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Snakes and Funerals: Aesthetics and American Widescreen Films

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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Dissertations Department of Communication 5-2-2007 Snakes and Funerals: Aesthetics and American Widescreen Films John Harper Cossar Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Cossar, John Harper, "Snakes and Funerals: Aesthetics and American Widescreen Films." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/12 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SNAKES AND FUNERALS: AESTHETICS AND AMERICAN WIDESCREEN FILMS by HARPER COSSAR Under the direction of Greg M. Smith ABSTRACT The study of widescreen cinema historically has been under analyzed with regard to aesthetics. This project examines the visual poetics of the wide frame from the silent films of Griffith and Gance to the CinemaScope grandeur of Preminger and Tashlin. Additionally, the roles of auteur and genre are explored as well as the new media possibilities such as letterboxing online content. If cinema’s history can be compared to painting, then prior to 1953, cinema existed as a portrait-only operation with a premium placed on vertical compositions. This is not to say that landscape shots were not possible or that lateral mise-en-scene did not exist. Cinematic texts, with very few exceptions, were composed in only one shape: the almost square Academy Ratio. Before 1953, cinema’s shape is that of portraiture; after 1953 cinema’s shape is landscape. Widescreen filmmaking is not simply an alternative to previous visual representation in cinema because no equivalent exists. Widescreen is quite simply a break from previous stylistic norms because the shape of the frame itself has been drastically reconfigured. With the proliferation of HDTV and widescreen computer monitors, certain aspect ratios that were once regarded as specifically “cinematic” are now commonplace both in the home and in the workplace. This project outlines a project that traces the innovations and aesthetic developments of widescreen aspect ratios from the silent era of D.W Griffith, Buster Keaton and Abel Gance all the way through to current widescreen digital manifestations of web-based media and digital “blanks” such as those created by Pixar. Other chapters include close textual analyses of “experimental” widescreen films of 1930, the development of “norms” for widescreen filmmaking in the early CinemaScope era of the 1950s and examinations of the experimental multi-screen mosaics of 1968 and beyond. INDEX WORDS: Widescreen, HDTV, Letterbox, CinemaScope, Auteur, Genre, Preminger, Tashlin, Ray, Sirk, Fleischer, Griffith, Gance, Keaton, Aesthetics, Aspect ratio SNAKES AND FUNERALS: AESTHETICS AND AMERICAN WIDESCREEN FILMS by HARPER COSSAR A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2007 Copyright by John Harper Cossar II 2007 SNAKES AND FUNERALS: AESTHETICS AND AMERICAN WIDESCREEN FILMS by HARPER COSSAR Major Professor: Greg M. Smith Committee: Matthew Bernstein Kathy Fuller-Seeley Jack Boozer Angelo Restivo Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2007 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 34 D.W. Griffith 39 Buster Keaton 53 Abel Grace 67 Chapter 2 79 The Big Trail 84 The Bat Whispers 109 Chapter 3 126 River of No Return 134 Bigger than Life 157 The Girl Can’t Help It 183 The Tarnished Angels 206 Conclusion 233 Chapter 4 241 The Boston Strangler 246 The Thomas Crown Affair 270 Chapter 5 290 Television, the Acadamy Ratio and Letterboxing 298 Video Gaming Aesthetics 302 Gaming, Cut-Scenes and Letterboxing 304 Screen Space in Star and Tiger Trap 306 Pixar, digital filmmaking and the end of widescreen 313 Conclusion 325 Works Cited 336 Filmography 343 1 Introduction Title: “Snakes and funerals: Aesthetics and American widescreen films”1 You can now visualize your scenes in their entirety … and not be cramped by thinking of them in terms of “cuts,” “dissolves,” “close-ups” and “inserts.” A director no longer will have to worry about cutting down a scene of enormous scope to fit the narrow limits of the old-style camera. — Jean Negulesco on directing How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, 176) The arrival of the wide screen with its opportunities for a new screen shape throws us once more headlong into questions of purely spatial composition. And much more — it affords us the possibility of reviewing and re-analyzing the whole aesthetic of pictorial composition in the cinema which … has been rendered inflexible by the inflexibility of the once and for all