(Above: scene from Heaven's Gate. Even outdoor scenes shot in bright light seem diffuse and gauzy.)
I was thinking that the green-screen film problem can be traced to well before the recent crop of green-screen films. A good example is Heaven's Gate (1980), the film that has become an icon of corporate excess and artistic megalomania. I tried to watch it again, but I just couldn't. The film's look made it every bit as oppressive and suffocating as Mirror Mask. In Final Cut, an account of the making of Heaven's Gate, former UA executive Steven Bach echoes the sentiment:
It was an orgy of brilliant pictorial effects, and no one who sat in that theater would ever again question where the money had gone, for it was there to see; the sweep of the movement of the camera, by the camera, spectacular effect following spectacular effect until there couldn't be any more, but there were, and still more after that. But little by little the anxiety of anticipation gave way to satiety, then to a sense of claustrophobia induced by the inundation of image and effect. We became disoriented, victims of sensory overload, deafened by undifferentiated sound tracks: the jingle of brides; squeaks of boots, thwacks of hatchets in flesh; concatenation of foreign tongues and accents all talking at once, or more, all singing at once, keening folkloric ballads, mournful dirges for vanished lives and approaching deaths. And still there was more. The battle, the pandemonium, the chaos, the terrorized animals, the blood, the cataracts of dust and debris and explosives were relentless, and the brain numbed, waiting for the last moaning immigrant to fall in the swirling dust, for the last brutal death to be done, for the last wave of picturesque fuller's earth to blow across the last unblinking lens, and when the last fading image--as exquisite as the first--ran through the projector, I felt bludgeoned by vainglory and excess, surfeited by style, sound, and fury (pg 338).
Later, he writes...
The "look" of the thing subsumed the sense of the thing and implied a callous or uncaring quality about characters for whom the audience was asked to care more than the film seemed to. Whether those characters were well or ill conceived, they seemed sabotaged by their creator's negligence of them as he pursued the "larger, richer, deeper" things that surrounded them, obscuring them, making them seem smaller, poorer, more shallow (pg 416).
Pretty much the same thing can be said about any of those green-screen films I've been talking about lately like Sky Captain or Mirror Mask. It's also not a surprise to find out that Heaven's Gate director Michael Cimino has an MFA in painting from Yale. Kerry Conran's (Sky Captain) degree is in animation from Cal Arts and Dave McKean (Mirror Mask) went to Berkshire College of Art and Design. There's something about having an art background that tempts directors to think of film as modern art--sculptural, beautiful, yet impenetrable. The misty, overly-constructed quality of these films makes the image opaque suggesting that unlike painting, film is inhabited and not viewed.
Postscript: for a great send up of Heaven's Gate see Irreconcilable Differences (1984, VHS only). In the film, Albert Brodsky's (Ryan O' Neal) career as a director tanks when he creates a Civil War musical starring love interest Blake Chandler (Sharon Stone). Also features a young Drew Barrymore.
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