney. Now, however, they are plen-
tiful and are among the biggest box office films of any given year.
Two studios—Pixar and DreamWorks—have specialized in digital animation fea-
tures. Pixar formed in 1986 and signed a coproduction deal with Disney in 1991, and
its first feature was Toy Story (1995). Other Pixar hits include Monsters, Inc. (2001),
Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004). Pixar combined high-quality digi-
tal animation with an innovative blend of humor aimed at adults as well as children.
This blend has proven extremely popular—parents enjoy these films along with their
children.
THE LOST WORLD (FIRST
NATIONAL, 1925)
3D animation has deep roots
in cinema, going back to the
silent era. The dinosaurs in this
special-effects film were animated
as miniature models (18 inches
high) by moving and photo-
graphing them a frame at a time,
with a portion of each frame
blocked (matted) from exposure.
The film was then rewound,
with the exposed area matted
this time. Live actors were then
photographed in the area of the
frame that had been originally
matted and unexposed. The
finished image combined live ac-
tion (the actor in the lower-right
frame) and animation (the bron-
tosaurus). Frame enlargement.
375

Modes of Screen Reality
DreamWorks’ features— Antz (1998), Prince of Egypt (1998), Shrek (2001),
Shrek 2 (2004), Shark Tale (2004), and Madagascar (2005)—offer a similar blend of
state-of-the-art computer animation with adult wit and children’s gags.
A key factor in the success of these films is the use of star voices. This dates
from Robin Williams’s turn as the wizard in Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Tom Hanks
and Tim Allen voiced Toy Story , and Renee Zellweger and Will Smith voiced
Shark Tale (2004). More recently, stars have been paid enormous revenues to do
these films. DreamWorks paid $10 million apiece to Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz,
and Eddie Murphy for Shrek 2. Ancillary rights bring in even more money, with
a 5 percent royalty on all merchandise using an actor’s voice. On this scale, Eddie
Murphy would get 50 cents from the sale of every $10 talking toy based on his
donkey character.
In this regard, digital animation has brought cartoon features into the world of
movie blockbusters, requiring high-power stars and aggressive marketing in order to
generate tremendous revenue streams.
PERFORMANCE CAPTURE In the world of 2D animation, the rotoscope was invented
in 1917 and was used occasionally to project live-action footage onto a cell, and an
animator then drew over the top of the photographic image. In this case, rather than
being combined with animation, the live action furnished a visual template for the
animation.
UP (PIXAR, 2009)
The virtual camera—computer simulation of camera movement, angle, and lens
perspective—has revolutionized animation, and the increasing sophistication of digital
software enables animators to create detailed renderings of three-dimensional fantasy
worlds. The animated feature film has returned in digital form as a contemporary
blockbuster. Pixar’s films look back to the Disney tradition in that photorealism is not the
goal. Instead, like Disney’s animators, Pixar’s artists embrace caricature as a means of
creating believable characters and getting to emotional truth. Frame enlargement.
376

Modes of Screen Reality
In the digital world, performance capture works in a similar way, using a live ac-
tor’s performance as the model for an animated figure. The actor wears a special suit
with reflective markers at the joints and is filmed by multiple cameras, each of which
sends a beam of light to the markers. The light is reflected back into the camera lens
and recorded onto film as a series of white dots against a black background. The dots
correspond to the location of the reflectors and provide a 2D portrait of the filmed
movement. By comparing in a computer the views taken by the multiple cameras, a
3D model of the movement is created.
Robert Zemeckis made The Polar Express (2004) in this fashion. Actor Tom
Hanks, in a skin-tight body suit and with 152 reflective pellets on his face (to
capture facial expressions), was filmed by more than 100 cameras. Digitizing his
performance and rendering it as animation enabled him to play five different char-
acters, including a child, inhabiting an all-digital world. The results were somewhat
less than satisfactory—the faces of the animated characters looked flat and un-
expressive. Zemeckis used the technique again on Beowulf (2007), with approxi-
mately the same results.
Zemeckis brought 2D animation to one of its greatest achievements in Who
Framed Roger Rabbit. He believes that performance capture and digital animation
will be tremendously liberating to the filmmaker, with nothing that cannot be visual-
ized, the only limits being those of the imagination. At the same time, this method
represents a digital extension of an old and traditional technique, namely, rotoscoped
images.
The Future of Animation
Animation is an enduring mode of cinema, and it has co-existed with live-action mov-
ies since the beginning of the medium. The pleasures offered by animation lie in its
ability to depart from photographic realism in order to create a visual world that is
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (DISNEY, 2009)
Jim Carrey (right) plays Scrooge in this animated version of Dickens’ Christmas tale.
Carrey’s performance was transformed into digital animation for director Robert
Zemeckis, who has made a series of performance capture-based films. In them, Zemeckis
aims to give animation a strikingly photo-realist appearance. Frame enlargement.
377

Modes of Screen Reality
more imaginative and magical than what live action can accomplish. A photographic
image is more constrained by time and space than an animated image. The talking fish
of Finding Nemo seem quite real as animated beings; they wouldn’t seem real if the
filmmaker tried to make the film by photographing actual fish. Whether 2D or 3D,
animation will always be present as an essential mode of cinema, enabling filmmakers
to create works of imagination that they could not achieve with live action.
