First Shots: The Dollars Trilogy

A short analysis of what Sergio Leone's first shots in each of his three Eastwood movies reveal about the films they open. The scenes that follow these shots have already been analyzed to death, so here I just try to squeeze out as much information from these first one or two shots about the films and Leone's developing style of storytelling.

Opening scenes or first pages are usually some of the most interesting parts of movies or books. Especially upon second viewing/reading, expository scenes reveal a lot of information to prime us for a narrative's main themes and characters. Most often, they basically contain the central conflict of the story.

Sergio Leone - like Kurosawa whose YOJIMBO (1961) he shamelessly remade as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS in 1964 - was fond of very long takes and elaborate tracking shots which he contrasted with frenetic cutting in action scenes. 

The Triangular Composition
After a rotoscoped credits sequence, his first Italian western fades in on a low angle shot of rocky desert sand. Before we see the "man with no name" (actually called "Joe" in this one), we see the hooves of his mule. The small size of the animal is immediately recognized because the rider's feet are dangling very close to the ground.

When zoom lenses became widely available in the 1960s, the practice of opening a scene on a detail followed by zooming out to the actual establishing shot came into fashion. Classical Hollywood producers preferred to open on an establishing shot and then cut ever closer to the actors. Of course, Sergio Leone was by no means the first director to reverse this practice - he might have lifted it from Kurosawa as well. In contrast to numerous Italian westerns of the era, however, Leone resisted the obvious zoom-effects and relied mostly on elaborate dolly and crane shots.

The camera then pans up and slowly trucks in to reveal the back of a man wearing a poncho. Remember, this is Clint Eastwood's first appearance in Italy and his first in a theatrical western at all. And at that time, nobody expected the star to be stubbly and dirty. This first shot continues until the following composition is achieved:

The basic conflict is visualized in this single composition: two warring parties live across the road from each other, Eastwood "smack in the middle" checking them out before playing them off against each other. Him standing closer to the right house may be simply a matter of balancing the composition. However, we will eventually learn that morally he is closer to the people living in the right house.

In form and content, all three films are based on triangles. Aside from the visual triangle that is formed between the two houses and Eastwood (and his mule), the well is also constructed in a triangular shape.

Then Leone cuts to a reverse medium close-up of Eastwood drinking and observing. I will not go into any more detail about the rest of the opening scene that basically sets up the iconic "man with no name" as a stoic western version of Mifune's unkempt animal-like YOJIMBO character Sanjuro.


The Man With A Rifle
Moving on to the very first shot of FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965), we can see how Leone started to get more confident with the vast widescreen of the Techniscope frame (a non-anamorphic grainy version of Cinemascope).

After a title card reading "Where life had no value, death sometimes had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared." the film opens on a blinking point of light that is reminiscent of the white burnout at the end of the first films credit sequence:

But upon closer examination, this blinking point guides our attention to the only spot of interest in the otherwise empty long shot of a gritty desert location. We already look at the middle of the frame when a far off rider appears during the dissolve.

Supported by the artificial representation of spatial acoustics on Italian soundtracks, the whistling and gun loading may very well emanate from the rider in the distance. In fact, even in 35mm the grain will not allow the audience to read the silhouette clearly. It is not even clear if the rider in the distance sits on a horse or a mule.

These compositions are obviously made for theatrical exhibition and not for cellphone screens.

From all we know from the first film and the posters, this might be Clint Eastwood approaching. But then (0:55) the sound is clearly located offscreen since we see smoke and hear a gunshot after which the rider falls off in the distance. But who are these two people? To make matters worse (in a film that first came out with all the voices dubbed by Italian actors), the offscreen humming and whistling was reportedly done by Sergio Leone himself.

This rigid long take sets up several key aspects of the following film: we shared the point of view of a sniper. In a traditional western this must be the villain because no honorable western hero ambushes another man. But with this film Leone introduced the bounty killer as a professional and thus motivated a whole sub-genre of bounty hunter westerns.

From the whistling it becomes clear how emotionless the bounty-hunting business is executed. We also see an action while the director withholds vital information to the scene - in this case the identity of killer and victim. Of course, everybody knew from the advertisements, that this time Eastwood was supposed to be meeting his match in the person of a man in black. With FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE Leone introduced his fragmented flashback technique that was unheard of in western storytelling.

The cynic key to successful bounty-hunting lies in the choice of weapons as Lee Van Cleef's character Col. Mortimer proves a line of dialogue from FISTFUL OF DOLLARS: "When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol's a dead man"
Mortimer usually kills with a long-range rifle just from outside his opponents shooting radius.


Going The Distance
By the time he did his internationally funded masterpiece THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966), Leone had perfected his directing style to the point where he was able to successfully defy all conventions, be they visual or content-wise.

