Steve Sailer – RE: Now, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was shot on a movie studio lot in England, not in anything like the original location, so perhaps there is a contradiction between having a coherent space as in FMJ and having a realistic one.

Not at all. One of the oddest, yet most persistent false claims on the part of many movie-goers is the strong demand or preference for “realism.” I call this the naturalistic fallacy, since most people have no idea that a supposedly “real” location or landscape might be a model, a substitute location, a soundstage or even a matte painting. But as long as the viewer’s eye is suitably deceived, he or she will accept the illusion as real.

The wonderful African landscapes inhabited by the proto-humans in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odysses” are all front-projected matte paintings, and are just as impressive as the equally “realistic,” but obviously un-real, space footage. Kubrick’s imagined space footage, in turn, has influenced what we expect being in outer space to look and feel like.

Sean Connery never set foot in the United States during the filming of “Goldfinger.” All his American scenes were shot at Pinewood Studios in London, both none of this affected a viewer’s sense of exotic locales being used in a Bond film. Also, Gert “Goldfinger” Frobe’s dialog was dubbed by actor Michael Collins, still another example of movie magic trumping “realism.”

Derek Lowe: Re - "Buckaroo Banzai." Interesting stuff about director W.D. Richter. Oddly enough, the shambling, shaggy Banzai is one of my favorite films. In some ways, the visual ineptness adds to the drugged out genial sensibility of the film.

Raymond Pert – RE: I've wondered how much movie makers have small screen in mind rather than large screen, knowing that the movie will be seen by many on a television screen or a computer screen.

Some filmmakers have been known to deliberately frame some of their shots with the ultimate video market in mind. Other directors, especially some whose background is music videos, fall back on TV-style framing as a crutch because they don’t know their craft well enough to exploit the visual opportunities of the movie screen, even though many of these people are film school graduates. Ironically enough, some of the “framed for video” works look anemic on big screen home-theater systems. Another bit of irony, perhaps, is to realize that a number of 50s and 60s directors whose background was the stage or series TV felt challenged and liberated when they finally were able to make feature films. Robert Altman and Sam Pekinpah, for example, directed a lot of episodic TV before graduating to the movies.

By the way, even though Altman’s “Gosford Park” is a multi-character chamber piece with almost all the action taking place inside a manor house, Altman takes pains to make sure that the viewer has a sense of the upstairs and downstairs the house, and exactly where and how far various characters have to travel in order to navigate both the physical and the emotional landscape of the film. A lesser director would simply have presented a number of flat shots talking heads and room interiors.

Lester Hunt – RE: The answer is that movies as they exist are dramas. Dramas are about conflict. And except in the cases where the conflict is "man against nature" a drama will only ever use landscape as backdrop, just as opera and stage drama does. End of story.

I don’t quite agree. Landscapes are sometimes a character in a film (e.g., the bleak and almost entirely empty vistas in “The Seventh Seal” or “The Duellists).” And how characters move within a landscape can also be evocative. In the “Lord of the Rings” films, per IMDB, when the hobbits are on screen, they always walk from the left of the screen to the right, never the other way around (because of the movie convention that West-East travel is represented by left-right movement)

Posted by: Alec on April 7, 2007 4:24 PM

Alec, I haven't seen "Seventh Seal" or "Duellists" recently enough to comment on them. An interesting coincidence: I have always imagined my hypothetical Walden-film as directed by Ingmar Bergman. I guess I should say not that such films are impossible but that they are fated to be at best extremely rare. On my view, the reason Walden can exist as a book and not as a film is just that a book is cheap to produce and need not find a huge audience to pay for itself. So the fact that its man-with-nature (as opposed to man-against-nature) theme is profoundly undramatic, and therefor boring to most people, will not bar it from the marketplace.