SUMMARY
Because the camera has a double capacity, functioning as a medium that can both
record properties of the visual world set before it and manipulate and transform
the appearance of that world, filmmakers can create differing styles or modes of
screen reality. The mode of ordinary fictional realism employs an audiovisual and
narrative design that aims to replicate on screen, with a fair degree of resemblance,
the spectator’s understanding of space, time, causality, and the dynamics of human
behavior.
The expressionistic mode makes available to filmmakers a range of extremely
explicit stylistic distortions and manipulations that are used to express heightened,
extreme, or abnormal states of feeling, thought, or behavior. The mode of fantasy and
the fantastic establishes a realm of time and space far removed from ordinary reality
in which character behavior can retain recognizably human dimensions or possess
magical and extraordinary powers and abilities. The mode of animation frees film-
makers from the constraints of live action, enabling them to populate a screen world
with talking non-human characters and bend the laws of time, space, and behavior
even more radically than in the mode of fantasy.
The mode of cinematic self-reflexivity is available to filmmakers who wish to re-
veal and display the constructed and artificial basis of the cinema. Typically, filmmak-
ers employ this mode for either a comic effect or for communicating an urgent social
message directly to their audience. In the latter case, filmmakers will use this mode
if they feel that the necessity of having to speak indirectly through characters and a
story will prevent them from getting their message across or may leave the message
itself muddied and muddled.
While the cinema has several distinct stylistic modes available to it, the divisions
and boundaries between these modes are not hard and fast. In fact, many films in-
corporate one or more distinct modes. Musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain and An
American in Paris , for example, typically draw on ordinary fictional realism as well as
fantasy and the fantastic. These stylistic modes are extremely flexible, and filmmakers
can move in and out of several different modes.
Screen reality is constructed partly by the manipulations of film design discussed
in this chapter, and it can vary widely across films. It is, however, also constructed by
viewers. Representational reality seems real only when a viewer decides that it does.
Representational conventions change over time, as does the viewer’s response to them.
Contemporary audiences react with disbelief when gunshot victims in 1940s movies
clutch their stomachs, double over, and slowly sink out of frame. Screen reality exists
in relation to viewers who judge its perceived levels of credibility and validity. By ma-
nipulating film structure, filmmakers hope to influence viewers’ judgments, but their
ability to control viewer response is limited. Like so much else about film, the creation
of screen reality is a collaborative production.
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Modes of Screen Reality
SUGGESTED READINGS
Jonathan Bresman, The Art of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (New York: Del
Rey, 1999).
Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989).
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992).
Irving Singer, Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1998).
Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (New York: Del Rey,
1996).
KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
animation
cells
cinematic self-
reflexivity
digital animation
direct cinema
documentary
documentary
realism
expressionism
fantasy and the
fantastic
historical realism
key frames
mockumentary
multiplane camera
neo-realism
ordinary fictional
realism
performance capture
realism
rotoscope
screen reality
stop-motion
animation
3D animation
2D animation
virtual camera
