8.3 The Surreal Images of Seconds

 8.3 The Surreal Images of Seconds

 Film historians generally acknowledge that the transformation from the Hollywood studio system to the American “New Wave” occurred with the 1969 release of Easy Rider. This counterculture classic, directed by Dennis Hopper and photographed by László Kovács, ASC, revolutionized cinematic storytelling with a visually and aurally driven style that broke away from the classic literary, narrative and pictorial devices familiar to older moviegoers. 

But the liberation of the motion picture camera had actually occurred a bit earlier, in the mid-Sixties. It's ironic that during a highly politicized era in which anyone over 30 was subject to mistrust, a leader of this cinematic insurrection was the renowned 67-year-old cinematographer James Wong Howe, ASC (Links to an external site.), who had been born at the end of the 19th Century. The veteran cameraman’s work on director John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, a controversial and misunderstood picture, would later exert a strong influence upon the future of American moviemaking.

At the time Seconds was made, 36-year-old John Frankenheimer was part of a new breed of directors trained in the “Golden Age” of live television in the Fifties. Following his prestigious work in television dramas for the series Danger, Climax and Playhouse 90, Frankenheimer developed his astute pictorial style for the big screen on provocative films such as The Young Savages, All Fall Down, The Birdman of Alcatraz and especially The Manchurian Candidate, a political thriller which entered the mind of a brainwashed man through a baroque use of black-and-white imagery, expressive production design and a paranoiac filled plot.

After Frankenheimer returned from filming The Train in Europe, he was propelled in a new creative direction. Hollywood movies were still produced primarily in the studios, where style and content could be heavily managed, but Frankenheimer decided that he wanted to create films outside of studio confines. For Seconds, Frankenheimer planned to shoot on the East Coast in New York's Grand Central Station; in Scarsdale, a suburb of Westchester County, for scenes involving Hamilton's firstborn life; and on the West Coast in Malibu, California, for the sequences that occur after the character's artificial rebirth.

The novel and screenplay had a surreal quality that suggested an extreme visual approach to Frankenheimer, who liked to use the armature (structure) of a simple story to construct a complex visualization. Frankenheimer saw in the project the possibility of creating a disturbing blend of cinema-verité, science-fiction and horror elements.

Perhaps Frankenheimer's most crucial directorial decision on Seconds was his request that James Wong Howe serve as director of photography. A seasoned Hollywood professional who always sought to bend the rules and express a story in vivid visual terms, Howe was a perfect collaborator for the youthful and ambitious Frankenheimer.

The "body cam" rig on Rock Hudson for the party scene

Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China on August 28, 1899. He began his more than 50 years of dedication to cinematography during Hollywood's silent film era, making his debut behind the camera on 1922’s Drums of Destiny for the Jesse L. Lasky Studio. Howe became a visual stylist who created atmosphere and emotion with his commanding application of the tools of cinematography. During his career, he worked with many first-tier directors, including Victor Fleming, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Erich von Stroheim, Busby Berkeley, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang and Lewis Milestone. Howe's stylistic hallmarks were deep-focus photography, low-key moods, film noir, and naturalistic, romantic and expressive lighting effects. He became a master of black-and-white photography while working on an impressive roster of films that included Air Force, The Power and the Glory, Body and Soul, Come Back Little Sheba, The Sweet Smell of Success and Hud, which earned Howe the 1963 Academy Award  (Links to an external site.)for Best Black-and-White Cinematography. He had previously earned an Oscar in 1955 for his color cinematography on The Rose Tattoo, photographed in VistaVision.

The central visual metaphor of Seconds emerged from Howe and Frankenheimer's experimentation with a 9.7mm fisheye lens. “In Seconds, the [idea of] distortion was terribly important,” Frankenheimer told Gerald Pratley in 1969. “The distortion of what society had made this man, what the Company then turned him out to be, and finally when he was going to his death everything had to be that complete distortion of reality and the fact that it was all just utter nonsense.”

Noted graphics designer Saul Bass' (Links to an external site.) unsettling opening credits (Links to an external site.) introduce this theme, as disturbingly extreme close-ups of a man's face (presumably Hamilton’s) twist and contort behind stark white typography. The images were created in-camera through the use of macro lenses and a flexible Mylar-like mirror:

Title sequence for Seconds by Saul Bass

The motif was continued by art director Ted Haworth. Some sets were designed to be distorted in perspective and were photographed with normal lenses. Other sets were designed in normal proportions and shot with extreme wide-angle lenses that warped their presentation. 

Richard Anderson, who played Dr. Innes, the ruthlessly hi-tech Company plastic surgeon who transforms dissatisfied, middle-aged men into vital-looking “reborns,” says that the collaboration between Frankenheimer and Howe produced a distinctive vision. “The script triggered the vision of [the picture] as almost a horror film,” says Anderson. “I was delighted to work with the man who had photographed Body and Soul (Links to an external site.) and all of those wonderful black-and-white pictures. James Wong Howe was hugely responsible for the mood of the movie visually, because he had such a striking vision of his approach. I was struck by the low-key quality of his work.

 John Frankenheimer has a great feel for camerawork, and he's very expressive and dramatic. The wide angles were used to extenuate the mood. I could see that they were going for unique ways of telling the story.”

