"The most primitive films were shot against a painted backcloth. Nobody minded even when the backcloth flapped in the wind. Audiences suspended their dis-belief, as they were accustomed to do in the theater.
Amazingly quickly, cameramen and designers caught on to the trick of matte painting. I remember seeing a silent film set in the seventeenth century called The Spanish Dancer (1923). I was amazed that the producers, Famous Players-Lasy, would pay for a huge castle to be constructed for just one shot. The castle was utterly convincing, but I found out years later it had been painted on glass. The camera dispenses with the third dimension, so a painting a few feet from the lens can, if the artist and the cameraman are skillful enough, look like a towering edifice hundreds of yards away. Over the years, I became skillful in spotting these glass shots, or so I thought.
Quite recently, though, I searched for a location that turned out to be another of these brilliant tricks.
I have immense admiration for the technicians who enlarged the scope of the motion picture. This book tells there story, and it is a work of enormous importance for film history. For years the practitioners of the invisible art fought hard for it to remain a closely guarded secret. "If you give these tricks away the whole illusion will be lost," they would protest.
Well we have had decades of learning how films are made and how the tricks are done. It hasn't destroyed the illusion - if anything it has enhanced the moviegoing experience.
Craig Barron based this book on interviews he filmed nearly twenty years ago, working with Mark Vaz, has created a treasure house of material. For how the flapping back cloth led to CGI is one the of the most fascinating stories of the last century."
I love how this quote starts off, this is essentially the optime of matte painting, the fact that how it's developed means the audience no longer needs to suspend it's disbelief like they do in theater. The fact that they can watch a film and be there without any crudeness it's a transportation from real life. That is the essence of what I want my practical work to be. Now I think the whole back cloth part is a bit extreme because the book doesn't mention any back cloths, it jumps straight into glass matte paintings. And also the ending although very poetic and grand is very long winded and american, in my opinion why is why I'm not going to use it, I might use the bit about theater suspending disbelief but I think I'll try find a better quote than this. This whole thing with the back cloth though led me to look at series of books regarding theater and set design, which is why I've included them in my bibliography.
There was this one book about architecture in film, which I found really really fascinating, because last year I read a book called Eyes of the Skin, which was super heavy going but was about architecture in general, so I thought this developed on from this nicely. But I think it goes off topic from Matte Painting. Because although it looks at it a bit like the extension of cityscapes through matte painting, it didn't really cover what I wanted to know more about. I was expecting it to discuss the fact that in the studio's they would build one level of a set and then extend it with a matte painting. I've only read of this once in richard rickett's special effects book and I didn't want to have that as the bible of my dissertation. Although it is the most amazing book. I love it so much. However what did fascinate me was this section.
Film Architecture, Set designs from metropolis to Blade Runner.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920.
A murder becomes visible - as a play of shadows on a fray wall. And shows once again how something imagined is more horrible than anything shown. No cinema can compete with our imagination. That the scream of a raped woman can be heard, really heard (if one has ears!) in this film - shall always be remembered about it. - Kurt Tucholsky 1920.
pg 50
In January and February 1919, during the days of the Spartacist revolt in Berlin, the as yet unknown screen writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz wrote the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. In April 1919, they submitted the screenplay to the producer Erich Pommer, head of the Decla film company. The production of the film, based on a revised version of the script, began in october 1919. The hero, Francis, tells a friend the story of Dr Caligari, who displays the sleepwalking Cesare in a “cabinet” at the fair in Holstenwall. A series of murders begins in the city. The sleuthing Francis finally exposes Dr. Caligari as the criminal who misuses the sleepwalking Cesare to do the murders. Caligari escapes and disappears into an insane asylum, eventually turning out to be it’s director. But instead of a morbid play on the tale is eventually revealed as a sick fantasy of the narrating hero. All the characters in his story turn up again at the end in the asylum’s inner courtyard, the only structure in the film that displays conventional architectural elements. In Germany the film was criticised by many for disavowing the Art of Expressionism as the deranged fantasy of a lunatic. After the war, Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner used this argument to link the film to subsequent art criticism of the National Socialists. Kurt Tucholsky was fascinated by the “completely unreal dream world” of this film, in which he saw the poetic power of the medium at work. For him, almost completely suppressing realistic representation meant an enormous enrichment of film’s suggestive design potential. Caligari’s architectural realisation by the set designers Walter Reimann, Hermann Warm, and Walter Rohrig lends it a definitive design principle throughout. A total of 33 different sets were used. The painted views, which distort the site of the action in perspective and tip them off balance, give the sets a claustrophobic atmosphere in which the actors move like ghosts. The walls of the city streets are covered with enigmatic graffiti. The specifications for the decor determined the camera work and lighting as well. Shadows painted on scenery produced the contrast between light and dark, while the usually static and neutral camera opened up the sites of the action from the front. Apart from the obvious artificiality of the sets was programmatic in a more general sense. Reimann felt strongly that the film should not try to imitate reality through the simple means of stagecraft. He repeatedly pointed out the distinct differences between actual architecture and the film sets and insisted that should the term ‘film architecture’ should be replaced by ‘film painting’. “In no way are film sets architecture! . . . The film, the art of ‘optical’ illusion, needs utopia. It needs a set that is a utopian space, simulating the atmosphere of a space for the imagination” (Reimann 1926). Only very few of Reimann’s sets have survived; they are now scattered over four different archives in Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Los Angeles. Warm provided sketches and a number of models for a retrospective exhibition at the Siftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 1963. No other film exerted as much economic and aesthetic influence of the cinematography of the early Weimar Republic as Caligari. Even though the Expressionist film boom following on it’s success subsided quickly, this film nonetheless opened up new export markets for the German film industry.P.L
pg52
Together the three fellas continued this aesthetic with a follow up film entitled Genuine - Die Tragodie wines seltsamen Hauses (Genuine - the Tragedy of a Strange House). The thing that most interests me about these films are the set designs by Cesar Klein.
