abstraction in cinematography

[David Mullen ASC]

This is an extension of what I was discussing in the other thread on painterly movies, that it's harder to emulate non-realistic art in cinematography. I have some examples of visual abstractions, two inspired by Francis Bacon, one from "Last Tango in Paris" and the other from the film about Francis Bacon, "Love is the Devil". The other is from "A.I."

 

 

 

[Elhanan Matos]

Someone shot a movie about Francis Bacon?!?! That has to be one twisted movie! David, do you know of any Dada inspired scenes in movies? It would be very interesting to see something inspired by someone like Marcel Duchamp.

[Sam Wells]

Well with Duchamp you could start with "Anemic Cinema" - a film by Duchamp :D

 

Man Ray made films, Picabia made films, Ferdinand Leger; Rene Clair came out of that millieu.....

 

-Sam

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I wonder if almost all modern film isn't an abstraction of some kind. This reminds me once again of Underworld[/], which is so blue as to be practically monochrome - it looks absolutely nothing like reality, but it reflects the mood of the characters. A complete abstraction, although not as obvious as the examples given here, which would only be used to punctuate a film as opposed to being the general look for the whole thing.

 

Phil

[Mike Williamson]

Although it's not directly addressing cinematography, Moholy-Nagy's book "Vision In Motion" from the early 40's (?) has some interesting thoughts on motion pictures from an abstract perspective. He talks about movies being the artistic form most inherently able to depict the passage of time and because of this, one of the most important art forms (he predicts) for the 20th century. The synthetic nature of filmmaking probably was very attractive to him as well.

 

I've only read the book once, but I remember him talking about more abstract ways of conveying ideas without relying on naturalistic, conventional storytelling. It felt indebted to Eisenstein's theories on montage in a number of ways. Moholy-Nagy was something of a polymath as well, a very underrated artist who did a great deal of creative work in a number of fields, probably most notably with design at the Bauhaus. I believe he shot special effects for "Things To Come" in Hollywood, but the footage ended up getting cut because it was judged to be too crazy.

 

I feel like a lot of films that are aiming to be abstract and non-representational focus on editing more often than cinematography, anyone else have thoughts on that? Maybe it's easier to take naturalistic images and make the context expressive than it is to make non-representational images photographically?

 

The stills posted are great, I particularly love the one from "Last Tango".

[Michael Nash]

I feel like a lot of films that are aiming to be abstract and non-representational focus on editing more often than cinematography, anyone else have thoughts on that? 

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Well, when you consider that the primary use of photography is to capture and reproduce what the eye sees, it's naturally going to be be "representational." I mean, as soon as you can recognize the subject, it becomes representational. So if you want to photograph abstract material (removed from reality), you've got to make a real effort to physically distort the image or viewpoint as it goes to film, so as to make it unrecognizable.

 

I think we do see quite a bit of abstraction in cinematography as well as editing in current films. In the Cut and Man On Fire immediately come to mind as recent examples of abstracting the images with cinematography (as well as editing) to create a less realistic, and more expressionistic effect.

 

But I don't think we really see much that's truly abstract or non-representational in narrative film, because if it were truly non-representational, there wouldn't be a narrative! Unless the abstract nature of the image itself, as inserted in a more traditional narrative, brings its own meaning to the film. I'm thinking of those weird color-wash things in Punch-Drunk Love as a recent example.

 

There's been some pretty abstract and "less-than-representational" (which could also be described as "more than literal") filmmaking going on in music videos, especially in the techno scene. You often see this stuff playing on monitors or projected on walls in dance clubs, where the non-sensical nature is deliberately done to bypass intellectual understanding and instead tap into or appeal to a purely emotional response.

[Annie Wengenroth]

Regarding abstraction... I was going to mention Bill Viola and other video artists, or even something that is CGI, like Autechre's "Granz Graf" video (yeah, I'm a geek!). I guess in some ways Viola set the stage for some of the aforementioned techno videos that they play in clubs.

 

As for editing techniques, perhaps when you're less focused on telling a concise story, you can think more about interpreting (and re-interpreting) the image itself.

[Sam Wells]

There's like an 80 year history of abstraction in film, you could begin with the "dadaist" painters/filmmmakers I mentioned, continue to Len Lye's handpainted film work beginning in the 30's Harry Smith in the 40's, what Brakhage started doing in the 50's & 60's etc etc.

