YOU KNOW THAT DUAL-MIRROR TRICK from Citizen Kane that we discussed a minute ago? There’s more there than just reflections of reflections. Each one of those reflections has something else: an ornate frame. Every one of those mirrors has a frame; stands to reason, when the original two do. So while what we’re aware of are repetitions of Charlie Kane, what we also see is frame after frame after, oh, you get it. This may be the culminating, but still only one, instance of frames within the movie. Here are a few others:
• We see the “key” to the whole thing, the sled, through the door of the industrial-strength furnace;
• Kane standing in front of an outsize campaign poster of himself;
• The skylight through which we enter the sad nightclub where Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, drinks and pretends to still be a saloon singer;
• A bored Susan sitting in front of a gigantic stone fireplace in an even more monstrous great room of Xanadu, Kane’s castle and monument to himself, working on a jigsaw puzzle;
• Ceilings! The great innovation of the movie (although it was not really the first one), the presence of ceilings inside the frame serves to limit the view—and therefore the aspirations—of the participants.
• Of that last one, when the enraged Kane trashes Susan’s bedroom as she is leaving him, the low ceiling along with the fancifully childish décor emphasizes the doll-like, almost creepy quality of the setting.
These are only a few examples the film offers, but they are essential to the vibe and meaning of the film. They convey information in ways no one has to articulate. For instance, when Susan is assembling her jigsaw puzzle in that cavernous room with its great maw of a fireplace, we don’t need to hear that it dwarfs her; we can see it. It is not a house but a mausoleum, and the fact that he cannot see that tells us much, if not quite all, we need to know about him. If you would understand the use of frames in film, you could do worse than Citizen Kane. And not much better.
Just don’t stop there. See a movie, find examples. Any movie. A-n-y movie.
We won’t look at just any movie, of course, but at some very fine ones. And before we do, there’s an item that requires a bit of sorting. That term, framing, has a specific technical meaning in film work. Which in turn has to do with the inevitable frame that is always present: the screen itself. Or, if we were looking at it from the filmmaker’s viewpoint, the individual frame of film that is the irreducible minimum of film composition. When light pours through that cell, its contents show up on the frame of our screen—same thing, different perspective. When movie specialists speak of framing a shot, they mean determining how a shot is composed. Many elements go into that act. What visual elements, precisely, are included or excluded? How near or far are they from the camera; that is, do they fill the frame or is there empty space around them? Are they entirely contained by the frame or is part of them lopped off? It makes a difference, for instance, whether we see an entire lamppost or only the post itself and not the light, so that the light seems to emanate from somewhere above the scene. That’s framing, and we can’t really understand movies without looking at it, which we’ve done elsewhere.
It is not, however, what we want to contemplate here. Rather, let’s look at the frames within the frames. One of the really interesting aspects of movies is how the people in charge of the visuals—directors and cinematographers—use other frames inside the larger rectangle of the screen as a way of controlling the visual field. The next time you’re in a movie theater, take a good look at the screen. That’s a whole lot of real estate. And depending on not only the movie but the particular spot in the movie, the director will have specific reasons for wanting to direct our attention to one portion or another rather than to the entire screen. If, for instance, there is an establishing shot of the Grand Tetons, then odds are that we are supposed to take in the whole awesome spectacle at once. If, on the other hand, a lone rider begins crossing that vast space on horseback, our attention will soon be drawn to him by, say, zooming slowly in, which will progressively diminish the vista in favor of a closer view of the human figure. In this instance, the framing is accomplished by reducing the amount of territory that the camera takes in as its length and point of focus change. For contrast, imagine the camera taking in our initial vista from a point in front of a homesteader’s cabin—same vast sweep. Another way of limiting the view could be for the camera to move—either by dollying through the door or simply by cutting and reestablishing a new shooting position—to the interior of the cabin. Now that vista is reduced to whatever remains visible through the artificial frame of the door. The distance to the mountains is the same as before, but most of the view is hidden by the cabin walls. Not only that, but how we think about the scene will be changed.
