Ken Wiley, a jazz historian and musician, has a radio show called "The Art of Jazz" that airs Sunday afternoons on my favorite station, KPLU-FM in Seattle (and online at Jazz24). He has a reocurring feature in which he chases down a musical element -- a melody, a set of chord changes, developments on a solo -- through a number of records. I've often wanted to do something similar with movies, and in researching my MSN Movies feature, "Wither While You Work" (Dave McCoy came up with that headline; I wish I had), a few ideas occured to me.
This one starts with King Vidor's great 1928 "The Crowd." The camera climbs up the side of a skyscraper (a miniature) looks through a window and a dissolve takes us to an overhead shot of an enormous diagonal grid of desks, emphasizing the regimentation and depersonalization of working life in the big city.
In one of the most famous homages in movies, Billy Wilder paid tribute to Vidor at the beginning of 1960's "The Apartment" with a tilt up the side of the building and a dissolve to the famous image of the sea of desks. Wilder shoots it straight on, from above desk level, but keeps both floor and ceiling in view, the receding lines of desks and fluorescent light fixtures converging into infinity. The scale is so immense, it's funny. Later, when 5:20 p.m. arrives and the bell rings, everybody gets up, places covers over their adding machines, puts on their coats and goes home... and another dissolve shows us C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) all alone in this vast office space, knowing there's no point in heading back to his apartment just yet.
Michael Tolkin's "The Rapture" opens with a maze of modern cubicles at a directory assistance facility. (And, yes, this is soon to be an Opening Shots entry.) Tolkin actually moves into the maze, rather than simply surveying it from above. The camera begins by rising above a cubicle wall in the foreground, then moves across to the left, down one of the paths, then back to the right until it floats over another cubicle wall and comes to rest nearly on top of Mimi Rogers' monitor. (You may be able to spot her if you enlarge the accompanying image here -- she's in the fourth box back, just right of center.) Notice how Tolkin also uses the overhead lighting to add forced perspective, a sense that the room extends even further than it actually does. And the lighting is so muted that the shot almost seems to be in black and white.
In "Fight Club," Edward Norton's anonymous narrator stands in front of a copier and describes experiencing the world through his depression as being like seeing "a copy of a copy of a copy." He's placed his Starbuck's coffee on the copier in front of him, and it rides back and forth on the top. When we look out at the office from his POV (fixed perspective), his copier lid moves back and forth in the foreground. Three people, also standing in front of copiers at perpendicular angles to the camera, are drinking their Starbuck's simultaneously, moving every bit as mechanically as the office machines. A man pushing a cart comes in from the left and moves in perfect sychronization with the foreground copier motion. The whole world has become a grid, populated by monochromatic automatons.
That's the same feeling conveyed by the relatively short, stationary shot in Mike Judge's "Office Space," where Peter (Ron Livingston) comes to work and passes across the screen in the foreground from right to left (not unlike the copier lid in "Fight Club"). This one, especially, reminds me of newspaper newsrooms I've worked in. Again, the lines of the cubicles and the fluorescent ceiling lighting converge in the distance. Whenever I see this image now, I'm reminded of dominoes -- how one thing leads to another and Peter and his friends from the office eventually knock down these walls, literally and figuratively.
This is just one of several instances of Tyler Durden slipping into The Narrator's consciousness, before he's actually met Tyler (yet another example of how "Fight Club" forthrightly tells you just how to watch it.) Tyler pops in for just a frame or two -- just like the frames of pornographaphy he enjoys splicing into kiddie films at his job as a movie theater projectionist.
Also important about the Fight Club shot is that in the midst of this "grid, populated by monochromatic automatons," there is a "subliminal" flash of Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, in bright red, standing there, breaking up the agressive orderliness of the space as he begins to become a conscious part of the Narrator's mind.
JE: Yes! Sharp eye, Ian! I remember seeing "Fight Club" on opening day and, after the first couple of times Tyler popped in, thinking: "Wow, this is a defective print. There's junk (splices?) in it." Then -- I think it was when The Narrator goes to the doctor -- I realized what was happening. (And, yes, when I was looking at this scene to get a frame grab for this piece, I also captured one with Tyler. I'm going to add it after the "Continue reading" jump -- as a subliminal effect!).
There's a great shot in Jacques Tati's "Playtime" that would fit in perfectly, where Hulot comes down an escalator into a sea of cubicles, kind of like the shot in "The Crowd". It's pretty cool because, IIRC, the camera follows Hulot from the top, with a God's eye view of the office, down to the bottom, where he's on the same level as everyone else, and the rigid , orderly office is now a maze for him to navigate.
