In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard famously proclaimed that tracking shots are a matter of morality -- an inversion of fellow Cahier du cinéma critic Luc Moullet's formulation that "morality is a matter of tracking shots" ("morale set affaire de travellings," sometimes translated as "morality is in the tracking shots"). The evangelical theorists behind what became known as the French New Wave had a tendency to ascribe moral values to cinematic style and technique.¹ André Bazin and the late Eric Rohmer, especially, championed the moral as well as aesthetic superiority of mise en scène over montage, of Hawksian "invisible cutting" over dictatorial Eisensteinian editing, and of deep-focus over a more selective, shallow depth-of-field. Bazin praised directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler (in collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland) for staging shots so that "the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend."
As David Bordwell summarized:
Their "deep-focus" style, he claimed, produced a more profound realism than had been seen before because they respected the integrity of physical space and time. According to Bazin, traditional cutting breaks the world into bits, a series of close-ups and long shots. But Welles and Wyler give us the world as a seamless whole. The scene unfolds in all its actual duration and depth. Moreover, their style captured the way we see the world; given deep compositions, we must choose what to look at, foreground or background, just as we must choose in reality. [...]
[Bazin wrote that deep-focus] "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."
In addition, Bazin pointed out, this sort of composition was artistically efficient. The deep shot could supply both a close-up and a long-shot in the same framing--a synthesis of what traditional editing had given in separate shots. Bazin wove all these ideas into a larger theory that cinema was inherently a realistic medium, bound to photographic recording, and Welles and Wyler had discovered one path to artistic expression without violating the medium's biases.
For Bazin and Rohmer, the highest purpose of cinema was to serve photographic realism -- which they saw not only in post-war Italian neo-realism (Rossellini, De Sica) but in the mise en scène of Murnau and Dreyer.²
I've never quite bought that argument, mainly because I don't believe in "realism." While I value the ways in which the greatest filmmakers (from Buster Keaton to Rohmer himself) show respect for the integrity of space and time in the ways they frame their shots, they still have to point a camera and put a frame around it like anyone else. Movies are illusions, plays of light and shadow, and photorealism in a frame is as illusory as any other -ism. Playfully overturning another famous Godardian aphorism ("The cinema is truth 24 frames per second"), Brian De Palma would later state the obvious: The camera lies all the time; lies 24 times per second."
I like Jonathan Rosenbaum's translation of something Moullet wrote (again in Cahiers, 1958) about Douglas Sirk's "The Tarnished Angels":
In art, there is only artifice. Let us therefore praise an artifice that is cultivated without remorse, which consequently acquires a greater sincerity rather than artifice masked by itself as by others under hypocritical pretexts. The true is as false as the false; only the archi-false becomes true.
All of which, at long last, brings me back to a health-related item that popped out at me in the New York Times this week, investigating the claim that 3-D movies like "Avatar" can induce "headaches, nausea, blurred vision and other symptoms of visually induced motion sickness." The finding: Yes, they most certainly can and do -- for perfectly sound physiological reasons. As I noted in December, I find current stereoscopic "3-D" processes distracting and artificial. Because they are.
The NYT's Really? columnist, Anahad O'Connor, writes:
The problem, studies indicate, is that the films often cause unnatural eye movements.
Normally, when an object approaches a person, the eyes respond in two ways. They converge, or rotate inward to follow it (as an example, extend an arm with your index finger pointed up, then slowly pull it toward your nose). At the same time, as the object approaches, the eyes focus and maintain a clear image of it by changing the shape of the lens, a process called visual accommodation.
But a 3-D object flying off the screen causes sensory conflict. The eyes rotate inward to follow it, but they must also maintain a fixed focus on the display surface. So they converge without accommodating, an uncoupling of two natural processes that -- over the course of a long movie -- can be stressful.
The column suggests that viewers should "avoid looking at unfocused parts of the scenes, which sounds a lot easier than it is." This was part of my original complaint about the movie. What if I wanted to check out that lei on the Na'vi to the left behind Neytiri, or see Grace's expression (is that Grace?) in that close-up of Jake? There are loci of interest back there, and if the movie is in 3-D, I ought to be able to look at them, to focus my eyes wherever I want.
James Cameron is a very smart and gifted director, so I don't understand why he would blunder so badly, using a shallow depth of field in which foreground and background are often shown out of focus -- in a 3-D movie, of all things! It is, I would argue, aesthetically and morally inexcusable. Cameron wasn't even constrained by the usual limitations forced on filmmakers by lenses, film speed and available light, since these scenes on Pandora were created entirely in CGI!
The blurry foreground-background technique is one that is usually employed to create an illusion of depth in a two-dimensional space. But if you're employing 3-D technology to stage in depth for the camera, enhancing your film-world's "immersive" qualities, why would you not allow the viewers' eyes to wander naturally around the frame, and from front to back within it? To force the 3-D camera lens to focus on some things and not others (rather than guiding the viewer's eye through mise en scène) defeats the purpose, and the proper perception, of that extra dimensionality. It does not respect, or take full advantage of, the medium's essential properties.³
This lapse alone should keep Cameron from receiving directorial honors from any group that knows anything about direction.