Ever since FISTFUL OF DOLLARS it has become one of his trademarks to cut from extreme long shots to close-ups without cushioning medium range shots inbetween. The camera framed the actors' faces increasingly closer until there was barely more to see than the actors' eyes (the now famous "Italian shot").

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY was again based on the concept of three (visual triangles galore) but also on the concept of surprise. There is hardly a scene that is no built around a surprise revelation. Moreover, the concept of withholding information is not only central to the narrative, it is also central to the visual realization. This leads to a highly stylized setting that does not extend beyond the frame edges.

Even the few suspense scenes (the natural opposite of surprises) turn out to be achieved by a visual trick that is revealed in a surprise ending.

So with these two concepts (juxtaposing extremes and withholding information) in mind, the first two shots of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY constitute one of my favorite opening scenes:

Again the empty long shot. But before we are able to find something interesting in the distance, Leone surprises us with an extreme closeup of a face (the startling effect on a scope cinema screen cannot even be guessed from this micro representation here). But he is not cutting from extreme long shot to extreme close-up; he is doing it within the same shot! Two hours later we will understand why it is crucial that this particular face (Al Mulloch) is imprinted in our memory.

Then we get the reverse shot. We share the point of view of this gnarly character. Now the searching for information begins. What is he looking at?

Is it the dog that crosses the plain? (The dog appears again hours later to momentarily consternate a frenetic Tuco).

No, there are two specs approaching from the distance. Leone cuts back to Al Mulloch, then back to the approaching silhouettes on horsebacks. Will they have a stand-off? Will he shoot the two with a rifle? We haven't seen anything else than his face, so he might as well carry a long-range rifle.

Of course, the situation turns out to be a wholly different one.

After opening ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST with a few short close-ups, Leone came back to the FISTFUL OF DOLLARS approach in his Mexican revolution western GIU LA TESTA (DUCK YOU SUCKER, 1971) with a long take that fades in on a close-up followed by a tracking shot into the establishing composition.

Note: all screenshot and excerpts from THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY have been taken from the impeccable Italian restoration (IL BUONO, IL BRUTTO, IL CATTIVO) (un)available on Blu ray which is visually far superior to the American one but unfortunately does not contain the English language soundtrack.

Morricone Bits And Pieces [UPDATED]

It's been some time since my last post and I didn't find time yet to write about any of those subjects I've had on my mind a few weeks ago.

After giving introductory lectures on Quentin Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED and Sergio Leone's THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, I am currently preparing one for a screening of Clint Eastwood's THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (March 26, 2013).

So before this here becomes a ghost blog with tumbleweeds drifting by, I like to direct your attention to three clips (only one of which was part of my Leone introduction) about some themes and motifs of Ennio Morricone's music for the dollar trilogy (aka "man with no name" trilogy):

Deguello

"'For my first Western, I asked for a score which was like the deguello which Tiomkin used in Rio Bravo and The Alamo. It's an old Mexican funeral chant.' [...] But it didn't have the lineage Leone ascribed to it. The deguello was specially written and arranged by Tiomkin for Rio Bravo, as a dirge to Sheriff Chance (John Wayne) and his raggle-taggle team of deputies standing guard over the town jail.[...]
Morricone recalls: 'I had to say to Sergio, "Look, if you put that lament into the film, I won't have anything to do with it." So he said to me: "Okay, you compose the music but do it in such a way that a bit of your score sounds like the deguello." I didn't take very kindly to that either, so I took an old theme of mine, a lullaby that I'd written for a friend, [...]. Make no mistake, the theme was certainly far removed from the lament. What brought out a resemblance was its performance in a semi-gypsy style on the trumpet, with all the melismas - the flourishes played around single notes of the tune - which are characteristic of that style. But the theme itself was not, repeat not, the same thematic idea as the deguello.'" (Christopher Frayling: Sergio Leone - Something To Do With Death, 153f)

The following clip includes both Tiomkin's "Degüello" (literally a cut-throat song) from RIO BRAVO and Morricone's sound-alike arrangement of his theatre lullaby that became the main theme of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS:

Motifs
Sergio Leone liked to "complete" his characters with short musical motifs that more often than not sound like an ironic commentary on the action. While Morricone's music for all three dollar films was based on whistling as an expression of the loner's solitude, Clint Eastwood's motif in the first film was a short descendent line played by flute (00:00).

In the second film (00:20), his motif has developed into something reminiscent of a recorder and his bounty hunter father figure rival Lee Van Cleef's piercing glare is reflected in a jew's harp twang (that is sometimes substituted by the metallic sound of an electric guitar or a purely electronic sound).

In the third and final film (0:40), there is only one single motif for all three characters which are supposed to represent three aspects of a single person. That motif is based on a coyote's howl and imitated by different instruments for each character.

