Two Blogathons of Note

As it happens, this weekend there are two blogathons going on, honoring two very outstanding filmmakers - Billy Wilder, hosted by Filmscreed, and Krystof Kieslowski, hosted at the Quiet Bubble. Both are sure to be must reads. I don't know how much I can offer - not that they aren't both great directors, not that I haven't been inspired by their films - just - well - I can't say I have a lot to say, right now. So I will leave most of it to the rest...

One thing I do want to note, though: like a lot of people, I have tended to think of Wilder primarily as a writer. But he could make pictures, too. This is not an argument, this post - just some screen grabs - but I think they show what he could do.

This started a year or so ago - I was writing a paper about Cindy Sherman's film still series. And went through some of my DVDs, looking for analogous shots. I figured The Apartment would be a good place to look - it was.



That was what I hoped I'd find - that's a shot that, other than the cinemascope framing, could have come from Sherman as easily as an actual film. A woman, alone, in some kind of angst - though also located in the middle of a scene. That was what I was interested in in Sherman's work - the ways she created narratives out of still images, the ways she places the women in her photos. Like this one:



...the rather intricate way Sherman creates a scene from this picture - the woman's eyeline, the way she holds whatever she has in her hand, the table, candles and all, her clothes, all suggesting there has been a private supper here... Combined with the way she excludes the other person - not just that there is no second person in the shot - but there are no signs of the other person. Even in the mirror - there's only one wine glass, one chair, one coat, and it belongs to the woman.... That shot of Shirley MacLaine follows almost all those rules: she's alone, though clearly reacting to someone else - but there's no sign of him. The closest you come is that doll in the background... And all the rest - the decor, her makeup, her gloves, the way she is sitting - is as posed as those Sherman photos. It's certainly the kind of shot Sherman was imitating....

But looking at the film that way (going through it looking for clips), I noticed other things - like these shots:

Now this is, actually, analogous to some of Sherman's photos - she sometimes uses this kind of deeper field, always to isolate a single person in a space. Wilder creates this shot rather interestingly: Jack Lemmon starts the shot in a two-shot with the doctor (they've discovered MacLaine unconscious in his bed), but he moves, and the camera moves with him, to create this fantastic composition. Deep focus, deep staging, aperture framing (you can see MacLaine on the bed in the distance - though you'll have to blow the picture up to see her), and the foreground objects like that lamp... And this continues, to create, eventually, this shot:



An absolutely stunning use of widescreen, deep space, staging, cinematography - MacLaine stumbling out of the bedroom in the background while Lemmon talks on the phone.... the purely formal elements, the placement of objects, that record sleeve that balances MacLaine’s appearance, the curves and arches, open and closed doors. Outstanding.

I don't know if Wilder's films all look as good as this one - if he sustained this level of work as a director. The problem is, he was such an exciting writer, sometimes everything else got short shrift. So I don't know. I just know that parts of this film can stand with anything...