379

380

Index
Index
Page references followed by “f” indicate illustrated
figures or photographs; followed by “t” indicates a
table.
1
1984, 55, 62, 64, 78, 85-86, 200-201, 275, 284, 313,
332, 345-346, 358
A
Accent, 257
Accuracy, 113
Action, 1-8, 10-11, 14, 17, 20-23, 26, 31, 33, 37, 39,
41-42, 48, 50-51, 53-54, 64, 69, 72-74, 82,
86, 98, 102, 105, 109, 111-112, 114, 124,
128, 132, 136, 149, 152, 157, 160-161,
163-164, 167-175, 178-183, 185, 189-190,
193, 200-201, 203-204, 206, 208-209,
211-212, 216, 220, 223, 225, 230-231, 233,
239, 241, 243-246, 249-250, 252, 255, 258,
260, 274-275, 278, 285, 289, 291, 293, 296,
300-301, 303-307, 309, 316, 318-319, 327,
341, 344, 355, 358-359, 363, 365-370,
372-378
Adaptation, 78, 274
Advice, 249, 333-334
advocacy, 339-340
Affection, 362
Affirmation, 278, 280
Age, 17-18, 157, 181, 203, 234, 250, 264-267,
269-270, 272, 329, 333-334, 370-371
Aggressive, 151-152, 156-157, 178-179, 193, 267,
376
Ambiguity, 245-246, 257, 343, 361
Amplification, 123, 125
Analysis, 178, 249
Annie Hall, 58, 159-160, 240, 328, 362, 364
Appearance, 9, 22, 36, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 77, 88, 127,
140-143, 282, 285, 293, 325, 329, 346-348,
352-353, 363, 377-378
Argument, 5, 60, 143, 364
Arguments, 343
Arrangement, 2, 4, 8, 17, 19, 62, 80, 180, 227
Artifacts, 294-295, 305, 316
Assertive, 213, 218, 329, 337
Assimilation, 285
Assumptions, 63, 215, 250, 257, 338
Attack, 91, 178, 201, 205-206, 246, 274, 280, 295,
312-313, 336, 339, 359
character, 91, 201, 206, 246
Attention, 2, 4, 21-23, 39, 42-43, 45, 61, 89, 98, 101,
103, 129-130, 136, 140, 154-155, 163, 175,
220, 228, 234, 244, 279, 313, 327-328, 331,
363, 365, 370
styles of, 21
Attitude, 30, 196, 204, 366
Attitudes, 160, 233, 311
Attraction, 122-123, 231, 246
Attribution, 6, 8
Audience, 7, 10-11, 17, 26-30, 43, 45, 90, 112, 123,
125-127, 133, 146, 188, 190, 201, 205,
208-209, 213-214, 225, 235-237, 255-256,
259, 261, 272, 277, 285, 288, 308, 326, 329,
345-346, 357, 364-365, 367, 370, 378
age of, 17, 272, 329, 370
challenging, 146
defined, 26, 29, 190, 225, 259
diversity of, 261
feedback, 127
immediate, 127, 277
information about, 27
knowledge of, 125
motivation, 256
needs of, 90
secondary, 11, 285
size of, 11
universal, 237, 308
Audiences, 1, 4, 11, 14, 29-30, 52, 58, 76, 93, 118,
127, 129, 131, 172, 196, 202, 205, 218, 233,
235-236, 245, 263, 267, 269, 272-273, 291,
312, 314, 326, 329, 336, 338, 344, 358-359,
367, 369, 375, 378
Authority, 3, 16, 18-19, 98, 116, 150, 196, 241, 244,
263-264, 266
appeals to, 263
B
Behavior, 7-8, 10, 29, 33, 52-53, 73, 105, 116,
134-135, 144-146, 175, 246, 262, 325-326,
329, 333-334, 354, 378
Belief, 85, 141, 285, 329, 366, 368
Beliefs, 6
Bias, 151
body, 10, 18, 21-23, 27, 34, 41, 50, 70, 84, 106, 119,
122, 128, 133, 136-137, 140, 153, 197,
226-227, 239, 265, 270, 274, 284, 335, 337,
347-348, 361, 377
Body language, 136
Books, 59, 97, 107, 136, 228, 249, 323
Bridge, 2, 10, 36, 106, 207, 223-225, 228, 298, 355
Burnout, 69, 94
Business, 3, 78, 98, 107, 140, 210, 256, 306
Bypassing, 344-345
C
Causality, 4, 6, 229, 245-246, 248, 256, 286, 378
Certainty, 241
Changes, 6-7, 19, 34, 36, 39, 60, 79, 81-82, 85-86,
103, 129, 132, 151-152, 164, 167, 170, 201,
217, 219, 221, 223, 231, 233, 256, 313, 316,
319, 322, 327, 329, 344, 358
Channel, 1, 189-194, 220, 227, 296, 314, 323, 358
Channels, 24, 67, 189, 191-193, 296
Character, 2, 6-12, 14, 19, 21, 23-24, 26-27, 30,
33-34, 39-40, 42-43, 45, 52-54, 61, 64, 72,
76, 80-81, 83, 85-86, 91, 93, 97-98, 100,
103, 107, 122-127, 130-146, 154, 158-161,
163, 167-168, 170-171, 173, 179, 189, 195,
198-201, 203, 206, 208-209, 213-215, 218,
220, 222-223, 226-227, 230, 233, 235,
238-239, 242-246, 249, 252, 259, 263-264,
267, 281-282, 284, 286, 289, 302, 306, 309,
317, 321, 325-326, 329, 331-332, 334, 338,
347, 350-353, 362-363, 366-367, 369-370,
372, 376, 378
Charisma, 130-131, 196, 265
Claim, 43
Claims, 62, 195
Clarity, 78, 97, 122, 134, 239, 278, 373
Classical period, 281, 284
