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