That’s the technique we want to examine. Happily, there is no shortage of examples; virtually every movie, at some point or other, employs such interior frames to limit, control, emphasize, contrast, combine, separate, and otherwise manage visual elements.
In The Artist, for instance, there’s a remarkable bit early in the film. The ingénue, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), has landed a part in a movie starring the cinematic giant George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). In fact, they have just shot their first scene together, one fraught with errors as each discovers that the other one is pretty interesting. When they cut for lunch, Peppy sneaks into George’s empty dressing room, writes “Thank you” on his mirror, and stages an amusing and touching bit of business with his evening jacket, causing it to embrace her, only to be interrupted in mid-snuggle by the great man himself. In the ensuing moments, he invests her with her “signature” difference, a grease-penciled mole on her upper lip. Then they examine the mole in his dressing table mirror (missing, maybe too conveniently, the message). In doing so, they realize that their reflections seem to be attracted to one another, and as they straighten up to look at each other, we catch them from a different angle in another mirror, an oval hung on a side wall. The camera pulls back, and we see them being drawn together only to separate, startled, when George’s chauffeur, Clifton, bursts into the doorway, having returned from his errand—buying jewelry to mollify George’s wife. Now, that is awkward. As one might expect of a movie about the movie business, The Artist is shot through with devices that frame, encompass, and sometimes exclude characters or things. It could serve as an instructional text for aspiring filmmakers—and readers—wanting to know how frames work. There are posters and doors and car windows and the screen on which George watches his old movies when he nearly self-immolates and—oh, everything. It is worth watching for all sorts of reasons, but highly worthwhile for this aspect alone.
So then, frames are very important, but they present a problem when shooting a movie: It’s very hard to capture the round world in a rectangular frame. There are various ways to try to negotiate that conflict, all of them imperfect. We’ll dismiss shooting round movies for the moment and concentrate on what can be managed.
• One could, for instance, strive for the most inclusive frame possible, which may partly explain the move toward gigantic screens and formats in the sixties. But it turns out there’s only so much visual information we can process at any given moment.
• It might be possible to shoot everything in long, long, long shots to pull in the whole world. That approach tends to lack the personal touch.
• Or, you could cut the world down to size, shoot through or within rooms, automobiles, windows, doors, car windows, windshields, bigger doors, mirror frames, French doors, telephone booths (how filmmakers, to say nothing of Superman, are going to miss those!), closets, and apertures of all sorts.
Of those several items, I vote for that last one. The solution, like the problem, is about more than geometry.
But since we’re on geometry, at least in part, here are two gems from the master of images and illusions, Hitchcock. We can range widely over his work, of course, but we can also find what we need in a single film, just two minutes apart, if that film is Notorious (1946). Here’s the setup: a U.S. intelligence agent, Devlin (Cary Grant), has, on orders, used a playgirl named Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), notorious both for her lifestyle and for her father, recently convicted as a Nazi spy, to infiltrate a German plot involving atomic bomb research in Brazil. In order to do this, she has to marry one of them, her former admirer Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), who ultimately finds out that she is a spy and begins, with the help of his scary mother (Leopoldine Konstantin), a sort of Mater Hari, to slowly poison her. As Devlin attempts to rescue Alicia from Sebastian’s mansion, he is confronted on the stairs by the suspicious husband but overcomes him with threats and bluff. Below, the three main Nazi conspirators emerge from the room where they have been meeting—onto a checkerboard floor, where they array themselves with nearly flawless posture (they are Nazis, after all, and this is one thing Hollywood knows about them). One, the leader, is exactly on a dark square, the one upstage nearly so, while the third and farthest back straddles two, as if trying to make up his mind about a move. Perfect, we think: in a film about using a woman as a pawn, the enemy is arrayed like pieces on a chessboard. In fact, they are more than “arrayed”; they array themselves. Each cut from the stairs back to the floor reveals that one more of them has moved into position, with, ultimately, the most advanced “piece” overtaking the stationary other two. None of these shots lasts more than a couple of seconds, and it is easy to miss, yet—and this is typical of Hitchcock—once we notice, the effect is unmistakable. The other frame is the final one. Devlin forces Sebastian to help get Alicia into the car, then dives in and locks Sebastian out, leaving him to an all-too-certain fate at the hands of his Nazi playmates. One of them summons him back inside, and he mounts the steps of his mansion like a condemned man, which he is, and then, as he crosses the threshold, the massive black door swings shut like the judgment of doom. The scene has already used the frames of the black-and-white squares encompassing the standing figures, as well as doorways to Alicia’s room and out the front, but the final, fatal frame of the outsize doorway and the puny Sebastian captures his fate as well as any shot ever has—or could.