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See also: David Bordwell's blog entry, "Gradation of emphasis starring Glenn Ford for a discussion of staging and depth of focus in widescreen, and ways in which films create primary and secondary degrees of interest/emphasis within images:
In "On the History of Film Style," I suggested that many aspects of technique work to call attention to any element in the field. The filmmaker can put a something in motion, turn it to face us, light it more brightly, make it a vivid color, center it in the frame, have it advance to the foreground, have other characters look at it, and so on. These tactics can work together in a complex choreography. In "Figures Traced in Light," I argued that they depend on the fact that we scan the frame actively; the techniques guide our visual exploration. [...]...To what extent do we find gradation of emphasis in current filmmaking? Today's American cinema relies heavily on editing, using a style I've called intensified continuity. Each shot tends to mean just one thing, and once we get it we're rushed on to the next. The unforced openness of the wide frame that Barr celebrated has been largely banned, in favor of tight singles--even in the 2.40 anamorphic format. It seems that most filmmakers are no longer concerned with gradation of emphasis within their shots.
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¹ I've never seen Gillo Pontecorvo's "Kapo" (1960), set in a Nazi concentration camp, but I love the way Jacques Rivette (later to become a famous director himself) writes about it, after referring to Moullet's phrase about the morality of tracking shots -- how the subject defeats "realism," and what makes one particular shot in the film morally reprehensible:
Look, however, in "Kapo," at the shot where [a character] kills herself by throwing herself on an electric barbed-wire fence; the man who decides, at that moment, to have a dolly in to tilt up at the body, while taking care to precisely note the hand raised in the angle of its final framing -- this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt. For several months, people have been breaking our balls over false problems of form and content, of realism and fantasy, of script and mise en scène, of the free actor or the regulated actor, and other dichotomies; let us say that it is possible that all subjects are born free and equal by law; that [what] counts is tone, or emphasis, nuance, as one will call it -- that is to say, the point of view of a man, the auteur, badly needed, and the attitude that this man takes in relation to that which he films, and therefore in relation to the world and to everything: that which can be expressed by a choice in situations, in the construction of the storyline, in the dialogue, in the play of actors, or in the pure and simple technique... There are things that should not be addressed except in the throes of fear and trembling; death is one of them, without a doubt; and how, at the moment of filming something so mysterious, could one not feel like an impostor? It would be better in any case to ask oneself the question, and to include the interrogation, in some way, in what is being filmed; but doubt is surely that which Pontecorvo and his ilk lack most.
To make a film is to show certain things, that is at the same time, and by the same mechanism, to show them with a certain bias; these two acts being thoroughly bound together.
² UPDATE: Richard Brody points to Rohmer's 1948 article "Cinema, the Art of Space," in which he "praises expressionism and sees Welles as an heir of... Murnau and Eisenstein and considers the new techniques of realism as a new form of stylization."
I found this passage in "Cinema, the Art of Space" particularly interesting (written nine years before Rohmer and Claude Chabrol published the first book about Hitchcock):
The methods that the modern director uses for spatial expression are much less apparent than they were twenty years ago. As in the other arts, it is normal that the evolution of film lean toward greater economy in its means of expression. This simplification may lead toward greater realism: Rossellini's success in "Paisan" is to have relied as little as possible on the editing and to have avoided breaking up his work into too many shots -- though such fragmentation seems to impose itself when working with action scenes. Even in such a realistic art, simplification demands, as compensation, a certain richness in spacial expression -- one very different from the distortions of the plastic arts.... [...]
In a completely different sense, that of the search for stylization, Hitchcock's work is extremely rich in lessons, but his brilliant style is sometimes combined with an insufficiently rigorous concept of the relationship between content and expression. Bresson's art is undoubtedly purer. "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne," so unjustly condemned, represents the attempt most worthy of being compared with German expressionism. The fact that stylization in the expression of time is given more attention than is spatial construction, is a measure of the distance separating modern cinema from that of the "grand époque" of silent films. In learning how to understand, the modern moviegoer forgot how to see, and if film has succeeded in educating us visually, it did not do so by making us more sensitive to the pure signification of certain forms or movements. To the extent that an art of seeing still exists, we are, quite simply, more likely to understand the intentions of a language that can have the nuance and subtlety of a spoken language, but that most often remains every bit as conventional.
La Revue du cinema, June 1948
³ Further clarification, from a comment below. Cameron had many, many options available to him in composing some of these shots that hurt my eyeballs (look at the shots that accompany this post!) because he chose to put something interesting in the frame and then to hold it out of focus -- especially since there are so many other ways of focusing attention than, simply, focus (composition, movement, lighting, color, etc., etc.):
Not a very imaginative directorial choice. If Cameron (or any director) places something in the frame, he's making it available to be seen. He didn't have to put it there -- especially in this film, which is mostly CGI. Then he can choose which lenses, lighting, etc., to use, where to place the camera, how to focus -- or, in this case, how to build the shot basically pixel-by-pixel via software. I still haven't seen a good argument for using such a shallow depth of field AND crowded compositions when shooting in 3-D. Sure seems counter-intuitive to me. Again, others (Hitchcock, for example) have also used less-than-absolute deep focus in 3-D, but have displayed more care in how they composed their shots. It can take hours to set up, block and light a shot, even in the most conventional movie. Cameron took years to make this one, shooting on a vast, blank soundstage in Playa Vista and filling in the details later. So much time and effort went into creating every single image. What was he thinking?