 

There's Oskar Fischinger. (you can see the mangled disneyfied remains of his work in the "Tocatta and Fugue" section of "Fantasia").

 

There's Jordon Belson (inspiration for Stargate seq in 2001), Scott Bartlett, computer imaging pioneers the Whitney Bros and so on.

 

To ignore this is to ignore a major chunk of 20th Century visual art.

 

-Sam

[Boone Hudgins]

I think that absract visual ideas can add to a story. If you watch Sam Raimi's Darkman, for instance, a lot of the main character's emotional pain is represented in quite insane montages where the background of a scene will fall away and literally become his mind, with bug invested nerve endings and electrical explosions. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but you understand his rage. I'm sure Raimi was influenced by the "Spidey sense" in the Spider-Man comic books, which was in itself a very abstact idea, and one that most people probably though would be impossible to represent in motion.

 

Of course, there's the more "traditional" sense of abstract art (if there is such thing...), things like the German expressionism found in silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. The way Murnau replicated the look of wide angle lenses with forced perspective in Sunrise is an abstract idea, but somehow we buy it. Of course today, the artifice is probably lost on some of our more "sophisticated" moviegoers, so they should enjoy the abstraction even better, since they don't see it as realistic at all. Of course, James Whale was influenced in the 30s and 40s (even on Show Boat), the Hammer films in the 50s, and today we have Tim Burton for all our expressionistic needs.

 

And then there are movies like The Boston Strangler, who tell their story all over the screen, like a comic book, or pop art. Scott McCloud has some interesting ideas on that style in his comic-related books.

 

I'm not sure if abstract art has to mean nonsensical. After all, abstract art started out trying to tell us something. It was pretty much visual satire, which is something like Terry Gilliam would give us today. If he were given a chance, that is. Granted, a lot of modern abstract art has a problem telling the difference between "I wanted to show the struggle of women in modern times" and "I wanted to paint the whole canvas red," it doesn't mean that you can't make a statement with something apparently nonsensical.

 

Which is what movies are all about, really. I mean, where else do you get to just cut to another angle? It's amazing what we'll buy into in movies. Robert Richardson's use of fading background light, for example.

[Annie Wengenroth]

Yes! When people complain that film isn't "real" enough, I have often been known to give them funny looks and then retort, "It's a f*cking movie, it isn't SUPPOSED to be real." Granted there is plenty of room in cinema for gritty, voyeuristic realism, which I can definitely appreciate too, but if every film were like that, it would basically be like plunking down 8 bucks to go watch somebody else's life. Now, would you rather do that, or get sucked into a completely different world full of things that may not even exist in our reality? I don't know. Sometimes I like the former, but I personally think that for the most part, a good film should pull the audience into a separate reality instead of keeping them in the one that they know of.

[Boone Hudgins]

It's strange. In the seventies, there were a few cinematographer's noted for their "realistic style" by desaturating and using heavy brown colors everywhere. Of course, that desaturated look is very popular today, what with easy access to DIs and bleach bypass, etc. But the thing is, real life isn't desaturated. There are colors everywhere. Production designers, costumers, cinematographers, directors, spend all sorts of hours "creating" "realism." Of course, it looks fantastic, and somehow it makes us think of how realistic it looks, when it's not.

 

And then, how much do we perceive "camera shake" in our eyes? Why does handheld strike us as more realistic? Sure, our eyes don't have a tripod, but they naturally compensate. Which is why a Stedicam looks so pleasing, I suppose.

 

It's obvious that when people think realism, they think documentary. They think of the occasional strange composition, low depth of field, low T-stop, blown out windows look. But that's not real, it's the reaction of the film, not our eyes. But that, I suppose, is the truest we can get to real life in the movies, and so it's the closest to real life movies can get, aesthetically.

 

I guess that my posts, few as they are, go to show that you can overthink anything.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> plunking down 8 bucks...

 

Good grief, tell me where in the world I can get a cinema ticket for £4! I usually pay twice that much for the local not-very-good multiplex, and more again in London.

