The Setting of a Film - Essay Example

?How and why does set design/setting contribute to/reflect the characters’ lifestyles/personalities. Introduction The setting of a film is often taken for granted because it forms the background to the action, and when we look at any scene, whether on the screen or in the real world, our eye is naturally drawn to movement, and our attention is taken up more with what is happening than with what simply exists. The setting, and the design of all the background elements in each scene are, however, very powerful elements in the total effect of a film. We recognise particular genres immediately when we see familiar settings such as the lonely cactus, rocky canyons and wide blue skies of the Western or the dark city streets and smoky interiors of the gangster movie. These set designs create a specific mood, and convey in a very immediate and often not even conscious way, all sorts of information about the characters in the film. Boggs and Petrie identify four key factors in the way that settings affect the story of a film: temporal factors, geographic factors, social structures/economic factors and customs/moral attitudes/ codes of behaviour.1 This paper examines each of these factors in turn with reference to a range of musical films from the 1920s and 1930s and shows how and why the settings relate to the characters’ lifestyles and personalities. Temporal factors. The very first film musical was of course The Jazz Singer (1927) and its main claim to fame is that it was the first film to integrate sound into the picture. This presented new possibilities for the musical, and set in train a fashion for musical films in America which continues to this day. This era in American history was one of great hope in technology and it captures the moment when black notices with white lettering, used to denote the passage of time, began to be replaced by the human voice. This type of musical is part of a genre which has been described as “The backstage musical” and this is because it “works primarily from the inside, originating from the venue where the show is made and centering on the relationships between the performers who make it.”2 The show is the setting for the film, and allows for the sumptuous set pieces on stage, with full chorus, glorious costumes and all the pomp and splendour of the theatre transferred onto the cinema screen. The Broadway Melody (1929), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and 42nd Street (1933) fall into this category too, and these films glamorize the image of Broadway, and its connection with talking pictures. Geographical factors This “show within a show” format allows the camera to shift perspectives from a very wide angle view, as on a theater stage, to a much narrower focus in small interiors. Besides the showtime glamor scenes, there are also backstage scenes which are much more intimate and revealing of the true personalities of the singers, dancers and various theater personalities. These two different aspects of setting, the full glare of the stage, and the more dimly lit backstage provide a neat parallel to the main tension of the musical genre, which is the tension between narrative discourse and musical discourse. In other words what happens in the spoken dialog operates according to certain accepted rules, while what happens when people burst into song, happens according to different rules. Rubin points out that the backstage, spoken parts of the film obey more conventional rules and are much closer to real life, while the musical parts are “impossible. – that is impossible from the standpoint of the realistic discourse of the narrative”.3 He cites as an example of this the fact that Pete Peters (Fred Astaire) and Magnolia Hawks (Ginger Rogers) in Shall We Dance (1943) are shown to have no experience with roller skates, but then they perform the spectacular number “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” on roller skates without any problems. For the viewer this impossibility is acceptable, because it takes place on the stage: a place of wonderment and fantasy where music and dancing are effortlessly performed in an atmosphere of extravagance and exhibitionism. It is as if two different worlds are being shown in the two settings and the characters provide the links between the two worlds. One advantage of the stage sets, as opposed to the realistic interior and exterior shots, is that they can present a utopian image of the American or European city, as for example when in Broadway Melody the dancers are presented in front of a backdrop complete with Art Deco skyscrapers, flashlights and neon, or when in Top Hat (1935) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance around recreations of Paris or Venice complete with stylized Eiffel tower and real gondolas. In these set pieces the human figures appear much larger than life size, compared with the decor. It is as if they dominate the physical environment, and playfully exert control over it, leaping great distances and using height, depth and distance to show this power. The real life street scenes, and especially the railway station scenes, however, which are interspersed between the interior sets, are filmed from a low camera angle, looking up, which emphasizes the tiny scale of human beings in the huge bustling city scape. For the singers and