CINEMATIC Thomas Geoffroy
CINEMATIC Thomas Geoffroy
CINEMATIC Thomas Geoffroy
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Published by University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam St, Cardiff CF24 2FN Š Thomas Geoffroy Photography Š the individual photographers 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission from the writer. Written, edited and designed by Thomas Geoffroy
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(Hiroshi Sugimoto - AL. Ringling Baraboo, 1996)
Contents Introduction 06 Narrative 07 Montage 10 Aesthetic Techniques 11 The Ubiquity of Cinema 14 Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson 18 Why Not Documentary? 19 Cinematic Sound 24 Cinematic 25 Bibliography 26
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Introduction From the very beginnings of cinema, like the chronophotography of The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge, there has been great overlap in both the purposes and intentions of both photography and cinema as well as the discourses surrounding these two mediums. The way that each medium deals with the dimension of time is usually the greatest point of discussion, and that will be important here, but this catalogue’s main purpose is to discuss the nomenclature of the word ‘cinematic’. This may appear to be a small and insignificant point of discussion, but this word is used frequently by academics and enthusiasts alike without too much thought. Defining what we really mean by ‘cinematic’ will result in a greater understanding of the works we use it to describe. Cinematic explores the nexus of photography and cinema, their relation in constructing narratives and the reasons we describe something as cinematic. By discussing the mechanisms of cinema and in which ways they are prevalent in photography Cinematic will justify the use of and define the word ‘cinematic’ when critiquing photography.
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Narrative Narrative is the first piece in the semantic puzzle of the word ‘cinematic’. It runs through both photography and cinema and humans seem drawn to it. At the most basic level narrative is a story. A world of new people and places apart from our own to get lost in. A good narrative is an exercise in empathy by caring for the wellbeing of completely fictional characters. The best narratives immerse the audience completely. The most successful narratives are not exhaustive lists of everything that happened, such a direct method can feel cold and push an audience away. A well told story, one that tricks an audience into believing in it, is an illusion. Written, spoken and stage performed fiction have been creating immersive narratives for as long as language has existed but in the twenty-first century, growing up with cinema as one of the dominant forms of art and entertainment it is understandable that many artists and audiences would find it as their anchor when navigating the visual arts. The phrase cut to the chase is a common one. When a storyteller is losing their audience as their story wanders into irrelevance it is what an audience will say. Cut to the chase. But when a story is totally engaging, when the novel, the film, the speaker, has the audience on the edge of their seat anticipating the next action they do not often stop to think how did we get here? What has been cut out? It fools an audience into believing a new impossible reality where time and space are bent, where days, weeks, months, years are compressed into maybe a few hours, where seconds are stretched into minutes.
People materialise in a whole new location with barely even a mention of how they got there. Maybe violence and guns and crime are commonplace, maybe magic is real and a man in a red cape flies through the sky every day. A good story removes reality, to a greater or lesser extent, to present a digestible and engaging new reality. This new reality focuses the important aspects of the story, but these illusory aspects are what we expect from cinema in all its excitement and bombast. Time is the first victim of storytelling. It is almost impossible to represent it in its true form and still tell a comprehensible story. Photography freezes time, either a moment or some longer length of time, forever into one still frame. Cinema could be described as photography with the added illusion of time. Time passes in a film for certain, but it does not pass as it does in the real world. Illusion is part of what makes cinema cinematic. The manipulation of time through montage is only the beginning of how cinema works, however. The aesthetics of film, the sound and the influences and experiences that an artist and audience bring to a work are all equally important.
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(Alex Prager - The Big Valley, Eve, 2008)
Montage Montage is the process of editing different shots together to form a sequence. In the very beginning, with films from the Lumières, Edison and Méliès, there was no editing at all (Dancyger, 2011, p.3). They were one single static shot, appearing more like a stage play than a modern movie. The innovation of editing and montage came from Edwin S. Porter and The Life of An American Fireman (1903). Karel Reisz (2014, p.6) says “Porter had demonstrated that the single shot, recording an incomplete piece of action, is the unit of which films must be constructed and thereby established the basic principle of editing.” Dancyger (2011) suggests that the contemporary idea of editing originated with D. W. Griffith. His experimentation of far closer shots than anyone had done before, as well as match cutting and cross-cutting between parallel action evoked far greater drama than those that came before. Reisz goes on to say that this new form of editing was unprecedented. Now the moving image resembles the sequence more than the still photograph or the single static shot film. Before the advent of editing a film appeared like a magical moving photograph, the frame was still and the characters moved around within it. Now a whole new picture was forced upon the viewer, replacing the previous one. Each shot placed before and after one another changes the context in which they are collectively read, “It implied that the meaning of a shot was not necessarily self-contained but could be modified by joining the shot to others.” (Reisz, 2014, p.5).
