Meditations on Visual Style

    

 Usually visual styles are most self-evident when a film incorporates numerous of them, like in the Hollywood flicker Traffic, where each of the storylines has their style: yellowish and grainy for the Mexican portion (with Tomas Milian!), bluish and bleak for the Michael Douglas drug czar portion and so on. The most interesting moments are when the stories overlap and the characters tresspass on each others' territory; Catherina Zeta-Jones for example appears in a visual style that's unlike her own segment.

The presence of this kind of visual profiling is highly felt in TV series like CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, where both cities are given a visual style that tries to characterize the place. One crossover episode took place in both cities, where the contrast between the orange-saturated sunny Miami and the bleak, bluish NY became pretty apparant even to visual illiterates.

One of the cliches of visual styles, in Hollywood productions especially, seems to be the high and mighty Bleach Bypass.

Muted colors. High contrast. Don'tcha just love it... mothafucka.

The origin of bleach bypass is John Huston's movie adaptation of Moby Dick from 1956. The film-makers wanted to create a pastel-like faded color scheme to suggest the days past, and accomplished the feat by using a film developing process that could be summed up saying that both monochromatic and color versions of the image were fused together, with some added silver to spice things up. A very similar technical process would be at the heart of creating bleach bypass in the years to come - but in today's world of digital cinema, the question is more about plug-ins and pressing the right buttons than about lab chemicals.

The First Official Bleach Bypass Movie was a product from that finest species of numerous new waves, the one from Japan. The film in question was Kon Ichikawa's drama Her Brother from 1960; the results were much subtler than subsequent products utilizing this visual look.

One of the most outstanding examples of the process came in the 1980's with the Orwell adaptation 1984 made in... well, you know when - and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (Offret), wonderfully lensed by Sven Nykvist. The streak continued in  the 1990's - Spielberg's Saving Ryan's Privates deserves a mention. Slowly bleach bypass began to resemble a cliche in this decade... especially in the arena of still photography used in movie poster art.

But(t), can a visual style gain an importance to itself that seems unjustified? A case in point is the animated feature Metropia from 2009 - an entire film that's been made around its visual style. In the film what makes the visual style unique goes beyond mere color palette or grain structure, and arrives at the very shapes and appearances of things. Here you get a unique sensation that you're watching something that hangs in some weird middle ground between live-action and animation.

Even though this visual approach is very titillating, it's just ain't enough, buddy. It might be for a short flick - if that. The only item worth of interest content-wise is a dystopian, but oddly compelling depiction of a future Europe, where nation state borders have been more or less dissolved. The whole plot is forgettable claptrap, and the unusual appearence of the movie seems to have nil to do with the actual events, themes, the story and characters. Just watching the imagery itself has its dreadful pleasures, alas, not enough to sustain anything over thirty minutes.

Perhaps an example of something that has fared a little better in this ballpark is Richard Linklater's Dick Film A Scanner Darkly - the rotoscoped imagery at least takes some steps into being in union with the themes of alienation and the unreliable nature of reality that the story features.

Now, two brief examples of visual style glory in conclusion:

Carl Theodor Dreyer's excellent Vampyr (1932) features a shoddy, greyish, low-contrast monochromatic look, which is augmented brilliantly by the muddy soundtrack. The visual look was famously conceived when during the making of test footage, some light accidentally leaked on the undeveloped film, which gave unusual visual sensations - the actual execution of that look in principal photography was created through gauzes being used as filters.Watching Vampyr gives the sensation (unique for a 1930's film) like you're in fact viewing a film made in this day, which in some Guy Maddin-ish way seeks to mimic old cinema, but retains a vague modern undertone.