The short motifs are followed by a sample of how they are incorporated into the respective theme track:

Demanded Re-Use

"The piece, a Woody Guthrie song called 'Pastures of Plenty', was arranged by Morricone in 1962 for American tenor Peter Tevis, and released in Italy as an RCA single in 1962. [...] The chorus is identical to the Fistful of Dollars theme (barring the latter's incromprehensible lyric), as are the strange instrumental sounds. 'Leone wanted that exact arrangement with a melody put over it,' says Morricone. [...] Leone remembered, 'I was absolutely smitten. [...] That's what I want. Just get hold of someone who is good at whistling.' The man for the job was thirty-nine-year-old Alessandro Alessandroni [...]. So Alessandroni provided and prepared the choir, played the guitar and did the whistling." (Christopher Frayling: Sergio Leone - Something To Do With Death, 156f)

In the final clip you hear Morricone's original "Pastures of Plenty" arrangement (00:00) followed by the same arrangement featuring various instruments played and whistled by Alessandroni for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (01:00). It's intresting that even Eastwood's iconic flute motif (see clip above) is already part of the Woody-Guthrie-arrangement.

As kind of a bonus I have added the beginning of Morricone's newly composed song "Ancora Qui" (02:00) from DJANGO UNCHAINED - which like the Leone films is based on cinematic myths rather than reality - that sounds like a slowed down reference to the repetitive guitar motif from A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS:

Bonus: The "Leone Close-Up" [UPDATE]
When people think of Sergio Leone, they think of the famous "Leone Close-Up" - a shot that fills the widescreen frame with only the eyes of an actor. Leone was able to induce his climactic confrontations in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST with an almost hallucinogenic quality through his use of extreme close-ups like the one below:

However, one of his heroes, the celebrated B-Western director Sam Fuller, had already experimented with such extreme close-ups in FORTY GUNS a few years earlier. Unfortunately, Fuller didn't seem to be to confident of this daring device and used the two shots (00:25) early on in the film and hardly to any effect that foreshadows Leone's confrontations:

German Summary / Deutsche Zusammenfassung [UPDATE]:

Deguello - Zusammenfassung auf Deutsch: 
Sergio Leone wollte für seinen ersten Western A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS ein Stück aus RIO BRAVO namens "degüello", das er für einen alten mexikanischen Beerdigungsgesang hielt. Es wurde jedoch von Dimitri Tiomkin extra für RIO BRAVO geschrieben und ist wörtlich übersetzt ein "Kehle-Durchschneide-Lied". 

Ennio Morricone weigerte sich, einfach ein Stück von jemand anderem zu kopieren und bearbeitete stattdessen ein Schlaflied, das er mal geschrieben hatte, und orchestrierte es für Mariachi-Trompete. Das Stück ist somit komplett anders, das Arrangement orientiert sich aber an Tiomkins "degüello".

Im Beispiel hören Sie beide Stücke, wie sie im jeweiligen Film verwendet werden. 

Motive
Sergio Leone "vervollständigte" seine Figuren gern mit kurzen musikalischen Motiven, die das Geschehen ironisieren. Morricones Musik für alle drei Dollar-Filme basiert grundsätzlich auf einer gepfiffenen Melodie als Symbol für die Einsamkeit des Einzelgängers. Im ersten Film steht ein kurzes Flötenmotiv für die Figur von Clint Eastwood.

Im zweiten Film (00:20) hat es sich zu einem Blockflötenmotiv verändert, während der stechende Blick seines Rivalen Lee Van Cleef vom metallischen Klang der Maultrommel (und später E-Gitarre) begleitet wird.

Im dritten und letzten Film (00:40) verwendet Morricone ein einziges Motiv für alle drei Figuren, die Leone als drei Seiten einer einzigen Figur gesehen hat. Das Motiv basiert auf dem Heulen eines Kojoten und wird von den entsprechenden Instrumenten imitiert. Im Fall von Eli Wallach von der menschlichen Stimme, die Morricone immer gern als Musikinstrument eingesetzt hat.
Nach den Kurzmotiven folgt der jeweilige Titelsong, wo sie eingeflochten werden: 

Wiederverwertung in eigener Sache:
Morricone hatte 1962 für eine Folkplatte des Tenors Peter Tevis einen Woody Guthrie Song auf seine eigene Art arrangiert. Leone war so begeistert von der Instrumentierung, dass er genau dieses Arrangement für seinen Film wollte und Morricone daraufhin zur identischen Begleitung eine neue Melodie komponierte. Pfeifen, Gitarre und Chor stammen vom 39-jährigen Alessandro Alessandoni.

