Staging
Cinema obviously shares a number of its characteristics with theatre. According to David Bordwell, “the film frame is analogous to the proscenium of a stage.” Imagine sitting in the audience of an auditorium for a theatrical production. There are rows facing the front of the auditorium, where the stage is. The lights come up, and you notice the framing of the stage floor, the walls on either side, and the horizontal line across the top that masks the lighting instruments and curtains. These lines tell you where to look—there is nothing of importance happening outside, above, or below those lines. This is one of the ideas embedded in the film frame. It shows you where to look.
However, films have other similarities with theatre, too. One of the most prominent is both art forms’ reliance on staging, which is the way actors are arranged inside the frame and the way they move through it. One actor stands in the foreground, say, drawing emphasis. Another actor is diminished by being placed in the background. As they talk, power relationships may shift, and they may switch places.
Watch the clip at right from the action film 48 Hrs (1982). In it, director Walter Hill works together with his cinematographer, Ric Waite, and the actors to construct an extended long take that follows the protagonist, police officer Jack Cates (Nick Nolte), through the police station. Jack has just survived a shootout with some criminals that has left several cops dead. The frantic pace of the aftermath of the gunfight translates to the single shot; however, you can also see how the actors move within the frame. Watch the clip once, just following Jack—he’s got the longer hair and gruff voice.
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Jack moves from left to right in the frame, and from the background to the foreground. The camera is constantly shifting with him, as other supporting characters step into the shot to share information with him. Still more characters, extras who are undifferentiated from each other, clutter the frame to make the police station feel busy and lived in. This feels like a real place, but it’s also a feat of staging—the actors and the camera must all be in the right place at the right time to maximize each beat of the scene.
Bordwell has written extensively on cinematic staging, examining a number of filmmakers’ concrete practices for blocking actors. As he sees it, “At every instant, in most storytelling cinema, cinematic staging delivers the dramatic field to our attention, sculpting it for informative, expressive, and sometimes simply pictorial effect. We don’t notice it, but it affects us.” In other words, Bordwell sees staging as an essential storytelling tool. It can communicate narrative information, such as a character walking through a door to deliver an important message. Actor placement and movement can also express the film’s themes, such as the positioning of a character behind a latticed pattern in the set that underlines their feelings of entrapment. Or, staging can simply be used to create a dynamic, interesting image.
Look at the series of images below from The Children’s Hour (1961, Wyler). In the film, two teachers at an all-girls’ school, Karen (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha (Shirley MacLaine) are accused by a vengeful student of being lesbians, a charge that carries devastating consequences. Late in the film, after both Karen and Martha have paid a severe cost and the school’s students have all withdrawn because of the scandal, the two teachers have a final, revelatory conversation in which Martha confesses her feelings to Karen—at least in Martha’s case, the rumor is true.
At first, Martha steps into the darkened school, with Karen sitting in the dark on the left side of the frame. Martha steps into a doorway, with the camera shifting to the right to follow her motion—Karen stays sitting.
After Martha closes the sliding doors, she steps towards Karen, who looks towards the camera, her back to her friend. The positioning of the performers suggests something about their relationship—there’s something that the two of them don’t want to face. Martha notices Karen’s distant behavior and steps closer to her. Martha’s movements contrast with Karen’s stillness. The camera once again rebalances to accommodate the movement.
A cut in to Karen and Martha’s level as Martha stoops down to match her creates a new relationship. Now, they are on the same plane, but Karen keeps staring off into the distance. She knows something is wrong, but Martha doesn’t. Then, there is a cut back as Martha stands up, after Karen suggests that she knows Martha’s true feelings.
Martha retreats at first at the idea, but then charges back in as she, in denial, confronts Karen, thinking she couldn’t possibly believe the rumor. A few shots later, Karen finally turns to Martha with the suggestion that they leave together. Martha finally retreats, convinced that there’s nowhere they can go where the accusation won’t follow them.
