Christopher Nolan’s Inception

In a revealing scene from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), the protagonist Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains the secrets of his trade — dream extraction — to new recruit Ariadne (Ellen Page) while the two are sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris. Suddenly the familiar scene turns uncanny as nearby fruit stands, a bookseller, and the façades of buildings explode around them, shattering into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle as they remain seated, unharmed. Ariadne realizes she’s entered a dream: “I guess I thought dreams were all about the visual, but it is more the feeling of it.” These lines take on some irony in the next few moments, when it is overwhelmingly the visual aspect of cinema that generates “feeling” in the viewer response. Paris is folded up like a piece of origami in just one of the film’s mind-blowing visual effects.

Working with Oscar-winning director of photography Wally Pfister, cinematographer on all his films since Memento (2000), Nolan chose high-resolution Vistavision film over digital cinematography for the film’s lush imagery and spectacular settings. Many of the film’s most impressive special effects were achieved without computer-generated imagery (CGI), instead relying on camera tricks. For a scene in which Cobb’s associate is trapped by a building’s ever- morphing “paradoxical architecture,” for example, the filmmakers constructed a rotating hallway with built-in camera tracks to create the illusion of a shifting building. Cues that we normally rely on to orient ourselves toward an unfolding story — optical points of view that tell us whose perspective guides a scene or camera placements and angles that imply spatial relationships — are not trustworthy in the world of Inception. Instead, consistent choices of color palette subtly guide us. Sense memories of the characters’ waking lives are built into small tokens that they carry with them to navigate dream levels. Viewers, however, must rely on untrustworthy images that can’t guarantee which level of movie illusion entraps us.

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isual stimuli determine a significant part of our experience of the world around us: we look left and right for cars before we cross a busy street, we watch sunsets in the distance, we focus on a face across the room.

The visual dynamics through which we encounter our world vary. Sometimes we are caught up in the close-ups of a crowded sidewalk; sometimes we watch from a window high above the street. Vision allows us to distinguish colors and light, to evaluate the sizes of things near and far, to track moving objects, or to invent shapes out of formless clouds. Vision also allows us to project ourselves into the world, to explore objects and places, and to transform them in our minds. In the cinema, we know the material world only as it is relayed to us through the filmed images and accompanying sounds that we process in our minds. The filming of those images is called cinematography, which means motion-picture photography or, literally, “writing in movement.”

This chapter describes the feature at the center of most individuals’ experiences of movies: film images. Although film images may sometimes seem like windows on the world, they are purposefully constructed and manipulated. Here we will detail the subtle ways cinematography composes individual movie images in order to communicate feelings, ideas, and other impressions.

KEY OBJECTIVES

▪ Outline the development of the film image from a historical heritage of visual spectacles. ▪ Describe how the frame of an image positions our point of view according to different distances and

angles. ▪ Explain how film shots use the depth of the image in various ways. ▪ Identify how the elements of cinematography — film stock, color, lighting, and compositional features

of the image — can be employed in a movie. ▪ Compare and contrast the effects of different patterns of movement on the film image. ▪ Introduce the array of techniques used to create visual effects. ▪ Describe prevailing concepts of the film image within different cinematic conventions.

We go to the movies to enjoy stimulating sights, share other people’s perspectives, and explore different worlds through the details contained in a film image. In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a woman’s tense and mysterious face suggests the complex depths of her personality. At the beginning of Saving Private Ryan (1998), we share the visceral experience of confused and wounded soldiers as bullets zip across the ocean surface during the D-Day invasion [Figure 3.1]. The Hurt Locker (2008) uses a different approach for a

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different combat context; brightly and starkly lit images capture not simply an arid desert landscape but also the brittle tension that seems to electrify the light [Figure 3.2].

3.1 Saving Private Ryan (1998). The film uses visceral camera work to bring viewers close to the dying on D-Day.

3.2 The Hurt Locker (2008). In a very different war, monochromatic cinematography conveys the tension that permeates the desert spaces.

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Vision occurs when light rays reflected from an object strike the retina of the eye and stimulate our perception of that object’s image in the mind. Photography, which means “light writing,” mimics vision in the way it registers light patterns onto film or codes them to be reproduced digitally. Yet whereas vision is continuous, photography is not; rather, it freezes a single moment in the form of an image. Movies connect a series of these single moments and project them above a particular rate of frames per second to create the illusion of movement. Humans process the incremental differences among sequential still images just as we process actual motion — this effect is called short-range apparent motion, and it explains our perception of movement when watching films.

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A Short History of the Cinematic Image The human fascination with creating illusions is an ancient one; in the Republic, Plato wrote of humans trapped in a cave who mistake the shadows on the wall for the actual world. Leonardo da Vinci described how a light source entering a hole in a camera obscura (literally, “dark room”) projected an upside-down image on the opposite wall, offering it as an analogy of human vision and anticipating the mechanism of the camera. One of the earliest technologies that used a light source to project images was the magic lantern. In the eighteenth century, showmen used these to develop elaborate spectacles called “phantasmagoria.” The most famous of these were Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s terrifying mobile projections of ghosts and skeletons on columns of smoke in an abandoned Paris crypt. These fanciful devices provided the basis for the technology that drives modern cinematography and the film image’s power to control, explain, and entertain. In this section, we will examine the historical development of some of the key features in the production and projection of the film image.

1820s–1880s: The Invention of Photography and the Prehistory of Cinema The components that would finally converge in cinema — photographic recording of reality and the animation of those images — were central to the visual culture of the nineteenth century. Combining amusement and science, the phenakistiscope (developed in 1832) and the zoetrope (developed in 1834), among other such pre- cinema contraptions, allowed a person to view a series of images through slits in a circular wheel, a view that creates the illusion of a moving image [Figure 3.3]. In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced the first still photograph, building on the work of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Photography’s mechanical ability to produce images of reality and make them readily available to the masses was among the most significant developments of nineteenth-century culture. Photography permeated everything from family albums to scientific study to private pornography collections. In the 1880s, both Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Englishman Eadweard Muybridge, working in the United States, conducted extensive studies of human and animal figures in motion using chronophotography, series of still images that recorded incremental movement and formed the basis of cinematography [Figure 3.4]. Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, introduced in 1879, enabled moving images to be projected for the first time.