American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1941)

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Let's Design Pictures For The Camera By CORDON WILES WE hear a great deal nowadays about "designing" productions. It has become quite a fad among our art-directors to take their screencredit with the phrase "Production Designed by Joe Doakes," instead of the old familiar "Art Director, Joe Doakes." But — always with the exception of William Cameron Menzies and one or two other equally outstanding members of the craft — we see precious little real "production design" on the screen. As a matter of cold fact, we are really getting less real "art direction" than we did a few years ago, for as a glance at the credits of almost any current production will show, what we used to lump together as art direction has now been divided into two specialized departments — set design and set dressing. And inevitably, with two specialists working this way, there's often an urge for each to try to outshine the other, with the result that, as Director Rene Clair pointed out in a recent article in THE AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, "sets are overdressed; the., contain so much 'realistic' detail that the audience's attention is distracted from the story-action." The trouble is that since sound came in most of us — not only art-directors, but directors, producers and writers alike — have forgotten the camera. Oh yes, we've realized it had to be there to record the action that accompanied our dialog, but we've forgotten the camera's ability to tell stories which, when silent films were at their peak, had made the motion picture a distinct form of art. It wasn't painting; it was distinctly different from the theatre: but it told stories in a way that had gained it world-wide recognition as a new and distinctive art. Sound came, and gave this new artform the ability to speak. And straightaway we became so engrossed with appealing to the audience's ears that we forgot their eyes, and the fact that at least 75% of man's strongest impressions of anything come visually rather than aurally. Furthermore, we were hypnotized by a new race of magicians — the sound engineers. They knew all about sound (so they said then). We didn't. They told us we couldn't do this, that we must do that; that we would have to do things this way — for the microphone — rather than that Pre-production sketch made of a scene of Wiles' p-oi duction "Forced Landing." Note how lens-angle = n» height are specified. way — for the camera — and we did. Wh I we've lately come to realize that tv sound-men are just human beings lik< the rest of us, and can get aeceptal I recordings even under conditions thy, originally shouted were impossible, a' vast deal of damage has been done, foil most of us have lost sight of the trickJ of visual story-telling which, coupk-dl with an imaginative use of sound, coulm give our pictures ten times the "punch"! most of them now have. So today the majority of our artdirectors have become more truly archi-3 tects than designers of pictures. Oun; writers have become more interested in dialog than in visual effect. Our directors have become more concerned with the reading of lines and basic action than with visual story-telling. But there is one man in the troupe who still is, and always has been more concerned with the visual and its dra matic value than with anything else. He is the cinematographer or director of photography. For fourteen years he has been in there fighting for all he was worth to preserve the vital visual side of our medium. Speaking both as a director and as an art-director, I think it's time he got some help from the rest of us! I'm by no means unselfish in this: I know that by taking full advantage of the cinematographer's understanding of visual dramatics, any director or art-director in the industry could make his own contribution to a production more telling, and gain credit for being associated with the making of a better picture than would otherwise be possible. What is the best way to take advantage of this — ? I feel it is by developing a system of three-cornered preproduction planning, in which the director, the art-director and the cinematographer would work together on a script, translating it from written words to visual pictures. As an example, suppose we have a script, fourteen pages of which are laid in a dining-room. How do we go about bringing that to the screen today? The art-director gets the script and sees the notation that such-and-such scenes take place in this dining-room. He checks up a bit as to the social and economic standing of the character in whose home that dining-room is supposed to be, and decides, let's say, that it should be a Georgian dining-room. So he makes a rough sketch of a Georgian dining-room and submits it to the director, with a more or less rough floor-plan. The director sees that thi? contemplated set won't interfere particularly with his planned action, and OK's the sketch. Then our art-director proceeds to build a beautifully realistic Georgian diningroom. The set-dresser inspects the set. sees it is of Georgian period, and pro 366 August, L941 American Cinematographer