IMAGES
If cinema is a language, then shots are its words. We need to learn how to read them. In order to do that, let’s examine the work of one of cinema’s most significant image makers—Alfred Hitchcock.
THE SHOT
As you think about film as an art form, it is important to develop an instantaneous reaction to the kinds of images you are seeing. What the frame looks like determines your relationship to the subjects within it. If the shot is close, it emphasizes detail. If the shot is far away, it emphasizes scale. If shots are stable, they may express control. If the shots move, they may generate excitement. How filmmakers choose to shoot their scenes changes everything about the film you watch. It is the basic unit of cinematic currency.
Though it is difficult to argue for the supreme significance of any kind of shot over another, you could do worse than beginning with the close-up, especially of an actor’s face. Above all, close-ups created identification between an audience and an actor. Many critics argue that the close-up is the reason that movie stars exist—the two developed simultaneously. Once audiences could see the actor’s face in close-up, stretched across a massive screen, they could project ideas and emotions into that actor, creating a star. Throughout his work, Alfred Hitchcock has used close-ups of actors to convey their distress in suspenseful situations, but also relied on them to convey important details of story. In the shot on the left, a wrongly accused man (Robert Cummings), suspended from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942), holds on for dear life. In the shot on the right from Dial M For Murder (1953), a husband steals a key from his wife’s handbag so that his plot to kill her will go according to plan. In each, the camera’s proximity to the subject creates a kind of identification. Hitchcock delighted in helping his audience connect with many characters throughout his films, especially the disturbed ones.
Shots carry meaning through their relative position. A shot taken from a distance can not only communicate basic information about setting (time of day, location), but also express how characters relate to their environments. Close-ups don’t really do this, because they emphasize detail. Wide shots, on the other hand, privilege environments. Below, the shot on the left from To Catch a Thief (1955) is very wide, showing a rooftop where a burglar is creeping through the shadows. The wide shot underlines his black costume, but also how well he blends into the surrounding environment, avoiding detection. Camera angles also contribute to meaning. A high or low angle can convey shifting power dynamics as characters move through the story. In general, a low angle shot looking up at a character makes them look bigger, giving them strength. A high angle shot looking down at a character tends to diminish them, making them look weaker. The shot below at right from The Wrong Man (1956) creates an accusatory, oppressive feeling; the wrongly accused musician Manny (Henry Fonda) has been hauled into the police station where the cops question him about a series of robberies. The high angle makes the cops seem more intimidating, looming over the confused and innocent Manny.
Many camera shots are stable, finding their fixed position and then letting the actors move within the frame while the camera remains motionless. However, many dramatic moments in films gain energy through camera movements. Filmmakers who want to move the camera have a number of different choices: they can dolly the camera forward or back; they can track the camera to the left or the right; they can tilt the camera up or down; they can pan the camera to the left or the right while keeping its base stable in a fixed position; developments in lens technology over the years paved the way for a zoom, wherein the camera stays still but the image gets closer through the movement of the lens; in the late 1970s, the Steadicam was invented, which allowed the camera operator to execute long moving shots while carrying the camera, the gliding technology smoothing out the bumps; cinema verite style that became popular in the 1960s dispensed with the glide technology and the camera tended to sit on the operator’s shoulder, bumps and shakes included. According to Patrick Keating, “The moving camera was an integral part of Hollywood’s filmmaking technique.” The clip below at top left is a dolly-in on Charlie (Teresa Wright) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Often, filmmakers combined movements, tracking and panning the camera simultaneously to follow an actor through a space. The shot top right from Vertigo (1957) is a combination of a dolly and a zoom, with the camera itself being pulled back while the lens zooms in, creating the disorienting effect. Hitchcock also executed more dramatic movements, like the acrobatic crane shot in Psycho (1960), bottom left. At right, perhaps Hitchcock’s most dramatic use of the moving camera, is 1948’s Rope, an 80-minute film consisting of only ten shots, most of which run longer than seven minutes. Watch the clip and follow the intricate, choreographed camera movements Hitchcock uses.