Dieser Clip enthält Morricones ursprüngliches Arrangement (00:00) gefolgt vom Titelstück von A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (01:00). Interessanterweise ist sogar Eastwoods Flötenmotiv bereits Teil des Woody-Guthrie-Arrangements. 

Bonus: Die Leone-Nahaufnahme
Ein Markenzeichen von Sergio Leone war, dass er mit der Breitwandkamera ganz nahe an die Gesichter der Schauspieler ging und dadurch auf der Grossleinwand seinen Konfrontationen eine fast halluzinogene Wirkung verlieh.

Doch schon der experimentierfreudige B-Western-Regisseur Sam Fuller probierte die Extreme Nahaufnahme auf die Augen ein paar Jahre vorher in FORTY GUNS. Allerdings blieb es bei zwei kurzen Einstellungen (00:25), und leider hat er sie so früh im Film eingesetzt und nie mehr aufgegriffen, dass sie völlig "verschenkt" wirken. Doch Leone war ein Fan von Fuller und hat diesen Film gekannt.

Directed by Clint Eastwood - Part II: show, don't tell

One of Eastwood's characteristics is his willingness to deliver exposition in images and not dialogue (a technique he might have learned from working with Sergio Leone on the Dollars-Trilogy). This is one area where animation filmmakers may directly profit by studying Eastwood (or Leone or Melville) films.

Classical Hollywood protagonists have to face and finally resolve a more or less suppressed incident of their past. Just think of Casablanca (1942) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Eastwood, however, likes to play taciturn characters whose past stays vague at best.

As a director, he doesn't like to explain too much or talk down to the audience. He'd rather leave as much as possible to the imagination:

"don’t lay out so much that it insults their intelligence. I try to give a certain amount to their imagination. [...] I think that audiences are smarter than a lot of producers think they are, and I think the audience will draw with you"

It is thus self-evident that Eastwood doesn't like expository dialogue. Whenever possible he establishes character relationships through staging in space. For that he relies heavily on master shots and shots with two or more characters visible at the same time. In a time when even Martin Scorsese (in The Departed and Shutter Island) has started to favor the single character shots, it is a real treat to have at least one mainstream director left who leaves the choice to the audience which character they want to focus on.

Eastwood's use of cinemascope for his larger scale stories comes in pretty handy as well. However, thanks to Joel Cox' perfected editing rhythm the individual shots do not attract attention to themselves or distort the spatial relationship like in a Sergio Leone film.

It's worth mentioning how many observers (innocent or not-so-innocent bystanders) there usually are in his western scenes. Ever since the "man with no name", Eastwood himself is often introduced as an outsider to the community who observes for some time and only reacts after a long time.

The exposition of the strange town of Lago in the surreal morality play High Plains Drifter may be one of the best examples of the Eastwood way of setting up a story. Communication is reduced to glances and sounds. Nevertheless, one immediately gets the notion that the townspeople of Lago do not welcome the stranger. 

0:10 Eastwood's head in shadow, filmed from behind, no facial expression visible 
0:13 With the music fading away, the rhythm of the horse noises is carrying the scene acoustically. 
0:23 low angle shot from behind an unsettled citizen. 
0:29 Eastwood's face visible, in shadow; horse sounds obtrusive, audible seagulls to remind us of the presence of an eerie lake. 
0:39 the stranger in silhouette in the shadow, his fearful observer behind glass following his every move.
0:52 through the unfinished building we see a white figure standing high above on the balcony of the town hotel. 
0:55 Close-up on white woman from below. Her face is in the light, she looks down suspiciously but seems less fearful, has a broom in her hands so we know that she's working (which is always a good thing in Eastwood's universe). 
1:09 the next woman's face is in the shadow. She is one of only three women in this town but will not have an important role and thus doesn't get a reverse-shot or a close-up.
1:20 the barber stands outside and the camera in the dark room. He gets a reverse-shot. 
1:32 The third woman is introduced in a shot with Eastwood. She's the only person who crosses Eastwoods path. Her face is shaded by her hat. Eastwood seems to follow her with his eyes. 
1:48 the white saloon door and one person sitting and one standing leave no question about the size of the dwarf coming out of the white door, although we only see him from waist up. At least he's coming out, is not paralyzed like the rest of the townspeople.
1:55 real close-up on Eastwood's dark face, reverse shot on sweating observer
2:07 the Lago mining company is visible, two men about to leave town in a carriage 
2:12 bullwhip sound, Eastwood immediately turns his head 
2:14 first words of incidental dialogue, carriage sounds obscure horse's noises
2:22 another bullwhip cracking, Eastwood turns away disgustedly.

There's no way one cannot get the importance of the bullwhip to Eastwood's "stranger" character.

