Henri

"Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important." Henri Cartier-Bresson

Aspect Irrationality

This post if going to come off as super-stuffy and very "Rossini-fanboy-esque". Just another facet of crazy me, the things that go through my head, committed to the blogosphere for all to ponder or wrap fish in.

I have always been a bit of a purist when it comes to movies. I will not watch a movie that has been altered from it's original form if I can help it. This includes reformatting, dubbing in English, and "editing for content or length", among many other offenses. Some people don't care, but for me, it ruins the experience.

Moby Dick is a great book. I've read it. It is convoluted and difficult to understand in parts, and there are sentences a mile long with a dozen semi-colons. But that's a big part of the charm. And it's a work of genius, largely because of those quirks. If you took Moby Dick and rewrote it to better fit the dialects of today, you would ruin it. It's not that you would be changing the story, but you would be changing the telling of the story, and that is just as important, if not more so.

The director and photographer (who is called a cinematographer in movie lingo) plan for a movie to look the way it does. They agonize over the construction of every shot angle, film stock choice, and lighting setup, trying to get just the right "look and feel" to tell the story the director wants to tell...to match that vision. Composition is instrumental in driving the narrative and meaning is conveyed through the relation and arrangement of the characters and props to their environment.

In the old days before television drove all the movies to wide screen, movies were generally shot at an aspect ratio of about about 1.33:1. So all the action and composition was set up to harmonize with this shape.



In the letterbox, or "scope" era, directors now have a wider stage on which to set their visuals, which they make use of in very deliberate ways. But in order to show a scope movie on a standard television, you have to either 1) matte the picture with black bars at top and bottom, or 2) chop it to make it fit. This is called "Pan & Scan". Unfortunately, option 2 is chosen much too often, because in doing that, the average viewer won't be wondering what the black bars are, and many won't notice the alteration.



But I do, and it makes me cringe.

Of course, with the advent of wide screen television (the 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTV was chosen to coincide roughly with the common 1.85:1 "Academy Flat" ratio), we now have a perfect excuse to eliminate that evil and vile Pan & Scan from our lives forever. Worst case, ultra-wide movie formats like "Anamorphic Scope" at 2.35:1 will have moderate black bars even on a wide television, but that's acceptable.





I love "foreign films", such as those of the greats like Kurosawa, Fellini, and Truffaut. And I hate when some idiot exec chooses to dub them in English to try to increase sales. It's not that I like reading subtitles, but I like to hear the actual voices, even if I don't understand the words. Luckily, there are companies out there like Criterion that are as fanatical as I am about original presentations.


There is pretty much no need to change a movie anymore. No compromises are necessary to see it at home. And more people are learning about the benefits of watching moves the way they were intended to be watched (albeit on a smaller screen).

Now I'm just waiting for some joker to get the idea to start cropping the old 1.33:1 movies top and bottom to fit the new wide screen displays. Grrr. Can't win.

Vision

Ansel Adams took this picture in 1941. He almost missed it as he drove by the small New Mexico town of Hernandez, as the light was fading and he couldn't find his light meter. He guessed the exposure and got one shot before the sun was completely down and the scene was dark. It is called "Moonrise over Hernandez, N.M."

Ansel had a very powerful way of internally visualizing the final result he wanted from a photograph. And that result was one that differed from reality in precisely the way he wanted it to. For all the wonders of his natural subjects, he did not try to reproduce them accurately. He bent his scenes into the artistic realm by adding to them according to his vision. He did this both with the initial exposure (using deep red filters to darken the sky, for instance), and in the development process (dodging/burning, altering exposure, etc.)

He printed this picture many times throughout the years, each time adjusting the process, tweaking the chemistry, trying different paper and altering his dodging and burning patterns. He finally got a print that matched his original vision...but not until the 1970's, more than thirty years after he took the picture.

I think of this story alot because it shows the value of forming a vision of what you want to accomplish and then following through to achieve that vision no matter what hurdles must be overcome.

This photograph is now considered Ansel's most famous. I think that is because he remained true to his vision.

Some of my favorite Ansel-isms:

"A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."

"A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words."

"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance."