Chapter 1: What Is a Movie?

Essay: The "Staging" of Movies

Movies can move seamlessly from one space to another . . . or make space move . . . or fragment time in so many different ways. Only movies can record "real" time in its chronological passing as well as "subjective" time as it passes in the mind.

Richard Barsam, Looking at Movies

Movies and theater share many of the same techniques and much of the same terminology, yet movies have always been understood as different from theater and the traditional arts. This module compares the "staging" processes in movies and in theater.

Both film directors and theater directors block out scenes in rehearsals. Blocking is the procedure of determining where actors will stand, how they will move, where they will enter or exit a scene, and the timing of all physical details. In both arts, actors may look for tape placed on the floor of the set to "hit their marks."

To perform in both film and theater, actors often need to present their bodies, faces, and voices to the audience, but they attempt to mask this frontality so as not to destroy the illusion that they are interacting only with the fictional world. When an actor violates this convention, the act of directly facing and addressing the audience is called breaking the fourth wall—the imaginary wall that separates the performance space from the audience. The plot of a movie or play will often justify frontal and direct performance to the actual audience by having characters perform for a fictional audience; performers in musicals sing and dance, for example.

Filmmakers’ ability to manipulate the space and time of fictional worlds in virtually unlimited ways accounts for the most fundamental differences between staging for film and staging for theater. Unlike stage productions, films can directly and radically manipulate viewers’ perceptual realms. Cinema can render captivating subjective perspective, for example, and amazing depictions of epic scale.

Frontality

As a concept, frontality allows viewers to distinguish between the natural ways in which people face one another when they speak and interact and the conventions directors and actors use to portray these interactions within fictional structures. One subtle method filmmakers use is to present a circle of three or more characters that is "broken"—the circle includes a gap so that the audience can peer into the grouping, as in the following shots from Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1983), Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981), and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956):

Occasionally, films will present scenes of full frontality. Note the self-consciously tableaux-like, picturesque, or painterly compositions in these shots from Das Boot, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), and John G. Avildsen’s Rocky (1976):

Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano present countless shots that heighten the viewer's claustrophobic sense of the space inside a German submarine. The shot above is a carefully staged wall of tense faces that fills the frame in the manner of a classical painting. Ben-Hur director William Wyler and cinematographer Robert Surtees show the audience a full-frontal view of the dramatic uniforms and bold colors of the Roman legionnaires.

In the visually brilliant Rushmore (1998), director Wes Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman play with the different traditions of staging and composition in theater, cinema, and still photography. In a montage sequence that demonstrates the numerous extracurricular commitments of Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a young student attending the private Rushmore preparatory school, Anderson uses titles to indicate each of seventeen clubs and activities Max has joined or founded. In the sequence below, Anderson and Yeoman use the play-within-a-play, the broken circle, and hints of breaking the fourth wall to present highly self-conscious compositions of Max's activities:

A typical in their embrace of frontality, these shots from Rushmore call attention to themselves—in much the same way that Max Fischer has called attention to himself. Thus the sequence plays with our expectations about movies’ handling of characters and presentation of fictional worlds. The artifice, rather than being “submerged” and normalized, is made part of the point.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

Likewise, whereas most scenes shot between two characters speaking face to face are done with the over-the-shoulder technique, a convention that allows actors to avoid looking directly into the camera, in Rushmore Anderson flirts with breaking the fourth wall by shooting this interchange between Max Fischer and Miss Cross (Olivia Williams) so that the actors must look directly into the camera. The technique injects one degree of artificiality into the exchange:

Subjective Perspectives

There are countless examples of subjective perspective in cinema, many dating back to the earliest films. Science fiction, horror, fantasy, film noir, and musicals—genres that overtly draw us into nonrealistic worlds and extreme states of mind—have a long tradition of subjective perspective.

In the Academy Award–winning biographical film A Beautiful Mind (2001), director Ron Howard uses subjective perspective in unique ways. A Beautiful Mind tells the story of mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe), who won a Nobel Prize in spite of a long struggle with schizophrenia. Howard uses subjective perspective not to depict Nash's schizophrenic delusions, however, but to depict his great visual and mathematical abilities to perceive patterns and relationships. In a scene depicting Nash's arrival at Princeton to begin his studies, Howard and cinematographer Roger Deakins highlight Nash's perception of patterns through point-of-view shots that connect Nash's vision of sun-drenched lemons, a punch bowl, and the pattern of a fellow student's tie:

In this sequence and others in the film, Howard and Deakins use a flash of light in Nash's point-of-view shots to indicate his recognition of a significant pattern in the world around him. In another scene, Nash visits a top-secret government intelligence center to decipher a code captured from the Soviets (an event, we learn later, that exists only in Nash's mind). In addition to the flashes of light, this scene uses extreme close-ups, deep-space composition, and superimposed images to cinematically express Nash's exceptional subjective perceptions:

Epic Scale

One of the largest-selling books of all time, translated into all the major languages, General Lew Wallace's novel Ben-Hur (1880) has been dramatized on stage and screen. Its spectacle of ancient Rome, complete with naval battles and chariot races in the Roman Colosseum, provides excellent material for those with a sufficient budget to stage stories on an epic scale. The Broadway play based on Wallace’s novel, which ran from 1899 until 1921, used a treadmill, a cyclorama (curved background), and eight Arabian horses for its chariot scene. The two most famous film versions of Ben-Hur, both from MGM—J. J. Cohn and Fred Niblo’s silent film (1925) and William Wyler’s expensive Technicolor spectacle (1959), starring Charlton Heston—rendered the chariot scene on the kind of massive scale that only movies can encompass:

In fact, in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999) director George Lucas created one of the most famous contemporary “epic” spectacles, when his pod-racing scene paid homage to the chariot scene of Ben-Hur:

Phantom Menace is one of many films that point toward a new type of film staging, which blends real sets with digital modifications. In films such as James Cameron's Titanic (1997) and Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), we see traditional techniques of staging as old as the theater being coupled with state-of-the-art manipulations of space possible only through digital technology. Whether digital techniques will radically challenge conventional staging practices or simply amplify and simplify what has been done for centuries remains an open question.

 

FOR FURTHER READING

Ben-Hur Museum.