Paycox

Hitchcock’s cameraman, Jack Cox, seems almost as fond of cameo appearances as the Master himself. In THE MANXMAN his name appears as signatory on a sailors’ petition, and here in JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK, he’s apparently a partner in the law firm that provides the plot’s, well, “MacGuffin” might be too dismissive a word for it.

Here’s Ronald Neame, quoted in Charlotte Chandler’s It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography (personal? is there another kind?) ~

“I was just starting out, and I was terribly overeager. Someone sent me to fetch the ‘sky hook,’ which I was told was a terribly valuable piece of equipment. I looked all over until I got to THE FARMER’S WIFE set. A rather plump twenty-seven-year-old director named Alfred Hitchcock was rehearsing the actors.

“For several minutes, I forgot all about the sky hook and watched the great director at work. Then I approached Hitchcock’s cameraman, Jack Cox.

“This kind man said, ‘You have been given a sort of initiation, because the sky-hook is a leg-pull. Why don’t you go back and tell them it was sold last week because it wasn’t being used.’

“Because of that nonexistent sky hook, I was able to watch Hitchcock directing, and I met Jack Cox, with whom I would be working.”

Later, Chandler quotes Roy Ward Baker ~

“Cox was very tall, a man of very few words, with a complete lack of pretense, and a sardonic wit. He didn’t chatter, you know. He just got on with his lighting.”

I suspect most cinematographers are a bit like that. My friend Scott Ward is, even down to being very tall. And Hitchcock wouldn’t be attracted to the “rock star” kind of cinematographer who puts his personal style first. I saw Nestor Almendros talk once, a charming, gentle man, and somebody from the audience asked him if he’d like to have worked with Hitchcock. A strange question, really, but Almendros graciously replied, saying that he’d have loved the chance, and that it could have happened. But I wonder if their styles would have fused or clashed?

Quote of the Day: sounds like a plan

‘Even more than in THE WILD CHILD, THE GREEN ROOM was conceived as a succession of plans-séquence. The term “master shot” is used in English for what in French is “plans-séquence”, but the two expressions mean different things, because a “master shot” implies that there will be supplementary shots of the same scene (often close-ups), and that these will be inserted later on, during the editing. The fact that there is no American expression for “plans-séquence”  is evidence of a basic difference in concept. In Truffaut’s plans-séquence nothing can be inserted because it is sufficient unto itself. The character moves about from one character to another, lingers, makes a leap into the void to take in the whole scene, retreats, advances, all at a stretch, without cuts. The scenes between Davenne and Cecilia in the auction room are the best examples of this technique.

‘From the practical point of view, this sort of filming has advantages and disadvantages. One of the problems is focus. Since the camera is always moving on wheels, it is difficult for the assistant to correct the focus, since the actors are constantly at different distances from the lens. It also presents a challenge for the camera operator. In a short space of time innumerable compositions are being produced with every slight change of place. Preparing shots of this type takes hours, because the actors’ movements must be adjusted in relation to the movements of the camera. Sometimes a whole day is needed to get a single shot.

‘But when a scene is split into different shots, to be edited together later, it creates the false impression that shooting is done quickly, whereas in fact the opposite is true: one must be sure that there is continuity of illumination from one shot to the next, that the actors are looking in the appropriate directions, that entrances and exits from the frame fit into the preceding scenes. With the plans-séquence these preoccupations are no longer relevant. In any case, the main interest of this technique is not that it offers advantages from the point of view of production but that it allows the director to define his style. For it is in the style that we recognise the artist’s signature. All of this is quite close to certain concepts that Truffaut inherited from his mentor, André Bazin.’

~ A Man with a Camera, by Nestor Almendros.

The term “sequence shot” is now often used to describe a shot that covers an entire scene without alternate angles being edited in, although the term is maybe more commonly used in criticism than “on the floor”. My suspicion is that we don’t have a widely-used term for this approach in Britain and America because (a) the technique isn’t widely used and (b) when we directors do it, we don’t tell anyone what we’re doing.

As my cinematographer friend Scott Ward says, there is a school of thought in television that says the director’s reason for being is to obtain sufficient coverage to make the show. Since shows are made for specific time slots, there needs to be a way to manipulate the duration of the footage, which becomes much harder if every scene has been covered with only one shot.

