Lucidno
On CinemaScope, Snakes, Funerals, Lang, and Welles
There seems to be a general agreement among cinephiles that Fritz Lang thought that Cinemascope was suitable only for filming snakes and funerals — despite the fact that Lang’s own Moonfleet (1955), shot in the related format of Metroscope, uses that rectangular shape quite effectively, as does the similarly anamorphic While the City Sleeps (1956).
But that wisecrack about snakes and funerals is more or less what Lang delivers while playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), also shot in a ‘Scope format. Yet as Pierre Gabastan points out in the Autumn 2016 issue of the French quarterly journal Trafic (No. 99), this is a remark stolen from Orson Welles — specifically, from a French translation of an article by Welles (reprinted in the same issue of Trafic) that appeared in the weekly magazine Arts (no. 673, 4-10 juin 1958), one of the journalistic mainstays of Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette during this period, which stated that CinemaScope was ideal for funeral processions in long shot and snakes in close-up. As Gabastan plausibly argues, Godard must have remembered this line and asked Lang to deliver it as his own.
If so, there might have been a faint sense of getting even on Lang’s part. According to the late David Overbey, a friend of Lang’s during the early 1970s, Lang felt some resentment towards Welles because he regarded some of the alleged innovations of Citizen Kane to be unacknowledged ripoffs of certain editing principles he’d employed much earlier in M; from this standpoint, stealing a witty line from Welles might have seemed like a fitting form of poetic justice. For it’s worth pointing out that Welles, who disparaged and ridiculed other widescreen formats, never employed them in his own films. As he put it in his 1958 essay “Ribbon of Dreams”, “Man is made in God’s image. To enlarge that image is not to glorify but to deform it. It’s a sort of joke, and one doesn’t joke with God. That is is not only religion but good aesthetics.
“It can happen to us to dream in color and sometimes in black and white, but never in CinemaScope. We never wake from a nightmare shrieking because it has been in VistaVision….” [9/4/16]
Jonathan Rosenbaum
first published in:
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/01/49899/