55 Comments
Jim,
You've really opened the Pandora's box here. Such a rich article, worthy of a thousand discussions. Thanks for this.
For me, Cameron's film is morally reproachable in every possible way - from the script to the screen. And I might just be able to live with this particular technical faux pas. May be this shallow focus was necessary to achieve the optimum 3D effect. I don't know. But the error isn't justified.
Ir's funny that, while Avatar is claimed to have heralded a new era in motion pictures, we seem to have gone back to the 30s and 40s when the filmmaker had to resort to one form of artifice or another to move closer to realism . Bazin speaks about achieving a trade-off between using deep focus (possible only in studios) and shooting on location (leads to shallow focus, he says) while comparing Farrebique and Citizen Kane. May be Avatar will lead us to another such dichotomy wherein we can either shoot 3D films with deep focus using photoshop or make simple 2D films on location. If that's to be, I'll choose the latter.
Rivette's trashing of Kapo is masterful, But, for readers who haven't read it already, here's what could well be the Citizen kane of film criticism - Serge Daney's The Tracking Shot of Kapo (), which takes off from Rivette's article and explores (not exclusively of course) the difference between what is "beautiful" and what is "just" in cinema. One begins to see why certain choices of films like Schindler's List are so worthy of condemnation, even if they use deep-focus and Hawksian editing.
The debate on whether ethics can be separated from esthetics is a never-ending one nevertheless so fruitful. To continue the train of quote-inversions, I'd like to negate Lenin's statement and say that TODAYS AESTHETICS IS TOMORROW'S ETHICS!.
Cheers!
//If it's 3-D, I ought to be able to focus wherever I want.//
Why? Eyes don't work that way: peripheral vision isn't focused.
Shift your eyes one way or another. Who decides what's "peripheral" in 3-D?
Let me preface by saying I do see your point and I'm not defending Cameron's use of 3D.
The problem, with the live action characters, is that the PACE Fusion 3D camera was designed to work like human eyes, adjusting its focal point in space with servo controlled left and right lenses. The goal was to achieve a selective 3D focus, that would work more like human eyes, so that distance from an object isn't the only thing that dictates depth perception. An object farther away from us, when our eyes focus on it, pops out from the rest of the periphery. But in standard 3D our attention cannot be called, by the director who is telling a story, to certain things if there's always a sameness and therefore no dynamic element to 3D depth perception.
That said, making that choice to solve one problem creates another, which you've described. Our brain doesn't understand why we perceive depth in that two-dimensional screen yet can't selectively focus our eyes on what we want... and the effect is at times unnerving.
I left that out of my analysis of the film because I thought it was more of a headache to me purely because I have trouble keeping my eyes aligned, and therefore poor depth perception. It's a headache for me to focus on individual objects in actual, three-dimensional space!
If there were no live action elements at all to match with a virtual camera that behaves precisely as the PACE Fusion, then you're absolutely right... they could have set up the shots to appear any way they like.
But it would still be a tradeoff... since the film doesn't know what you're going to focus on at any given moment, even with deep focus shots the degree of offset for any individual element would always be dictated by distance from a "camera" with fixed stereo optics... and so only the foreground would ever really pop out at you, rendering the use of 3D kind of a moot point all together.
Nice post, Rubin. Your clear breakdown of the logic behind filming in 3D makes me wonder if the better question is, "Why did Jim Cameron allow himself to be handcuffed by 3D?" It would seem that by filming for 3D, Cameron was simply following a template for camerawork rather than actually directing it.
I think one of the main problems with 3-D, Somniferous, is that the peripheral vision is not engaged. A normal screen just simulates a plane of focus in which case it's fine that peripheral vision is not engaged. But if you want to simulate your sight, you ought to put in peripheral vision (one of the most disconcerting things in the movie was that things popped out of your vision where they shouldn't have). But if you immerse the watcher in an environment, it becomes a glorified video game, because the viewer can look anywhere.
In other words, someone ought to tell the image to stay on the screen.
Movies play at 24 frames per second. To say that they do anything else 24 times a second is fallacious, as it is based only on the technical specifications and ignores the way the contents actually work. Film rarely shows 24 different pictures in a second (some flash montages of single frames occasionally appear.) Even Brakhage, who made films for his unnaturally fast eyes, and whose films therefore are incomprehensible to most human eyes, did not show 24 different images in a second. The truth is that movies usually show 24 different variations on the same image in a second. Tracking shots and other shots that include large changes may be seen as continuously evolving images or as a succession of several images, but even then, to break them down into individual frames and to endow each frame with the same importance, so that no frame may be excluded in discussion or understanding, is absurd. The unit on which we should base our thought model is more the shot, or segment of a shot, than the individual frame. It is the moving image, rather than several still images in a row. And as you know, when Roger Ebert and a class go through films frame by frame, they do not stop at every single frame to notice how unique it is, because frames frequently do not differ much from one another and the sum total can often be represented, in still form, by one frame or a small group of frames.
My point is that when people talk about film lying, revealing, or doing anything else 24 times a second, all they're doing is exclaiming, "Look at me! I know what speed film plays!" 24 frames per second is just a simple fact, and rarely is it a significant one. It's a technical specification, only very rarely a component of the film contents. Basically, it's not important, and it's not the point.
I wonder how 3D movie would look like with every single thing on focus. If done succesfully, this would be a real ground-breaking directorial achievement, something to which Cameron is not even close with 'Avatar'. I'm not sure, however, that it could be "done succesfully"; how would a filmmaker emphasize what's important? would you look at the actor's face in a deep-felt soliloquy, for example, or would your eyes be wondering around?
My guess is that the effect would be either bewildering in its detail and thus difficult to watch or either nauseating in its lack of focused attention and difficult to watch.
Part of the problem with Avatar's technique, as described before, is that the technology is forcing the viewer to focus their attention in a way that isn't natural. But having everything in focus isn't natural either. Look around you. Your eyes focus reflexively on the FOCUS of your attention. Yes, you can focus (within limits) on whatever you want but you can't look at everything in your field of vision in perfect focus all the time or at any time. I've seen rendered 3D still art where everything is intentionally in perfect sharpness and focus and it's almost impossible to know where to look. Now imagine moving pictures like that. It would be stomach-turning to watch. You might get used to it over time, but really what would be the point? Do we actually need everything to be in perfect focus and if so, then what is the director's job?
*wander, not wonder; miswrote it twice
Joel, that's my guess too. And the thing is that I also agree with this: "To force the camera lens to focus on some things and not others defeats the purpose, and the proper perception, of that extra dimensionality". Since it seems clear to me that 3D technology is here to stay, there has to be an understanding between focus and the extra-dimension. Yet I have no idea where the two come together.
When the film is in 3-D, you're never focusing on the entire frame at once, because it doesn't exist on a single plane (like, say, the Welles/Toland or Wyler/Toland collaborations Bazin cites -- whether "Kane" or "Ambersons" or "Best Years of Our Lives"). Look at how Jack Arnold used 3-D in "It Came From Outer Space" (1953), or Alfred Hitchcock in "Dial M for Murder" (1954). Indeed, some shots in "Avatar" (mostly exterior long shots or establishing shots) do use deep focus. That's just one of hundreds of considerations a director has to keep in mind when composing a shot...
Dial M for Murder was in 3D?! Wow. I haven't seen it in a number of years but I'll definitely be viewing it differently next time around to see what Hitch did in the medium.
Because it was all studio-shot (like "Rope," it's a play), the outdoor back-projection is a particularly bizarre effect, since it's so obviously flat. He wasn't after "realism" at all! The movie was shot in 3-D, but the fad was over by the time of its original release so the 3-D version wasn't seen in American theaters until the early 1980s. Same polarized glasses then as now.
Since I don't see anyway we can "look at how Jack Arnold used 3-D in "It Came From Outer Space" (1953), or Alfred Hitchcock in "Dial M for Murder" (1954)" -pity- I'd appreciate if you told us how these deal with the third dimension and focus. Because you'll still have too focus on something specifically sooner or later; I assume you don't mean that everything has to be on focus all the time. How can you not be distracted by an object closer to you than the actor speaking? I find it'd be an almost impossible task to point out what's important in certain 3D shots giving up shallow focusing.
OK, let's start with this: If you're going to shoot in 3-D, don't fill the background of your shots with distractions that your audience may want to look (or at least glance) at, and then leave them out of focus! Different directors have different styles and priorities, but Cameron's use of a shallow depth of field in "Avatar" seems to be to be self-defeating. As I mentioned in another reply here, Hitchcock didn't use strictly deep focus in his 3-D "Dial M for Murder," but the focus contrasts (in foreground and background) were much more subtle than the images from "Avatar" that I used as examples in this post. As for "deep focus" in general... well, it's a huge subject (especially among the Cahiers du cinema crowd). Reams have been written about Gregg Toland's work with Welles and Wyler alone. Here's one concise overview, concentrating on Wyler, at ArtsJournal: http://j.mp/axKklo
P.S. "Dial M for Murder" and "It Came from Outer Space" are available on DVD -- in 2-D. The focus is still the same in 2-D and 3-D versions...
"If you're going to shoot in 3-D, don't fill the background of your shots with distractions that your audience may want to look (or at least glance) at, and then leave them out of focus!"
Alright, completely agree. Actually I just finished reading your entry 'Avatar 3D headaches: Look at this! Don't look at this!' in which you state the same convincingly.
Beats me how Cameron didn't foresee this after working for how long? in this project. Could it be that the simultaneous 2D, 3D shooting messed it all up? I mean, I don't think Cameron had 3D glasses on every(any)time on set, which is probably the thing to do: watching properly what's being shot when it's being shot, 'focusing' on 3D first then adapting the movie to 2D would familiarize the director with the extra dimension and his talent (if held) would do the rest. Maybe, after all, Cameron didn't commit to the extra D fully.
"P.S. "Dial M for Murder" and "It Came from Outer Space" are available on DVD -- in 2-D. The focus is still the same in 2-D and 3-D versions..."
I know, I have them both. I meant we had no way to get to the 3D experience.
I have to ask: Given that the great majority of people seem to enjoy the film, and the 3-D, is it possible the people who get headaches from it are simply unfortunate, not evidence of some failure of Cameron's? I mean, if you have a peanut allergy, that doesn't make, say, peanut sauce *bad*, it just makes it bad for you, personally.
It's not only a matter of headaches or physical responses to the movie. I didn't get a headache and still think what Cameron did wasn't good directing. Crowds of people fill the theaters every time a Harry Potter movie comes out, and that doesn't make them good -or bad. It's called marketing.
I'm certainly not saying popularity is proportional to quality, I'm questioning when people claim that because this 3D technique gave them a headache it is bad somehow. If you have a problem with it beyond that, fine, make your argument, but don't pretend there aren'ts people just griping because it gave them a headache and they apparently think that even though it *didn't* give a headache to millions of people, that means it's bad, bad, bad.
In the future movies will be watched for you so you only need to be implanted with the memory of having watched it. Saves time that way.
That's where it's going in my view and it's true that Avatar brings us one step closer to that reality.
Plot too complex/ unfamiliar?
We know you work hard and want to relax for a bit.
...Let's use a plot that you're already familiar with so it's not too taxing. Pre-chewed so to speak.
Is the screen too far away? Here, we'll move some of the action _to_ you so you can see it better.
What's that? Your brain is outside the door, but you feel like your eyeballs are being overworked with too much to see? No problem -just let your eyes relax and we will switch the focus onto the bits we want you to see.
Avatar -nothing required but reflex.
i coulodn't agree with you more on this one. i've tried explaining this very criticism of "avatar" to those who proclaim the movie one of the best they've ever seen, but from now on i'll just send them a link to your article. you've made my life easier.
another observation i made, which is suggested in your opening paragraphs, is that 3D movies need to be slowed down. far less cuts and more long shots... otherwise, it feels as if somneone has their hand on a teleporter button that you have no control over, and they're constantly hitting it: one second you're seeing the action over here, then over there, then from behind that bush, then in their faces... it can be very disorienting. but if the camera was allowed to move at a more deliberate pace, sweeping in and out and around the action, then that along with the 3D might really pull you into the screen.
Jim,
Has Cameron himself said anything about this? I know your job isn't to be a reporter, but I think it would be worth seeking out his, um, perspective on this.
One wonders what moral implications there are in the closing shot of Haneke's Cache, wherein the natural tendency of the eye to focus upon the woman in the foreground right-of-center distracts from what is arguably the subject of the shot, if it can be said to have one at all. It is subversively autocratic, in that the shot preys upon the natural tendencies of the viewer to hide the machinations going on elsewhere, a kind of bread-and-circuses distraction. However, under the French New Wave definition of deep focus and its democratic overtones of liberality of choice, one could argue that democracy equally embraces those who cannot see past their own nose and those who take a more critical stance, allowing the group who prevails to take power, though perhaps only temporarily. In this way, the shot could be didactic as well, serving as a problem whose solution serves to increase the health of the democracy as a whole by pointing out the methods by which it can be subverted.
yes i agree!
thank you jim for being brave enough to point out how avatar isn't just a poor movie, it's borderline evil. i'm just glad that there are people like you out there who love movies enough to recognize that most of them aren't just bad, they're actually morally destructive and are willing to write article after article exposing them on every conceivable level as the shallow destructive abominations they are. if it weren't for heroes like you i might actually like things like avatar and dark knight and, well, basically anything that other people seem to enjoy.
but where's your parade?
Morality? Wow, these guys took the art of picture making a bit too seriously. I always looked at motion pictures as, well, moving pictures. look at the still frames above, and you'll see it's a choice of composition. If you're going to have deep focus in a movie as detailed and candy colored as Avatar, or any other all-dressed-pizza extravaganza, at some point the eyes need to rest on the immediate subject, or you'll have frames that are poorly composed in terms of tonal values, composition, overlapping shapes and all the other principals of good picture design. Orson Welles' films worked with deep focus, but they were in black and white, and supremely well composed in terms of black shapes, white highlights and grey values. My criteria for a good film visually is if you could take a still frame from each scene and hang it on your wall. Look at anything that cinematographers Conrad Hall or Roger Deakins shoot and it's a joy because not only are they beautifully shot, but they tell you exactly what you should be looking at. Just as a cut is a choice point in a film - the director telling us when to change place or time - the choice of framing is telling us where to look. If a close up of the face above had lots of clutter behind it, why should I be distracted by that when the point of the shot is to pay attention to the words or emotion in the scene. It's basic visual storytelling.
I didn't see Avatar in 3D for 3 reasons. It's more expensive. It causes headaches. I see it as a silly albeit successful marketing gimmick designed to increase box office revenue due to higher ticket prices, while adding nothing of value to the storytelling. What do I gain for my extra 2 dollars besides a cheap pair of mostly useless glasses. Presumably 3D increases immersion, which I thought a compelling story and interesting characters and themes were supposed to do.
As a 2D movie I thought shallow focus was the right choice. Despite the admittedly impressive CGI the movie still had trouble not looking completely like a cartoon at points, especially during wide shots featuring multiple Na'vi. Using a shallow focus helped contribute to the illusion that Pandora was a real place. In cartoons everything is in deep focus because it looks awkward to draw something blurry in the background for the most part and you don't have the limitations of a real camera. Avatar wasn't quite a cartoon, or at least it tried not to be so the shallow focus was an effective technique into fooling the viewer that real cameras were filming a real place. At least in 2D.