Climate, 109, 175-176, 352
Closure, 252, 255
Coherence, 100, 164, 185
commentary, 103, 105, 252, 336, 338, 343
Commitment, 143
Communication, 10, 71
perception and, 10
principles of, 10
Communities, 327, 333, 338, 341
Comparisons, 144-145
Complementing, 304
Compromise, 19
Computer software, 1-2, 53
Computers, 87, 122, 313
Conflict, 33, 76, 98, 175, 178, 258-259, 279-280, 334
content, 178
culture and, 175
defined, 259
principles of, 178
relationship, 259
Consensus, 277
Constraints, 126, 368, 378
Construct, 113, 152, 181, 215, 227, 252, 352
Constructs, 237, 360-361
Contemporary period, 7, 195
Context, 17, 26, 31, 54, 62, 86, 91, 93, 135, 144, 163,
167, 175, 200-202, 207, 213, 236, 242, 277,
285, 289, 343, 345, 354, 358, 365
characteristics of, 201, 236
culture and, 144, 175
Contrast, 2-6, 10-11, 15, 17, 21, 23, 26, 35-36, 38-40,
43, 48-49, 59-60, 63, 77, 79-80, 83-87,
93-94, 103, 112, 114, 116, 123, 125-127,
129, 146, 175, 191-192, 196, 206, 213, 216,
219, 223, 232-233, 235, 239-240, 245, 249,
260, 267, 270, 272, 275, 278, 282-283, 293,
315, 327, 331, 347, 354, 361
Control, 7, 16, 18-19, 58, 60, 75, 88, 116, 122, 151,
161, 181, 206, 222, 257, 284, 309-310, 312,
314-315, 343, 366-368, 378
Conversation, 4, 10, 37, 55, 78, 159, 167, 195, 214,
219, 326
principles of, 10, 195, 214, 219, 326
Coordination, 118
Credibility, 128, 315, 325, 356-357, 378
Criticism, 1, 3, 5-7, 9-10, 134, 340
behavior and, 134
Critiques, 279
Crowe, Russell, 143, 190, 327
Cruise, Tom, 37, 171, 190
Cues, 3, 5, 7, 24, 53-54, 150, 180, 203, 209, 250, 299,
318-319, 323, 327, 338
Culture, 23, 114, 144, 175-176, 246, 263, 271, 273,
311, 344, 362
gestures and, 23
relationships and, 23
time and, 175, 273
Cynicism, 30, 129
D
Dalai Lama, 111
Data, 3, 87, 191, 314
Dating, 75
Debates, 337
Deception, 173
Decision-making, 278
Decoding, 191, 193
Definition, 5, 52, 77, 87, 94, 192-193, 312-313
Delivery, 67, 196, 345
democracy, 275
Description, 3, 14, 88, 203
Diagrams, 39
Dialect, 132
Dialogue, 1, 3, 9-10, 12, 14, 33, 47, 123-125, 134,
158, 167, 178, 187-188, 195, 197, 199-200,
204, 207, 211-212, 214-217, 221-223,
226-228, 230, 241, 250, 253-254, 267-268,
327-328, 341, 344, 356
Direct symbolization, 206
Discourse, 286
Dissatisfaction, 263
Diversity, 261
Dominance, 37
Drawings, 10, 97, 107, 368-369
Dress, 16, 103, 109, 333-334
DVDs, 192
E
Emblems, 362
Emotion, 7-8, 15, 23-24, 27, 80, 122-123, 126, 134,
139, 144, 206, 208, 216, 227, 233, 254, 366
expression of, 123
universal, 23, 80, 144
Emotional expression, 24, 137
Emotional states, 141, 348
Emotions, 3-4, 7, 11, 14, 23, 25-27, 32, 125, 134-135,
138-139, 143-146, 190, 203, 211, 218, 233,
252, 272, 332, 367
Empathy, 23-24, 145, 263
feeling, 23
thinking, 23
381

Emphasis, 16, 32, 37, 42, 155, 200, 211, 274, 340,
367
Encoding, 136, 140, 191
Environment, 1, 6, 8-10, 21-22, 26, 54, 113-114,
116-117, 179, 188, 192, 194, 200-201, 212,
215-216, 219-220, 228, 250, 275, 283, 293,
309, 314-315, 317, 341-342
Episode, 12, 105, 191, 196, 201, 231, 238-239, 273,
312, 356, 366, 379
Episodes, 84, 160, 245-246, 338, 356
Ethics, 338
Evaluating, 37, 144, 257
evaluation, 366
Evidence, 3, 129, 144, 172, 233, 236
Exaggeration, 24-25, 92
Examples, 11, 45, 60, 82, 103, 106, 114, 139, 244,
277-278, 288, 291, 318, 322, 351
using, 11, 82, 103, 106, 288, 291, 318, 322
Experiments, 348-349
Expression, 1-2, 8, 13, 23-26, 31, 45, 53, 83, 103, 123,
125, 137-139, 144, 176, 182, 223, 266, 282,
290, 342
facial, 8, 13, 23-25, 53, 103, 125, 137-138, 144,
182
Eye contact, 23
meaning of, 23
F
Face, 2, 6, 22, 24, 26, 30, 35, 40, 42, 45, 52-53,
61-62, 75-76, 79-80, 89, 111, 122, 132,
137-139, 141-144, 154, 161, 163, 171-172,
179, 182, 196, 198, 223, 231, 233, 244, 270,
272, 319, 339, 350, 361-362, 377
Facebook, 87, 188
Facial expression, 8, 13, 23-25, 53, 103, 144, 182
Facial expressions, 24, 51, 54, 137-138, 163, 369, 377
Fact, 1, 9, 19, 23, 28, 36, 52-53, 70, 100, 111,
124-125, 128, 189, 198, 204, 222, 235, 239,
278-279, 289, 306, 311, 338, 341, 343, 378
