Scheduled Film for 5 March 2010

PICNIC
March 5, 2010

---

Picnic was a Pulitizer prizze-winning play on Broadway before it was filmed in 1955. The film did well at the box-office, with its major star, William Holden as Hal and a new star named Kim Novak as Madge.
    The film's director, Joshua Logan was noted more as a stage director than as a film director, as the staging of scenes in this film, as well as the recitation of some dialogue, shows. A great deal of the credit for the film should go to cineamtographer James Wong Howe for extraordinary low-key lighting effects.
    But the lighting, like the picnic of the title, has symbolic value as well. The lighting suggests a descent into the darkness of repressed desires and feelings. The progress of the film is day-night-day, the second day undoing the illusions and problems of the first, with the night as the journey that allows this resolution among all the characters in the film.
    There are many symbolic visual motifs in the film, as the study pictures explain, including Hal's shirt, his boots, his jacket (held by Millie during the moonlight dance), Millie's cigarettes and book, etc.
    The soundtrack of the film was popular too; and the main love theme, by the film's composer George Duning, reached Number 1 on the Billboard charts, paired, in counterpoint, with the old pop tune, "Moonglow," as it was used in the fim's famous moonlight dance between Hal and Madge.
    The film is also a good place to study "scope" (Cinemascope, as it was patented by the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio). "Scope" has become a generic word, however, used for any widescreen image.
    Now when a film shot in scope is shown on TV it is often rescanned ("pan-and-scan") for the smaller screen, called "full frame" as distinct from "letterbox" format. The paradox is the average viewer thinks they are seeing more of the image in full frame when they are actually seeing less! That's because the sides have been clipped in order to blow up the middle of the image to fit the entire screen. True, the image will be larger but not more complete; the letterbox image will be smaller on the screen, with the top and bottom of the screen in black, but the image will be complete, just as the director and cinematographer intended it, apart from the weaker resolution of the TV image compared with the sharper resolution of the projected celluloid image on the film screen.
    Besides obvious cropping of the sides of the image on television, often a more subtle operation on the film is done. The film is reshot using a second camera and then the second camera pans and scans the image ("pan-and-scan") in order to isolate what it's believed is the most important part of the image for TV viewers, usually the person who is doing the speaking rather than the person listening, or else the center of the action.
    Another solution is to cut a two-shot in scope into alternate shots of the characters for the TV screen. That is, Tom and Jill speaking together will be seen on television as first Tom speaking, then a cut of Jill speaking. Regardless, the film as it was directed and filmed is not the same one the viewer sees.
     From the social point of view, the film dramatizes the problem of the weak sense of masculinity, and of gender role conflict, typical of 1950s dramas, with the emergence of the teenager and then Rock 'n' Roll later in the decade. Though Hal is obviously not a teenager in the film he clearly stands in for the average teen with low self-esteem.
    As for the musical underscore by George Duning, even though our focus is on cinematography this is a good opportunity to study the use of themes in Picnic. There are several versions of the main theme on youtube. The soundtrack cue is here. The Billboard hit, blending the pop song, "Moonglow" with "Theme from Picnic" is here. This is the music used for the famous moonlight dance in the film, which is here. Duning's tune (by itself) set to a lyric by Steve Allen, can be heard here.
    There are several important themes in the film, but it's better to study the use of the main theme than nothing. But first you should familiarize yourself with the main theme before you see the film so you can identify its different variations in the film.

---