Staging talking heads
As you might have noticed, Eastwood likes to block his actors so that their heads are hardly ever on a horizontal line which is abetted in the western by having some of them sit on horses or stand on boardwalks.

This is not a publicity photograph but an actual screenshot from Flags of our Fathers (2006): the characters' heads' are not on a horizontal line and we can actually choose on which character's reaction we'd like to focus.

Eastwood also likes to stage dialogue scenes in contemporary films with one person sitting and one standing which creates visual dynamics. When the camera is facing the sitting person in a shot-reverse-shot sequence we often see the hip (where the guns hang in a western) of the standing character. I have nicknamed this recurring type of shot the "hipshot".

Eastwood's Ben Shockley in The Gauntlet (1977) gets his next assignment in alternating overshoulder- and hip-shots.

In Gran Torino (2008), Kowalski's opposite doesn't even sit and we get low-angle hip-shot.

Of course this is no exclusive Eastwood trait, but he likes to hark back to it more often than other directors. The same can be said about the moving camera from the point of view of the rider which leads to a slight encircling of standing characters. While this is commonplace in scenes involving horseback riding or cars, Eastwood transplants this short camera movement to all kinds of different movies as can be seen from the following non-exhaustive montage:

Note: I haven't decided yet if there will be a next installment of this series and what area it would cover. In the meantime you may be interested in this earlier post on Bronco Billy (1980).

There are many books on Clint Eastwood's career both as a director and an actor. One of the more rewarding is Laurence F. Knapp's analysis of Eastwood's first 18 films aptly titled: Directed by Clint Eastwood. Unfortunately, I don't own a copy and Amazon will only send used or new books to Americans, but I have read it in a library a few years ago and Knapp is really digging into Eastwood's visual style (without the benefit of pictures, though).

Last but not least, there's also an interview book edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz from which I have excerpted many of the quotes in these two posts.

Directed by Clint Eastwood - Part I: unobtrusive stylistics

Since his directorial debut Play Misty For Me in 1971 Clint Eastwood has helmed 32 features and has grown increasingly productive lately. He is one of the few American directors within Hollywood who keep making movies for grown-ups - movies concerned with the current and historical state of American society. Ever since the 1990s his films trigger an emotional resonance that by far transcends the melancholy solitude of his loner protagonists.

There are basically four types of taciturn characters Eastwood has developed, re-invented and even retired within the last 40 years: Leone's western loner, Siegel's vigilante cop, the war veteran and finally the artist (DJ, musician, showman, photographer...) he introduced with his debut feature.

Don Siegel taught him how to get a picture done under budget which has secured him an artistic freedom other Hollywood directors dream of. For reasons of efficiency Eastwood likes to work with a group of people who know exactly what he wants and who stay on his Malpaso production company for decades. On the downside, his habit of shooting screenplays without the usual rewrites did hurt some of his films.

However, he only tells those stories which he envisions clearly in his mind ("You have to have the picture there in your mind before you make it. And if you don’t, you’re not a director, you’re a guesser.")

Although his personal directing style is very much grounded in the anti-heroes he portrays and dictated by the sort of stories he tells ("each film requires its own visual style") it is also quite distinct and at the same time unobtrusive.

Rooted in the surroundings
For one thing, he prefers to shoot on location whenever possible. On the one hand, he likes to show sets from all possible angles which is seldom possible on sound stages. On the other hand, his protagonists are usually defined in relation to their surroundings. Thus, the location has to reflect the mood of the story.

When you look at the following openings of Play Misty For Me (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) you might notice how often we see or hear wind.

Play Misty For Me opens with one of many helicopter shots in Eastwood's films. We first see a harsh, fissured coastline as a perfect symbol for the psychological abyss of the story. Then we focus on a house in the middle of nowhere and a lonely protagonist in front of it. Eastwood always likes to make us feel the real distances which in this film are crucial to the suspense.

The High Plains Drifter slowly emerges from the landscape like western protagonists like Shane have done for years. No matter how larger-than-life a hero seems to be, he is always dwarfed by nature. Here however, his appearance through a mirage is hinting at more supernatural aspects of the story.

On the other hand, it is only consequent to not show any characters on Iwo Jima, the island of black sand, because this is a film about soldiers killed in action whose only testimony are a bag of letters.

Low Key Staging
Contrary to his mentor Sergio Leone Eastwood is always trying to subordinate himself as a director to the story. He once said in an interview that he understood directors who must mark their presence so that audiences might appreciate their contribution. In his case though, being present as an larger-than-life actor he didn't see a reason for thrusting himself into the picture.

Therefore, writing about Eastwood is a lot like writing about classical Hollywood cinema in terms of unobtrusive directorial guidance. It's no coincidence that Eastwood likes his lighting, colors and film music rather low key.