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After you begin to identify camera shots for their descriptive characteristics, you can think more about another crucial aspect of cinematic storytelling, which is how the camera conveys point of view. Cinema is unique as an art form because it can switch points of view each time the camera position changes. A typical example that audiences decode effortlessly is a two shot sequence: in the first, a character in close-up looks off screen; in the second shot, a new object, we see what the character is looking at. The first shot is, we might say, objective because it shows us a character without a clearly stated point of view. The second shot, however, is subjective, because it shows us what the character sees as though we, the audience, were that character. This idea is foundational to cinema, but Hitchcock makes direct use of it in Rear Window (1954), as its central character L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) spends most of the film looking out the window of his apartment, convinced he’s witnessed a murder.
Filmmakers can also use the camera shot to express something else about their characters’ subjectivities. Hitchcock often placed the camera inside the perspectives of people who were mentally disturbed or dangerous in some way, forcing us to share their point of view. The shot below on the left comes from Notorious (1946), and is taken from the perspective of a woman (Ingrid Bergman) whose vision is distorted because she’s had too much to drink. Hitchcock blurs the image and tilts the camera, matching her perspective on the bed where she has passed out. In Spellbound (1945), Hitchcock forces us to adopt the point of view of a murderer whose crime has been revealed; he has just threatened a woman with a gun, but has decided instead to turn the gun on himself—the revolver turns and faces the camera, firing directly into it. In each, subjectivity dominates. However, the subjectivity in cinema is almost always temporary. A filmmaker can cut to a more objective shot at any time, disrupting the illusion of close identification.
In short, the camera’s moves can express something about the story and the characters, or they can communicate ideas, emotions, and themes. The camera is the essential cinematic tool, and the shots filmmakers create do more than any individual film element to make cinema an art form. Obviously editing, music, sound, dialogue, and other elements matter a great deal, but cinema is ultimately a visual art—without its shots, it would not exist. There is virtually no limit to the kinds of variations that filmmakers can create with their camera shots. North by Northwest (1959) contains a number of striking images. Here are a few of them.
In a series of conversations between Hitchcock and François Truffaut (the book memorializing them is called, aptly, Hitchcock/Truffaut), Hitchcock articulates what he sees as the distinction between surprise and suspense. His example, told to Truffaut: “We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock, and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!’ In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”
Throughout his career, Hitchcock worked most often in the suspense genre, making a number of films quite like North by Northwest, which focused on the efforts of a wrongfully accused man to clear his name. While he was still in England, Hitchcock made The 39 Steps (1935), an espionage thriller with a similar plot; his American films Saboteur, Spellbound, I Confess (1953), and The Wrong Man follow the same general pattern. According to Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto, this film is a “summation of [Hitchcock’s] American period.” In Spoto’s opinion, North by Northwest is an example of the director’s “dark vision of the human condition: for all his attempts at flight, man is clinging, suspended over an abyss, and his fall appears inescapable.” Hitchcock repeatedly dramatized this idea, but in North by Northwest, it culminates in the sequence on Mount Rushmore at the film’s climax.
The most famous sequence in North by Northwest, and one of the most notable of Hitchcock’s career, is the moment in the cornfields when Roger is attacked by the plane. In Hitchcock/Truffaut, the director says that the scene was constructed to emphasize the openness of the setting: “Here you’re not dealing with time but with space. The length of the shots was to indicate the various distances that a man had to run for cover and, more than that, to show that there was no cover to run to. This kind of scene can’t be wholly subjective because it would go by in a flash. It’s necessary to show the approaching plane, even before Cary Grant spots it, because if the shot is too fast, the plane is in and out of the frame too quickly for the viewer to realize what’s happening.”
