A5p3ct Rat105

When tracing the origin of many a cinematic technique, Abel Gance's landmark 1927 epic Napoléon makes an entrance - this is also the case with the subject of film-makers operating with more than one aspect ratio in their films. Napoléon had the most of the movie in 1.33 ratio, but the finale expands to three cinema screens (Polyvision), which show three seperate images side by side, and at times one single very wide visual.

 CinemaScope is generally excepted to have arrived on the movie scene in 1953; this however ignores not only the early scope films of the early 1930's (The Big Trail and The Bat Whispers among others), but such unexcepted exceptions as William Dieterle's 1948 haunting, slightly boring ghost tale Portrait of Jennie. Most of the film was in full frame 1.37 aspect ratio and in black & white, but the final shot was in color. Ditto the color suprise (similar to The Picture of Dorian Gray movie released three years earlier),  some special theatres gave the storm sequence finale a green tint (restored for the DVD) and had a wider screen ratio of 2.18 (not restored on the current DVDs).

In the 1950's, to underwrite the way that a painter creates in many shapes of the frame, Henri-Georges Clouzot used two aspect ratios for his documentary The Mystery of Picasso (see previous blog entry on distorted visuals). Kubrick filmed Dr Strangelove using two aspect ratios (full frame 1.37 and 1.66) with in-camera mattes, which take turns during the movie to a little bewildering effect - the initial DVD release preserved this, but the anamorphic release changed the film visually to 1.66 only.

The act of using numerous screen shapes does rise its head from time to time, such as in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's cancer drama from 2010, Biutiful, which utlizes both the 1.85 and scope 2.35 ratios. Cartoon series like Samurai Jack push the concept of changing aspect ratios to self-consciously absurd extremes. IMAX productions have an endemic tendency to use numerous aspect ratios -- from a tiny square to utilizing the entire picture space that at its best fills the viewer's entire field of vision.

A film that is usually missing from the discussions on movies with multiple aspect ratios is Orson Welles' confusing noir The Lady from Shanghai - the lauded and much-copied (Enter the Dragon, anyone?) mirror finale has the film mutating to a letterboxed ratio of about 1.66, slightly wider from the full frame 1.37 that the film is in. According to Peter Boghdanovich, Welles' inspiration for the different aspect ratio -- done with in-camera mattes, was D.W. Griffith, and how he masked the image with the iris in his silent productions.

The finale of Lady from Shanghai however is not the only scene which dissents from the 1.37 ratio that the rest of the movie possesses -- the funhouse sequence earlier on instead goes the other route - an aspect ratio which was narrower, of about 1.19, conjuring up memories of early sound films which employed this particular shape (which was praised by Sergei Eisenstein for its dynamism), such as Fritz Lang's M and the excellent The Testament of Dr Mabuse (below), along with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.

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SFX maestro Douglas Trumbull's 1983 movie Brainstorm is a proto-Strange Days tale of technology that records human sensations for others to experience. The narrative scenes are in 1.85 while the sensorial tapes shot in POV widened the screen to scope (2.20 in 70mm, and 2.35 in 35mm prints). The sensation recordings are reminiscent of amusement park contraptions, where people would go standing in a dark room, and POV footage of rollercoaster rides and such was blasted on a big screen - they had these as long as still during my childhood in the early 1990's. The widescreen video releases of Brainstorm faithfully preserve the screen sizes, but here the letterboxing gets bigger in the sensation recording sequences due to the wider aspect ratio, causing the image aperture to actually diminish - not exactly what the film-makers originally envisioned.

  
Update: There's a Blu-ray disc of Brainstorm out now -- it is presented in 2.35 ratio, with windowboxing for the narrative scenes to maintain the smaller aspect ratio - while this accomplishes that the disc stays faithful to the fact that the picture indeed widens for the Xperience-O-Helmet shots, it comes with the cost of a tinier image and lower resolution, which make for most of the movie. This decision of presentation seems to have gathered mostly negative reactions thus far from film buffs.

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Hiroshi Teshigahara's arthouse horror The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) from 1966 is one tough, neat film. It's a situation where the director seems (m)eager to take creative risks at seemingly every corner. The movie centers on a facially sca(r)red businessman, who receives an astonishingly life-like mask, which gives him a reneissance in identity.

Speaking of those creative risks I mentioned before, halfway through the story, we are apruptly introduced to a sub-plot, which is parallel tale of a woman suffering a fate similar to the main character. The jarring narrative quality is enchanced by the sudden shift of aspect ratio (!) from full frame 1.37 to about 2.00, which lasts for a brief time.

Teshigahara's film is a must-see, in both of the screen formats it deploys.