dancers, the practice room and the theater are a sort of safe place away from the bustling city. Social Structures/Economic factors When looking at these backstage musicals as a whole it is clear that the two types of setting, intimate backstage for the storyline, and huge sets for the musical numbers, are used in different proportions as the film progresses. In the early parts of the films, there is more backstage plot and character building, but as the story unfolds the showtime scenes start to take up longer slots, so that the emphasis shifts from the drab environment of 1930s theater employees to the glory of music: “These spectacular numbers moreover are typically ‘stacked’ placed in sequence or toward the finale”4 Both types of setting are crucial ingredients in that specific time in American history when unemployment was high and people sought solace in the cinemas: “… a successful Depression musical comedy might be expected to used highly differentiated settings to present the conflicting content of realistic representation and healthy escapism.”5 The contrast works, and the two different sets complement each other, because for Americans in that difficult time the struggles of the working singers and dancers in the films mirrored their own daily lives, while the joyful stage scenes represented glamor, success, and all that people aspired to in capitalist America. The increasing dominance of the stage sets suggests that the Depression era will soon end, and a new spectacular age will follow after it. To some extent this mirrors the plot lines which follow fairly traditional boy meets girl, both suffer adversity, and finally the show, and the romance, triumph together. In the film Love Me Tonight the setting of the city is made to participate in the drama, as when the sounds of industry blend into a rhythmic musical score. Different working people are shown going about their daily tasks, and this emphasizes the working class culture of the main character Maurice Courtelain (Maurice Chevalier). When he then enters the very luxurious chateau of the Viscount, it appears stilted and false, in comparison to the earlier scenes. Many cliches of European artistocracy are placed in the background such as oil paintings and statues, which lends an air of exoticism for an American audience. Customs/Moral Attitudes/Codes of Behavior. In The Jazz Singer there are shots of Jolson sitting at the mirror in his dressing room, putting on his black face make up which transforms him from the everyday white man that he really is, to the celebrated blackface persona that walks a moment later onto a huge empty stage and a tiny spotlight. The transition phase takes away some of the mystery, but then the shift from the tiny confined dressing room space to the huge stage symbolizes the liberation and joy that musical films bring top the enraptured audience. The character he plays is constantly torn between different worlds, what this scene shows is the symbolic putting on of makeup to hide his true self. In another important set of scenes, at the very end of the film, Jolson is pictured going back to his parents’ household to visit his dying father. The decor of the rooms show that this is a very traditional family, and very different from the glamorous world of the stage. His mother lights candles, and there are many details which denote the family’s adherence to the Jewish faith. The bearded patriarch on his deathbed recalls Biblical scenes and this whole setting presents the moral dilemma of a person of faith who has to choose between his roots and his career on the stage. When Jolson leaves this constrained location to go into the synagogue and sing, the mother opens a window to let the sound come in. Conclusion. We have seen, then, that setting is very important to musical films because it fills out details about the characters, and the context that they live in without interfering with the dialog or the plot. As the characters move between their home, place of worship, and the world of theater they show that it is possible to inhabit all of these separate cultural spaces and this in turn reflect America’s particular history of multiculturalism and openness to immigrants and their traditions. Very often the films of this period also show their characters undergoing a cultural transition, from innocent and natural people from ordinary backgrounds to highly successful stars who inhabit a world of luxury. The musicals show extremes but he and there we see small spaces of overlap, and moments of transition and the film’s different settings illustrate these cultural boundaries and crossings, often using musical elements as a link between them all. References Boggs, Joseph and Petrie, Dennis W. The Art of Watching Films. 5th edition. Mountain View: CA: Mayfield, 2000. Cohan, Steven.(ed.) Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Dunne, Michael. American Film Musical Themes and Forms. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004. Rubin, Martin. “Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical” in Steven Cohan (ed.) Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 53-63 Films: 1) “The Jazz Singer” (c. 1927)  2) “Broadway Melody” (c. 1929)  3) “Love Me Tonight” (c. 1932)  4) “Gold Diggers of 1933” (c. 1933)  5) “42nd Street” (c. 1933)  6) “Top Hat” (c. 1935)  7) “Shall We Dance” (c. 1937) Read More