On my most extensive TV gig, I shot some scenes in sequence shots, purely because the schedule was so tight. I was aware that if anybody asked for additional angles in the edit, I would probably be in trouble (I was constantly in trouble on that shoot, or so it seemed at the time). So they had better work. More than half of the scenes had more than one angle, though after falling behind schedule on day one, and further on day two, I took to devising schemes that allowed even the most busy scene to be taken in no more than two shots, if at all possible. We finished on schedule and the episodes were manipulated into the right time slot with relative ease.

But consider the case of Leonard Kastle’s THE HONEYMOON KILLERS. The first five or so minutes of the film are a series of elaborate long takes, stretching the abilities of the camera crew beyond breaking point, but still fascinating and effective. The director of these scenes was the young Martin Scorsese, who was swiftly fired for only shooting masters. “If you only shoot masters, the film could end up four hours long,” he ruefully reflected, understanding his employer’s ruthless response.

It may be also that some producers will object to long takes for the very reason Almendros recommends them: as an expression of directorial style. Producer Pandro S Berman is supposed to have approached director Albert Lewin and asked, “Why do you do these long tracking shots?”

“It’s my style,” explained Lewin (naïve fool!).

“Style. I always wondered about that. What does that mean, style?”

Lewin is taken aback, bt endeavours to explain: “Well, style, that’s like when Picasso paints a certain way and you can tell it’s a Picasso. Or with Rembrandt, he has a style, and you can see how it’s different to Picasso.”

“Is that so? Is that what style is? Well, I don’t want any of it in MY PICTURES!”

Now this may well be one of those libellous stories directors like to tell about producers (writers tell them about directors too), but there is a certain mindset that probably sees the producer’s job as being to quash any excessive outbursts of directorial style. Hiring the right director and then trusting her might be an easier option, but such a person, or such an emotion, is not always available on demand.

As Howard Hawks said to Peter Bogdanovich when asked if he ever had final cut; “No. Suppose I went crazy?”

Fog Fog Fog

We started watching ’70s horror BURNT OFFERINGS, and within twenty minutes Fiona was telling me it wasn’t even worth blogging about. A few possible angles did present themselves — the father/mother/son triad arriving by car seemed like a very close match to THE SHINING, and the concept of a building with an inner life of its own seemed relevant to Kubrick’s MUCH BETTER FILM.

Karen Black and Ollie Reed and Better Davis are of course hugely watchable, but Burgess Mereditch takes the acting honours for a dementedly camp turn as a chair-bound nutter.

For a while I thought I might write about the sheer dullness of it all (half an hour in and literally NOTHING has happened) but that might get dull, and as we resorted to the fast-forward button in order to get to the (impressively apocalyptic) ending, it became unfair to really comment on the film at all. So forget that I said it was dull, OK? I’m not qualified to pass judgement because I didn’t watch it.

But I thought I could mention the fashionable ’70s fog filter, which diffuses the whole film with a hazy smear. Then Ollie Reed has a nightmare and things get MAJORLY DIFFUSE:

The haziness is actually fine here — pretty pictures! — but damaging elsewhere because in the story the house is supposed to heal itself, and the filtration kind of blurs the textures so you can’t tell. When Karen Black stares in alarm, the filmmakers have to dub a line over the back of her head, where she expresses her surprise that the house has, in fact, seemingly improved its appearance in an unexpected way. Gosh!

Nestor Almendros used to walk out of films as soon as he saw diffusion being used, which does strike me as a bit hard-line. But in setting rules for himself, Almendros was really shifting himself out of the craftsman-for-hire category and repositioning the cinematographer as an artist in collaboration with the director. If you want extreme artificial lighting effects and filters and so on, get a cinematographer who doesn’t mind working that way — get Mario Bava! Almendros had one particular approach, and if you hired him you knew sort of what you were going to get.

Looking at BURNT OFFERINGS, I’m glad diffusion went out of style. But I wonder if it could be used in an interesting way now. No technique is actually bad in and of itself, I feel. What’s bad is default filmmaking that picks the fashionable approach without regard to the effect desired.

Director Dan Curtis tracks into close-up. Fiona says: “Karen Black’s face is unhappy.”