Cinematography (1)
Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion

Steven Shaviro
October 5, 2011

Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion (1937)

• Jean Renoir (1894-1979): son of Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir
• Made films 1924-1970
• Greatest period of creativity: during political turmoil of the 1930s
• Worldwide Great Depression (started 1929)
• Totalitarianism: Nazi Germany (Hitler), Fascist Italy (Mussolini), Communist Soviet Union (Stalin)
• In France: violent polarization of left and right
• Rearmament of Germany, Spanish Civil War

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1)

Pierre Auguste Renoir (2)

Grand Illusion: Themes

• A prisoner-of-war escape movie, with a difference
• Set during World War I, which ended in 1919...
• ...but anticipating World War II, just 2 years away
• End of an era: passage from the old Europe to the new
• Social tensions and differences
• Class: aristocrats, bourgeois, common people
• Ethnicity/Religion: Christians and Jews
• Nationality/Language: French and Germans
• Can universal brotherhood transcend these differences?

Grand Illusion: Form

• Naturalistic settings: prison camps, countryside
• Almost no close-ups
• Fluidly moving camera
• Camera tracks gazes, reframes accordingly
• Use of offscreen space: what lies beyond the frame
• Camera frequently zooms back from a detail of the set to a broader view of a group of people
• Shot compositions emphasize groups of people, and relations between them

Grand Illusion: The prisoners put on a show

• Theatricality
• Frontal view of the stage
• Dancers in drag
• Contrasts with naturalism elsewhere in film
• 360-degree pan: camera moves from stage to audience, and around audience
• From the stage to the Germans walking out
• As French sing national anthem, moving camera breaks through division between stage and audience, uniting them all
• Irony (in next sequence, Germans retake town again)

Grand Illusion: Von Rauffenstein and the Prison

• Erich von Stroheim as Von Rauffenstein
• Tracking shot (with pans, tilts, etc.): we see objects in von Rauffenstein's office, & his servant, before we see von Rauffenstein himself
• Movement & objects reveal character
• The shot is paralleled and opposed by the later tracking shot of the pictures on the walls, and other items, in Elsa's house

Grand Illusion: The Death of De Boildieu

• Isolation: geranium
• Passing of old ruling class & social order
• The 2 aristocrats have much in common
• De Boildieu dies in order to allow the lower middle class Marechal, and the wealthy Jewish Rosenthal, to escape
• De Boildieu chooses patriotism over old ruling class ties
• But Marechal and Rosenthal affirm universal humanism, rather than patriotism
• The final sequence: crossing the border

Cinematography

• Literally, "photography" = "light writing"
• Literally, "cinematography" = "movement writing" or "writing in movement"
• Cinematography = Everything that is done with the camera
• Not what is filmed, but how it is filmed
• Structure of the shot
• Framing
• Camera movement

The Shot

• The Shot: basic unit of cinematography, or of any movie
• Shot = a single, continuously exposed piece of film
• Cinematic POV: position from which shot is filmed
• Subjective POV: re-creates the vision, or the perspective, of a particular character within the film (like first-person narrative in prose fiction)
• Objective POV: represents the more impersonal perspective of the camera (like an omniscient narrator in prose fiction)
• Focus: the specific object highlighted by the shot, or the point in the image that is most clearly and precisely outlined by the lens of the camera

Framing and Depth of Field

• Framing
• Way the image is contained within rectangular frame
• Depends upon camera's distance from its subject
• Usually straight and balanced, but can also be canted
• Depth of Field
• Range or distance within which objects remain in focus (sharp and clear)
• Shallow focus: only objects at a particular distance from the camera are sharp and clear; anything closer or further away appears blurred
• Deep focus: all distances from the camera are equally sharp and clear

Varieties of Framing

• Angle of Framing: Straight-on vs. High or Low
• Level of Framing: Straight-on vs. Canted frame (diagonal)
• Height of Framing: Distance from ground
• Varying the frame (masks, iris-in &,-out, split screen)

Aspect ratios (shape of the frame rectangle)

• Academy ratio, 1:33-1 (1930s-1950s; still used for TV)
• Standard Widescreen ratio (Europe): 1.66-1 (since 1960s)
• Standard Widescreen ratio (USA): 1.85-1 (since 1960s; currently also used in widescreen TV and HDTV)
• Ultrawide, 2.35:1 or larger (CinemaScope, since 1950s)

Camera Movement

• Some shots are taken entirely from a single, fixed perspective
• Other shots are taken with a moving camera, and therefore involve a mobile frame
• Camera movement as reframing to follow characters
• Camera movement independently of the characters, to reveal more of the space
• Zoom out to reveal wider context, or zoom in to focus on detail

Framing, Movement, and the Exploration of Space

• Onscreen space: actual space visible within frame
• Offscreen space: implied space beyond frame
• Uses of offscreen space
• Usually, the action offscreen is less important than what we see onscreen
• But what's offscreen can impinge on what we see
• Sound coming from offscreen
• Sometimes we hear things before we see them
• Monsters in horror films lurking just offscreen
• Implied contexts in offscreen space

Image and World