Ending on a light note, a Video Nasty that should be on your to-see list is the campy (!!) concentration camp and war turkey The Beast in Heat - the sic-happy on-screen title during the lonesome opening credits actually is The Horrifing Experiments of SS Last Days. Above is the Dutch tape from the appropriately named video label - the (w)hole pride and glory(hole) of my VHS collection.

I don't have a clue about how the DVD releases of the film handle it, but the VHS has at least three different aspect ratios at work. This eclectic quality about screen formats goes to pretty absurd measures during the silly war sequences that stand in for the dubious finale - at times almost every single shot seems to be in a different aspect ratio - it's a true conflict on a meta-cinematic level as well, it seems.

Tha Es0teric Pleasures of Colorized Motion Pictures

In the late 1970's and during the 1980's, an ominous process began to take shape with old black & white films, which looked like it could lead to having them computer-colorized. This trend, which had media mogul Ted Turner as its antagonistic symbol for many a folks, produced a strong condemnation from high-profile film-makers, such as Martin Scorsese. Colorization presents a philosophy that color image -- in these cases, a yuckkingly over-saturated color scheme featuring people with Umpa Lumpa skin -- is somehow inherintly superior to watching black & white. B&W is seen as something inferior, something that is limiting. The movie buff counter-argument goes basically that monochromatic films were designed to be viewed in that particular way, and that B&W ought to be treated as its own unique thing, possessing features that is as good as color imagery is, but in its own right. Colorization as a process is perhaps analoguous to dimensiolizing 2-D films into stereoscopic 3-D (as is the case in the re-release of the Star Wars films and Cameron's Titanic). But those of us who're not on the totally puritanical disposition, colorized cinematic art does indeed offer some perverted pleasures of its own. This blog entry is dedicated to give a hint of these relishes.

 

The Special Edition DVD of the twisted crackpotty anti-marihuana propaganda opus Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children!) has a new colorized version provided by Legend Films. This version, clearly justly created with tongue firmly in saliva-filled cotton-mouthed cheek, features several different color tones for the marihuana smoke, each color-coded, depending on the severity of the character's addiction to the Devil's Weed (rooted in Hell).

 This brings to mind a heart-warming memory of a Bela Lugosi B-mystery chiller The Death Kiss made in 1932  - it was on late-night Finnish television about a decade ago, and was broadcast for some reason in a n obscure colorized form - a scene showing a fire breaking out in a projection room had an added surreal touch as the smoke was colored orange for some nutty reason!

In 1963, a rumour began to circulate that the last movie before that Lee Harvey Oswald saw before he committed his ungodly deed was the Frank Sinatra vehicle Suddenly, from 1954, which depicts a planned assassination of a U.S. president - Sinatra again dived onto similar territory later with The Manchurian Candidate. In 1986, a colorized version became available, and the neat thing about this is that, "Ol' Blue Eyes" was given a Brown Tone to his Windows to the Soul in an inadvertently subversive touch!

The afore-mentoned Legend Films corrected this flaw in their colorization re-issue of the flick.

 

Skull Island does acid.

Aaaah... the original King Kong. We all know that the monochrome version was great, but experiencing the flick with psychedelic-looking dinosaurs is a real treat, I tells ya! This one is a real corker. What in God's Name were they thinking when they did the colorization?!

In the monochrome original, there's a strange sort of plausibility going on with Kong as a character, but this is just utterly artificial, making the poor creature look like the clumsy puppet that it is. It's a distancing device. Hurry! Someone colorize a Bertolt Brecht movie! Yo, Adrian...!

Speaking of adorable monsters, Larry Cohen's It's Alive cums to mind. Cohen sought that the visual style to aim for was like a colorized film, with its saturated, unreal pastel visions, and some moments in the movie do archieve this somewhat.

An apotheosis of the 1980's colorization controversy came with the rumor that Ted Turner's company would colorize Orson Welles' seminal Citizen Kane. An elderly Welles complained about this to indie director Henry Jaglom:

"Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons!"

 Welles' original unusual RKO contract containing unusual creative freedom finally did it for Kane, and the colorization never took place.... Alas, not so for Welles' mutilated Kane follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, slightly less accomplished in terms of craftsmanship, but more human. It got mutilated to another degree with a colorized Turner release.

OK, finally fellas, let me make my stand clear: colorizing B&W films generally makes as much damn sense as -- cue a Noam Chomsky-like drawing of an unexpected analogy -- re-releasing Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert in black & white.