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Aesthetic Techniques Throughout its history cinema has defined and redefined its basic visual language. In the beginning it was a document of an event. The Lumière Brothers placed their movie camera down in front of something moving, a train pulling into a station or workers leaving the factory. There was no close up shot. The camera was always at approximately eye level. It did not move. There was no colour, and the monochrome film was always of a neutral contrast that draws no attention to itself as film. Although the marks and materiality of that film gives their movies a warmth of nostalgia and history that was not present in its creation as a novel and futuristic medium. George Méliès presented his work as theatre on a stage, although again with a locked off camera. He also introduced the world to cinema as a medium of fantasy and magic. As the medium and its technology matured more aesthetic options became available to filmmakers. Filmmakers employ a wide range of focal lengths to evoke drastically different narratives from a scene. With a normal lens, one that is close to the human eye in its perspective, the shot does not draw attention to itself. A wide lens will increase the depth of an image. Objects close to the camera become larger and objects further away become much smaller. In Cinematography: (Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors) Blain Brown (2011, p.55) says that this “All this can give the viewer a greater sense of presence —a greater feeling of being in the scene”. A telephoto lens does the opposite. It compresses the depth in the image. Depending on the subject matter and use alongside other aesthetic and narrative devices telephoto perspective can create a feeling of claustrophobia, heightened danger, and action or simply beauty. Claustrophobia is evoked due to the lack of space surrounding a subject, as the background is drawn in close behind them. Danger and action are heightened because the compressed space makes things appear closer. Brown (2011, p.56) explains that “With careful camera placement and a long lens, a speeding bus can seem to miss a child on a bicycle by inches, when in fact, there is a comfortably safe distance between them.” This trick has been in use for so long that even when it is not being used to make stunts safer it can still evoke the feeling of danger and intensity as almost a Pavlovian response to the telephoto perspective. Beauty is clearly a much more subjective idea, but it is widely accepted that telephoto lenses make people appear more pleasing by their use as portrait lenses in still photography.
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(Gregory Crewdson - Untitled, 2004)
The Ubiquity of Cinema Photography was around long before cinema, but in an ever-increasingly technologically complex and multimedia world it is nearly impossible to work in one medium, say photography, and not be influenced in some way by every other medium regardless of its relation or recency, like cinema. Roland Barthes said that a movie only becomes truly filmic when its motion was completely frozen (Campany, p.135, 2010). Barthes’ position on the idea of filmic, and how cinema only becomes filmic when it is effectively turned into a photograph is interesting and could easily fill a whole separate writing. His view does, however, highlight the importance of the link between these two media. If one were to
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a film and present it as a single photograph, as Barthes suggests, then the line between photography and cinema becomes blurred. Just as cinema has used photography since its invention, photography uses cinema. George Baker in Still Moving (2008) says “For the photographic object theorized then has fully succumbed in the last ten years to its digital recoding, and the world of contemporary art seems rather to have moved on, quite literally, to a turn that we would now have to call cinematic rather than photographic.” The digital age, providing easy access to both still photography and moving image to everyone, and the ubiquity of film and television that surrounds us made possible in part by the digital revolution, has left contemporary photographers engulfed by imagery originating from cinema. It is impossible now to create work truly free from the influence of cinema, Baker (2010) states “even the most traditional of a younger generation of contemporary photographers cannot now resist the impulse to deal with concerns of other mediums into their practice,”
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(Alex Prager - The Long Weekend, Irene, 2010)
Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson Every time I approach a photograph by Alex Prager or Gregory Crewdson I imagine a different scenario that led to that moment and then the moment immediately following. David Campany says in Photography and Cinema that many film theorists see photography as “awaiting cinematic articulation as one of 24 per second.” Their photographs truly feel like one of twenty-four per second. That there is a beginning and end that we are deprived of, to forever only see the middle. The narrative that these images create asks questions about the suspension of disbelief. Is there a believable string of events that would lead to the situation presented in the photograph, or is this purely a staged image to illicit these feelings of uneasiness and tension? Both Crewdson and Prager straddle this line, creating images solidly grounded in our own reality and images that are not. Not knowing exactly what has happened is what makes photography so special and different from cinema. Barthes (1993, p.96) said, “the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views; in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts.” Barthes