Because of the extensive use of wide-angle lenses, Seconds was a demanding exercise for the film's camera operators. The visual approach required multiple cameras (often handheld), oddly-placed framing and unusual camera movements. A bedroom scene in which Hamilton realized that he cannot make love to his wife was photographed simultaneously with four handheld Arriflex cameras. These various angles were covered by Frankenheimer, Howe and two other operators at the other positions.

Multiple cameras again came into play for the film's opening sequence, which portrays Grand Central Station as a Gothic labyrinth. For certain shots, a camera outfitted with an 18mm lens was harnessed to actor Frank Campanella, who portrayed a Company agent in pursuit of Hamilton. The result was a strange, somnambulistic tracking effect as the camera faces Campanella, keeping him in the frame as the architecture of the station moves by in the background:

YouTube video of

Seconds (1966) - Opening Scene at the Train Station 

Link Here

Description:

Extremely unique camera angles and gorgeous cinematography for the 1966 cult classic "Seconds", the opening scene couldn't represent more how beautifully-shot this movie is. The main title from Saul Bass can be found on YouTube but I thought the opening was also worth sharing.

Seconds is a 1966 American science fiction drama film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Rock Hudson. The screenplay by Lewis John Carlino was based on Seconds, a novel by David Ely. The cinematography by James Wong Howe was nominated for an Academy Award.

Seconds premiered on October 5, 1966. It did poorly on its initial release, but has since become a cult classic.

Directed by John Frankenheimer
Produced by Edward Lewis
Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino
Based on Seconds, a novel
by David Ely
Starring Rock Hudson
Salome Jens
John Randolph
Music by Jerry Goldsmith
Cinematography James Wong Howe
Edited by David Newhouse
Ferris Webster
Movie = Seconds

Frankenheimer came up with two working strategies to capture the actual commuters streaming in and moving through the well-traveled train terminal. .Seven cameras, often handheld, were hidden from view. Two were inside the centrally located main information booth, others were in a newsstand and the stationmaster's office. A few cameras were even installed in suitcases to achieve eerie low-angle handheld shots as the operator, case in hand, surreptitiously followed Hamilton through the station

Frankenheimer also staged a diversion in another part of Grand Central's concourse that allowed the filmmakers to work undisturbed. In the main thoroughfare, he had screenwriter John Lewis Carlino and a bogus crew fake the shooting of a scene which involved a well-dressed young man being greeted by a fully clothed blonde siren who, when the crowds began to encircle them, stripped to a brief bikini. The faux crew drew so much attention that few noticed Frankenheimer and Howe shooting the real setups elsewhere in Grand Central.

The production crew also filmed aboard New York, New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut commuter trains; Frankenheimer later noted that Howe operated the camera during the bulk of the scene. A handheld shot traces Hamilton on the train as the camera moves frenetically from his face to his hands, jump-cutting from one angle of the view out the speeding train window to an angle of a blurry, ever-closer suburbia, and then to another angle that jumps back and forth between the two views in rapid succession. 

In this scene and many others, Seconds utilizes the unconventional camera and editing techniques of the French nouvelle vague, while retaining a Rod Serling-like sense of story and tone: the film looks like a Twilight Zone episode directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

For a sequence of Hamilton arriving home, the crew went to Scarsdale to shoot at the local train station. To achieve verisimilitude, Frankenheimer and Howe again adopted a hidden camera technique to film actor John Randolph coming off the train in a real-life setting among real suburban commuters. Cameras were positioned in trash baskets, behind signs and in other places where they couldn't be seen by the public. At one point, Frankenheimer personally yanked a startled commuter out of frame when it seemed evident that a shot might be obscured.

During preproduction in May of 1965, a Paramount production manager had gone on a location scout in Scarsdale for Hamilton's suburban home, selecting a white clapboard house. A deal was struck with the owners, who were to receive $100 so the Seconds crew could film the exterior of their home. Haworth's art department designed and built interiors to match the exterior on a soundstage on the studio lot in Hollywood. However, two weeks before Frankenheimer and Howe arrived in the upscale Westchester community with a crew of almost 35, the tenants of the home changed their minds, saying they were going on vacation. Producer Edward Lewis told the production manager to offer to pay for the vacation, and penciled in $500 for work in Scarsdale.

Due to the use of wide lenses and their close proximity to the performers most of Seconds was shot without sound because of camera noise. However, filming Seconds as a silent movie gave Frankenheimer and Howe the freedom to concentrate on their elaborate visual style. "I believe that we are in the movie business, not the sound business," Frankenheimer told the New York Times during the making of the film. "It's the screen image that is important." Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score, the sound design, and heightened, re-recorded dialogue would later support the ornate visuals.

In a sequence suggested by Frankenheimer that was not in the novel, the director combined a freewheeling verité camera style with a liberated European attitude toward screen nudity. After Hamilton assumes the identity of Wilson in Malibu, he encounters Norma Marcus (Salome Jens), an attractive Company operative who tries to break down Wilson's middle-class inhibitions so he can enjoy the sensuality of his new California lifestyle.

- Vincent LoBrutto, "The Surreal Images of Seconds," American Cinematographer -Link