West Side Story 1961 - Unique "focus" effect"

Kit Mackenzie · February 1

Hello!

Apologies if this is been addressed before but my searching hasn't pulled anything up...

West Side Story - 1961 - 39m 5s. The wide shot of the hall dancing and then the middle begins to blur. We then cut to shots that are constantly blurred but how was this transition shot carried out do we reckon?

There's no noticeable dissolve in the action of the dancers so I couldn't see it being a dissolve from a clean to blurred pass - it seems like it must be something more complex no?

Tricky to demonstrate in still images only but a few below and the clip is here:

Thanks

Joerg Polzfusz · February 1

I would assume that some assistant simply moved a glass with some grease on it up or down… -> see attached image: Initially, you can see everything in focus, as you start with the blue part in front of the lens. Then the glass got moved up, with everything except for yellow parts being out of focus because of the grease…

(Other than this, I would guess that it’s a composition of a scene shot in front of a blue/green screen with a blurry scene.)

David Mullen ASC · February 1

I think it’s done in an optical printer since it dissolves over the shot rather than slides into the frame.

Kit Mackenzie · February 1

Yes I couldn't see any slide and the out of focus area appears to curve out to the edges which would mean you couldn't slide it in.

@David Mullen ASC I can't discern any shift in the movement of the crowd though - so not dissolving between a version with and a version without the effect.

Are you suggesting they shot the blurred version without the crowd and then partially overlayed this and compensated for exposure somehow? There does seem to be a slight flicker...

Or are you saying the effect was done completely in the optical printer by introducing a filter at that process?

Thanks

Simon Wyss · February 1

Linwood Dunn described it in 1974, mattes on the optical combination printer. In Europe the auxiliary film pieces are called cache and contre-cache. High-contrast extreme fine grain black-and-white stocks are being exposed behind defined parts of the OCN with dissolves where wanted, developed, then run in contact with colour intermediate film one after the other, the primarily exposed stock rewound the same length, and so on. After development again you have interpositive scenes that get cut in to the master interpositive. Once complete, an internegative is drawn from which one-light projection positives are struck. Ya follow?

Edited February 1 by Simon Wyss

Kit Mackenzie · February 1

@Simon Wyss Thank you very much, after a few readings and a bit of American Cinematographer Manual consultation I reckon I've got my head around it, fascinating technique. Any idea how the OCN was masked to give the soft edges? Although on closer inspection perhaps the edge isn't soft actually and it was a hard matte?

Do you have a source for Dunn's explanation? Would love to read more about his techniques over the years.

Thanks

David Mullen ASC · February 2

You’d cross-dissolve two passes of the same shot on two IP copies onto a new negative, one IP with the blurred areas. Now how they blurred it, I don’t know — perhaps just on a clear piece of film in front of the IP in the projector gate of the optical printer, with some Vaseline applied with a paint brush.