Let's have a look how he stages himself as an actor: to enforce the larger-than-life presence of his characters he often positions the camera below eye level so that it looks up to him and he appears even larger. He hardly ever uses eye level photography on any character in his films.

Furthermore he emphasizes the protagonist's ambivalence by staging himself in the shadow or in backlight. Only parts of his face are harshly lit if at all.

With his first cinematographer Bruce Surtees (who has also been called the "prince of darkness") he created a look that simulates natural lighting conditions on location. Especially night time and interior scene benefit a lot from perceived "natural" lighting.

Costumes and sets are usually made with earthly colors in mind, preferably green and brown. Of course, there is a distinct color scheme to the specific films and some, like High Plains Drifter, deviate a lot from this general mold. But here I'd like to focus on the elements that remained constant throughout the years and those that specifically indicate the difference in the works of the late Bruce Surtees and Eastwood's successive principal cinematographers who both passed through their apprenticeships within Malpaso.

Josey Wales: "Some of them would like to have the sun behind their back"

In Eastwood's own take on Dirty Harry - the fourth in the series - he centers the story on a female revenge murderer (Sondra Locke) and finally resurrects beat-up Calahan to safe the day (or rather the night).

Harsh contrasts, characters always darker than the background.

The rape victim's face is half in the shadow, camera from below.

Iconic backlighting, Dirty Harry slightly larger than life.

Surtees' assistant Jack N. Green took over after Pale Rider (1985). While still maintaining low key lighting and backlight whenever possible, Green gave his pictures a softer, sometimes almost velvet look. The Green era produced some of Eastwood's most realistically photographed movies concerning color and lighting.

Eastwood has long been trying to represent the melting pot America realistically by casting Afroamericans, Native Americans, Latinos and Asians. Many of his more personal projects contain decided statements against racism. Using only fill light on their faces Jack N. Green even manages to minimize reflections on Afroamerican actors' skin.

Diane Venora as Chan Parker is more obscured than illuminated by two lampshades.

Much is hinted at in these unusually dark pictures.

The kitchen scenes of The Bridges of Madison County are worth studying for Eastwood's very unobtrusive mastership in staging and directing.

Perfect simulation of "realistic" lighting conditions.

On Mystic River, Green's gaffer Tom Stern got promoted to cinematographer. He displays the most artificial style of the three. While going back to Bruce Surtees' harsh contrasts, he increasingly drains the pictures of color, especially everything else than green and blue in post production. Recently, this has led to very artificial images in Letters from Iwo Jima and Changeling with digitally desaturated pictures that retained one or two color spots (like red lips or orange fire) that almost felt handpainted.

First a few extreme examples of dark green-blue images from Stern's beginnings:

Then the colors got increasingly drained during the war twin-movies:

 

In Gran Torino the red white and blue of earlier films about Eastwood's war veteran character have silently faded away. There's not much else than a brownish green. Even the Ford of the title is green.

Walt Kowalski in his neighbors' house...

...and at home.

Production photo (with normal colors), not a film still.

The next part will be about Eastwood's avoidance of expository dialogue.


All 32 Eastwood-directed films are available on DVD. So if your new to his body of work, you should probably look for the following:

• Play Misty For Me 
• Breezy
• High Plains Drifter
• The Outlaw Josey Wales (my favorite)
• Bronco Billy or Honky Tonk Man (both personal projects)
• Bird
• Unforgiven
• A Perfect World
• Bridges of Madison County
• Mystic River
• Million Dollar Baby
• Flags of Our Fathers
• Letters From Iwo Jima
• Gran Torino

Face Accent

When I watched Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982) - a truly awful Cold War movie - the other day, there was a moment (lasting barely a second) that made me wince unexpectedly, not because of some filmmaking trick but due to controlled acting. It was this one shot that still lingers on in my mind, so I decided to take some screengrabs and post it here as an acting study.

What I'm writing about here is fairly conventional stuff, but stuff I tend to forget about when falling back into animation acting clichés.

Like the hard-boiled crooks in film noir classics, Eastwood's Russian military antagonists move as little as possible when they talk.This, of course, helps establish the stiff military environment. If Eastwood as a director is capable of one thing, then it's most classic straight forward film making that never draws attention to itself. (Part of what makes this movie so unbearable is his heavy-handed earnestness applied to a preposterous story.)

What we have here is a lenghty suppressed power play between the sober Soviet general Vladimirov (Klaus Löwitsch, one of Fassbinder's stars, condemned to play communist bad guys in 80s Hollywood) and the First Secretary (Stefan Schnabel), who is outraged about Eastwood stealing a MIG31 ("the firefox"). The scene is intercut with two parallel outside actions and - just before the climax - with reaction shots of the rest of the crew, which I have all left out.