inflexible frame proportions of the screen. — Sergei Eisenstein (writing in 1928), 1970, 48-4 With a little adjustment and with some help from the supply companies and the professional associations, widescreen filmmaking offered only trended changes in the classical style. — David Bordwell (1985, 36) In early 1919, D.W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer are shooting scenes for the melodrama Broken Blossoms (1919). The filmmakers wrestle with sequences that feature Lucy (Lillian Gish) in extreme peril and utter loneliness. A wide shot of the seedy London waterfront does not quite portray the requisite hopelessness and abandonment that Griffith and Bitzer desire. Griffith pushes Bitzer to arrange a shot that foregrounds Lucy’s isolation. Ultimately the filmmakers narrow Lucy’s vertical world and subsequently accentuate the horizontality of mise-en-scene that she must navigate with a letterbox-like matte. 1 The title derives from a quote that is alternately credited to both Cecil B. Demille and Fritz Lang referring to CinemaScope’s usefulness. Lang, however, actually says CinemaScope “wasn’t meant for human beings. Just for snakes and funerals” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). Lang is also quoted as saying CinemaScope is “a format for a funeral, or for snakes, but not for human beings: you have a close-up, and on either side, there’s just superfluous space.” (Higham and Greenberg, 1969, 122) 2 Illustration 1 An iris would constrict and focus attention in a circular shape within the boxy confines of the Academy Ratio composition. Thus, rather than show Lucy’s isolation, an iris would only reduce what the viewer sees and thereby not emphasize the enormity of the environment in comparison to Lucy’s diminutive figure. Griffith and Bitzer choose the horizontal stylistic flair of the letterbox-like matte to exaggerate the tension of the moment. Griffith and Bitzer used this type of matting sparingly before in both Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) to make even more spectacular epic scenes of battle or set design. Why do the filmmakers choose these moments to accentuate the horizontal viewing perspective? More to the point, why would Griffith and Bitzer choose to emphasize the horizontal axis over the vertical? More than four decades later in Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968), the police and Boston society are frayed by the menacing, brutal murders of Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis). Throughout the film, Fleischer fractures the screen into multiple shapes and aspect ratios within the singular and “inflexible” Panavision (2.35:1 anamorphic) frame. In one exemplary camera and editing flourish, the camera cranes down behind a wrought-iron fence and settles on a framing in which the visual field is divided into five vertical panes corresponding to the fence 3 posts. Suddenly, the five windows spring to life (accompanied by five disparate audio tracks) and alternate both shape and size as separate narrative units. Illustration 2 The discord and cacophony that results in such a division of the screen is palatable. The viewer struggles to focus on one particular or perhaps central visual frame, but the screen’s width paired with the contrasting narrative units is stunning. Women throughout Boston describe their fear and what measures they’ve taken to avoid DeSalvo’s brutality, as all five panes shriek with terror and panic. The screen presents a paralyzing volume of narrative visual material to be consumed. Why does Fleischer choose to portray this scene (and others like it throughout the film) in this fractured and jigsaw puzzle style? Do certain genres encourage such experimentation? Both of these examples feature attributes that are hallmarks of this project — experimental uses of widescreen aspect ratios in genre films. Ultimately the case studies featured throughout this project are stories of aesthetic experimentation with widescreen techniques that rail against the “inflexible frame.” In one sequence, Fleischer conveys the story of a split- personality serial killer within the confines of a fractured, rectilinear frame. In Broken Blossoms, Griffith embellishes Lucy’s desperate and impoverished state by deploying a widescreen matte 4 within the Academy Ratio frame, thereby colonizing readily available vertical space. Griffith and Fleischer both use what I will term a widescreen “rupture,” but for subtly different ends; one shows an isolated, vulnerable woman overwhelmed by a city and the other serves as metaphor for a city whose
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