Posted by: Lester Hunt on April 8, 2007 11:21 AM

Alec, I guess I should say, not that my hypothetical filmic Walden is impossible, but that it is doomed to be extremely rare. Books are much cheaper to produce than movies, so Walden's profoundly undramatic "man with nature" theme will not bar it from the marketplace. Books don't need the support of a huge audience, as films do. (Interesting coincidence -- I have always imagined the movie version of Walden as being made by the director of "The Seventh Seal.")

Posted by: Lester Hunt on April 8, 2007 11:56 AM

Alec, I guess I should say, not that my hypothetical filmic Walden is impossible, but that it is doomed to be extremely rare. Books are much cheaper to produce than movies, so Walden's profoundly undramatic "man with nature" theme will not bar it from the marketplace. Books don't need the support of a huge audience, as films do. (Interesting coincidence: I have always imagined my hypothetical filmic Walden as being made by the director of "The Seventh Seal".)

Posted by: Lester Hunt on April 8, 2007 1:34 PM

I would add Brian DePalma's Untouchables. The scene with the baby carriage, besides referencing Potemkin, is a brilliant exploration of space to create tension before the big shootout. There's another one in Carlito's Way, when Pacino has to sneak down an escalator on his back. They both take place in train stations, which are always fun.

Posted by: nushustu on April 8, 2007 3:46 PM

One movie I remember that had fairly strong spatial coherence was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (remember that one?). I think it was all filmed inside, so obviously there were no landscapes.

Another movie, which I haven't seen, that apparently uses this same idea is the Russian film Russian Ark, filmed I believe in a single cut completely in the Hermitage.

As you can see, spatial coherence in these two films is established through the lack of cuts, with the camera moving through space in continuous time. But editing is a major part of cinema, and the juxtaposition of different scenes was discovered early on to be the source of cinema's power and meaning, as you can read in a basic textbook on filmmaking. Visual metaphor, metonymy, and all that.

So I think coherent space is going to be a somewhat rare in film, especially at the full length scale.

I guess the films I mentioned are the "euro arty" ones referred to by MB, and it brings up the valid question as to whether their coherence serves any purpose. I've only seen the first, and it was years ago, but I think the idea is that it created a closed environment, its characters trapped in a social hell, and that intensified the awfulness of their relations.

At the scene level, I see a number examples where physics is important: shootouts, battles, slapstick, car crashes. Space is represented coherently, often with multiple camera POVs, which is effective for people with good ability to visualize in 3D.

Posted by: nathaniel on April 8, 2007 5:38 PM

Ricpic,

Thanks for the correction regarding the setting of the movie "On the Waterfront."

If the film was actually set in Hoboken (and Hoboken was not just a convenient or inexpensive stand-in for Brooklyn), it certainly turns that particular "negative" regarding "coherent space" (i.e., a "careless" shot of the Manhattan skyline from Hoboken) into a "positive" (a very nice, understated statement of place).

By the way, according to Wikipedia (accurate?), the main character of the film is actually based on someone who was a longshoreman in Hoboken -- although the character of the priest is based on a Manhattan priest and the Pulitzer Prize series of stories that inspired the film were (according to Wikipedia) about organized crime in Manhattan and Brooklyn. So the Hoboken connection was apparently real and not just an expedient.

Thanks also for verifying the "arbitrariness" of the locations chosen as backdrops. (It was probably a good number of years between when I saw the film and when I finally visited Hoboken.) But while film makers certainly have an "artistic" license not to be logical about their use of locations, this is indeed a negative, in my opinion, with regard to the utilization of "coherent space" in film (and particularly noticeable in this movie because of the other things they do right).

While I realize that communicating "coherent space" is a very low priority with film makers -- the main focus is understandably on telling a story -- it seems to me that film has a possibly unique ability to communicate spatial relationships and movement through space (e.g., buildings, cities, etc.). So it seems a shame to me (especially as a student of cities) that more of this hasn't been done (e.g., making a film that, in addition to telling an important story, also shows the spatial realtionships of a place like Hoboken in 1950s, etc.).

Posted by: Benjamin Hemric on April 8, 2007 8:00 PM






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