The act of colorization possessing artistic integrity is not an entirely impossible concept. The best example that pops up is the 1935 fantasy film She, which was originally intended to be shot in an early experimental color stock, and the entire production was constructed with this in mind -- but RKO studios at the last moment called it off, and the end result was a monohrome flick. Some years ago, Legend Films (the company that obviously is some kind of warped hero of this blog entry) under the supervision of Ray Harryhausen, the legend himself, colorized the film in  order for viewers to experience what She would look like in color. This was further a propos by the fact that 1930's color film stock possessed a similar faded, pastel quality that colorized imagery has.

Originally in the 1980's, some film-makers were actually enthusiastic about the technology, including Frank Capra, who wanted to colorize some of his classics, like the excellent study of individual vs community, It's a Wonderful Life, but was barred from the colorization booth when it emerged that the films were in public domain. This led the bitter Capra join with the anti-colorization brigade.

On a general level, colorizing old films might be a dumb idea, but if you do do it - then go the Reefer Madness way, and actually be crazy and creative with it, and have fun!

Aaaaah, an' one final quickie nugget:

Roger "The Man" Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors - in its original monochromatic form, veeeery innocent and tame kiddie fodder; but GodDaaaaamn the way the more gory moments start to look in the colorized version - this is beginning to be quite heavy stuff, all of a sudden, soon it's kissing cousins with Blood Feast. I was shocked. No wonder almost all gore films in cinema history have been in (blood dripping) color...   ?

dIsT0rTiOnS

  A real tour-de-force in the esoteric category of cinematic visuals of a distorted nature is here.

                                                                          Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn) -                                                                          one of the finest films of the 1990's -                                                                           uses distorting mirrors and lenses to create an unreal visual style through-out the whole movie; the majority of its images are distorted in one way or nother ("Nother died"). An outstanding and uncompromising feature about the work is that no apologetic clear justifications, or rather excuses, are given for the visual appearance -- no-one is hit over the head with a club nor are there any beer mugs revealed on the foreground, as, say, in the Francis Bacon bio flick Love is the Devil.

We are priviledged to be part of the final moments of a mother and son's relationship, taking place in a secluded place in the countryside. Intimate views of the characters are intercut with landscape shots, stylized to a degree that they're reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, than regular master shots from films. The thing distinguishing this marvelous attempt from simply creating tableaux vivant versions of the director's favorite paintings is the true sense of time flowing, passing - unique for the cinematic medium. Here the ambiguous nature of the crooked visions gives a sense that we're inhabiting a place somewhere between life and death, a place of transition, of reality being in flux.

But to give a little historical context, the first and most common strategy in using distorted imagery in cinema is to create a narrative context for it which establishes that the distorted visuals seek to convey the disoriented perception of a given character in the picture. There's a ton of examples of this in Hollywood and mainstream cinema, but let's throw John Carpenter's Christine as one title among many. One fairly interesting early example is from the silent era, in the 1928 Teutonic short film Überfall, from Ernö Metzger. A milktoast guy gets in trouble, and is knocked out cold for his efforts by a brutish thug; this breaks the film - until then shot and edited in conventional manner - into a prolonged, ritualized montage of distorted faces and sights.


A little similar experiment was conducted by the illustrious Abel Gance in 1915 with the short La folie du Docteur Tube, which features a conehead-looking mad doc experimenting with a mystical powder, which goes off everywhere, and distorts the surrroundings - the movie is basically a self-justifying showcase for the then-novel visuals created by an anamorphic lens.

An' speaking of anamorphic . . . . .

The fresh Finnish DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature documentary The Mystery of Picasso from 1956 isn't really technically what it ought to be. The entire movie basically observes Picasso's pictures being made, and the twists and turns his creative process possessess. Perhaps a little too tedious for my money, at times feeling like watching paint dry - ha! - but it's an interesting little movie  (I do prefer Clouzot's documentary on Herbert Von Karajan) which not only mixes together monochromatic and color imagery, but also various aspect ratios. The original theatrical release, and also the U.S. DVD, have the film mostly in the square aspect ratio, but about halfway through Picasso remarks I need a bigger canvas, and the screen expands into CinemaScope. The U.S. DVD has these sections letterboxed, but the Finnish DVD - while being superior to its U.S. counterpart in terms of color and image sharpness - insanely has this stretched completely anamorphically, as you can see in the above screenshots, the Finnish dvd is the one on the left and the U.S. on the right - just like in politics, natch?

Weirdly enough, stretching these paintings even more than goo' ol' Eugene Tooms could bear, seems to give them an additional Picasso-esque quality!
But I still personally prefer letterboxes.

Too bad this anamorphicity (is that a reel word?) extends beyond the showing of paintings on the DVD presentation. This maybe takes too big a step towards making Picasso look like something out of Resnais' Night and Fog: