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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL: Wes Anderson takes the

4:3 challenge

Wednesday | March 26, 2014     open printable version

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

DB here:

Be shot-conscious! I urged in a blog entry some years ago. I illustrated the

point with a tradition of staging and shooting that seemed simple and modest
but was actually quite flashy, and even fashionable. Although many
filmmakers resorted to it, either often or occasionally, critics hadn’t attended
to it. Wes Anderson’s work yielded one of many examples of what I called
(swiping from art historian Heinrich Wölfflin) a “planimetric” style.

Ideally, you should look at that entry before reading this one. (To encourage
you, I link it again. Not for the last time.) Very briefly, this style involves a
frontal presentation of the action. You frame people against a perpendicular
background, as if they were in a police line-up. Usually you face them to
camera, as in this shot from Godard’s Made in USA.

As we’ll see, sometimes you can frame the characters at right angles to the
camera, or turned directly away from the camera. Here are examples from
Napoleon Dynamite and from Angelopoulos’ The Traveling Players. (Is this
the first time these two movies have been mentioned together?)

  
The key idea is that the people and the setting aren’t observed from an
oblique angle; if the background is perpendicular, the people will stand or sit
at 90 or 180 degrees to that.

You can arrange them in some depth too, but again, they are stacked in
perpendicular fashion, making each area a pretty strict  plane. Here’s an
example from Pulp Fiction.

One point of my earlier entry is that this is a surprisingly old strategy;

Keaton used it occasionally, and Godard was using it heavily fifty years ago.
Here are two shots from Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963).

  
It has endured in some surprising places. It’s now a go-to option for one-off
effects in mainstream cinema. Here are examples from Shutter Island and
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 version).

  

A few filmmakers make it the basis of an entire film, as I indicate in this

entry on Oliveira’s Gebo and the Shadow. And since I wrote the original
entry, I’ve drawn on other examples from time to time, particularly from
directors who are pastiching Ozu to some degree or another.

Still, Anderson is today the most widely visible example of the style, partly
because while others use it sporadically, he is single-minded about it. He has
made people shot-conscious (at least when they watch his movies). So after
seeing his newest film, I thought it would be fun to think about what
distinguishes his approach.

Playing with planes

With the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, several bloggers have
pointed to recurring compositional features, most obviously bilateral
symmetry. I’d just add that such symmetry is often used by practitioners of
the planimetric approach, with results that sometimes exceed Anderson’s.
Here are two shots from Angelopoulos’ Weeping Meadow.

  

When you think about it, it takes a brave filmmaker (e.g., Godard) to use this
approach and not deploy symmetry.

Anderson has used the planimetric approach more extensively in recent

years, and he modifies it some distinctive ways. I think particularly of his
habit of crowding people together in layers rather than stretching them along
a single line. He makes some images look like group portraits or over-posed
highschool yearbook shots (The Royal Tenenbaums; Fantastic Mr. Fox).
   

By employing the planimetric strategy, Anderson gains a somewhat

awkward formality, a sense that we are looking from a distance into an
enclosed world that sometimes looks back at us. There are as well the sort of
comic possibilities that  Keaton recognized in Neighbors and The General. A
rigid perpendicular angle can endow action with an absurd geometry.

 
These apparently simple framings often evoke a world of childhood. Just as
Kitano Takeshi shows us gangsters behaving like little boys, Anderson’s
dollhouse-room frames make adults seem to be toy people arranged just so–
like items laid out in a Joseph Cornell box. It’s a style suitable for magical-
realist premises like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and in Moonrise
Kingdom it finds its echo in children’s illustrated books.

All in all, then, I have to salute an American filmmaker who thinks about his
images carefully and has incited sensitive viewers to notice them. I think we
should go further, though. We can ask: How does Anderson, staying loyal to
this tradition, vary the look of the shots? And how does he cut them
together?

Cutting around

Consider the editing option first. Unless every scene is to consist of only one
shot, the question comes up: How do you maintain the style while cutting?
Either you make all your cuts axial, straight in or straight back.; or you
create a sort of compass-point editing. This can involve cutting 180 degrees,
to what’s “behind” the camera in the initial shot. So if characters are
confronting one another, the camera is in effect sitting between them as each
looks over or through the lens at the other (Ozu’s Late Autumn).
   

In effect, this option respects the classic 180-degree line, or axis of action,
between the characters. It’s just that the camera sits right on that
line. Parking the camera on the axis is a common tactic for subjective
cutting, showing us first a person looking, more or less at the camera, then
what she or he sees from their vantage point. Our example in Film Art: An
Introduction comes from Rear Window.

Ozu used this 180-degree reversal often, but not absolutely; he had a more
complicated way of conceiving space, and the 180-degree frontal cuts were
only part of it. Kitano made a simpler variant central to his early films.

  
When I asked Kitano why he did it, he explained that it was exactly the way
people saw each other in ordinary life. We face each other. He then added
that he was such a naive director when he started that it was the only way he
knew to set up scenes. We get kindred images in Terence Davies’ work; his
frontality may owe something to the Hollywood musical.

Compass-point editing offers another possibility, that of cutting at 90-degree

angles to the background plane or the figures’ position. Chantal Akerman
does it throughout Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
(1975).

  

Anderson exercises all these cutting options inThe Grand Budapest Hotel.
Here a planimetric profile 2-shot yields two frontal shots; we shift 90
degrees and then 180 degrees.

  

  

Now here’s a 90-degree shift for the reverse shot.

  

In the passage below, the first cut rotates 90 degrees, and the second cuts in
right on the lens axis. In this tradition, an axial cut respects the perpendicular
layout of the space.

  

  
In such cutting patterns, the compositions keep the action in the same upper
zone of the frame from shot to shot. As a result, our eye doesn’t wander
much. In long shots, Anderson sometimes follows the classic Hollywood
practice of allowing some decentering, as long as the cuts balance one off-
center composition against another. Here the changing angles obey the
compass-point principle across three shots, and they crisply shift the
emphasis from the right side of the frame to the center to the left.

  

  
Someone who wanted to deflate Anderson’s visual ambitions could say that
his shots are monotonous. Having imposed a big constraint on himself, he’s
now obliged to show us that this approach can be varied–in obvious or subtle
ways.

One way is through lens length. Most planimetric filmmakers use long
lenses, which flatten the space even more. The figures can look like clothes
hanging on a line. But Anderson favors quite wide-angle lenses (often
40mm). These make horizontal lines bulge, as in early CinemaScope films
(Rushmore, The Life Aquatic).

  

You can see similar distortions in the straight-on shots of the hotel desk
in Grand Budapest, above.

Another way Anderson varies his images is by departing from straight-on

angles. As long as the framing maintains a planimetric geometry, we can
look down or up at the action. In this passage, again the camera makes 180-
degree reverses. This contrasts with the more orthodox shot/reverse shot
framings in a comparable scene in The Little Foxes.

  

In this spirit, Anderson can give us bird’s-eye views, as Matt Zoller Seitz
points out in his sumptuous book-length interview with the director. It’s rare,
but there are precedents, as in the work of the Coens. In one shot of The
Hudsucker Proxy, a movie with an inordinate number of straight-down
angles, the inflexible framing creates a joke.
   

Grand Budapest Hotel has room for some classically funny framings. If you
want somebody to look lonely, common practice says, frame the figure off
center in a long shot. Here Anderson seems to be having a joke on the
convention. He presents it as a POV, although presumably if the Writer were
looking at the mysterious man he  would put the object of attention in the
center of his field of vision.

  
I think that Anderson’s earliest films weren’t quite so strict in obeying the
planimetric and compass-point strategies. Those options were often slipped
in as alternatives to more orthodox framing and cutting. But as he’s become
more rigorous about using them, he has found ways to put his stamp on
some common techniques. Like Ozu incorporating devices of classical
continuity into his unique stylistic system, Anderson can recruit certain
conventions while staying faithful to his basic approach.

For instance, Anderson sneakily brings in the OTS–the over-the-shoulder

framing standard in shot/ reverse-shot dialogue scenes. In one prison scene,
Harvey Keitel’s Ludwig is granted an OTS that varies subtly from the more
purely straight-on views.

  
Much the same thing happens with in the punching scene at the reading of
the will, when frontal characters are assaulted by fists coming in as if in
reverse angles.

Anderson has figured out another way to vary his compositions. I learned
this before I saw the movie, thanks to some comments by the
cinematographer Robert Yeoman (great name).

High or wide, and handsome

Rushmore (1998).

To get the criticky part of this entry out of the way: The Grand Budapest
Hotel has all the charm, fussiness, and intricate whimsy typical of
Anderson’s work. As often in his films, it cuts its preciosity with moments
of offhand brutality (sliced-off fingers) and flashes of naughty sexuality
(fellatio, the lesbian painting). With its ensemble cast, sometimes deployed
in cameos, it suggests a PoMo remake of those sprawling, self-
congratulatory spoofs of the 1960s like The Great Race, Those Magnificent
Men in Their Flying Machines, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (The
film’s title evokes those all-star films set in hotels, like Grand Hotel and
Hotel Berlin.) It’s much better than those, partly because it engages in an
oblique way with history, creating a comic-pathetic alternative account of
Nazi imperialism. It imagines the collapse of Europe in operetta terms,
filtered through Anderson’s pawky humor and distinctive style. I admired
the film but don’t feel able to analyze it much after only one viewing.
Fortunately for me if not you, its stylistic aspects fit today’s sermonette.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in several time periods, and they’re
presented via The Blog’s old friend, the device of flashbacks within
flashbacks. One character recalls the past or tells a story, and inside that line
of action another character recalls or recounts a story, and so on. In Grand
Budapest Hotel we move from the present, more or less, to events in the
1980s, then the 1960s, and eventually the 1930s, which constitute the central
episodes.

Anderson has shot the frame stories in different aspect ratios. It’s 1.85 for
the near present and the 1980s, when the Author recounts meeting the hotel
owner. That meeting, set in the 1960s, is shown in 2.40, the anamorphic
aspect ratio. The central story, taking place in the 1930s, is presented in
classic 1.37, or 4:3 imagery. With typical Anderson butterfly-collector wit,
each era gets a ratio that could have been used in a movie at the time. It’s
remarkable that Anderson could persuade Fox Searchlight to let him do this.

Most commercial releases in the 1950s and afterward were filmed in some
widescreen ratio. In the early days, a popular option was a sort of clothesline
staging, centering a single character or balancing others around the central
axis: two side by side, three across, four as a pair of pairs, and so on. These
shots are from Demetrius and the Gladiators and How to Marry a
Millionaire.

  
Thanks to the widening of the frame, there is less air above the characters
and less ground below them. The empty spaces are typically on the sides,
particularly in the anamorphic 2.40 ratio. The problem of filling that up was
solved, at least for some directors, by moving the camera very close to the
actors. Spielberg remarked that he began shooting more close-ups when he
filmed in anamorphic.

If you’re inclined to the planimetric approach, it fits the wider format

nicely. Anderson wasn’t worried by the extra acreage; he just used the set or
empty areas to balance one side against the other. Shots of only one
character could be centered, as if posed, and shots of groups could be
arranged more or less symmetrically, as in this passage from Moonrise
Kingdom. Central perspective helps drive your eye to the main items.

  

In Grand Budapest, Anderson’s signature framings fit snugly into the scenes
shot in 1.85 and 2.40. (The latter has been his favored ratio over the years.)
But what about the 1.37 scenes? This brings me to Mr. Yeoman’s remark.
Explaining why he and Anderson watched a lot of films from the 1930s,
especially by Lubitsch, Yeoman notes:

We looked at those more to familiarize ourselves with the 1.37:1 aspect

ratio, which Wes wanted to use for the 1930s sequences. This aspect
ratio opens up some interesting compositional possibilities; we often
gave people a lot more headroom than is customary. A two-shot tends to
be a little wider than the same shot in anamorphic. It was a format I’d
never used before on a movie, and it was a fun departure. You can get
accustomed to 1.85 or 2.40 to the point that the shots become more
predictable.

Put it another way: Anderson’s penchant for centering and symmetry

inclines him toward widescreen compositions that could be simply cropped
right and left to fit the 1.37 ratio. His single characters and huddled groups
could remain much as before. But in more distant framings you might get a
lot of extra space at top and bottom–areas that simply aren’t there in the
wide ratios. In other words, Anderson’s multi-format strategy gave him a
new problem in maintaining his signature style.

How did he solve it? Many Budapest Hotel shots do leave considerable
headroom, as you see in most of the 1.37 examples above. But other shots
show Anderson filling his 4:3 frame in varied and engaging ways.

As Ozu showed, for instance, the planimetric option can fill the frame’s
upper area when the camera height is below eye level. During the
conversation in the car, above, Anderson gets the head of M. Ivan (Bill
Murray) in the top of the frame thanks to a low angle. Here are two more
examples of filling the upper reaches of the format by use of a lowish
camera position.

  
In the elevator shot, the headroom becomes comic, with M. Gustave and
Madame D. seated on the right, the morose bellboy filling the vertical area
on the left, and Zero in the middle. The empty space above the couple
creates a lively imbalance emphasizing them in a way different from the
very balanced framing that centers Henckel among his men.

The set can cooperate. In the first shot below, Zero’s and Agatha’s centered
embrace leaves lots of headroom, but the slightly disheveled stack of pastry
boxes in the upper background contributes to the sense that they’re engulfed.
In the second shot below, part of its humor comes from the rigid geometry of
the grid and the way M. Gustave and his colleagues fill in the matrix with
their intent faces and busy hands.

  
In all, Anderson seems to me to find intringuing ways to create visual
interest in the 4:3 format. But as with any severe style, you wonder about
what’s been lost.

Most obviously, Anderson loses some of  the intimacy that comes with more
angular and less strict approaches to the classic ratio. We like to see people
from 3/4 views too. We also like depth shots that plunge us into a dynamic,
diagonal playing space. Here’s a shot from John Huston’s In This Our Life,
as precious in its own way as Anderson’s imagery.

As Hogarth pointed out, with the serpentine line in painting and drawing,
such shots can lead our eye on “a wanton kind of chase.”

Because directors of the 1920s-1940s accepted a wider range of

compositional options than Anderson embraces, headroom simply wasn’t an
important problem, as in the Huston shot. Even in simpler shots, classical
uses of the 4:3 ratio permitted a flexible organization of figures.

Centered symmetry against a flat ground is a fairly easy compositional

strategy, after all. It wasn’t used much in the mainstream tradition because it
looks artificial; perhaps only with the rise of art cinema was this sort of self-
conscious composition welcomed. In any case, sticking with symmetry
sacrifices the more delicate spotting of figures and faces around the frame.

A lot of visual art tries for more supple and subtle twists, torsions, and
counterbalancing. Apart from organizing your space along the horizontal and
vertical axes, you can try to set figures in delicate array along
diagonals. This is why some old-time cinematographers argued that the 4:3
ratio was the best suited to the human body: it can flatter it from any angle.

To get a sense of these possibilities, I’ve compiled a little collection of

images from a film that doesn’t boast any outrageously pretty shots: Otto
Preminger’s Angel Face (1953). It’s typical of the unassertive approach we
find in Preminger’s work of the 1940s and 1950s. He avoids the flashy depth
of the post-Kane directors and offers something less aggressive but no less
fascinating. Composition and staging integrate expressions, posture, glances,
and gestures to create a smooth flow of action. My samples also indicate
how rare straight-on views of faces and bodies are in American studio
cinema. The 3/4 angle rules.

  
   

As with the American films of Lang, Preminger’s work displays a style

that’s tough to analyze because the technique isn’t obvious. There’s a
marvelous variety in the ways that the 4:3 ratio can render a single figure or
two figures, or three, shifting them not around the perfect center of the
picture format but around curves and diagonal axes–that yield interest in
their own right.

This last comparison isn’t a slam on Anderson. I think well of many of his
films, particularly the most recent ones, and I appreciate anyone who takes
on a challenge of narrowing his range of creative choices. Once you narrow
that range, it turns out there’s a host of new possibilities that pop out. Call it
the Ozu strategy: refine your means and you discover nuances nobody else
notices.

Still, in art as in life, every choice is a trade-off. It’s worth remembering

what one loses by pursuing a particular path. By sticking to his signature
look in working with 4:3,  Anderson gave himself a problem that didn’t exist
for directors of an earlier time, the problem of maintaining a frontal style in
a squarish format. I’m glad he faced it and solved it. But I’m also glad that
classical filmmakers, quite intuitively, showed how much you could do with
an alternative option.

Without any conspiring between us, Matt Zoller Seitz, top expert on Wes
Anderson, has just urged critics to write more about film form–to be, among
other things, shot-conscious.

Iain Stasukevich’s American Cinematographer article on the making of The

Grand Budapest Hotel is well worth your attention beyond the technical
matter I latched onto.

The Huston image came to hand because of the previous entry. Go there for
more instances of the sort of framing and staging that Anderson and his
planimetric colleagues don’t aim at.

I survey the planimetric style in On the History of Film Style and in Figures
Traced in Light. A search of this blog’s archive will bring other instances to
light. I analyze Ozu’s style in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, available as a
pdf here. For more on CinemaScope, you can visit my online lecture.

P.S. 27 March (Hong Kong time): Jonah Horwitz writes with a useful

point:

One thing I would add to your summary is that as early as Rushmore,

most notably in The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson purposely inserts into
his limited stylistic palette selected, isolated “foreign” devices like loose
framings, handheld camera, and relatively aimless zooms (as opposed to
his more common precise shock-zooms). In some cases, as in the drama-
club staging of “Serpico” in Rushmore, these devices serve as citations,
in that case to “realist” New Hollywood cinematography. But they also
feel very much like the exceptions that prove the rule: they stand out
from his usual stylistic register so much that they effectively reinforce
the latter. I’m looking forward to seeing Grand Budapest to see if this
continues, or if he emphasizes instead a further refinement of his typical
gestures.

I agree with Jonah that importing foreign devices often throws into relief a
filmmaker’s signature style–a matter of a film’s intrinsic norm getting
reinforced by some marked deviation from it. I think of Ozu’s pans or
tracking shots, which occur in all his black and white films, and which often
just remind us how narrow the style is in the rest of the movie. And
sometimes, as in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, those camera
movements are hybrids or compromises with with his static style. Thanks to
Jonah for corresponding.

P.P.S. 27 March: This entry has been revised to eliminate an error.

Originally I had said that the play with aspect ratios in the film wouldn’t
have been possible before digital projection. Bryce Utting wrote to point out
that it was indeed possible on film, since Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book
used both 1.85 and anamorphic widescreen. I had even seen the film and
forgotten that! Thanks to Bryce for the correction.

P.P.P.S. 30 March (Hong Kong time): Jim Healy, impresario of our

Wisconsin Cinematheque, writes to point out several other films that mix
aspect ratios:

The first hour of Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, the urban-set part, is
in 1.85. When the characters make it to the open horse country, the
image widens to ‘scope. . . . The 2002 Disney animated feature Brother
Bear (which isn’t so bad) is 1.85 for about the first 20 minutes and when
the principal Inuit character (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is
transformed into a bear, the picture goes to Scope.  

The biggest example to my memory, though, is Douglas Trumbull’s

Brainstorm (1983). In both 70mm and 35mm prints, every time the
characters are experiencing virtual reality wearing Louise Fletcher and
Christopher Walken’s gizmo, the image widens to scope. AndI think,
Trumbull shot all of the widescreen stuff in 65mm, which made
everything seem “more real” if you saw a 70mm print.
Wow! Thanks to Jim for these new examples, none of which I’ve seen. I
keep learning stuff.
P.P.P.P.S. 15 April (Wisconsin time): Speaking of learning stuff, now that
I’m home I revisited The Grand Budapest Hotel. Turns out the 1.85 sections
are weirder than I’d noticed.
Without going into detail, I’d say that outermost frame story (the young
woman reporter visiting the cemetery) and the 1980s frame story (the Author
addressing the camera) involve two different sizes of 1.85: one filling the
screen, and the other smaller within that area. To complicate things, I believe
that the rounding-off at the film’s end presents yet a third size, still in the
1.85 proportion.
Why? I have no idea, but it’s something to watch for. And of course 1.85
most closely approximates the proportions of an opened trim-size book….
P.P.P.P.P.S. 22 June (Prague time): Now that the DVD edition is out, I can
be clearer about what Anderson has done with his embedded ratios. The very
opening, consisting of company logos and an expository title, fills the 1.85
screen fully, as do the final credits. The first frame story, showing the
student putting a new key on the Author’s monument, is enclosed within that
full screen, and it has a ratio of about 1.80. The 1985 flashback, as I
indicated, is at about the same ratio as the frame story, but it’s smaller in
size, so that it’s fitted within the prologue frame. The 1968 story, at 2.40,
runs to the frame edge (the 1.80 ones don’t) but of course it’s letterboxed, so
it doesn’t fill the screen. Then the 1932 events in the central story are
presented at 1.255 (see below), at least in the DVD version. (I wonder if it’s
an approximation of some squarish early sound ratios.) So Anderson’s story-
within-story plot is presented through more or less enclosed image boxes.
Alas, though, I was wrong about there being a different ratio for the ending’s
return to the monument. That epilogue is in the same 1.80 ratio as the
opening.
I can offer one more sidelight. Flying here the other evening, I watched The
Grand Budapest Hotel on the plane, just to see what adjustments might have
been made. (“This film has been modified to fit this screen and edited for
content.”) Surprisingly, the aspect ratios were all preserved. The cuss words
were cut out, as was the fellatio shot (but not the guillotined fingers). The
most startling change was that the painting of female sexual congress had
become a big, blank white one in the Rauschenberg mold. Was it an
alternative shot for the airline version, or was the naughty one digitally
whitewashed?
P.P.P.P.P.P.S 2 August (Madison time): After rechecking the 1932 story’s
aspect ratio, using both a Blu-ray and a 35mm print (yes, they exist), I find
that my estimate above is a bit off. The aspect ratio of the 1932 story is 1.31
on those presentations. I regret the error.
  
comments about the state of this website go to Meg Hamel.