JE: Thanks, Kza -- that's a great one! I saw "Playtime" in a pristine 70 mm print at Ebertfest two years ago and it was a revelatory experience -- even better with Roger talking with Jonathan Rosenbaum (who considers it his favorite film) afterwards. I used a shot from "Playtime" in my Opening Shots Pop Quiz. Now I think I'll add the shot you mention to the list above.
Though it's not anywhere near the same level, I feel it's worth mentioning the noted similarity between Fight Club and Old School -- with the latter as sort of a Will Ferrel-style comedy spin on essentially the same root themes.
There's no riveting cubicle shot in Old School, but there are plenty of shots in an office (and office-like settings, such as the opening business traveller sequence) that grow from mute frustration (the same opening sequence, the boss who won't listen) to absurdity (college kids showing up to talk about ordering KY in mass quantities) and revenge (sleeping with the boss's jailbait daughter).
Everyone in Old School is unhappy with their work situation, and that more than anything drives Old School's plot. Such as it is.
How about the shot in Tron, where the wall is painted to make the cubicles seem to extend out into the horizon.
Another one that springs to my mind (one that, though more playful, has a lot in common with the one in "the rapture" in the way it's used as an introduction to the movie) is the opening shot of Martin Scorsese's "After Hours". (which is by the way, quite underrated imho)
JE: Right you are, Erwin! I love that opening shot that hurls you across the office toward Griffin Dunne (and Bronson Pinchot). I'm working on frame grabs for a future Opening Shot entry for "After Hours."
Let us not forget Josef K's workplace in Orson Welles' The Trial. Row upon row of desks that again seem to go on forever. The noise from the adding machines is deafening. Later, Josef tries to get his uncle to leave by insisting he's not allowed visitors during work hours. Everyone spontaneously stops work and walks out.
JE: Good one, Matt. I love that movie. Gotta go take a look at that bit again...
And for something completely different, a scene that yields the same mood in a radically different way, consider the ultra-bleak depiction of conformity in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." The first office space, while Jonathan Pryce's character is still a part of the drones, shows the immense, dank factory where workers buzz around like bees. It's a big space, emphasized by a rapid dolly shot, but the mustiness and dim lighting emphasize the utter lack of air. I love how Gilliam sets up the workers as mindless conformists, but then shows how they all buck the system when the boss closes his door; when they hear the "click" of the doorknob," they all switch their monitors to the same television channel as one.
The second office space is even more interesting. When Pryce's character takes a promotion, he wanders around in a noiseless, people-less sterile maze, decorated only by random ductwork, before he gets caught in a tornado of yes-men swirling around a manager-type. Once ensconsed, the new employee plops down into a space barely adequate as a coat rack, where he shares a desk with an employee on the other side of one of the walls. They fight over the desk as though it were a game of tug of war.
Perhaps Gilliam lost his cinematic edge years ago (he lost me at least two movies ago), but these delirious bits help make "Brazil" a wholly unique vision of servitude and drudgery, a point that he nicely contrasts with his glorious dream sequences and fake happy ending.
What a great topic! But you are focusing exclusively on the office workspace of so-called "late capitalism." What about the dehumanizing effects of good old-fashioned industrial labor? 'Metropolis' springs to mind. As does Chaplin's 'Modern Times' (which is incidentally being used by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to educate the country's workers about issues of exploitation and their rights in the workplace, as a recent LA Times article noted). What about women and the workplace? How about Norma Rae? Or even Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman' about the alienation of work within one's very own home?
Sorry to get all film-geeky here. It's a slow day at, ahem, work...
JE: Hi Matt: I do indeed get into "manual labor" (and "Modern Times" in particular) in my MSN Movies piece (previous post), "Wither While You Work."
coen brothers' hudsucker proxy
How about the start of Joe vs The Volcano? Here's the pic
http://www.jvtv.org/mine/zigzag1.jpg
How about the Shot from Pixar's Incredibles of the overproportioned Mr Incredible constrained amongst a sea of too-tiny cubicles.
In fact the first 20 minutes or so of that film capture the mood of frustration and supression of office life - remarkable work from Pixar again in what is a kids movie.
There is also the office that Jane Addams works at in "Happiness," in which the cubicles appear to have no entrance or exits, and people can barely raise their heads above them to talk to the next inmate. An office where it is not surprising that a former employees death would go unmourned since he's just as unremarkable and anonymous as all the others.