This next one is a bit of a special case, but it demonstrates the larger point even while being a one-off. Something you will never notice on a first viewing about Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) is that there is no framing at the home of the non-artist. The movie begins at the frameless family home of the protagonist, Griet (the very young Scarlett Johansson). The first shot contains a doorway—two, actually, although the second door is closed—but Griet isn’t visible in the first until we gain a slight angle through it, and she’s never properly framed, as if we can’t bring her into focus. Her first framing is literally the moment she enters the Vermeer house; she stops in a doorway. From there, it’s Katy-bar-the-door, as it were.
• When she first goes to clean the artist’s studio, she pauses in the doorway at the end of the hall, flanked by her two adversaries, Vermeer’s wife, Catharina, and his awful daughter, Cornelia. Doors, by the way, work very well in this film: since seventeenth-century doors tended to be low, with wide casings, the effect is of a very pronounced frame, often with little extra space within it.
• She catches a view of herself with the artist’s manikin in a mirror.
• Vermeer (a nearly mute Colin Firth) allows her to view the picture he’s working on through his new toy, a camera obscura, which captures the image through a lens (something she’s never seen) and mirrors.
• Vermeer, half-hidden by a door frame, watches Griet with her hair undone as she prepares to put on the blue scarf that famously appears in the painting. The partial revelation emphasizes the voyeuristic quality of his profession and their relationship. (See also, Hitchcock.)
• When the climax arrives and Catharina storms the ramparts to demand to see the painting, Vermeer removes the painting on which he is currently working. In so doing, he reveals Griet, who is standing in front of a wall of paintings, through the lattice of his tripod. She suddenly goes from a girl standing in front of paintings to an image of a girl standing in front of paintings.
• Once she is dismissed from service in the house by the jealous Catharina, her exit is a series of framed shots. She walks slowly (she does everything slowly in the film) through a door and into a room. To her left, through one open door and in front of another, we see her fellow maid, Tanneke, look up from her sweeping at her departing friend. The shot is composed like a painting, lest we miss the point: in the foreground, just before the doorframe, a small, dark chest with a parrot on the stand; slightly beyond that, a circular table with a bright cloth and a candelabrum, then the door, and then Tanneke, sweeping. Griet then moves to the stairs below the studio, where we see her, predictably, from the upper hallway, through yet another aperture. Again, the shot has a very painterly quality—the girl with a bundle under her arm stands before a sturdy balustrade, and beyond that, a large, translucent window. It’s a terrific shot. The one we don’t get to see, though, would be with one or both of them framed by the studio doorway; she goes to the door, caresses it, but does not open it, while he remains, tormented but predictably silent, within. Even then, she is framed by the corner the wall makes with the frame, and by the sliver of light coming through the barely open door, the lesser shadow that is the wall, and the greater one that is the door itself. It is a highly Vermeer scene. At the far end of the hall, she pauses and looks back one more time, with the same POV as the earlier shot, only this time she is on our level and not below. The last framing of her departure takes place not indoors, as so many have, but on the bridge over the canal, with the houses on either side closing off the view anywhere but straight ahead, toward Griet’s departing form.