argues that a photograph arrests its subject in time, in a point of limbo, with no past or future. It just records something “that-has-been”. The photograph is made endless by the viewer’s own contemplations on what could have happened before and after the closing of the shutter. The level of uncertainty inherent in the medium is what makes them photographic rather than the cinematic, but still there is a sense of the cinematic. Barthes also said “[cinema] does not make a claim of its reality, it does not protest its former existence”. This is where the true cinematicality of Gregory Crewdson and Alex Prager lies. Their images do not feel real. There is a referent, something real that was photographed but it is so very obviously an actor on a set. The method of production, on large artificially lit locations and sound stages, the eerie atmosphere and unbelievable situations create a sense of artifice. Drama can be found all throughout photography, but it is this artifice that makes these images cry out to Hollywood cinema.
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Why Not Documentary? It is possible to find a similar cinematic feeling in documentary photography, so why then is it not too the focus of this exhibition? The photographs of Robert Capa and Frank Hurley seem to tick all the right boxes for a cinematic image. They seem subjective, with a personal narrative string at their core. They record the lives of extraordinary individuals in situations that most people will never know; he records real fantasies. Frank Hurley’s First World War images display a sense of danger and unbelievable scale, and snapshots of the lives of heroic men in a far-off land. His composite images, created to emphasise the danger and scale beyond what his camera could see, mirror what John Knoll would pioneer with Industrial Light and Magic in modern special effects “So it looked like these men were in the middle of an absolutely tumultuous battle, when, of course, all of it was a fantasy.” (James Fox, 2020). Speaking now of Capa’s famous D-day images, there is a disconnect between them and our reality as we perceive it. They have an incredibly harsh contrast, cast in brilliant whites and deep blacks. They are shaky and difficult to focus on, and the subject matter is too terrifying and strange to be thought of as the everyday even though it was for these men. It seems to be the photograph that combines subjectivity, narrative and fantasy feels cinematic. So what is the issue with Capa being labelled as cinematic? Firstly, there is the reality inherent in these photographs. They are documenting a real referent and even though the way they present the referent is subjective, and in Hurley’s case employs a substantial manipulation of the image, they are not completely fabricating a narrative. The visceral feeling of reality and the knowledge of the situations these photographs are taken in create a punctum about time. They capture a moment of time that can never be revisited or reclaimed. Barthes (1993, p.96) described this succinctly as “that is dead and that is going to die.” It is impossible for me to see these images and not think about what happened to the soldiers. Did they make it home? Even if they did, or if these were documentary photographs of an entirely safe situation they were still taken long enough ago that these people may not be with us anymore. There is an inherent sadness to historical documentary photography. The subjects and the moment in time are frozen in a moment in time that can never be revisited. The knowledge of the time that has passed since reminds us of our own mortality is extraordinarily discomforting. Contemporary documentary photography does not
have the punctum of time passed to the same extent but there is still an intense feeling of reality that permeates them. Documentary photography feels too real to create the kind of disconnect, distraction and suspension of reality to feel cinematic. There are plenty of documentary movies featuring cinematic visual language and fiction films that utilise archive documentary footage. One issue here lies in semantics. For a photograph to be labelled cinematic there is a claim that the photography is referencing, and commenting on, cinema. Alex Prager references and comments on Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood system and its films from the 1960s. Gregory Crewdson references and comments on Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s. Robert Capa and Frank Hurley do not reference or comment on cinema, rather cinema references and comments on them. Sam Mendes’ 2019 film 1917 references and comments on Frank Hurley. James Fox (2020) says of Frank Hurley’s images “Hurley’s photographs had undeniable impact. In the 100 years since they were taken, they inspired paintings, film sets [1917], and poster designers [War Horse], making the First World War unimaginable without them.”. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan references and comments on Robert Capa. In a TV interview with Mark Cousins Steven Spielberg (1998) says “I kept saying, god we got to try to duplicate those Robert Capa photos, we’ve got to do what he did, except we’re doing it at twenty-four frames per second on movie film.” Documentary photography does not disqualify itself from being described as cinematic by its nature as documentary. But in a world where nothing is original and inspiration is everywhere, it is commonplace to find cinema borrowing from the aesthetics of documentary photography, and rarely the other way around. The photographs of Robert Capa and Frank Hurley are not cinematic. The films 1917 and Saving Private Ryan, the films they inspired, are photographic.