facts, 107, 235, 241-242
Familiarity, 173, 362
Family, 18-19, 29-30, 32, 43, 77, 101, 133, 182, 224,
233, 246-247, 269, 273, 330, 338, 343, 352
fears, 29, 92, 275-276
Feedback, 98, 127
Fields, 46, 52, 58, 157, 225
Film and video, 185
films, 1-2, 4-12, 14, 16-21, 25-26, 29-32, 34, 38,
42-43, 46-51, 53, 55, 58-59, 62, 65-72, 75,
77-78, 80-81, 83-84, 86-88, 90-91, 93,
95-97, 99-103, 105-107, 109-110, 114,
116-118, 122, 124, 126-129, 131-133, 136,
138-141, 143, 146-147, 150-151, 155-158,
160, 164, 171-172, 174-176, 178-179, 183,
188, 191-194, 196-202, 206, 210-212,
215-219, 221-225, 230-234, 237, 240-242,
244-245, 248-249, 251-254, 257-262,
265-267, 269-275, 277-286, 288-291, 296,
301-304, 306, 309, 311-315, 318, 322,
326-348, 350, 354-359, 361-368, 370, 372,
374-378
Flexibility, 223, 338, 357
Force, 15, 60, 76, 130, 178, 190, 237, 261, 281, 300,
361
Frames, 5-6, 42, 45, 51-52, 68, 75, 126, 151, 157,
174, 180, 195, 199-200, 203, 239-240, 326,
364, 374-375, 379
Friendship, 43
G
Gaze, 61, 80, 289, 298
Gender, 4
Genres, 26, 100, 196, 230, 233, 257-258, 260-261,
273-274, 281, 306
Gesture, 23, 26, 123, 125-126, 134, 139, 144
Gestures, 11, 13, 23, 125-126, 135, 139, 147
Gibson, Mel, 43, 58-59
Group, 5, 7, 44, 153, 201, 216, 221, 249-250, 254,
290, 339, 345-346, 358, 374
characteristics of, 201
primary, 5, 345
think, 345
Groups, 43, 90, 158, 178, 210, 223, 240, 249, 257,
367
focus, 43, 158, 240, 249
Gullah, 198
H
Hair, 294-295, 352
Halo effect, 91
Hearing, 192, 206, 222
Hierarchy, 1, 10, 215-217, 228, 246
Honesty, 123, 146, 235
Humor, 222, 339, 346, 362, 364, 375
Hurricane Katrina, 97
I
Identification, 5
Identity, 83, 136, 140, 255, 259, 271-272
Illustration, 214, 347-348
Illustrators, 59, 99
Imagery, 4, 11, 18, 33, 49, 58, 69, 87, 111, 117, 128,
164, 193, 259, 281, 305, 322, 341, 348, 354,
361, 365
Immediacy, 72
Index, 334
Inferences, 146, 163
Inflection, 23
Influence, 2, 9, 13, 15, 19, 59, 63, 69-70, 98, 116-117,
126, 134, 145, 157, 178-179, 222, 251-252,
254, 257, 263, 269, 273, 281-282, 311-313,
332, 365-367, 378
Information, 1-3, 5-6, 8, 10-11, 19, 27, 31, 42, 51-53,
77, 79, 81, 86, 88, 95, 98, 113-114, 138-140,
144, 153, 155, 161, 163, 165, 167, 172, 175,
178-179, 188-189, 191-193, 212-216,
219-220, 222-223, 225, 231, 243-244, 246,
248, 254-257, 283, 285, 294, 318-319, 339,
341, 356, 366, 370
negative, 6, 11, 27
power and, 189
sources of, 1, 6
Innovations, 60, 91, 370
Inputs, 16
Interaction, 2, 256, 296
Interest, 6, 17, 53, 73, 81, 139, 161, 167, 181, 232,
245, 272, 275, 285, 358
Internet, 67, 344-345
interpretation, 1, 3, 5-6, 8, 122, 163, 228, 256-257
perception and, 256
Interpreting, 145, 336
Interviews, 94, 119, 228, 336, 339, 344-346
preparation for, 345
Intimacy, 22, 26, 234
Intolerance, 106, 175, 233-234
Introductions, 30, 362
Invasion, 47, 49, 216, 274, 373
Invention, 208, 218, 232, 269, 304, 319, 357, 369
Irony, 116, 180-181, 346, 365
Isolates, 37, 167
Issues, 1-5, 10, 18, 20, 35, 43, 50, 69, 74, 76, 96-97,
168, 245, 257, 280, 316, 337-338, 379
J
Jokes, 198, 222, 362-364
Journals, 311
Judgment, 145
K
Kerry, John, 340
knowledge, 61, 107, 125, 144, 150, 243, 315, 319,
343, 366
L
Language, 9, 132, 136, 195-196, 336
characteristics of, 9
elements of, 9, 136, 195
meaning, 9, 336
sounds, 9
technical, 9
Leader, 84
Libraries, 218
Lighting, 2-6, 8-10, 14, 17, 25, 32, 57, 59-60, 63,
69-77, 79-86, 88-91, 93-94, 96, 106, 109,
112, 114, 117-118, 122-124, 126, 138,
143-144, 150, 176, 197, 244, 267, 270,
281-285, 304-305, 314, 316, 326-327,
330-331, 345, 347-348, 353, 370, 373, 375
Links, 146, 154, 223, 245-246, 260, 327, 352
Listening, 154, 172, 192, 208, 211-212, 228, 364
effective, 364
ways of, 208
Love, 2, 19, 26, 29, 43, 73, 132, 137-138, 143, 145,
164, 182, 189, 196, 207, 211, 219, 246, 252,
267, 269, 285, 334, 355, 373
Lucas, George, 5, 12, 17, 77, 87, 156-157, 218, 235,
277, 311, 323, 356, 358-359, 361
Lying, 32, 182
M
Magazines, 89
Mapping, 1-3, 114, 118, 296, 323, 375
Maps, 109
Marriage, 18, 132, 145, 199, 207