• Griet’s final framing is in the kitchen door of her new house, presumably that of her husband and his father, the butcher. She is seated when we first see her, but rises as Tanneke arrives with a memento: a package containing the cornflower-blue head wrap and the pearl earrings that caused all the fuss.
All of this makes perfect sense: she works in the house of a man whose entire life is devoted to capturing images in frames. Again and again, we see Vermeer seated in front of a frame, a work in progress of one description or another. We see the painter and his wife view the offending portrait with very different eyes. Griet herself has studied many of the paintings in the studio. And when, at the movie’s end, Vermeer’s patron, the lecherous Pieter van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), sits before the titular work, his response is both appraising and creepy—which is probably the way a great many works of art have been viewed down the years.
On the other hand, who says frames have to be rectangular? One of the most famous is a pointed arch, and it’s perfect. Even in movies with the most expansive canvases possible, John Ford manages to carve out human spaces by placing his characters in frames. Sometimes those frames are transparent: stagecoach windows, jail doors or barred walls, exterior or interior doorways (open). Sometimes they are solid: walls of rooms shot so as to encompass the human activity in front of them, spaces between buildings shot from oblique angles so that the side wall of the far building seems to close off the alley, barn or livery interiors. There is even the malleable example of swinging doors of saloons, which can reveal or conceal as the moment demands. Anything to provide a livable scale in the vastness of the desert Southwest. For my money, however, his finest frame has nothing to do with Westerns. Unless we mean the West of Ireland. The glory of The Quiet Man, of course, is Winton Hoch’s cinematographic love affair with the County Mayo countryside in and around the village of Cong (changed to the more euphonious Innisfree in the picture). But even with all those streams and rock walls and rolling landscapes, the thing that makes the picture are the framing shots: the runaway wife Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) peering out the train window, then slumping down and almost out of view from her searching husband, Sean Thornton (John Wayne); the two of them in a tiny cottage with the wind raging in through windows and doors; the crowd parting to make way for Mary Kate at the start of the fight sequence, then forming and re-forming around Sean and Mary Kate’s brother, Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), proving that frames can be mobile and ad hoc; and the bar and the header over it framing the combatants while they take time out for a glass of porter. And doors and windows and low ceilings seemingly everywhere.
Topping them all, however, is the arched window of the ruined abbey. Like a couple of kids, although neither is played for youth, Sean and Mary Kate bolt away from the marriage broker who is chaperoning their stroll from his slow horse-drawn carriage by commandeering a tandem bicycle, then race away until they come to a small stream. In order to ford it, Mary Kate removes her silk stockings, a gesture much appreciated by Sean and that raises the sexual tension between them, and then they race onward, along the way foolishly tossing off their hats—there is a great deal of hat-and-cap business in the film, probably enough for a seminar paper or three in some graduate program. Just as they finally embrace, the unforeseen storm hits, sending a branch down that narrowly misses them. Sean puts his suit coat over Mary Kate’s shoulders and they race for the cover of the roofless abbey, hoping the walls will afford some protection. Soaked to the skin, they finish their embrace, adding a passionate kiss, directly in front of the pointed arch of the old monastery’s window. With his sodden white shirt and her flaming red hair reduced to soggy curls, they resemble, if only for a moment, a painting that Dante Gabriel Rossetti or some other pre-Raphaelite forgot to paint. Perfect.