I take Hitchcock’s explanation of his technique in the crop-duster scene and apply it to an analysis of the sequence’s use of framing in the commentary at right. Pay special attention to the kinds of shots you see, and when the film adopts Roger’s point of view and when it retreats into objectivity, per Hitchcock’s description of his method.
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Hitchcock is obviously one of the most important filmmakers in cinema history, notable for his ability to make art within the mainstream studio system. His films are entertaining in their reliance upon genre and supremely well-crafted from a technical perspective. However, as many writers have demonstrated, Hitchcock is also a master artist, using the medium to explore ideas that obsess him, themes that fascinate him, and emotions that bring him into empathic connection with his audience. Hitchcock’s films were mainstream entertainments that many critics had to defend as great works of art. They demonstrate that many filmmakers, even those working in the mainstream, were able to create art through storytelling and commitment to craft.
Aspect ratio
Let’s take a look at two other formal strategies inside images. One considers the role of aspect ratio. Most of Hitchcock’s early films were shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio (essentially, the image looks like a square). In the early 1950s, widescreen cinema came into vogue as a way to compete with television. Before long, the widescreen image became the standard aspect ratio for most mainstream films with access to the technology.
The shape of the image changed the ways in which filmmakers designed them; they shifted away from depth and more towards horizontal design. In Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Vietnam veteran Michael (Robert De Niro) returns home to his small Pennsylvania steel town midway through the movie. In the commentary at right, I examine Cimino’s approach to framing Michael when he returns to his trailer in the light of day, after the welcome-home partygoers have left. Cimino uses the widescreen frame throughout the movie to tell the story in grand scale. When it slips into more intimate moments, the widescreen shot can emphasize isolation and alienation, important emotions in the final third of the film, when Michael returns to Pennsylvania carrying the trauma he experienced in the war and the pain of leaving his friends behind.
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focal depth
Another visual strategy that filmmakers use to shape perceptions of characters is focal depth. This is one of the most subtle, but also most common methods of using images to tell stories. At their core, images are designed to get us to focus on an object or subject. Filmmakers can obviously do this through framing—close-ups are the most obvious method. However, directors also use focal depth to guide our eyes to the most important place in an image.
The use of focal depth is easiest to see in the close-up of an actor. Look at these two images from Seven (1995, Fincher), in which police officer Somerset (Morgan Freeman) has a conversation with his partner’s wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow) at a diner.
The most important thing in each shot is the actor/character, and so director David Fincher’s images use shallow focus. Somerset and Tracy are in focus, while the background, which is relatively unimportant, is out of focus. It’s subtle, but it’s a clear indicator to our subconscious where we’re supposed to look.
While focal depth is often a very practical tool, it can also be used to achieve thematic depth. In the commentary at right on a pair of sequences from A Simple Plan (1999, Raimi), I examine how the use of focus expresses a distant relationship between two of the central characters, Hank (Bill Paxton) and Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), brothers who have spent much of their lives more or less estranged. Pay close attention to how director Sam Raimi uses focal depth to isolate his characters, but also to express thematic distance between them.
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We’ve just scratched the surface of the kinds of strategies filmmakers can use to tell stories through images. Framing, relationship to the subject, camera movement, aspect ratio, focal depth—all are features of the camera and carry expressive power. Images are rich in isolation; when combined together in the cinematic medium, they only grow in their meaning-making ability.
clip quiz - images
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (2005, Clooney)
One of the most effective strategies for a filmmaker is to use a close-up. What impact do close-ups have in this scene from Good Night & Good Luck? |
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THE LETTER (1940, Wyler)
Describe the camera movements in this early sequence from The Letter. How does the camera move? When? Why? Be specific about time stamps and direction (right to left, up or down, etc.). |
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HIGH & LOW (1962, Kurosawa)
How does this scene from High & Low use the width of the frame to express its ideas? |
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TOKYO STORY (1953, Ozu)
Identify three patterns in the images you see here from Tokyo Story. What three things do you see in all of the shots? |
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IMages in seconds
Director John Frankenheimer’s thriller Seconds (1966) is a film consumed by the idea of images; its unconventional narrative focuses on the unhappy middle-aged Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), who works a job he doesn’t really love anymore and goes home to a wife he thinks he also doesn’t really love anymore in a house in the suburbs of New York City that he probably never loved in the first place. When he is approached by a stranger claiming to be an old friend, who has undergone a procedure to fake his death, change his physical appearance to seem younger, and start a whole new life, he is initially skeptical. But the frustrated and bored Hamilton soon becomes too curious to ignore the overture, and finds out that his friend is indeed telling the truth. He gets a second chance.
