and Billy Wilder's The Apartment, with its deep spaces and carefully arranged bric a brac:
Then - I was thinking about production design on a budget, as per Ed Wood - using the same lamp, say, in two different sets:
Meanwhile, rooting around my Ed Wood collection, I came upon this shot, which reminds us what even a hack can come up with once in a while (in fairness, Wood came up with more decent shots than he gets credit for - that's not where the problem lies, usually):
It also calls to mind another do it yourself film, though with a somewhat higher level of accomplishment - I will leave you then with some of the lamps in Inland Empire. And add - if you have the DVD, or have seen the Lynch One documentary that circulated last year - you might have noticed how much of the extra material is devoted to production design. Lynch building sets - building objects - choosing locations. The strong sense you get from the extras is of the pleasures of the physical work of building a film... so I think this is a good place to end my rather bland contributions to this project.
4 comments:
Nice post, Sam. I'm a big fan of The Pornographers (your banner was one of the things that first attracted me to your blog). To me the real genius of The Pornographers is in its composition... I took a bunch of screenshots admiring Imamura's compositional eye and posted them here. Hope you enjoy seeing my picks, and thanks again for participating in my blog-a-thon...
Thanks - The Pornographers is about as extravagant an exhibition of multidimensional composition as you can get. Shots like the one of the house I posted - that show you the outside of the building, let you see some details inside the building, as well as the train in the distance - or some of the shots from inside the house, that show the street outside - are just breathtaking.
Wood's regular cinematographer, Bill Thompson, was pretty talented. PLAN 9 has some very good shots considering how cheap the sets are- the cemetery stuff is very tatty, but it's all stark blacks and whites and that gives it a certain eeriness.
Absolutely - Wood's films look surprisingly good: well photographed, with stronger, more imaginative compositions than you would ever expect - the Plan 9 shot of the bedroom lamps is wonderful: the balance, the almost sculptural use of light and shadow - it really does look like something from Inland empire... even the Jailbait shots are certainly well photographed, and those are pretty good compositions. And there are better shots, in both films (maybe nothing quite as good as that "Lynch" shot) - some neat use of props, even in the cheapest looking sets... It's the acting that kills them....
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