Abstract
A note on critical methodology A t one and the same time the motion picture image is both a flat, two-dimensional pattern of light and dark and an illusory three-dimensional reproduction of the scene that appeared in front of the camera. Critics and audiences almost never notice the two-dimensional pattern, responding instead to the stories that unfold in the illusory three-dimensional world. It takes an unusually assertive image something like the bone tossed into the air in prehistoric times in 2001 that with a cut instantaneously becomes a similarly shaped spaceship in flight to make viewers notice a graphic element as such while a story takes place. When I first began to view anamorphic films to see whether there were any compositional strategies filmmakers might have used in the 1950s and 1960s to organise the wider image, I expected that whatever I might discover would be embodied in the apparent three-dimensional space of the image. Yet as I studied films from those years, I found myself unexpectedly attending to the two-dimensional qualities of their images, especially at moments of shot change and camera repositioning. Increasingly, continuities of line and shape came to define composition in ways I had never expected. Eventually, I came to understand that these two-dimensional qualities served as formal keys to the disposition of three-dimensional elements, And in understanding this, I realised that traditional methods of cinematic analysis were no longer appropriate. Not surprisingly, once I concentrated on the two-dimensional qualities of the image as graphic design, I discovered that the language and assumptions of typographers and graphic designers were much more relevant to understanding anamorphic composition than I ever expected. Most useful of all has been the concept of the grid as a rational and objective regulative system. In books and magazines the grid insures a uniformity of lay-out from page to page. The quartered grid in anamorphic filmmaking provides a similar uniformity of composition from shot to shot. The two dimensional pattern of the grid that underpins the placement text and image on the printed page functions equally well to underpin the placement of a film's apparently three-dimensional elements. Josef Muller-Brockmann's suggestion in Grid Systems in Graphic Design, the standard work on the subject that 'as a controlling system the grid makes it easier to give the surface of space a rational organisation', applies equally well to the motion picture image as to the printed page.2 I explain the experiences that brought me to the ideas discussed in this essay in order to alert readers that what they will encounter here has little to do with traditional ways of discussing cinematic composition. Instead of discussing the placement of camera and actors as a directorial decision, for example, I shall define their placement according to a grid uniformly designed into a film's sets. As one might expect from my unusual approach, my discussion is not based upon written documents. Rather, its conclusions are drawn from the careful examination of more than one hundred anamorphic films released between 1953 and 1965. Those films released before 1960 were filmed primarily in the CinemaScope anamorphic process; the
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