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6.38 Within a teeming shot of a crowd’s reception, 6.39 The visual pyramid at work: Because onscreen
Léonce Perret frames the officers at the base of a censpace tapers toward the lens, the foreground figures fill tral, cleared vertical and within a carriage window (L’enup more of a plane than do the background ones (Quo fant de Paris, 1913). Vadis? Enrico Grazzoni, 1913).
Depth offered the director a fine-grained scale of emphasis, a way of raising or lowering an actor’s significance from moment to moment as other performers were brought into play. To exploit this orchestration of figure movement, however, the director had to master some other problems inherent in cinematic space.
Looking at the people and things on the screen, we tend to see them as occupying a cubical area. In interiors, for instance, we easily assume that the frontmost playing area is as wide as what we see of the set’s back wall. This is an illusion. Kuleshov, in his 1929 monograph The Art of the Cinema, reminds us that the area visible within the frame has the shape of a sidelong pyramid, with the tip resting on the lens (Fig. 6.39).45 This tapering of space toward the lens is not so much ideological (pace Comolli) as inevitable, at least in photography-based forms of cinema. Regularities in the behavior of light were not constructed by Renaissance humanism or bourgeois ideology; they were discovered by artists, artisans, and scientists. Geometrical optics describes certain of those regularities, and photography exploits them to project the layout of a space onto a frame of film. The lens’s sampling of that layout systematically excludes information about what lies outside the converging light rays. Photographic lenses can defeat some depth cues offered by linear perspective, but they cannot abolish the optical pyramid itself. Indeed, some version of the optical pyramid would seem to be necessary for any representation of depth in a moving image. Although animated films could invoke other representational systems, nearly all in practice imitate monocular geometrical pro-jection (Fig. 6.40). Programs for computer animation make the visual pyramid the basis of calculating the spatial array (Fig. 6.41).
Like the “visual triangle” described by Alberti in his treatise on painting, cinema’s optical pyramid presupposes a monocular viewing point.‘ And this
ON STAGING IN DEPTH
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