"James Cameron is a very smart and gifted director, so I don't understand why he would blunder so badly, using a shallow depth of field in which foreground and background are often shown out of focus"
What a strange thing to say. Shallow DOF is often employed in close shots to isolate the subject from the background -- what in the world is wrong with simulating the same effect in a CGI shot? I haven't seen the movie and can't comment on any scenes, but how is this anything more than Cameron's aesthetic choice? Disagree with it if you need to, but it certainly wasn't *wrong*.
I thought the funniest thing about the 3-D was the way the subtitles had to jump from depth to depth.
That said, do you know why so few people actually feel the headaches, if it's such a direct physiological reaction?
Take me, for example. I read your article before going for the movie, and I made sure my eyes were roving around the screen. No problems felt.
It does seem like a tricky situation. As you pointed out, Jim, if it's shown up on the screen, *someone* framed it, so it ceases to be "real." I don't know if framing a tighter shot with a shallower depth of field is any less real or any more morally offensive than any other shot. I've seen countless movies by great directors with shots just like that picture of Jake up there. You can try to look at Grace's expression, but in a regular 2D film, you'd still struggle to do so because of the blurriness. To me, Cameron's choice is almost the same as any director's choice to shoot with a shallow depth of field -- 3D picture or not.
The rub comes in with the eye strain, as you pointed out. I personally have never experienced this eye strain, no matter where on the screen I look. Yes, a director like Cameron should be aware of this and be concerned with this, but I'm not willing to call it "morally inexcusable." You're right, Jim, with a 3D film, there's kind of no point to blurring the background; the human eye does that naturally. But like I said, Cameron's making the same choice that many directors do in 2D films ("Avatar" *does* also screen in 2D). His mistake is not caring enough about potential eye strain -- if you choose to see that as a mistake. So maybe this makes him unworthy of the Best Director Oscar this year, but again, I'm only willing to call this a *stylistic* choice/blunder.
Depth of focus is completely separate from central vs. peripheral vision. (And no movie requires you to fixate only on the center of the screen, anyway).
Central (or foveal) vision moves with your eyes. Depth of field doesn't, instead your eyes adjust to the pre-existing depth of field. In real-life, that's how things work, at least.
There is a very good reason Avatar was not shot in deep focus as this would exacerbate the eye strain problem.
The issue is that 3D is an illusion. Regardless of whether the image appears in front of the screen of behind the screen, in reality all the images are on the screen itself. By keeping the background blurry Cameron in training is audience to only focus on one part of the image at the distance of the screen.
If, as you suggest, the movie used deep focus, the audience would be led to believe that they could focus on an object that appeared behind the screen. The problem is to correctly focus on that apparent background image would require no change in focal length in the eye... which defies common experience and causes people to have to focus then re-focus... leading to eyestrain.
I think you understand this, so I'm confused as to why you think this is a poor directorial choice.
I caught "Kapo" on TCM about four years ago, and at the time knew nothing of Rivitte´s famous review. Incidentally, the shot he´s referring to seems to slip my mind. I will say, however, that I was impressed with the film as a whole. You´ll have a great chance to see it in a few months, because Criterion will be releasing it on their Essential Art House label. I´m excitied by the chance to see it again in light of Rivette´s thoughts.
As for 3-D, I still haven´t seen "Avatar", and haven´t seen a 3-D film since "Captain Eo" at Disney World when I was in fourth grade. My cultural street cred is taking a serious beating right now.
I'm sorry, I simply don't buy this at all. I'm not a huge defender of Avatar--I enjoyed it, but it has deep and obvious flaws--but I think this idea that a film-maker "forcing" you to focus on one piece or another of his frame is somehow evil and autocratic is simply silly. By the same logic, it's an act of supreme evil every time a director excises a shot they don't like. Hell, why not put every take on screen and allow the audience to choose which one they like best? Does this mean that the ultimate format for a film is the DVD, where you're free to skip scenes you don't like or repeat ones you do as you watch the film? And if we're giving the audience as much choice as possible, surely the only morally pure way to approach a film is to hand the audience a camera and let them decide what they want to see themselves.
This is, of course, absurd. The entire point of film--and the entire point of *art*--is that the artists *has something he or she wants to show you*. The degree of freedom they give you--that is, the amount of material they give you and the degree to which they draw your focus to certain parts of it--is a variable that affects how "good" or "evil" a film is only in context.
While I think arguments about aesthetics can be made in "good vs. evil" terms, can be seen that wa , that wasn't what I, at least, was trying to do here. It depends on context, of course: the shot Rivette describes, or the way Alan Parker cast and photographed black people and white people in "Mississippi Burning." There's something I think can fairly be called "evil" in them. "Avatar" may be irresponsible, may not display a respect or understanding for the spatial integrity of the medium (which is what makes it a lesser movie than those that do), but I'm not one of those calling it "evil." (Though some conservative commenters certainly have. Somebody at the kooky Big Hollywood site recently attacked Cameron for his exploitive use of 9/11 imagery.)
To force the camera lens to focus on some things and not others defeats the purpose, and the proper perception, of that extra dimensionality. It does not grasp, or respect, the medium's essential properties.