Equally effective if somewhat less exulted are the many framing shots in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat. I mentioned earlier the French doors encompassing the now-suspicious lovers after the murder, one on either side of the open double frame. In some ways, the other shot I mentioned, of Matty serving Ned a drink, is even more interesting. Shot from the outside looking in through floor-to-ceiling windows, it takes in the lovers and reveals, beyond them, French doors opening to the outside in vain hope of catching some cooling breath of air—the utter absence of air-conditioning in contemporary South Florida is one of the great mysteries of the film, but it affords better photography. Throughout the movie we are treated to all manner of framing devices, windows and doors of all shapes and sizes as well as the boxy enclosures of consultation rooms and interrogation rooms. Not for nothing is the bomb Ned uses in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime placed behind a door, nor the bomb that seemingly kills Matty behind another door. Utterly fitting, don’t you think, for a movie in which one main character is framed by another?
Here’s the thing about placing frames around the action: you can accomplish almost anything you want with them. Sometimes directors use them to restrict the real estate of the screen, closing off much of it to focus our attention on a smaller portion. Sometimes they go the other way and expand the frame until it takes in virtually the entire screen. You can push characters farther away by putting the frame between them and the camera or pull them nearer by placing the frame behind them. The size of the frame relative to the characters also conveys information. Here’s an experiment you can try on your own: stand two people close to each other and shoot them inside frames of different sizes. For the first, shoot them through a narrow opening so they pretty much fill the frame. For the next, find some considerably wider space and photograph them again. You can expand the project, placing them nearer or farther away from the openings, then moving the camera closer or more distant and keeping the “characters” in the same space. This research requires willing accomplices and patience by all parties, but you will be amazed by your artistry.
What does it tell us if the frame lies completely between two characters? Sounds downright unfriendly, doesn’t it? And the farther outside the frame they stand, sit, stroll, lie, or lumber, the more the distance between them will be magnified. Or if the characters are off-center within the frame (not merely on the screen, but within the device that further defines the space). Every such decision conveys critical information about characters and the relationships between or among them.
There’s nothing magical with these examples. While I would urge you to see these movies, don’t worry about seeing them simply for the examples. Every film has plenty—good ones if it is competently done. What we need to do on our journey toward mastery of the medium is to recognize and understand those devices when they appear. Which is pretty much all the time.
In the course of this book, there is a lot of discussion about film technique. It may not be all that technical, but inasmuch as the aim is to analyze how filmmakers communicate with us, how they use their language to bring us stories that compel, it is about technique. From time to time, however, it behooves us to consider just what that language can accomplish. Movies, you see, rarely stay inside their frame. One way or another, they leap or inch or lurch out into the broader cultural conversation, making points about history or ideas or politics. One of the functions of technique, that is to say, is to get beyond itself, beyond “mere story,” to something of larger significance. An example, you say? Sure. Try this:
In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), director Wes Anderson offers up a madcap, surrealist version of life between the two great wars. But he does something else very particular: he shows us, visually, the extremely circumscribed life of the inhabitants of that world. Everything about this situation is narrow. Great cars carrying notable guests arrive via a passageway that barely permits their entry. Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), the lobby boy, sleeps in a room scarcely wide enough to contain his single bed; later, we find that the concierge, M. Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), sleeps in a room scarcely larger and takes his evening meal in an even meaner, smaller space, in his underwear. That pretty well strips away any illusion of grandeur projected by his public persona. In his nightly review of and pep talk to the staff, M. Gustave speaks from an alcove scarcely wider than his lectern but also containing brooms and ash bins, emphasizing its smallness. This alcove appears to be set at right angles to the dining area, equally narrow, so that speaker and audience evidently do not see one another but are each confined in a tiny space. We see Zero and M. Gustave in the tiny elevator with guests, Zero pressed against the back wall; the two of them framed by a railway car, one on either side, while the fascist authorities (who in this fictional world prefer double Z figures to the Nazi SS insignia) occupy the center of the carriage, even as they are framed by the door; Gustave with his accountant and lawyer framed by a tiny window whose frame seems in danger of bursting by the three large heads that fill it; various characters seen within automobile or railway windows; Madame D. (a hilariously made-up Tilda Swinton), one of the elderly ladies for whom the omnisexual M. Gustave has provided special “services,” in her coffin; and, well, everywhere. There’s hardly a scene in which we are not reminded, in one way or another, of the puniness of these merely human, and delightfully wacky, efforts. In fact, when Gustave is falsely arrested and imprisoned, the tiny spaces and weirdly continuous architecture of the penitentiary don’t seem all that different from the Grand Budapest. The uniforms are more drab, but otherwise . . .
