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THE INVISIBLE ART
(Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, 287 pp., Chronicle Books, $75)
reviewed by MICHAEL KORESKY
a Film Comment online exclusive
"How'd they do that?"-the ultimate expression of movie spectator awe once upon a time, the encapsulation of cinema's sheer wonder. The special effects thrill-ride, the dazzling authentic period piece, the fantastic netherworld of chromatic fluidity-these are strictly cinematic modes, sealed from closer inspection within the confines of the screen. But with CGI textures and quick-fixes now monopolizing the art of "movie magic," the very question is slowly becoming redundant. We know how they did it: that Gladiator's Coliseum creaks under the weight of its digital cross beams, that, at the hands of a digital compositor, that really big fake ocean liner collided with that really big fake iceberg.
Not to dismiss the impressive achievements of digital artists and animators, but for purists, the temptation to use computer simply to cut corners rather than to create degrades the traditional notion of film art. Transporting us back to an era when the untrained eye would be hard-pressed to spot the counterfeit image, The Invisible Art pays tribute to those often neglected masters of classical filmic trickery, the matte painters. Gorgeous, glossy, and all ready for the coffee table, the 287-page book goes into great detail about an all-but lost art whose secrets Hollywood was once terrified of revealing to its audiences, lest the question of "How'd they do that?" be answered.
With the art of traditional matte painting (the process of placing a sheet of glass on which is painted a desired background or foreground) becoming obsolete, Vaz and Barron's analysis couldn't be more welcome. The first few chapters focus exclusively on the works of matte pioneer Norman Dawn ("The Great Illusionist," as Irving Thalberg dubbed him) who had tried to convince D.W. Griffith to replace his extravagantly constructed backdrops with his own lifelike paintings. Having pushed the process into new realms on Story of the Andes, using mattes and counter-mattes to create an original negative image on the same roll of film, Dawn became the go-to guy for the combination of live action and painting, making room on the playing field of cinematic illusion for everyone from The Wizard of Oz's "eccentric genius" Warren Newcombe to Robert Stromberg, whose work on Scorsese's The Age of Innocence represented the form's last hurrah.
The greatest pleasure of this extraordinary treasure trove of visual and historical excavation lies in discovering exactly where the real ends and the artificial begins. For instance, how much of that vertiginous overhead shot of the Bodega Bay gasoline station attack in The Birds was authentic location shooting and how much was Albert Whitlock's intricately detailed evocation? And who knew that the set of George and Mary Bailey's Bedford Falls dream house in It's a Wonderful Life consisted of only two actual floors and that the rest sprung from the tip of a paintbrush? And with its stunning reproductions of some of the most lyrical, poetic mattes ever composed (The Thief of Baghdad (1940)'s wondrous, dazzlingly colored Arabian architecture; Mary Poppins' amber London skyline dotted with puffing chimney stacks; that ominous, looming dust cloud about to sweep across the tiny Midwestern town in Bound for Glory) the book is a must for FX fans. No pixels here; in order to find out How They Did It, you'll have to squint to see the brushstrokes.
Michael Koresky is the Copy Editor of Film Comment.
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
