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6.2 Legible action in the final tableau of Tom, Tom: the 6.3 The long shots of G. A. Smith’s Mary Jane’s Mishap townsfolk prepare to dunk Tom in a well. (1903) place the maid’s head midway down the picture
format, as was common in the period.
much space in the top of the picture (Fig. 6.3). This principle appears to bestill in force today: in distant framings, a lot of empty space may be left above the figures. Perhaps too directors wished to steer attention to the most informative part of the body, the face. In the absence of cutting and close-ups, it is not unreasonable to put actors’ expressions at the geometrical center of the format.
Furthermore, the fact that an action doesn’t occur at the center of the picture format does not mean that it doesn’t become a center of attention. In general, image makers can decenter the primary object and rely on many other devices for molding attention. Many medium shots and close-ups in current movies avoid framing actors dead-center, but these shots are not disorienting or difficult to grasp, largely because the human figure tends to be salient in any composition. In most images in Western culture since the Renaissance, some decentering is perfectly acceptable. Often, the more distant the framing, the more off-center the key components can be. We see this in the self-conscious tucking of figures into one corner of a landscape, or in the tendency to seat a person at one end of a park bench in order to make the figure look more isolated. Moreover, in a time-based art like cinema, the composition may start off uncentered but move toward greater centering as it unfolds.
So treating “decentering” as an off-center composition is fairly problematic if we want to describe early film images. At other moments, though, Burch wants decentering to mean that the shot in the Primitive Mode of Representation is overstuffed. There are, he says, too many “signs” soliciting our attention all at once, with little “hierarchization” among them. Now the earliest films do occasionally present confusing and distractingly busy compositions, such as the opening of Tom, Tom; but these do not seem to constitute the norm. Moreover, we should expect some uncertainties of composition in the first decade of an art form that poses many challenges of visual design and
ON STAGING IN DEPTH
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