In the first part of the scene, Vladimirov's eyes are almost always in the shadow. He is left in the frame, while the First Secretary is halfway in light and backed by his subordinates.

Then Eastwood shows us the spatial relations because one of the two radio guys in the front is receiving new information. It's interesting that he doesn't cut to an immediate close-up of the radio guy but stays on the ensemble to have us see the reaction of all people involved.

Then we come back to the antagonists, only closer this time.

After a few shots of a parallel scene we are back in the control room where the two have changed positions.

   

Vladimirov is still surrounded by darkness but his face is lit from below.

 

By classically cutting closer to the opposing faces (with large shadow areas, one of Eastwood’s most obvious trademarks), the tension is heightened. So when the climactic upshot (another one of Eastwood’s trademarks) finally appears, we only see facial features lit from below.

The climax of this power play scene: the general accuses the First Secretary (the real big shot here) of being stupid in front of all his men. After a short silence, the general now reverses the chain of command and tells the first secretary: “you must act, first secretary!”.

Dialogue (mustact.wav)

If you listen to the dialogue snippet, the accent lies on the word “act”. In animation we tend to accent this word by a strong head move (with a big anticipation maybe). Now a big head accent would destroy the rigid composition and would also appear out of character for the general. Instead the actor goes for what I call a face accent:

 

In this video you see each individual frame (roughly a second of screen time) for half a second.

If you overlay frame 1 with frame 17 (the extreme position), you see how little the head moves, yet how strongly the face is distorted:

The beautiful thing: In animation we could go much further with the distortion.

This shot also shows how the expression change is not happening all at once. Just study the timing on the various features like eyelids, eyebrows, cheeks and mouth. There are so many details here. Note how before the accent (frame 11-14) he doesn’t look his opponent into the eye but slightly dow. Here are the 25 frames used in the slow-motion video (the last one is next to the First Secretary's reaction shot):

 

  

  

  

Staging the act

I've just learnt that this is already my 50th post. Initially I intended to do a post a week on average which means that I should have had my 52nd before April 9. But anyway, the following has nothing to do with animation in particular but a lot with the basics of film making in general.

As stated earlier this year, I’ve been looking at a lot of Clint Eastwood pictures lately. Although he always tries to sneak out on questions about his visual handwriting by stating that each story dictates the style of a film, there are some characteristic traits that are instantly recognizable once you’re aware of them. He may not be considered a stylish director like his mentor Sergio Leone but his visual handwriting is found in all his directorial efforts, good and bad.

Visual handwriting
While in a self-conscious Leone picture the chosen compositions and shots are essential to the experience, Eastwood is much less eye-catching. He likes to tell his stories in an unhurried no-nonsense way, achieving this by subordinating all stylistic devices to his narrative points.

Concerning light and colors, the most obvious characteristic is Eastwood’s preference for having characters – especially himself – stand in the shadow. The brightest spot in a shot is hardly ever a character’s face, it’s usually some light source in the background. He really celebrates his special variation of low key lighting at times, but never so much so that it distracts from the plot.

During the 1970s and 80s, he kept the colors mostly “natural”, meaning normal fleshtones – nowadays he likes them digitally toned down – surrounded by earthly browns, greens and greys. Primary colors were (and still are) reserved for special occasions, usually red and blue in connection with white. The amount of shots that feature American colors and flags is unsurpassed, I guess.

Additionally he likes to put the camera below the eyeline to make his larger-than-life protagonists even slightly more towering, as if we had to look up to a cowboy sitting on a horse.

Bronco Billy
In the following, I'm analyzing two pivotal sets of recurring scenes in Bronco Billy (1980). Hardly Eastwood’s best film, it nevertheless contains some good examples of staging.
It’s essentially a failed stab at doing a screwball comedy, complete with a cold big-mouthed blonde (Sondra Locke, his then wife) whose hair color stands out among all the other characters. It’s definitely one of Eastwoods more personal films. Strictly speaking it is not a Malpaso film, but most of the crew are Malpaso co-workers.

Bronco Billy McCoy (Eastwood) is a former NJ shoesalesman who travels the country with his Wild West Show second only to Buffalo Bill’s. As a last and lost cowboy he is out of touch with modern life and thus resorts to his ersatz-family of social outcasts (one of his favorite themes of the period starting with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)) and where he has to communicate to the normal world, he is most comfortable with children. In short, the comedy deals with the redemption of Eastwood’s cowboy character in finding his place in modern society. After all, it’s about the American Dream still being possible in 1980.

Inside the tent
The movie starts and ends with scenes inside Billy’s Wild West Show tent. In the first one Scatman Crothers is introducing all the acts with Billy as the main attraction. It’s a rather pathetic event since there’s a very small audience, almost no applause and before the show is over there are two accidents (including some embarrassing reaction shots). Most of the show is almost painfully silent, so that you really feel the lack of applause.