I disagree. The assumption being made here is that 3-D must provide a complete presentation of "extra dimensionality." Why? That's as arbitrary as saying that every element of a 2-D film should be in (deep) focus. Granted, I realize that what you're describing is what some people -- perhaps even Cameron -- want out of 3-D. But I don't see it to be essential, unless we start requiring the same of 2-D.
I saw Avatar in both 3-D and 2-D formats. Much to my surprise, I found the 3-D version much more interesting to look at. Even if it doesn't provide a complete extra dimensional experience, there's no denying that it provides a distinctly different experience. That, in my mind, is the only "purpose." I'm at a loss as to why it has to be an all or nothing scenario in terms of its use of 3-D.
Having said that, I understand your frustration that you can't 'look around' the image to focus on what you want to focus on. But this would be the same in 2-D. Sometimes you might want to see something that's out of focus. Sometimes you might want to see something that isn't even in the frame.
The director directs our eyes. That includes Godard, because, as you said, he still has to work within a frame like everyone else. If a director creates any film with a narrow point of focus, then he/she does. Same in 2-D as 3-D. Though at least with the 2-D you don't get headaches (er, well, unless the director uses Shakycam).
Yes, my point is that Cameron's is an unnecessarily restrictive use of 3-D. In 2-D your eyes don't naturally try to focus on what the camera lens is presenting as out of focus. In "Avatar" I found myself straining against the movie over and over in ways I would not have in a 2-D picture, because I would not have been tricked into believing I could naturally focus on things my eyes could not. In that sense, "Avatar" works against the eyes' natural inclinations. Hitchcock didn't use deep focus exclusively in "Dial M for Murder" -- but he blurred backgrounds more subtly, and didn't put things behind or in front of his in-focus actors that you would be distracted into wanting to look at.
The description of your Avatar viewing experience reminds me of A Clockwork Orange. It's an extreme (and kind of funny) association but one that makes your claim against the film's morality more clear. Cameron isn't just directing your eyes, he's forcing them into a locked position on the image that he desires you to see. That's a physiological manipulation by Cameron which makes it absolutely worthy of an argument against its morality. That doesn't mean we all need to go marching down the street in protest, but it is something to recognize and consider when thinking about if the film was well directed or not (or whether it's good for others to be influenced by it).
I like the way you connect this to the claims against the morality of the Soviet montage theory. It's easy to argue that films that favor a heavy use of dialectical montage are attempting to use the medium to force you into a way of perceiving not just the film but the world (whether that view is for "good" or "evil," the manipulation is still manipulation). Now, that doesn't make montage bad, but it does warrant conversation on its morality.
Sorry, I don't buy that Cameron is somehow forcing you to see certain images--except insofar as he has put them on screen and you have decided to watch them. All he has done is, in effect, reduced the effective size of his frame--albeit he backs the image he's presenting (say, a face) with a blurry image rather than a simple black background. But I somehow don't think we'd be seeing arguments that Cameron is autocratic or forcing something on his audience if he simple presented occasional faces on black backgrounds...
Is that really the only -- or even the likely -- alternative: shooting faces against black/blank backgrounds? Not a very imaginative directorial choice. If Cameron (or any director) places something in the frame, he's making it available to be seen. He didn't have to put it there -- especially in this film, which is mostly CGI. Then he can choose which lenses, lighting, etc., to use, where to place the camera, how to focus -- or, in this case, how to build the shot basically pixel-by-pixel via software. I still haven't seen a good argument for using such a shallow depth of field AND crowded compositions when shooting in 3-D. Sure seems counter-intuitive to me. Again, others (Hitchcock, for example) have also used less-than-absolute deep focus in 3-D, but have displayed more care in how they composed their shots. It can take hours to set up, block and light a shot, even in the most conventional movie. Cameron took years to make this one, shooting on a vast, blank soundstage in Playa Vista and filling in the details later. So much time and effort went into creating every single image. What was he thinking?
The only option? Not at all--but my point is that these people somehow accusing Cameron of "forcing" them to look at something as if he was doing something extraordinary seem to be forgetting that all Cameron is doing is limiting the size or scope of the image he's presenting, and they don't seem to have a problem with that in any other context.
As to your question: Why use shallow focus while still crowding the composition? My thought is that Cameron wants to draw your attention to certain parts of the frame without letting you forget about the highly detailed, heavily populated world the film is set in. I think it would be rather incongruous if, given the rain-forest-like array of life to be found in almost every shot of this movie, the close-ups somehow managed to be scantly populated.
Maybe someday, 3-D will be something worthwhile, a non-gimmicky element that enhances a movie's immersion factor with no headaches or any other issues. But it certainly isn't there yet, and just maybe, it never will be. Maybe it was a bad idea from the start.
You know what I'm going to do (if I have the patience)? I'm going to wait 10 years before I see another movie in 3-D. Then I will watch the best example of 3-D around by that time, and if it still isn't very good, I will wait another 10 years before seeing another 3-D movie. And so on. I hope to be pleasantly surprised with the quality of 3-D one of these decades, but for now, I am perfectly content to see movies in Glorious 2-D.
I feel as though some of you are missing the point. Jim isn't railing against a shallow depth of focus, per se, he is railing against its use in a 3D picture, particularly one as spectacular as Avatar.
I use spectacular in the sense of 'a spectacle', not in the common use of the word meaning 'great'.