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(Frank Hurley - The Raid,aka Over The Top, 1918)
(Robert Capa - US troops’ first assault on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. June 6, 1944.)
Cinematic Sound Cinema employs sound as an equal, or arguably even more important, to the visuals. Diegetic and non-diegetic sound makes up the soundscape of a film. Non-diegetic sound, sounds that do not originate naturally from the actions in the frame, tends to come in the form of music. Music can establish time, place and tone, explore subjective psychological viewpoints, build up to impending drama, emphasize action and link scenes together (Rothbart, 2013, p.1213). The sense of scale and intensity that sound can create is not to be understated. A film without sound is still a film, but there is an immersion and an excitement that is lost without it. Imagine watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2012) without the now infamous BWAAA sounds. Sound is the one tool that photography, on its own, has no way of replicating. The visual aesthetics of cinema are created photographically and are inherent in both mediums. Montage cannot be forced upon the viewer as frames per second, but it can be replicated as a series of photographic images viewed together, as is common in the world of photography, or as images composited together to form a photomontage as seen in Hannah Höch’s Cut with a Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany or David Hockney’s cubist portraits. Sound could be played in the same room as photography is being shown, it could be represented as visual sound waves, or the photographs could be shown in sequence alongside sound. Sound is unique among cinematic techniques in that it cannot be embedded directly in photography. If sound can be cinematic can something wholly removed from the visual be cinematic, and what would this reveal about the term cinematic itself? FOREST (For a Thousand Years) (2012) is an audio art installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The audience is guided into a forest where speakers are placed in the trees and bushes in every direction. They are encouraged to sit down and to walk through the space as the twenty-minute piece is played. The works subjects are eclectic and disparate. A plane is heard overhead, gunfire in the distance, mumbled voices, choral and orchestral music is heard every so often. There is no direct narrative, but instead a raw emotional one. The piece is overwhelming at times, with an intensity and surround that aesthetically feels cinematic. The music builds tension
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and the gunfire sparks danger. At times it could be a Spielberg war film, and at others a Terrence Malick mood piece. The sheer scale and intensity of it begged for the label of cinematic. In an interview with ArtNet Janet Cardiff compared the making of FOREST to a film, with a large crew and a shooting script (Halperin, 2017). Cardiff also states that the inspiration came simply from their previous work The Murder of Crows (2009). This piece was much more direct in its narrative, with clear spoken words and a three-act structure. If, as stated before, cinematic is purely a descriptor of the nature of a works influence from cinema, then The Murder of Crows and FOREST (For a Thousand Years) suggest that cinematic can indeed be applied to non-visual artwork.