Martha retreats at first at the idea, but then charges back in as she, in denial, confronts Karen, thinking she couldn’t possibly believe the rumor. A few shots later, Karen finally turns to Martha with the suggestion that they leave together. Martha finally retreats, convinced that there’s nowhere they can go where the accusation won’t follow them.
All staging techniques are done with respect to the camera itself. In Classic Hollywood filmmaking practice, which became extraordinarily influential around the world, the images work together with staging of the actors and standard editing patterns to communicate information clearly to the audience. Bordwell describes how this standard approach works: “In the stand-and-deliver approach, which may turn into a sit-and-deliver approach, the characters are shown taking up positions, usually in a master shot. An axis of action governs the actors’ orientations and eyelines, and the shots, however varied in angle, are taken from one side of the axis. Actors’ movements are matched across cuts. As the scene develops, the shots tend to get closer to the performers, carrying us to the heart of the drama. Analytical editing presents shot/reverse shots, over-the-shoulder angles, and singles—all the coverage required by long-standing premises of classical continuity editing. When characters change position within the space, a new establishing shot gives us the information.”
You can see these techniques, along with more concrete analysis of staging in action in the commentary below, which focuses on Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947). Preminger was inclined to let his camera run longer than other directors, and he usually preferred to move the actors and the camera itself rather than cutting to a new shot. According to V.F. Perkins, “one of the major pleasures of a Preminger movie is the grace and fluidity of his camera movements. But Preminger’s ideal picture makes sense as an aspiration which reflects one attitude to the spectator and one type of viewpoint. Preminger uses means of emphasis which do not draw our attention to the image as an image but rely on arranging the action so that the scale of significance is established there.”
Daisy Kenyon stars Joan Crawford as the title character, a woman caught between two men—one is the married man with whom she has been having an affair, played by Dana Andrews, and the other is a soldier freshly returned from World War II, played by Henry Fonda. She is excited by the married man, and bored by the soldier. In the commentary at right, I examine the opening sequence of Daisy Kenyon, when Dan (the married man) visits Daisy in her apartment, from the perspective of Preminger’s use of staging; watch how the actors interact with the camera in the set.
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As you watch films in the Classic Hollywood style, it is important to pay attention to this technique of staging. Film style has not remained stable over time, however, and changes in shooting and editing patterns have had an impact on cinematic staging. Today, directors rely more on faster cutting and tend to shoot in close-up more than in wide shot. This has had an impact on staging as a means of communicating story; it is less important when characters appear mostly in close-up, because the images don’t express where they are in relationship to one another beyond their matching eyelines. Still, it is an important technique worth paying attention to—some contemporary filmmakers still rely on this approach to express ideas.
clip quiz - staging
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
THE LIFE OF OHARU (1952, Mizoguchi)
Describe the staging in this scene from The Life of Oharu. When and how does the camera move? When and how do the actors move? |
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ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1962, Preminger)
Why does the setting of a courtroom from this scene in Anatomy of A Murder lend itself to the use of staging to express themes? |
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12 ANGRY MEN (1957, Lumet)
What does the staging in this scene from 12 Angry Men tell you about the relationships between the characters? How does their placement in the frame express those relationships? |
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THE PIED PIPER (1973, Demy)
How does the staging of this scene from The Pied Piper control the focus of the shot? Watch closely how the camera and the actors move inside the frame, and describe what you see happening. |
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Staging in laura
Staging decisions are always a combination of practical considerations—how to manipulate actors within a given set or location, in concert with the camera—and thematic expression—how to create patterns of actor blocking to illustrate the ideas of the film.
Director Otto Preminger was chief among Classic Hollywood filmmakers in his interest in staging, largely because of his preference for wide image compositions and longer takes. Many of his films were also set in courtrooms, which are natural settings for staging because of their theatrical positioning of various role players in the trial and large playing space for the lawyers to make their arguments for the audience of the judge and jurors.
There are no courtrooms in Laura (1944), Preminger’s romantic drama that is often classified as a film noir for its mysterious, dark story about Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), who is called in to investigate the murder of socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a beautiful woman whose body is discovered in her apartment with her face blown away by a shotgun blast. While there are a number of settings in Laura, one features prominently: Laura’s apartment, which McPherson returns to over and over again both to look for evidence that will help him solve the murder, but also to commune with the portrait of the murdered woman that hangs prominently in the living room. As McPherson begins to learn more about Laura, he falls in love with her memory, the idea of her beginning to haunt his dreams.
Early on in Laura, Preminger establishes an investigative tension between a trio of characters; there is Detective McPherson, who is pursuing the murderer, and two major suspects: the newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), Laura’s friend and a man who was deeply obsessed with her by his own admission, despite her rejecting him, and Laura’s apparent fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a sinister-seeming man who is too smooth to really be trustworthy. As McPherson takes Waldo and Shelby into Laura’s apartment, Preminger uses the camera to subtly negotiate the detective’s suspicions of his two companions. Look at the images below, paying careful attention to how Preminger places McPherson the cop in relationship to his suspects.
For staging to have the most dramatic impact, the filmmaker has to rely on a significant number of wide shot compositions. In close-ups, staging doesn’t matter that much—the camera framing creates the emotional intimacy between characters by its relative position to the actors. If the shot is framed from a wider distance, then the actors’ movements can express more of those relationships.
These kinds of staging decisions comment on the relationships between the characters. McPherson is in the fact-gathering phase of his investigation, and he doesn’t know who to believe. He stands or sits across from the men he is interrogating, taking in their stories without betraying his true feelings. Wide shots allow the audience to see McPherson and his suspects in the frame together, which creates an interesting dynamic: we watch the suspects, yes, but we also watch him watch them. This is the kind of thing you wouldn’t get in a traditional shot/reverse shot approach.
The most significant aspect of staging in Laura comes in its surprising plot development midway through; while McPherson sits in Laura’s apartment, on the verge of nodding off, the door suddenly opens and a woman enters—it’s Laura herself, apparently and shockingly resurrected. It wasn’t Laura who was killed, it turns out, but another woman, Diane. The way Preminger stages this moment makes it supremely dreamlike; McPherson has perhaps fallen asleep, and at first isn’t sure himself if he is awake when he sees Laura materialize in front of him.
Preminger’s staging decisions prior to this have also foreshadowed Laura’s eventual return by signifying her importance; though she appears in flashbacks narrated by Waldo, her dominant visual presence for much of the first third of the film is in the portrait that hangs above the fireplace. Many of the scenes that take place in the apartment prior to Laura’s return make the portrait the centerpiece of the frame, as all the conversations seem to pivot around its looming presence. It’s like every discussion is really a triangle, with McPherson, whoever he is talking to, and Laura lingering in the background like a ghost.
The resolution of the mystery is also shaped by Preminger’s staging of the action; the killer is revealed to be Waldo, who mistakenly shot Diane in a fit of jealous rage over Laura’s rejection of him, and, afraid he’ll be discovered, returns to the apartment to finish the job. Waldo’s menacing wielding of the shotgun he has already used once on the ill-fated Diane makes him intimidating, despite his slight frame and refined manner. Once again, wide shots emphasize the isolation of Waldo and Laura in her apartment as he prepares to kill her for real this time. McPherson’s sudden return and killing of Waldo disrupts the pattern of staging, playing out in much closer shots.
Staging is something of a lost art in contemporary cinema; it has been one of the sacrifices of the turn to faster cutting, shorter scenes, and tighter closeups. Where the actors is just not as important when the editing is so fast and furious; in fact, contemporary films are often disorienting precisely because so few wide shots establish the placement of the actors, and so few directors are careful about tracking their movements. However, when used effectively, staging can yield information about character relationships that can deepen audiences’ understanding of who they are and how they change moment to moment.