Not so much the movies themselves (when viewable on Youtube) as much as the Internet’s hundreds of amateur GIFs featuring famous actors in famous scenes, made directly from movies of that era.
GIFs, as most know, are brief (two to four seconds) silent motion loops taken from the movies themselves.
Because a GIF, until activated, is a still image to the viewer, it presents a very different take on those famous wartime cinema scenes than what the 1940s set photographer presented.
Compared to the tiny 35mm half movie frame exposed to a moving subject at a shaky 1/24 of a second, a set photographer’s tripod-mounted big 4x5 or 8x10 negative, of a subject asked to sit still, and shot at a high speed of 1/250 a second, was inevitably going to be much much sharper, for technical reasons alone.
The shots indeed do look crisp, sharp, mostly distinctly black and distinctly white : as they had to be , to be reproduced successfully on coarse absorbent newsprint by the then crude newspaper half tone printing technology.
So 1940s newspaper images of films looked very different, not only compared to the actual film itself, but also to those same set photographer’s image when reproduced on the 1940s’ mirror smooth coated paper of the up-scale magazines and books, using their superior halftone printing technology. (The technology still used to reproduce them today.)
Back to the GIFs and the actual movies themselves.
Generally, the GIF and movie shows the actor(s) and the background behind them in a much softer and dimmer, greyer, focus.
The effect is rather like (by deliberate design) the photographic effect professional and amateur art photographers aimed to achieve between the 1860s to the 1930s : now known to historians as the “Pictorialism” Movement.
Photographs that were much closer to the rather soft focus achieved by painters of all eras due to the comparative bluntness of brushes and fingers compared to the effect of tiny light photons exposed to tiny specks of silver compounds.
In the 1930s to 1950s, Hollywood and its global rivals retained this Pictorial Look even as the elite world of still photographers moved on to their new objective of sharp focus all over the image left to right, front to back.
You might suspect that the soft focus look flattered the stars and stars sell movie seats. True, but the real reason it was retained was the immense costs it saved.
Movie lighting equipment is built like a tank and can easily last decades, its capital costs spread widely over hundreds of films and adding little to the budget. Nor was the cost of extra electricity more than a pittance.
It is true, high illumination was hard on the eyes during long sets and the heat in summer couldn't be reduced by noisy fans.
However the truly costly part of extra lighting was the much longer set up time required for each scene : and labour costs, from star down to stage hand, was the major expense in every film ever made.
Studio bosses and their bean-counters demanded that light levels be kept low to reduce set up time (remember : time equals money) and that to balance this, lens were to be set wide open to gather as much light as possible and then the development time of the film negative was to be extended to compensate.
So the camera operator focused on the actors’ faces as accurately as he could, from close up, with the backdrop left neglected. But a len used wide open, at its biggest aperture, is probably only sharp in the middle - aimed at the actor’s eyes and mouth. The actor’s face and body are nicely, gently, blurred.
The backdrop, again by deliberate design, was set well back in the shot and was well blurred and dim, ensuring our eyes naturally focused on the sharpest brightest part of the overall image : the actor’s eyes and mouth.
What sex there was in these Hays Office era heavily censored movies - and there was plenty ! - was almost all found in those same eyes and mouth, together with hands and hair.
As a big cost-saving bonus, a backdrop that was to end up drastically blurred and dimmed on camera required much less effort, time and material expense to render realistic !
Once we notice this on the still GIFs, we tend, I believe, to notice the effect in the movies themselves.
By the 1950s, this soft focus effect was disappearing for a variety of reasons. The old guard of cinematographers were retiring, dying or being laid off by the studios.
Color films of that era required more lights and much flatter lighting —- TV even more so.
The move to shooting out in the real world meant that backdrops were set even further back than inside a sound stage but the intensely bright sunshine still rendered them in sharp focus.
The trend to super wide screen movies also tended to find viewers thinking a super-wide blurred background was now too much of a good thing.
The main reason though was that the art photography was, once again, again distinctly out of sync with the larger ideological world around it.
Pictorialist photography bloomed ( a great word to describe it, in the circumstances) at the height of the steel-hard Machine Age, at the height of Reductive Modernity.
“Reductive Modernity” was the resulting ideology/hegemony when middle class educated elites world wide concluded - (mis) led by scientists - that reality as something that fundamentally, in its most basic smallest forms, was something stable and simple and predictable and knowable and controllable.
Reality was ‘clear-cut’, a favourite term of leading modernist Howard Florey, simple straight-forward, clear, laid out in stark black and white.
Pictorialism reacted against this view, presenting instead a world of grays and fog and dim light, of uncertain shapes and boundaries : a pre-Modernist view of the world in fact.
Typical of photographers, who are generally an apolitical lot, the bulk of photographers began moving to clearcut black and white stark Modernist photography just when much of the air in the tires of Reductive Modernity began leaking out, around 1945, when Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb suggested modern reductive science had its limits.
Greyness and fog and obscurity and blurred uncertainty began coming back intellectually, what we today call Post-Modernism for lack of a better word.
I am definitely a post-modernist, not a modernist - and I suspect Henry Dawson was too.
So I want the still images in my digital book on Martin Henry Dawson and his WWII penicillin-for-all crusade to be actually wartime film-like, Pictorialist, intellectually pre or post modern, not at all like the Modernist set photographers’ work of that time or like other Modernist stills of that era.
But because my images are stills, not motion images, I want rather a mix between the look of the actual Pictorialist movie themselves and of Pictorialist styled still photos, which can look very much like a paintings.
In a word they are mixed media - part a photograph taken by a machine and part the result of a human mind and a human finger altering the machine’s efforts to achieve an effect.
And reproducing the look of GIFs of that era seems the best way to go about it...
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