Contemporary critiques commented extensively on the set designer’s efforts. Like Caligari, Genuine was made exclusively in the studio. Here, too, the artificially of the architecture was emphasised to stress the alien , synthetic psychological world of the plot. However, there is less use than in Caligari of spatial depth, sequences of movement and various lighting conditions, substituting instead a more two dimensional treatment of the floor, walls and ceiling. As we know from Cesar Klein’s preliminary drawings, the lively expressionist sets were designed in powerful colours. And although he experimented with a number of sketches in black and white, he could not prevent the sets from appearing over done and disjointed to a number of critics. “The paintings by Cesar Klein may testify to new expressive responsibilities, but their much too rich imagination obscures the clarity of the image in a splendid confusion of decor and costumes . . . with it’s artificially bizarre audacity, this presentation suffocated the emotion the actor made one feel.” wrote a contemporary critic (“Genuine,” Der Kinematograph, 1920?. For the development and discussion of expressionist film and it’s attempt to reprint psychological space, Genuine is an important counterpart to Caligari. Because of the lack of framing narrative, there was no opportunity here to write of the expressionist decor as the vision of someone mentally ill. Conservative critics doubted the expressionism was justified in such a case.(Jgh.1920); others claimed that Genuine stood at the beginning of a new epoch in artistic film making. (A.F. 1920).
Genuine lives in a subterranean glass house filled with magic trees, the splendour of glittering mirrors, luxurious beds, strange furnishings. The house itself has extensive halls, quiet enclosed gardens, dark rooms full of knik knaks, and exotic curio . . . The town is a dream town filmed with curious boutiques, narrow little lanes, rough people. Around the town there is a magical forest , , , This forest is a masterpiece one would like to own as a painting, and at the same time utterly characteristic of what Weine actually wants . . . Weine creates a forest out of cardboard and canvas he does without nature because he wants to create a fairytale , and thus he achieves a strength of atmosphere even beyond the best works by Schwind [the nineteenth century romantic painter Moritz Von Schwind]. We have here the first poet who gives film style the first maestro who masters the material fully. [A.F. 1920]
pg 58
After reading these few pages, I had to watch these films, and they are bizarre and eccentric but also amazing at the same time. But it is more focused on set design. But the amount of paint that went onto the sets is incredible so weird. I loved it. The designs and so on reminded of Noel Fielding and the mighty boosh. And at that kind of fun element, I bet they had so much fun making it. This kind of goes off topic completely from matte painting, the only way i could link it is if you built a set and instead of painting the set you painted glass panels in front the set had the set all white and had the comedy sketch move in between the panels. Kept the same set and just changed the glass panels, you would need massive glass panels though. I can see that working in a Mighty Boosh esque manner. I might plot this out as an idea. Either giant glass panels you could use to do the effect in camera or you could not do that and instead put them in after, but then you'd have to green screen the characters which might be a farce.
I saw this from september issue of creative review and to do this they sandwiched the model between painted sheets of glass, which is kind of the same effect. Although of course it's pertinent to remember that glass in still photo's has been going for a long long time a lot longer than films have been made. I think this brings me nicely onto Norman Dawn, my next blog post, who is supposedly the first ever guy to make a matte painting. I've found out so much about him, I think it would be a shame not to share this information with you, but I'm only going to discuss the history of matte painting in 1,000 and I could probably waffle on about Norman O Dawn for at least 9,000 so I'll do my next blog post on him. Also I'll come back to the first book the Legends of Movie Matte Painting as I get further into discussing the route of my project. As for the books of architecture and set design I really just wanted to mention them briefly and stem off this first idea of practical and my thought process behind it. I need to get a few ideas down on paper at this stage and this is the first one I had, so I'll come back to it and develop it and draw it out when I come to present all my ideas.
No comments:
Post a Comment