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Comics at 300 Frames per Second: Zack Snyder's 300 and the Figural Translation of Comics to Film

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2011.646574

1543-5326

Dru Jeffries,

Cinema History and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Lefèvre 2007 Lefèvre, Pascal. 2007. “Incompatible Visual Ontologies?: The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images”. In Film and Comic Books, Edited by: Ian, Gordon, Mark, Jancovich and McAllister, Matthew P. 1–12. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. [Google Scholar]. 2. Given the focus of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Elliott mentions only film and not comic books as trafficking in figures rather than figures of speech. The statement can, however, be safely applied to both media. 3. That the annual awards for achievement in comic books are called the Eisner Awards should give the reader a sense of his stature in the comic book community. 4. Throughout this essay I will attribute authorship of 300 (the film) to its director Zack Snyder. While I would not necessarily make a case for Snyder as an auteur in Andrew Sarris’ sense of the word, interviews with the film's crew and visual effects teams all point towards Snyder's as the controlling vision behind this project. The creative areas that this essay explores—framing and shot composition, visual effects, editing and montage—will thus be attributed to Snyder, who drew all of the storyboards, worked directly with the visual effects houses and oversaw the editing of the film. 5. The terminology involving graphic novels and comic books are often confused and contested by experts and laypeople alike. For my purposes here, ‘graphic novel’ will refer to a long form comic book that either collects multiple issues of an ongoing or limited series (as 300 does) or a single story, conceived and published as a single book, that is longer than the standard pamphlet-style comic book; ‘comics’ (in the plural) will refer to the medium itself. 6. My focus on the film's formal elements precludes a discussion of the film's themes and politics, which have been written about elsewhere. See Burris 2011 Burris, Gregory A. 2011. Barbarians at the Box Office - 300 and Signs as Huntingtonian Narratives. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28(2): 101–119. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] and Courcoux 2009 Courcoux, Charles-Antoine. 2009. From Here to Antiquity: Mythical Settings and Modern Sufferings in Contemporary Hollywood's Historical Epics. Film & History, 39(2): 29–38. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] for discussions of the film's politics and treatment of masculinity, respectively. See Whissel 2010 Whissel, Kristen. 2010. The Digital Multitude. Cinema Journal, 49(4): 90–110. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] for a discussion of the relationship between the use of digital extras and themes of apocalypse in 300 and other contemporary Hollywood films. 7. The book, written and drawn by Miller and colored by Varley, was original published in instalments over five months in 1998 before being collected in a single volume the following year. Given that each individual issue of the comic conformed to the standardized size of pamphlet-style comic books (10” x 6.5”) rather than the landscape (approximately 10” by 13”) orientation of the hardcover, it would be interesting to compare the aesthetic effects of the original run of 300 with its collected version. 8. Miller had previously been unsuccessful in the film industry, having written largely reworked drafts for both Irvin Kershner's RoboCop 2 (1990) and Fred Dekker's RoboCop 3 (1993). Miller is credited as co-director on Sin City, and later directed a feature by himself, an adaptation of Will Eisner's property The Spirit (2008). 9. In its first weekend alone, the film grossed over $70 million, $5 million more than its production budget. The total domestic gross was over $210 million (Box Office Mojo). 10. Of course, this is not the only reason why the film captured the cultural zeitgeist when it was released. However, fan discourses linking fidelity with quality definitely held some degree of sway over the film's reception, as indicated in reviews of the film (many of which are cited throughout this essay). 11. Here I draw upon the terminology of Nicole Brenez. Because, unfortunately, her work has yet to be translated into English, my understanding of these terms is informed by William D. Routt's review of her 1998 book De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: l’invention figurative au cinema for the online journal Screening the Past. 12. The scene in question takes place between 44:06 and 52:42 in the film. 13. For example, in the film there is an added subplot involving Queen Gorgo, a character without a significant presence in the graphic novel. 14. See Hutcheon 2006. 15. Fong worked closely with Snyder to achieve replicate Miller and Varley's images on screen. As cinematographer, his responsibilities included lighting the sets to replicate the use of light and shadow in the graphic novel. 16. The Pageant of the Masters, an annual part of the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California since 1941, is a ninety-minute program consisting of about twenty living recreations of great and famous paintings and sculptures set to a live orchestral score (Malloy). The tableaux feature “special lighting effects and highly sophisticated technical miracles” to help recreate the overall visual effects of the original as much as possible (Shemanski, 18–19). 