Matrix, 8, 51, 53-54, 59, 61, 127, 273, 275, 357
Mean, 143, 255, 373
Meaning, 1-4, 6, 8-10, 13, 21, 23, 45, 57-58, 76, 80,
83, 86, 95, 121, 149, 178-179, 187, 202,
205, 212-214, 226, 228, 229, 233, 256-257,
287-288, 325, 327, 334, 336-337, 379
multiple, 8-9, 202, 233, 325, 337
surface, 1, 4, 327
Media, 12, 116, 251, 339
messages, 116
movies, 251
Medieval period, 211
Memory, 64, 160, 239-240
Men, 41, 43, 48, 62, 70, 72, 76, 99, 103, 109, 115,
130, 151, 156, 184, 198, 204, 211-212,
217-218, 239, 249, 261, 275, 282, 301, 339
Message, 378
Messages, 103, 116, 367
Metaphor, 45, 75, 88, 93, 176, 190
Mode, 2, 4-5, 7-10, 248, 325-329, 332-333, 336-338,
345-347, 354-358, 360-362, 364, 368-369,
373, 377-378
Models, 1, 8, 10-11, 96, 98-99, 103, 113, 118, 138,
252, 273, 288-291, 300, 303, 310-315, 319,
357, 368, 373-375
Modern period, 156-157
monitors, 1, 8, 52, 64, 116
Monotone, 138
Moods, 93, 161, 302
Moore, Michael, 336, 339-340
Motivation, 98, 175, 256
Movement, 1-2, 5, 7-8, 10-12, 13, 17, 20, 22, 28, 36,
38-47, 50-51, 53-55, 62, 82, 86, 89, 114,
138, 150, 158, 164, 169-170, 172, 176-178,
214, 217, 219, 221, 233, 250, 258, 268, 296,
309-310, 315, 319, 331-332, 340, 358, 366,
368, 370-371, 376-377
facial, 8, 13, 51, 53-54, 138, 377
Movies, 1, 13-14, 17, 32, 34, 51-53, 55, 57, 68, 87, 93,
95, 101, 106, 110, 121, 125, 127, 129, 132,
134, 145, 149, 157, 172, 187, 191-193,
195-196, 204, 208-209, 211, 215, 218, 221,
228, 229-233, 235, 237, 242, 249, 251-254,
256-257, 273, 275, 282, 284-285, 287, 289,
300, 303, 306, 311-313, 315, 318-319, 322,
325, 331-332, 337, 343, 362-364, 377-378
N
Narrative, 1-12, 17, 19, 27-30, 33, 43, 45, 58-59,
76-77, 81, 83-86, 93, 118, 123-124, 139,
144-147, 152, 158, 160-161, 164, 185, 199,
229-286, 322-323, 325-327, 329, 334,
336-338, 350, 354, 356-357, 361, 364-367,
378
Needs, 53, 90, 111, 147, 172, 218, 220, 223, 232, 312,
331, 334, 375
establishing, 172, 223
Newspapers, 199
Noise, 52, 191, 211, 217, 219-220, 226, 252, 358
electronic, 52, 219, 358
emotional, 219
Norms, 138, 263, 334, 364
Notes, 138, 150-152
O
Objectivity, 339-340
Organization, 3-4, 14, 58, 83, 93, 96, 111, 184, 235,
249, 285, 335, 365
characteristics of, 4
proximity and, 4
Others, 9, 16, 52-53, 88, 131, 134, 157, 163, 171, 199,
211, 220, 246, 256-257, 272-274, 279,
281-282, 329, 339, 344, 371
Outputs, 52
Overlaps, 3, 83, 118, 153-154, 354
P
Pace, 3, 17, 20, 45, 132, 160-161, 175, 180, 208, 268
paintings, 1, 7, 10, 12, 58-59, 99, 102, 104, 110-112,
114, 118, 250, 282, 288-289, 296, 301,
382

306-307, 309, 311-312, 315-317
Panel, 106, 109
Paradox, 32, 164, 329, 366
Pathos, 26, 206
Pauses, 226, 244, 364
Peers, 71, 93, 117
Perception, 8, 10, 14, 50-52, 167, 172, 213, 217, 225,
256, 273, 319, 341, 370
communication, 10
defined, 225
interpretation, 8, 256
interpretation of, 8
nature of, 256, 273
of differences, 213
organization, 14
person, 51
processes, 256
understanding of, 14, 52, 167
Perceptions, 4, 8, 63
Persona, 11, 70, 129-130, 136, 147, 241, 339, 362
Personal experience, 7, 11, 134, 241
Personal space, 23
Personality, 11, 53, 59, 97, 103, 129-130, 132, 135,
137, 144, 146, 159, 189-190, 196, 199,
201-202, 219, 369-370
Perspective, 1-2, 5-10, 12, 26, 28-29, 35-41, 43-44,
48, 50, 53-55, 62, 81, 86, 112, 117, 151, 172,
185, 188, 206, 215, 217, 219-222, 228,
242-244, 286, 287, 289, 296-297, 299-300,
314-316, 318-319, 322-323, 349-351, 370,
375-376
psychological, 9, 12, 86, 206, 228, 244
Photographs, 8, 31, 55, 101, 103, 107, 112-114, 168,
239-240, 282, 304, 307, 333
Physical appearance, 140, 347-348
Play, 14, 23, 52, 54, 99, 122-127, 131-137, 143, 146,
191, 196, 203, 219, 221-222, 230, 235, 251,
285, 287, 305, 309, 315, 317, 340, 362,
364-367, 377
Political power, 264
Population, 232
Position, 2, 5-6, 10-11, 13, 19-21, 23, 26, 31-32, 36,
47, 54-55, 81-82, 124-125, 146, 157,
164-165, 167-170, 174, 215, 228, 233, 244,
264, 315, 318, 320-321, 326, 334, 347, 352
Posture, 23, 137
Power, 25, 40, 60-61, 73, 77, 88-89, 101, 128, 131,