There are many wide high angle shots that dwarf the actors. The darkness around the harsh blue lights makes the tent seem to be infinitely large. The audience is practically non-existent.

There’s something very admirable about all of Eastwood’s films: he (or rather his lighting crew) is particularly careful with lighting dark skinned actors so that you can always see their features equally well as those of white actors, even if they are shown against bright light sources. This has been less common in American cinema than one would expect.

Music off a record is heard playing only during Billy’s horse stunts, it sounds rather thin.
Even Billy’s stunts and the proud announcer are primarily shown from up above. Although there are lots of red props, they are not highlighted too much.


Only when he is addressing his “little partners”, the children in the audience, is the camera below his eyeline. It emphasizes the point that only the children are looking up to him. The same is true for his blonde assistant who is introduced as a silly, scared girl. Note that in the lower left screencap the camera position puts Billy higher in the frame than the girl who is actually hanging a few feet off the ground.

In the end, we see the same show in a new tent which is completely made of American flags (stitched together by inmates of a mental institution, in case you wondered…). Of course by now everybody’s reconciled and the tent bursts with people. This time, Billy comes in at the beginning, making it possible for the music to play during the whole show – not through the tinny speakers but on the soundtrack. There’s also applause throughout, Billy gets his close-up this time and most of all, it’s not that dark anymore, so we see the omnipresent red, white and blue.


The lighting emphasizes the strong primary red more than in the previous tent scenes.

The magic moment of reconciliation is celebrated with especially theatrical lighting that sculpts not only the faces but also the hats very clearly, after all we're in the middle of a staged show. Eastwood himself is again partly in the shadow. This time his eyes are the visible part, which is very unusual for him. He’s still higher in the frame than anybody else.

All the show members seem to get their “heroic treatment”, i.e. their extreme low angle shot. Interspersed with tight framings of the cheering crowd.

At the end of the show (and the film), he speaks to his little partners one last time. They are more or less on eyelevel now.

In between these two bookend scenes there are two confrontations that are handled like ritualistic western shootouts:

Confronting his “Little Partners”
Just before Bronco Billy talks to the blonde (arriving in a cold blue car by the way) for the first time, a few kids examine his flamboyant red convertible. They have come to get a glimpse at the “real” Bronco Billy, apparently some kind of hero to them. Billy does what’s expected from him yet accidentally reveals that he’s out of touch with normal life by not knowing what day of the week it is.
In classic western fashion he’s approaching them, but keeps the distance until they have turned at his call. The camera is more or less at the children’s eyelevel. While this prevents us from looking down on the children, Billy still looks larger-than-life.

They turn around and we see him from extremely far below, in silhouette against the sky.

Billy whirls his six-shooters which has the desired effect, he then tells the children to lower their hands.
Approaching them slowly, he looks increasingly smaller. Also from behind he’s rather dark against the background.

The child standing alone on the left explains to him that they “don’t go to school today, Bronco Billy, it’s Saturday…”. This shot’s slightly from below the child’s eye level. Billy's already bent down to them, standing next to an American flag once more.

He then hands out free tickets to the show and asks the kids to bring their folks tonight. He’s in control of the conversation.

They take off with Billy driving off (after giving his gunbelt to Doc) with them.

Confronting the local sheriff
The second confrontation scene comes late in the film when Billy lets himself be humiliated by a local sheriff in order to get his friend out of prison.

We first see the empty street out of town, followed by a classic backlit low angle shot. Here, Billy is still in control of the situation.

Then the camera tracks down as the sheriff comes closer (one of Eastwood’s favorite establishing devices).
As expected, The sheriff is facing the sun, while Billy stands with his back to it. As soon as he is offering the money, the sheriff is seen in the higher position, although he is physically smaller than Billy.
The rest of the scene is handled in shot - reverse shot.
“just how fast are you with this?” pointing to the gun, not accepting the money

Billy “admits” that the sheriff is faster than he is. He doesn’t move a bit, only his face does.

He drops his gun. There’s even a high angle shot as the sheriff approaches the now unarmed Billy.
With the sheriff now closer than ever, Billy’s face is twitching, but he’s not moving, the humiliation has left him speechless. They have met on eye level. But Billy is not capable of handling such a situation. This is a far cry from Dirty Harry. Bronco Billy may in fact be Eastwood’s least violent picture, nobody gets killed during this one.

Although nothing about these examples is unexpected or bold, I still think they illustrate well how even a set of established stylistic traits is flexible enough to adjust to the needs of a scene. Style doesn’t have to be the icing on the cake, in fact, it shouldn’t. It should be the means by which a story is told visually.

All screenshots taken from Bronco Billy, DVD PAL RC2.