Cinematography (1)
Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion (1937)

Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion (1937)

Jean Renoir (1894-1979): son of the Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir
Started making films in the silent era; his last film dates from 1970
His greatest period of creativity: France in the 1930s
An era of political turmoil

The 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

Grand Illusion: Themes

A prisoner-of-war escape movie, but with a difference
Set during World War I, which had ended 20 years previously...
...but looking forward to World War II, which started only 2 years after the film was made
The end of an era: passage from the old Europe to the new
Social tensions and differences

Class: aristocrats, nouveau riche bourgeois, common people
Ethnicity/Religion: Christians and Jews
Nationality/Language: French and Germans

Theme of universal brotherhood and camraderie, transcending these differences

Grand Illusion: Form

Naturalistic settings: the prison camps, the countryside
Fluidly moving camera
Camera tracks gazes, reframes accordingly
Frequent use of offscreen space: reference to what lies beyond the frame
Almost no close-ups
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
Theatricality: dancers in drag
How this contrasts with the naturalistic perspectives elsewhere in the film
News of a French victory -- interruption of the show --
360-degree pan: camera moves from stage to audience, and around audience

From the stage to the Germans walking out
As the French sing their national anthem, the moving camera breaks through the division between stage and audience, uniting them all

Irony (in the next sequence, the Germans retake the town again)

Grand Illusion:
Von Rauffenstein and the Prison

Erich von Stroheim as Von Rauffenstein
Tracking shot (with pans, tilts, and other movements) shows us objects in von Rauffenstein's office, and his servant, before it shows us von Rauffenstein himself
Movement and 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; the geranium
The passing of the old ruling class, and the old social order
De Boildieu and von Rauffenstein have much in common
De Boildieu dies in order to allow the lower middle class Marechal, and the nouveau riche Jewish Rosenthal, to escape
De Boildieu chooses patriotism over the old ruling class ties
But Marechal and Rosenthal affirm universal brotherhood, 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: the basic unit of cinematography, and indeed of any movie
Shot = a single, continuously exposed piece of film
Cinematic Point of View: the position from which a 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

Frame, Depth, and Movement

Framing

The way the image is contained within a rectangular frame
Framing depends upon the camera's distance from its subject
Framing is usually straight and balanced, but it can also be canted (askew)

Depth of Field

The 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 blurry
Deep focus: all distances from the camera are equally sharp and clear

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

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 the ground (e.g., Hawks vs. Ozu)
Aspect ratios (shape of the frame rectangle)
Varying the frame (masks, iris-in and iris-out
Split screen (experimental films; also some TV shows, like 24)
Aspect ratios (shape of the frame rectangle)

Academy ratio, 1:33-1 (1930s-1950s; still used for television)
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 high-definition TV)
Ultrawide, 2.35:1 or larger (CinemaScope, starting in 1950s)
Problem: Letterboxing vs. pan-and-scan

Framing and Space

Onscreen space: the actual space visible within the frame of the image
Offscreen space: the implied space or world that exists outside the 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 the offscreen space

Image and World

Using the frame as a window onto a larger world (Renoir)
Using the frame as a kind of painter's canvas (von Sternberg)