136, 173, 177, 184, 189-190, 193, 225-226,
233, 241, 262-264, 282, 285, 323, 332, 334,
336-337, 339, 343, 350-351, 361, 367,
375-376
information, 77, 88, 189, 193, 225, 285, 339
language and, 136
legitimate, 233
principles of, 189-190, 193, 225-226, 233
referent, 336
types of, 262, 339
Powerlessness, 27
premises, 361
Presentation, 66, 68, 183, 202, 244, 268
movement, 268
pauses, 244
pauses in, 244
Presentations, 231
Pressure, 210
Production, 1, 3-4, 6-9, 11-12, 13-18, 21-22, 47, 49-50,
53, 55, 58-60, 67-69, 71, 83, 86, 88, 90, 94,
95-119, 123-124, 129, 133, 141, 146-147,
149-150, 156, 160, 170, 184, 199-200, 203,
212, 218-219, 228, 229-230, 232, 241,
244-245, 248, 253-254, 260-261, 266,
274-275, 283, 290, 299, 303, 311, 313, 319,
322, 325, 327, 331-333, 345, 348, 354,
357-358, 371, 375, 378
projectors, 66, 86, 191, 219
Pronouns, 242
Proof, 337
Proximity, 2, 4, 26-27, 37, 260
Psychology, 10, 80
Purpose, 73, 161, 245, 247, 319, 360
Q
Questions, 14, 29, 248, 271, 284, 340, 360
Quotations, 90
R
Race, 17, 42, 232, 275-276, 296-297, 357
Racism, 233, 367
Radio, 50, 201, 210, 215, 226, 252, 367
Receiver, 193, 215
Receiving, 191
Reconstruction, 233
Recorders, 344
Reeve, Christopher, 293
References, 11, 58, 144, 163, 252, 342, 362-364
Referent, 336, 338
Reflexivity, 2, 326, 361-362, 364-365, 367, 378-379
Relationships, 2, 11, 16-17, 23, 26-27, 31, 36, 39, 55,
158, 160, 163, 208, 215, 217, 222-223, 225,
228, 245, 250, 269, 285, 313
definition of, 313
depth of, 11, 36, 55
love and, 269
primary, 228
types of, 39
Remembering, 199
Renaissance, 58, 110
Repetition, 93, 178, 188, 208, 250, 257-258
Reporting, 143, 345
Representations, 2, 267
Reproduction, 4, 60
Research, 103, 107, 311, 313, 333, 358
books, 107
examples, 103
online, 358
Resonance, 19
Responding, 53, 167, 210
Response, 6, 8, 13, 27, 29, 31, 55, 110, 143-146, 163,
171, 201, 311, 331, 336, 340, 361, 378
Rhetoric, 9, 286, 367
Rhythm, 6, 157-158, 160, 174, 176, 208, 342
Roberts, Julia, 130, 152, 171, 185, 200, 207
Robots, 219
Roles, 129, 132-134, 139, 287
individual, 129
Romanticism, 129
Rules, 51, 70-71, 149-150, 163, 172, 178, 185, 188,
215, 222, 257, 261, 263, 346
cultural, 172, 263
S
Sandler, Adam, 171
Scorsese, Martin, 16, 37, 42, 77, 92, 111, 157, 262,
266, 298, 329, 352
Scripts, 16, 101, 230
Self, 2, 30, 43, 83, 154, 250, 252, 254, 262, 268, 293,
326, 329, 331, 342, 361-368, 378
material, 342
open, 250, 252, 262, 331, 361
social, 43, 262, 326, 329, 342, 364-365, 367, 378
spiritual, 83
Self-awareness, 83
Self-disclosure, 365-367
Self-reflexiveness, 366
Separates, 171
Separation, 3, 6, 80, 154, 200, 319
Sequence, 4, 6, 8, 10-11, 17, 43, 45, 47, 51-52, 70,
103, 136, 150, 155, 160-161, 172, 177-178,
181, 185, 206-207, 209, 217, 223, 237, 245,
253, 275, 277, 284, 289, 298, 302, 304,
307-309, 327, 334, 339, 342, 349-350, 352,
361, 363, 365, 367-368
Siblings, 83
Signs, 8, 24, 51, 54, 144, 179, 252, 304
Silence, 74, 143, 145-146, 172, 209, 211
Similarity, 116, 123, 338
Simplicity, 234
Simulation, 12, 57, 69, 72, 376
Sincerity, 144-145
Slang, 284
Social class, 140, 334
Social groups, 367
Social identity, 140
Source, 1, 6, 8-9, 11, 51-52, 57, 59, 63, 69-70, 72, 75,
77, 79-80, 93, 98, 109, 201-202, 209-210,
213, 219-220, 223, 225, 271, 304, 370
Sources, 1, 4, 6-7, 9-10, 59, 69-70, 72, 74, 80, 189,
204, 213, 219, 225-226, 268, 272
Space, 1-3, 7-8, 10-11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 33, 35-36,
39-41, 45, 50, 52-53, 65, 77, 79-81, 98, 101,
106, 116, 173-177, 179-181, 183, 185,
188-189, 191-193, 201, 215, 217-218,
220-226, 228, 233, 236, 250, 273-276,
291-292, 300, 304, 307, 309-310, 312, 315,
318-319, 321-322, 326-327, 341, 354, 356,
358, 361, 368-369, 371, 373, 375, 378
personal, 1-2, 7, 11, 23, 326
power and, 40, 189, 233
Speaker, 191, 215, 220
Speakers, 10, 167, 189-191, 193, 227
speaking, 10, 27, 122, 196, 236, 253, 300, 364
Speech, 3, 10, 103, 195-197, 199, 213, 215, 227-228
Spelling, 344
Stalking, 225, 352
Star, 5, 9, 11-12, 17-18, 24, 87, 98, 105, 110-111,