That second chance comes when he is transformed into the painter Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson), who is as chiseled, handsome, and youthful as Arthur was flabby, ordinary, and aging. Everything should be right for Arthur/Antiochus to rediscover his zest for life, but it doesn’t exactly turn out that way.
One of the first decisions facing Frankenheimer and his filmmaking team, including the cinematographer James Wong Howe, a Hollywood legend who specialized in black and white photography, was how to shoot the film to communicate its sense of creeping unease, dissatisfaction, and dread. Howe was a perfect choice to execute the ultimate strategy, which was to shoot Seconds in black and white; it was released in 1966, when the standard for Hollywood filmmaking had shifted to the use of color almost as a default, so black and white photography, while not a total rarity, represented an affirmative decision on the part of the filmmakers. They chose black and white for a reason. Some of the images below might offer some rationale behind their choice:
The narrative content of the story was also surely a motivation for some of the particular individual shots set up by Frankenheimer and Howe. Seconds is a psychological thriller where nothing is quite as it seems; though the shadowy organization that offers renewal to Arthur makes a lot of promises to him, very few of those promises actually come true. Viewers watching closely from the beginning will mistrust them right away; the images themselves are telling us not to take them at their word. Strange close-ups, shot with a wide-angle lens, create distorted, unconventional depth of field where things seem odd, creating a sense of consistent underlying unease.
There are also a number of particular choices throughout Seconds that illustrate its close adoption of Arthur/Antiochus’s point of view. One of these comes early on, as Arthur visits the offices of the company for the first time, unsure of what he’s getting himself into. Watch the short commentary at right, in which I examine Frankenheimer’s visual approach to create a disturbing, psychologically dangerous sequence.
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As the film progresses, Arthur/Antiochus is overwhelmed with the idea that he really does have a new chance at a different kind of life; some of the most bizarre and striking images in all of Seconds come at a critical moment midway through, when the youthful, vigorous Antiochus abandons all his inhibitions and joins in a grape stomping ritual with a bunch of young artists and weirdos who live near his beach house, their naked bodies sloshing in a giant barrel in the middle of the woods.
But it’s all too good to be true, and Arthur/Antiochus starts to miss his home and his wife—in short, he wants to check in on his old life. When he visits his wife Emily (Frances Reid) in his new body (she has no idea who he is) under some pretense of knowing her husband, he discovers that he isn’t really missed, and she’s already moved on emotionally from his “death.” It seems she wasn’t all that in love with Arthur, either. The images composed in this sequence at Arthur’s old house emphasize the mirror above the fireplace, an example of the film’s many examples of duality.
But some of the most horrifying images in Seconds are saved for the final sequence, when Antiochus returns to the company because he wants yet another do-over; he finally gets his chance, but it’s clear that he’s being wheeled into the operating room to be used as a corpse in a death-faking for another customer, not being given another body himself (Thirds, I guess?). High angle shots above the gurney where Antiochus lies look down at his helpless body, strapped to the bed as the medical staff wheels it through the hallway; shots looking up from his point of view distort the faces of the doctors and nurses. It’s a profoundly alienating final few moments.
Visual design is essential to the art form of cinema. Because images are so important to the way the medium works, it’s important to understand the sophisticated ways in which they are constructed, and all the various possibilities available to filmmakers in expressing meaning through them.