And on other hand, there's E. Elias Merkhige's 1989 arthouse horror Begotten. The movie's furiously dull, and a definite lackluster. The soundtrack is lame and fails to ignite the visuals, which do have potential in their unusual appearance, which strives to present only black and white tones in extreme contrast. Back in pre-digital days the creation of this look took hundreds of grueling hours worth of post-production work, while today it would take just a press o' a button. Begotten is the kind of movie that, if you view stills from and read a synopsis of it, it strikes as potentially tremendous, but the actual watching of it is a cruuuuuuel awakening. Merkhige later was hired as the director of the nosferatu movie Shadow of the Vampire in an interesting Eraserhead-David-Lynch-hired-to-direct-Elephant-Man sort of way.

That's it for this subject... for now... (insert ominous music)

Style: all that is not technique.
Robert Bresson in Notes on the Cinematographer

Ramifications on black and white + color

This perhaps is a topic I might have a slight fetish on: the introduction of color into a black & white film (or vice versa) for a brief moment. Having spoken about the topic in many a forum, here are a few observations that never have found their way into any other context (hey, waddya think this blog is about if not for emptying my mental trash bin?).

A nice starter. The practically forgotten 1958 B-horror The Return of Dracula is black & white, featuring a terribly bland Drac, and only one quick unexpected cheering up via the film form. Now tell me if you've heard this one before: it's a monochromo movie, and then one scene has blood appearing Simply Red, while the rest of the film's in black & white. Well, back when this was made that cliche didn't exist, Simply due to censorship regulations; if you ever saw blood at all, it certainly was not in color. But here ya have it, ladies and gentlemen: near the end, a staking of female vampire has a close-up of crimson in color.

Intellectually you're aware that what you're witnessing is something horrendous, but at the same time you can't ignore the fact that you're enjoying it. Yeah, it's that sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, where a comic book fan (see, I didn't use the word "geek" - naaah, I'm beyond that) reading a B & W (indie?) comic book gets sucked inside one, where the teen (in color) fights a B & W Freddy in crummily painted monochromatic sets. This scene ends up as the highlight in this rather tedious outing. Here's a quote from that classic of books, Official Splatter Film Guide Vol 2:

"The plot's a bore, sure, and Freddy and his 'sharp wit' take a back seat this time, but director Hopkins and his FX folks pour on the psychosexual imagery and surrealism with such Buñuelian abandon that the film almost becomes an experimental art movie"

                                                                            Sergei Eisenstein used color in the second part of his uncompleted Ivan the Terrible trilogy. Shot on wildly saturated Agfacolor film stock captured from the Nazis, the film equates color with the banquet room, where the lavish but sinister party finale takes place. The otherwordly colors are exactly what you would have excepted the palette of this highly artificial film to be, judging from its preceding B & W moments. The interplay between the banquet room in color and the monochromatic outside world is quite fantastic.

Going towards his doom, Vladimir halts at the room's exit and is washed over by the color green. This cuts to the corridor outside the room, in black & white. Then, subversively for its time, the film cuts back to the banquet room - again in color: Vladimir comes back to his senses, and the green color disappears, and he continues his way to his death. One film scholar described this as a color equivalent to James Joyce-like stream-of-consciousness.

Did I see just see that, or was it something in my eye?                 Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound possesses not only juicy-but-oh-so-brief dream images designed by Salvador Dalí, but also some flair in terms of its cinematic language in the finale, where the main baddie (aaawww, Hollywood...) turns the gun on himself in a startling POV shot, and pulls the trigger. While the gun fires, the screen turn into a comic book-like red explosion for a few frames... so try not to blink, gov! Like it is the case with older films with very limited color footage, most prints are totally monochromatic (like how many times have you seen Eisenstein's Potemkin with the flag being red as it should?), and such is also the case with this Hitchcock film. Even some DVD releases omit the almost subliminal red flash.