125-126, 129-132, 136-137, 146-147, 156,
191, 196, 201, 203, 210, 217-219, 224, 235,
241, 249, 252, 259, 266, 273, 275, 277, 285,
310-313, 355-356, 358-359, 361, 363-364,
369, 372, 376, 379
statements, 99, 104
Status, 9, 129, 236, 248, 254, 263, 285, 345, 364, 366
Stereotype, 205
Stereotypes, 205
Stories, 29, 51, 80, 163, 175, 178, 196, 198, 230,
232-235, 251-252, 257-259, 267-268, 271,
281-282, 284-286, 288, 296, 322, 329, 344
Stress, 2, 6, 21-22, 54, 91, 138, 205-206, 213, 259,
279-280
Style, 1, 3-5, 7-8, 11-12, 13-15, 18, 25, 29, 32, 34,
47-48, 53-55, 58-60, 69-70, 80-81, 90-91,
93-94, 99-100, 102, 106-107, 109, 111, 117,
123, 129, 134, 136-144, 146-147, 151-152,
156-157, 163, 175-176, 178, 184-185, 188,
196, 203, 205, 210, 223, 228, 233, 241,
252-253, 257, 261-262, 267-268, 282-285,
304, 315, 327-333, 335-337, 339, 342-343,
345, 347-349, 354-355, 357, 362-367
ambiguity, 257, 343
defined, 29, 93, 262, 284
irony, 365
language and, 136
level of, 5, 80-81, 93, 139, 329
Substitution, 218, 289, 291
Summarizing, 249
Summation, 30
Support, 41, 213, 236
Surprise, 11, 139, 144, 172, 254-256, 286
Surveillance, 163, 214, 276
Surveys, 90, 288
Symbol, 93, 177, 265
Symbols, 350
Sympathy, 190, 263
System, 1-2, 4, 6-7, 10-12, 29-30, 41, 107, 150-152,
163-164, 167, 171, 185, 189, 191, 263, 280,
291-292, 296, 304, 306, 309, 311-312, 315,
358, 374
T
Taboo, 11, 365
Taboos, 365
Tattoos, 239
Team, 3, 16, 114, 118, 158, 172, 212, 241, 332, 370,
374
Technological advances, 358
Technology, 4, 47, 201, 203, 221, 272, 311, 333, 354,
358-360
Telephone, 12, 137, 224-225, 342
Television, 1, 6-8, 10, 12, 30, 50, 62-67, 83, 101,
132-133, 157, 175-176, 182, 191, 218-219,
251, 275, 339, 342, 344-346, 371
Tension, 11, 17, 61, 78, 91, 109, 157, 163, 211-212,
245-246, 335
Test, 76
Thought, 29, 107, 134, 177-178, 188, 205, 233, 252,
378
Time, 4-6, 10-11, 13, 17-19, 24, 27, 35, 45, 48-49, 55,
59, 61-62, 66, 69, 79-82, 84-86, 88, 93, 98,
102-104, 111, 114, 116-117, 124-125, 127,
129, 133, 136, 140, 151-152, 157, 159, 161,
163, 172-178, 180-183, 185, 188, 191-192,
195, 200, 203-206, 208-210, 213-214, 217,
221, 223-224, 227-228, 231, 234, 237-240,
245, 248-250, 252, 259, 261-262, 266-267,
273-275, 283, 288-289, 291, 303, 321-322,
326-329, 334, 337-339, 341, 343-344, 354,
356, 361, 368, 375, 377-378
Time of day, 79-80
Topic, 32, 335
Touch, 37-38, 43, 201, 283, 341, 352
transitional devices, 156
Transitions, 2, 150-152, 154-155, 228, 249, 267,
302-303
Truthfulness, 143, 285
Turning point, 249
383

U
Uncertainty, 343
Understanding, 11, 14, 20, 26, 33, 52-54, 77, 83, 143,
145, 167, 215, 225, 233, 235, 241, 257, 286,
326, 367, 378
United States, 47, 49, 175, 231, 275, 339, 348, 369,
371
V
Validity, 90, 326, 368, 378
Values, 9, 12, 63-64, 72, 81, 83, 87, 93, 257, 267, 296,
321, 331, 337, 354, 360
Variety, 16, 25, 27, 60, 67, 98, 105, 132, 150, 168,
189-190, 199, 214-215, 245, 257-258, 278,
280, 326, 334, 339, 361, 370
Video, 1, 3, 5-9, 11-12, 15, 47, 49, 52, 64, 66, 86-88,
94, 116, 150, 157, 185, 191-192, 194,
203-204, 227, 231, 312, 336, 339
Violation, 271
Violence, 19, 30, 38, 43, 48, 60, 86, 109, 175-176,
180, 210, 214, 252, 259-260, 262, 264-265,
270, 272, 281, 340, 361
Visualization, 58-59, 94, 98
Vividness, 359
Vocalizations, 189
Voice, 3, 9, 12, 27, 122, 125-126, 133, 137, 160, 185,
190, 195-199, 204, 213, 215, 217, 219, 224,
227-228, 250, 252, 263, 281, 284, 341, 367,
376
pitch of, 190
volume of, 215
Volume, 10, 17, 191, 204, 215, 219, 221-222, 319
W
Watergate, 176
Withholding information, 11
Women, 4, 99, 132-133, 156
Words, 23, 50, 81, 96, 104, 126, 164, 167-168, 181,
223, 241, 327, 340
characteristics of, 241
Worldview, 179
384

Cover
Table of Contents
Glossary
1. Film Structure
2. Cinematography
3. Production Design
4. Acting
5. Editing: Making the Cut
6. Principles of Sound Design
7. The Nature of Narrative in Film
8. Visual Effects
9. Modes of Screen Reality
Index
1
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W