Cinematic Cinematic sound challenges the idea that Photography inspired by cinema is cinematic and cinema inspired by photography is photographic. The sound found in modern cinema is of course inspired by the cinema before it. But it is wholly removed from photography. A holistic definition of cinematic must be applicable to more than just photography and cinema, yet still apply to them without losing its depth and usefulness as a descriptive term. The term cinematic is a useful one, it carries with it a cluster of properties that artists and critics use to communicate ideas about artworks. It can describe the history of their art-forms as derived from the photographic, their aesthetics, subject matter, mood, scale and intensity, their influences, and their method of exhibition. Maybe the word cinematic is useful because of its vagueness and to assign it one specific definition would be reductive and counterproductive. The word thrives in context. Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson’s works are cinematic in terms of their aesthetics and influences as well as their subject matter and photographic visual medium. Robert Capa and Frank Hurley’s works are cinematic in that they influenced cinema and so they exist in the sphere of cinema’s history. The Murder of Crows (2009) and FOREST (For a Thousand Years) (2012) are cinematic in their scale and intensity, in their production and possibly their influence. Simply put, it can be useful shorthand for ‘like a film’. If, then, cinematic can mean so many different things in different contexts is there a more precise definition than ‘like a film’? ‘Like a film’ feels clumsy and almost as if we are no closer to a definition than at the beginning of this book. In the beginning we discussed narrative. A narrative is a story, one to get invested in and care about. We discussed editing and visual techniques as methods cinema uses to convey its narratives and pull an audience into them. And we discussed documentary photography and its disposition to feel too real to feel truly cinematic, even when it is using the visual language of cinema. Finally we discussed sound, and its incredible power to completely immerse an audience. For photography, or any medium, to be cinematic it must immerse an audience wholly in a fictional narrative and successfully distract from the real world for even the briefest moment.
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(Gregory Crewdson - Untitled, 2004)
Bibliography Brown, B. (2011) Cinematography: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors. Oxford: Focal Press. Dancyger, Ken. (2011) The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice. Oxford: Routledge. Rothbart, P. (2013) The Synergy of Film and Music : Sight and Sound in Five Hollywood Films. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc. Reisz, K. and Millar, G. (2014) The Technique of Film Editing. Burlington: Focal Press. Beckman, K. and Ma, J. (eds.) (2008) Still Moving Between Cinema and Photography. Durham: Duke University Press. Barthes, R. & Howard, R. (1993) Camera lucida : reflections on photography. London: Vintage.
Halperin, J. (2017) Who Can Tell a Forest’s Secrets? Janet Cardiff on What It Takes to Create a Truly Epic Work of Sound Art. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/janet-cardiff-george-millerorigin-story-glenstone-1062569 (Accessed: 15 December 2020). The Murder of Crows (2009) Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller [Audio Installation]. Germany: Berlin. Sugimoto, H. (1996) AL. Ringling Baraboo. Available at: https:// ibashogallery.com/artists/96-hiroshi-sugimoto/works/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021). Prager, A. (2008) The Big Valley, Eve. Available at: https://www.alexprager.com/part-i-view (Accessed: 23 January 2021). Crewdson, G. (2004) Untitled. Available at: https://gagosian.com/ exhibitions/2005/gregory-crewdson-beneath-the-roses/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021).
War Stories. Mark Cousins Talks to Steven Spielberg. (1998) BBC Two Television, 13 September.
Prager, A. (2010) The Long Weekend, Irene. Available at: https://www. alexprager.com/part-i-view (Accessed: 23 January 2021).
‘A New Reality’ (2020) Age of the Image, Series 1, Episode 1. BBC Four Television, 2 March.
Crewdson, G. (2004) Untitled. Available at: https://www.galerierudolfinum.cz/en/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021).
Höch, H. (1919-1920) Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany Available at: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_ catalogue_241_300015683.pdf (Accessed: 06 December 2020). 1917 (2019) Directed by Sam Mendes [Film]. United Kingdom: Entertainment One. Saving Private Ryan (1998) Directed by Steven Spielberg [Film]. United States: DreamWorks Pictures. Forest (For a Thousand Years...) (2012) Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller [Audio Installation]. Germany: Kassel.
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Hurley, F. (1918) A Raid aka A Hop Over. Available at: https://www. sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/frank-hurleys-world-war-i-photography/exhibiting-war (Accessed: 23 January 2021). Capa, R. (1944) US troops’ first assault on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings. Normandy, France. Available at: https://www. magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/robert-capa-d-day-omahabeach/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021).
CITAMENIC Cinematic explores the motion picture inspired photography of Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson, the photographs of Frank Hurley and Robert Capa that influenced modern cinema, and how we should use the word cinematic when critiquing art that is not cinema. yorffoeG samohT
CITAMENIC yorffoeG samohT