Using a shallow depth of focus is a perfectly legitimate technique, although, like any other, it has to have meaning. As someone noted earlier, it is meant to separate the foreground from the background, presumably to direct the audience's focus and to create a sense of intimacy with the subject. In such shots, the only things that matter are the subject in focus and the audience.
For an entire picture to be shot that way is silly. If we consider the shallow depth as we have come to understand it, Avatar would have us believe, at most points in time, that Pandora is rather insignificant. We shouldn't look at it unless told to do so. I don't think that is true, nor do I think that Cameron intends it in that way. But, he uses the technique, and in doing so, is going against our common conception of the language of film. This is confusing to us, whether we realize it or not.
Not only that, but the spectacular nature of the film makes the audience want to see it all. Yet Cameron doesn't allow us to. The irony is that his visual flair is what put that desire into us in the first place.
To make matters (infinitely) worse, the fact is that the audience is actually punished for this desire when watching a picture in 3D. If I let my eyes roam in a normal picture, the only thing that happens is that I may be frustrated that I cannot make out the background images. I would probably gripe about Cameron's use of shallow depth of focus for the reasons stated above. It would be a matter of film theory, taste, perhaps sophistication in the language of film, and so on. In 3D, it becomes a matter of comfort; IT GIVES YOU HEADACHES!
This is the crime. Cameron makes you want to explore the frame. He intentionally puts the hero in front of the vat containing his avatar. The hero is certainly the focus of the shot, but didn't we pay to see blue aliens? Yet, when we look at the alien, the 3D technology makes us sick. What a crime.
Jim said earlier that if you are going to shoot in 3D, don't frame the shots in such a way as to leave visually interesting things in the fuzzy background. That is a perfectly good suggestion. It would probably make for uninteresting experiences, but, and this is key, we would not have headaches!
The problem, from what I can gather, is that deep focus is impossible in 3D. Something about our neuro-visual processes. It makes sense. A normal film can be shot in deep focus, allowing us to look where we like, but our brain processes it in the way it must. Deep focus gives us the option to focus where we wish, but we still need to focus somewhere in the frame. Taking the whole frame in at once is impossible.
In 3D, there are two planes of 2D images. Each is seen by one eye. Each, then, point of focus, which combine to give us the focus we know. The brain puts it together and makes sense of it, but it sould seem impossible that we are to take that much information and focus on all of it, the entire 3D 'frame' simultaneously. It just doesn't work that way.
It's like imagining a conception of reality without time; it is theoretically possible, but our brains don't work that way.
So, it looks like a fundamental problem. For those of you in love with 3D, look at it this way: 3D technology is perfect, it is our brains that are the problem.
For those of us in the real world, who might even like 3D if it didn't bother our brains, we will continue to gripe. And hope for new technology. It may not be a fundamental problem with 3D. We may be able to find a solution. As it stands, that solution is to use the 'shortcut' Jim suggested: not framing shots in such a way as to encourage us to look at the background. This is deeply unfulfilling, however, so my fingers are crossed for better tech.
Pixar 3D movies does the same thing(just look at the new Toy Story 3 trailer). And they are all CGI.
Excuse me, Eduardo, did we see the same Toy Story 3 trailer? Most of the shots in it had deep focus. At least the one I saw.
I'm trusting Pixar to get the 2D version right. They did a great job with UP; I didn't miss 3D on that film at all.
I cannot watch films in IMAX or 3D. They literally nauseate me. People are saying that 3D is the wave of the future; well, if in the future films are shown in nothing but 3D, I'll stop watching anything but 2D films. I doubt I'll miss a thing.
You know, most of the greatest movies ever made are in 2D, low-resolution, black and white. CITIZEN KANE, CASABLANCA, THE THIRD MAN, KING KONG (a helluva SFX film, still), THE SEVENTH SEAL, SEVEN SAMURAI...Need I continue?
3D is evil, and unnecessary. A pox on it.
Jim, thanks for confirming my impression. I went to "Avatar" solely for the visual experience - I approached it as a theme park ride - as I had heard that the script was pretty weak. But I felt like I literally couldn't see most of the movie, as so much of the image was out of focus. It was like looking through a fogged up windshield. I've talked with friends about this - some get it, and some tell me to get my eyes checked.
Sorry, but I have to point out something not extremely relevant to the essence of the text, but which annoyed me greatly all along. Please, when you use french words, use them right. Mise en scène is written that way, not "mise en scéne" or even worse, "miss en scène". Miss En Scène would surely disapprove of seeing her name used in vain.
Miss En Scène regrets the spellcheck/cut-and-paste errors!
Allez dans la paix du Christ, mon enfant. Vous êtes pardonné.
Another correction: I don't have the source for the Godard citation you use, but "morale set affaire de travellings" seems like an ungrammatical phonetic rendering of "la morale, c'est une affaire de travellings".
I don't doubt you. That translation was from the Cahiers anthology, "The 1950s" (edited by Jim Hillier and published in English in 1985).
Aesthetics = Morally Neutral.
Next?
I don't think that's true, it's dependent on context. It could be morally reprehensible to, say, make a film where all white people are treated with a more "positive" aesthetic than the black people, for instance...
And?
At some point while watching "Avatar," I burst a blood vessel in my right eye. You might be onto something here.
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