 

Phil

[Guest fstop]

Moholy-Nagy was something of a polymath as well, a very underrated artist who did a great deal of creative work in a number of fields, probably most notably with design at the Bauhaus.  I believe he shot special effects for "Things To Come" in Hollywood, but the footage ended up getting cut because it was judged to be too crazy.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'd LOVE to know more about this if you can provide any more details Mike it would be much appreciated!

 

I see Dadaism is mentioned- no idea how you'd categorise that photographically- very vague and ambiguous subject heading in this context!

Edited January 13, 2005 by fstop

[David Mullen ASC]

I tend to define abstraction as still allowing recognization of real forms, just distorted or reduced to specific elements -- i.e. abstracted. Something beyond that would probably be called non-representational.

[Mike Williamson]

Tim, you should try and find a copy of "Vision In Motion" by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, it's out of print but I figure most libraries should have it. The book is excellent overall, sort of an outline for a proposed curriculum for an art/design school, but it approaches things in a very fresh way.

 

As far as "Things To Come", Moholy-Nagy describes what he did for the film briefly in the book, unfortunately I can't remember the specifics. No doubt he was doing something non-representational, probably dealing with color, and these would have been essentially special effects sequences. He was a noted still photographer and had been doing early cameraless photography along with people like Man Ray, and his interest was in the formal properties of film and how it could interact with light. This was the kind of sensibility that he brought to working on that film, no doubt very different from most of Hollywood.

 

Not knowing his full biography, I would guess he ended up in Hollywood after emigrating from Germany in the early 30's. Being an early industrial designer, he was extremely comfortable with the idea that large industrial production is artistic and he goes along way towards breaking down the outdated idea that art is sullied by its affiliation with commerce.

[Sam Wells]

"Tim, you should try and find a copy of "Vision In Motion" by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, it's out of print but I figure most libraries should have it. The book is excellent overall, sort of an outline for a proposed curriculum for an art/design school, but it approaches things in a very fresh way."

 

I have a book called "Moholy = Nagy" which reprints a lot of essays by him and about him.

(I haven't looked at this book in years, I'll have to re -read)

 

It's published by Praeger, don't know if still in print.

 

(cover price on the paperback is $ 4.95, so I've had it a while ;)

 

-Sam

[Dan Salzmann]

A brief bio for the curious:

László Moholy-Nagy was born in Bacsborsod, Hungary on July 28, 1895. He began drawing and watercolor painting while recuperating from a wound suffered in World War I as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, associating with many avant-garde artists of the period. In 1922, in collaboration with his first wife Lucia (Moholy), he produced his first photograms that explored the themes of transparency and light, concerns derived from his abstract paintings of the period. In 1923 Moholy joined the faculty for the Staatliche Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau. While at the Bauhaus, Moholy and Lucia continued their experiments with photograms.

 

In 1928, Moholy left the Bauhaus and moved again to Berlin. There he worked with publications, exhibition and stage design, and helped organize the 1929 exhibition, Film und Foto. With the rise of the Nazis, Moholy fled Germany in 1934, emigrating first to Amsterdam, and later to London. In London, Moholy worked in graphic and commercial design, provided photographic illustrations for several books (Street Markets of London and Eton Portrait), and designed lighting effects. In 1937, through the assistance of Walter Gropius, Moholy was invited to Chicago to direct a new design school. The New Bauhaus, as Moholy named it, lasted only one year, closing in 1938. The following year, Moholy and some of the staff of the New Bauhaus opened The School of Design, which continues to this day as the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Moholy had taught photography informally to students at the German Bauhaus, but now made it an integral part of the curriculum at the School of Design. He was instrumental in the spread of photographic education in the United States. Moholy-Nagy died in Chicago on November 24, 1946 at the age of 51.

[jeff striker]

when this is discussed i always think of dali's work on spellbound and bunuel films

[DavidSloan]

I love this thread...is anyone here familiar with Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton? I couldn't find any images to show you guys, but those 2 are my favorite abstract filmmakers.

[Sam Wells]

I'm familiar with their work, but am not sure I'd call it "abstract"

 

-Sam

[DavidSloan]

@Sam: You're right...although they use certainly use abstract imagery, which is what this thread is about.

 

Have you seen Rabbit Pix by James Herbert?

[Leon Rodriguez]

Some of my favorite Moholy-Nagy