17. As a counterpoint, Michael Williams has argued that 300's hyperbolically muscled and digitally enhanced male bodies evoke a sense of death, because they more closely resemble bronze statues than living persons, particularly when shot in extreme slow motion bordering on stasis (46). In my view, however, the stasis of these images, and in particular the way that they are constantly teetering on the edge of full, embodied motion, brings them closer to the tableau vivant tradition, and thus to life rather than death. 18. To anticipate a Benjaminian response to the present case study, I believe that the question of aura in the case of 300 is moot as the original text is a mass produced object to begin with. The motivation of the tableaux vivants therein is thus not to provide access to an inaccessible work, as it was in the nineteenth century, for the graphic novel is at least as accessible as the film version, if not more so. 19. Recent practitioners of tableaux vivants have pushed these inherent tensions even further. For instance, the 1998 CounterPoses exhibition in Montreal, Quebec incorporated elements of interaction and movement into traditional tableau vivant practice, taking the trope from the realm of the still life to that of living/performance art. Citing the tendency of new technologies to transcend the corporeal level of experience, the CounterPoses curators sought to repurpose the tableau vivant in order to both recuperate “the body as a site of experience and knowledge” in the age of new media (Fisher, 6) and to undermine the disinterested aesthetic gaze of the museum goer by confronting them with living bodies and active agents rather than inert, un-interactive pieces of art (12). 20. Often, in films such as Godard's Passion and Pasolini's La ricotta, the tableaux vivants are being produced for a film within the film. Such a positioning within the narrative can serve to reinforce the inherently transtextual nature of the tableau vivant, though this is not the case in 300. See Leutrat 1986 Leutrat, Jean-Louis. 1986. Traces that Resemble Us: Godard's Passion. SubStance, 15(3): 36–51. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] and MacBean 1984 MacBean, Roy James. 1984. Filming the Inside of His Own Head: Godard's Cerebral Passion. Film Quarterly, 38(1): 16–24. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. 21. This is partly because comic books have never received the same level of theoretical treatment that the cinema has, but also because comics, like painting, do not lend themselves to a single, restrictive ontological identity. 22. See Prince 2004 Prince, Stephen. 2004. “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images and Film Theory”. In Film Theory and Criticism. 6th ed, Edited by: Leo, Baudry and Marshall, Cohen. 270–282. New York: Oxford UP. [Google Scholar]. 23. See “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” by André Bazin, trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13.4 (Summer 1960): 4–9. 24. While 300 takes place in ancient Greece, the film was shot entirely in Montreal—and during the winter, no less. 25. While the digital provides an inexpensive means of producing a painterly aesthetic, such results are not exclusive to the digital and have been discussed in these terms elsewhere. For a compendium of writings on the topic, see Vacche 2003 Vacche, Angela Dalle. 2003. The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. [Google Scholar]. 26. “Drawn” being the operative word in both cases due to the use of digital tools in the creation of most cinematic visual effects. 27. For instance, Munich-based house Scanline, who had previously worked on Wolfgang Peterson's Poseidon (2006), was employed to create the water effects in the six-shot storm sequence (Fordham, 75). 28. See Albert 2009 Albert, Aaron. 8 July 2009. 300 Movie to Comic Comparison—Frank Miller's 300. About.com., . November 9, 2011 [Google Scholar] and culturalelite 2006 culturalelite. 4 October 2006. 300 Comic to Screen Comparison. Solace in Cinema, . November 9, 2011 [Google Scholar]. 29. Home video technologies, which give the reader the ability to pause, fast-forward, rewind and slow down the action at will, constitute a notable challenge to this paradigm. 30. Timecodes obtained from the film's official DVD version. 31. It actually does recall the first panel on page 45 of the collected hardcover version, but the compositions are not so similar that one immediately recalls the other. 32. The lenses were 85 mm, 35 mm and 18 mm, giving radically different depths to each camera despite the identical shooting position. 33. If projected at the normal playback rate of twenty-four frames per second, each second of profilmic reality would take over six seconds to view. 34. The entire film was shot at no slower than fifty frames per second, allowing for subtle slow-motion effects to be inserted in any shot of the film during editing. 35. The reader will recall that the aforementioned “Crazy Horse” shot is, like bullet time, an amalgamation of discrete images that are edited together to create the illusion of fluidity; while this is true, it is the speed ramping that defines the panel moments within the shot as such, rather than the suturing.