Movies being negative

Films usually tend to feature inverted imagery only in their camera negatives, but some movies do make an exception. All kinds of movies, ranging from Man Ray's experimental films from the silent era to today's mainstream Hollywood have created interesting inversions. Weirdly enough, none seem to use the technique (intellectually) to convey something being its actual opposite; what a negative image is in relation to a positive. But still film-makers have utilized this slice of filmic vocabulary in other intriguing routes. This very first posting gives a brief celebration of this.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse,1959

The wildly eclectic U.S. experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage made this short film as an autobiographical summary of the first months of his marriage, starring himself and his wife. This is one of Brakhage's more, ahem, figurative films, but still quite abstract and impressionistic in terms of its narrative content. A couple inhabits a gloomy house and we witness their mysterious, tension-filled everyday (or rather night, as the film has no moments set during daytime) moments. There are instances of graphic visuals of lovemaking, that have been inverted into negative. This makes the moments of sex to be very explicit, and yet shrouded and suggestive at the same time. Still, this is incredibly racy stuff for its time.

Nosferatu, 1922

Murnau's silent film is an interesting adaptation of Dracula; the scene, recreated numerous times in subsequent films, has Jonathan Harker being escorted to Dracula's castle by a sped-up carriage. To convey that we're entering into a zone that is esoteric indeed, the image turns to negative to bizarr-O effect.

  

Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer), 1954

This Finnish horror fantasy, lauded by Jean Cocteau on its release, is set in Lapland and dwells on Sami mysticism. The negative shot marks the first appearance of the mythic white reindeer, to which the heroine of the story is magickally transformed. To underwrite the mystic quality of this moment, the film-makers shot a dark reindeer galloping against a snowy white background, and inverted this, making the reindeer white (this gives it a kind of perverted kinship to Black Gestapo, featured up a head). I double-dare you to try to find another mainstream Finnish film of this era that uses such a thing as negative imagery, let alone in such a way that at least strives towards artfulness.

El gran amor del conde Drácula (Count Dracula's Great Love), 1974

This deliciously violent (although many minutes of gore and sexy depravity was scissored before the release) movie by Javier Aguirre  from (S)pain is perhaps the best of Paul Naschy's horror efforts, which isn't saying much, folks. The film has several vampiric scenes printed in negative because... well... OK, who knows why, but they're pretty interesting, nonetheless.  The film's claim to fame has been its beginning, which officially has been heralded as The Greatest Opening Credits Sequence Ever, where we see a person falling down the stairs dead... and then we see it again. And again. And again. And again... and again.

Alphaville, 1965

Jean-Luc Godard's arthouse-scifi is unusually restrained for the director - or is at least to some degree. As the futuristic world around lead dick Lemmy Caution starts to crumble near the end, so seems the filmic language itself, as the image aimlessly turns into negative and back. Godard did a similar trick in his later Weekend, when a car wreck unleashes a wreckace on the film image itself.

Devil Doll, 1964

Lindsay Shonteff's quite impressively creepy horror flicker (which has some interesting plot parallels to Cronenberg's later Scanners) has a riveting scene of hypnosis near its beginning. A sinister magician (Bryant Haliday) puts a man from the audience under his spell; the man's falling onto the magician's mental grip is conveyed through a close-up of Haliday's eyes which turn to negative. The negative image used here was apparantly a still frame, as Haliday's face is utterly static even though he starts to speak - this goof lends the scene some surprising supplemental creepiness. Yummy mummy.

The Black Gestapo, 1975

The film is a sort of paranoid interpretation of the militant 1970's civil rights organization The Black Panther Party (for Self-defense), portraying them as a bunch of hypocritical, criminal black nazi-like thugs. The wonderful concept is completely wasted to a stunning degree in this boring outing, which has almost nothing going on politically or in terms of blaxploitation cinema. The "almost" being the opening credits, which are a juicy wet dream of political incorrectness. Newsreel footage of Hitler and the nazis are shown to us, and as the title comes up, a sight of Hitler turns to negative to... well, you know, make his skin seem like it's black. A standing ovation to exploitation veteran Lee Frost for this particular touch, which makes for a potentially fun Youtube clip. But shame about the rest 0' this cinematic calamity.