So what does all this business with tight spaces mean? On some level, of course, anything the movie suggests to you. The two of us, however, don’t know each other that well, so I’ll limit myself to what I see going on in that constricted space. The movie gives us plenty of hints. The action takes place between the world wars, which was itself a brief moment in history, and even shorter if we consider the interval as lasting not from 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles, until the open outbreak of hostilities in 1939, but as instead ending with the accession of the National Socialists to power in 1933, which is really the first domino in a very long chain of calamity. Beyond that, Gustave is a man hemmed in and limited by the class system. He possesses the bearing and some of the trappings of the upper classes, but he is still stuck in the servant class, however elegant his service may be. We see this conflict in the sudden swings of his behavior from the debonair and obsequious to the crude and boorish. Although he does acquire a fortune late in the film, he is never a member of that blessed group, the Truly Fortunate, those born into wealth and power and ease. In part, naturally enough, that’s because he spends only moments of screen time in that lucky state.
Even more than that individual level of restriction, everyone in the film is imperiled by the rise of the heavily uniformed, totalitarian presence represented most clearly by not one but two intrusions of authority into railway carriages in which Gustave and Zero are seated. One is violent but ultimately comic; the other proves fatal. This is a world very much like the actual world between the wars: personal freedom is a scarce and fragile commodity that will soon be snuffed out by a series of menaces that figure in the film (the hotel resides in a mythic country that, like so many others in Eastern Europe, would fall to another brand of absolutism following the war). And that leads us to the final correlative to the physical constraints—time. At the end of the film, the elderly Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) says that he believes that Gustave’s world had vanished even before he was born into it. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that the five-star, old-line hotels and their upper-crust clientele—indeed, even the sort of privilege conferred more generally on that class—are doomed to a fate as sure and nearly as swift as that of M. Gustave himself.
As the movie progresses, there are sprints down vastly long corridors and up and down staircases that miss M. C. Escher recurring-loop standards by a mere architectural hair and entries into a series of boxes—rooms, to be sure, but boxes nonetheless. The surrealist and absurdist elements build and build on those initial shots of straitened spaces. But neither surrealist nor absurdist art grew in a vacuum: the first developed after and at least partly in response to World War I, the second somewhat more directly out of Nazi occupation and the various resistance movements that tried to subvert it. How else to explain that so many of the existentialists and absurdists—Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—had direct experience of either fighting against or living under the Nazis? Anderson, something of an absurdist by nature, picks up the connection along with themes of entrapment, meaninglessness, pursuit, and fear, if not quite fear and trembling. And he does so in bizarrely inhuman settings: a transfer of the hunted and their rescuer that involves switching cable cars over a dizzying drop, stairways that lead to stairways that lead to still more stairways, a gunfight across an atrium in which hundreds of shots are fired to no effect but noise, mazelike passageways. That may or may not look like political commentary to you, but in a literary universe in which Ionesco’s version of people getting caught up in political mania showed them first denouncing and then turning into rhinoceroses, it works for me.
We’ve been talking here about frames in particular, but it’s worth mentioning that those are only a small part of the larger screen geometry: how bodies and objects move through space on the screen, how they are arranged in terms of each other, how they are presented for maximum effect. Is a character in front of or behind the main action of the scene? Part of the key group or off far left or far right? Seen from above or below? In other words, all those sorts of shots we’ve talked about. Frames aren’t the whole story, but they are a major piece of the story. If you can see frames at work, the rest of that geometry becomes pretty obvious.