Sunday, January 23, 2011

FUNNY LIGHTING AND STAGING

This (above) is a dumb composition, isn't it? I mean that as a compliment.  It's for a comedy so the art director wisely violated the normal rules of composition. The picture's too symmetrical,  too much attention is paid to the tablecloth, and the three doors are distracting...but so what? It's funny.

I LOVE ignorant staging!
You don't always need funny sets to make live background elements funny. It's about how you shoot them and light them. 

Here's (above) two ways to shoot a cup, the normal way and the funny, ignorant way. The cup on the left looks fine, but you'd call it dignified, rather than funny. In the world of cups it's a solid citizen, a device that earns its way by being useful to humans, a cup whose mother is proud of it...but it's not funny.

The cup on the right however, the one in the wide shot, is lonely and insecure, and maybe something of a klutz. He's probably always spilling things on humans. How do we know? Because the world he inhabits is so awkward. The ocean of empty space around the cup, the funky table, the lip of the table and the awkward area underneath...it all says that this silly cup hasn't got the brains to sit closer to the camera.  He's funny.   

BTW, I'm glad the art director didn't show too much detail in the cup background. Too much detail would have hinted at a larger story, and taken our attention away from the simple ignorance of the situation.


Study the deliberately ignorant and theatrical staging (above) in silent comedies. It just shouts, "This is a funny picture!"



Too many people assume that sets were made this way (above) because the films were made in a primitive time, when nobody understood composition. That's not true. Old timers understood composition at least as well as we do now.  They simply thought this way of doing things was funnier..


Even the lighting (above) was ignorant in those days. Lots of film people knew how to light properly, but comedians favored frontal lighting, which flattened out the face and gave it a cartoony, graphic look.


Stan Laurel insisted on in it in the early films he did with Hardy. 


Later he allowed very light shadows on one side. Other actors in their films were allowed to have deeper shadows, but not the two stars.


Still later, they were forced to use the same stark lighting that dramatic actors used. By then, producers were insisting that comedy people conform to dramatic rules.


By luck or intentional skill, early TV used the kind of flat lighting that we saw in some silent comedies. It made everything more funny. 


Lighting wasn't the only thing that was funny in early TV. The sets were funny too.  You can see the influence of old silent comedy staging.   



Me, I think that ignorant composition is bliss.



BTW: Mike's the biggest Laurel and Hardy fan that I know, and he wrote the following comment: 

"When Laurel & Hardy - whom I revere - left Hal Roach Studios in 1940 to move to 20th Century Fox in '41, they seem to age 20 years overnight. This was the direct result of the new studio's intrusive and insensitive meddling with the team.

Fox, who seem to have been as determined to ruin Laurel & Hardy as Paramount was to ruin Popeye (and MGM was to ruin Keaton, Our Gang and the Marx Brothers), insisted on uniformly realistic makeup and lighting in all their films. It didn't matter if it was a drama, musical or slapstick comedy - an approach about as individual as a cookie cutter.

Laurel instinctively knew the team needed stylization to be believable in the special world they created and inhabited. Besides keeping them young - and preserving the comic illusion that they were overgrown children - the subtle clown-white makeup the team had been using since their silent film days also kept them slightly cartoony, and that much more removed from harsh reality. Stylized sound effects, lively music and flat lighting accomplished the same feat, exactly what the team needed, and had had at Roach.

Of course, the front office couldn't resist tampering with the scripts as well, and their literal, assembly line, sausage factory approach was exactly opposite to what L&H had been used to up until that time. These are just some of the reasons why the boys are still delightful to watch in Saps as Sea, their last film shot at Roach in 1940 - and already old and tiresome in Great Guns, their first one made at Fox only one year.

Unfortunately, corporate interference with creative artists is just as destructive now as it was then. In the words of Scotty Beckett: 'They'll never learn...' "



18 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:14 PM

    I LOVE posts like this. Your far side post changed how I looked at drawing cartoons. Instead of thinking "what is a realistic way to draw this space?" and painstakingly using pictures as guides I just try to draw the space as funny as I can. Especially with modern interior design being as ugly and functional as it is. Trying to realistically draw a space like a supermarket is a nightmare, so much funnier to draw a few sparsely stocked shelves and smiling grocer with arms folded behind the front counter.

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  2. I agree with that theory! The lighting and staging techniques in the old comedies are extremely brilliant!

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  3. Anonymous3:29 AM

    This is one of your best posts yet. I love this idea that staging and backgrounds should look just as funny as the actual cartoons themselves, but also have an ignorant quality to them. Simple idea on paper, but it really does make a huge impact on some of the funniest silent comedies of that era, in my opinion. Those guys were huge geniuses!

    Nowadays, purely fun ignorance like that is hard to find in our cold, sterile modern culture full of bad auto-tuned pop music and hip hop, pretend, cookie cutter country, dead looking cartoons (not saying this for all of them, but the primitive flat, badly written ones are a shame to our profession. You know which ones those are.), bad reality TV shows, infomercials, etc, and this is coming from someone who was actually born and raised in the 1990s/2000s, believe it or not, Eddie. The awful truth is that deadness creeps everywhere in our society now.

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  4. Thats something you don't see everyday. People nowadys don't embrace the comedic value of ignorant staging, thats a shame.

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  5. While I enjoy and agree with everything you said in this post, I don't have much to add! So here is something off topic:

    I saw these and immediately thought of you

    http://www.dedon.de/en/collections/detail/collection/nestrest-171/hanging-lounger-1412/chalk-75.html

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  6. Super cool, Uncle Eddie

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  7. Anonymous11:21 AM

    Are you a Harry Langdon fan Eddie? I didn't know that much about him until I saw this New Yorker feature on him and I'm still not sure. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/01/the-chaser.html

    Usually people write articles about Harold Lloyd as the "forgotten silent star" or whatnot. On the surface there's a weirdly effemenite quality which I could see turning off audiences and his wide-eyed tramp character seems like a Chaplin clone. Apparently he had a very distinctive directing style which bombed in the 20's but has been championed by a lot of great directors. It's hard to find that much about the guy, I figured you might have some interesting thoughts on him.

    Also have you been watching Boardwalk Empire? I first heard of Eddie Cantor when this act was repeated verbatim on the show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mhpw7gb1fE It's interesting to read about famous film stars and comic strips from that era that were household names that almost no one has even heard of today.

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  8. There's a cool book called "Herr Lubitsch Goes Hollywood" I'm reading now that explains the differences between german comedy lighting, Hollywood comedy lighting, and Ernst Lubitsch's style in both countries. You'd like it, Eddie, although it doesn't advocate ignorant lighting. It talks about lighting that ties into thematic meaning.

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  9. Anonymous3:17 PM

    It's also interesting to imagine whether early film comedians could be successful if they were born today. It's unfair to judge them by their material since it's not like a Groucho Marx born in 1975 would have a 30's sensibility. I wonder if he would have developed a sense of humor that gels with todays Will Ferell, Ben Stiller type of comedy Star or would have ended up a serious actor or accountant or something.

    Could Jim Carey have become a silent film star? How would todays youth respond to a young Bob Hope or George Burns?

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  10. Hi Eddie,
    Mark Kennedy did a few posts on comical vs dramatic composition.
    http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2009/01/flat-is-funny-depth-is-dramatic.html

    http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2009/02/just-little-bit-more-more-flat-and-deep.html

    After reading these I had one of those "Usual Suspect" moments where a flood of memories confirming the premise pour in.
    I love your use of the word "ignorant" with such affection. It sums up the difference between a lovable moron and an annoying idiot.

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  11. Anonymous4:40 PM

    I mean it would be interesting to see what a Groucho Marx who grew up watching Monty Python on PBS would be like today.

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  12. Anonymous, I think everyone who's into old music knows who Eddie Cantor is.

    As for Jim Carrey being a silent film star, I think he definitely would have been one. Today I was listening to some Redd Foxx and realized that all the old catskills "one liner" comics like him and Henny Youngmann could have been stars today.

    I realized that one-liners are some of the most popular jokes told today by hipster comedians, but the delivery is completely different. Mitch Hedberg, Dimitri Martin, Stephen Wright, Zach Galifinakis and Dana Gould could have all been comics in the 40s and 50s, their delivery would have been way different, though.

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  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  14. I never thought 'bout things this way....

    THANKS EDDIE, FOR MAKING A POST THAT MAKES ME THINK! :D

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  15. Keenly observed, Eddie, as always! It's "ignorant" as opposed to "sophisticated".

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  16. Anonymous8:01 AM

    Compare the staging and lighting in the Marx Bros. early Paramount movies (their best stuff) against that found in their next-to-last film, "A Night in Casablanca" - aside from being older, the Marxes in this squid must battle staging that works against their kind of humor: certain action set pieces are staged too wide, showcasing the sets at the expense of comedy. This sounds insane until you see it.

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  17. When Laurel & Hardy - whom I revere - left Hal Roach Studios in 1940 to move to 20th Century Fox in '41, they seem to age 20 years overnight. This was the direct result of the new studio's intrusive and insensitive meddling with the team.

    Fox, who seem to have been as determined to ruin Laurel & Hardy as Paramount was to ruin Popeye (and MGM was to ruin Keaton, Our Gang and the Marx Brothers), insisted on uniformly realistic makeup and lighting in all their films. It didn't matter if it was a drama, musical or slapstick comedy - an approach about as individual as a cookie cutter.

    Laurel instinctively knew the team needed stylization to be believable in the special world they created and inhabited. Besides keeping them young - and preserving the comic illusion that they were overgrown children - the subtle clown-white makeup the team had been using since their silent film days also kept them slightly cartoony, and that much more removed from harsh reality. Stylized sound effects, lively music and flat lighting accomplished the same feat, exactly what the team needed, and had had at Roach.

    Of course, the front office couldn't resist tampering with the scripts as well, and their literal, assembly line, sausage factory approach was exactly opposite to what L&H had been used to up until that time. These are just some of the reasons why the boys are still delightful to watch in Saps as Sea, their last film shot at Roach in 1940 - and already old and tiresome in Great Guns, their first one made at Fox only one year.

    Unfortunately, corporate interference with creative artists is just as destructive now as it was then. In the words of Scotty Beckett: "They'll never learn..."

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anon: Interesting! I'll look up the Casablanca film and check out the sets.

    Mike: Fascinating! I reproduced your letter in the article!

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