On the Background in the Cinema

Tsai Ming-liang, Where (still), 2022. From the Walker series.

This week, Film Notes publishes a new essay by Tiago de Luca, drawn from his ongoing research project on the conceptual history of “environment” and cinema as a recording medium. Focusing on the background—the details and atmospheres that sit behind the figure—the essay traces its aesthetic and technical roles across film history in relation to questions of power, marginalization, and environmental crisis.

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1.

One of the many lessons the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us is that the background of an image matters.1 As communication shifted definitively online, we quickly realized that whatever existed or moved behind us would eventually draw attention: a curious cat, a confused toddler, a distasteful wallpaper. To blur one’s mess of a home or replace it with soulless virtual interiors soon became standard practice, while tutorials on how to put together professional-looking bookshelves to have in the background began popping up on the Internet. Contemporary visual cultures encourage a mode of looking attuned to the peripheral detail. As our engagement with images is now defined by unprecedented flexibility and malleability—the ability to pause, rewind, slow down, fast forward or even zoom in on a partially concealed detail with a fingertip on our phones—the background has never been so within reach or available for scrutiny as it is today.

The background is a polyvalent semantic category. It can be temporal, as in the conditions and events that account for a particular situation in the present, like family history and professional experience; aural, like the ambient noises and sounds that constitute the acoustic field of a given environment; or spatial, like the portions of a scene or image that recede behind the (often human) figures in the foreground.2 Concerns over the “right” background in Zoom meetings replicate its customary function across the visual arts, where it must fulfil a seemingly paradoxical role. The background is essential to provide context and setting for the figures, but its presence must not solicit disproportionate attention, lest it detract focus from the protagonists. It hangs precariously at the interstices of the visible and the invisible, a contextual thereness that has to make itself felt but not quite “seen.” 

2.

Given its perceptual liminality, the background constitutes an important pillar of the phenomenological project. Musing over the writing table in front of him, Edmund Husserl once wrote: “What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least), is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality.”3 To perceive reality is to pick things out against a background which, while still “co-present,” remains, as it were, out of focus, a “dimly apprehended depth.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty strikes a similar chord: “it is necessary to put the surroundings in abeyance the better to see the object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure.”4

If the perceptual act involves choices as to what is brought into focus, what should we make of the fact that, in the histories of representation and thought, certain subjects tend to occupy the foreground while others are consigned to the back? Sara Ahmed frames this question as “the partiality of perception.”5 In her quest to “queer” phenomenology, Ahmed turns to the background as the locus against which certain shapes and figures are normalized and made visible at the expense of the obstruction and invisibility of others. Foregrounding, which by necessity entails a backgrounding, carries a politics of looking. Reworking Husserl’s axiom, Ahmed urges us to think of “the background not simply in terms of what is around what we face, as the ‘dimly perceived,’ but as produced by acts of relegation” that are often class-based, gendered, and racialized.6

The history of lens-based media bears this out. In public and private archives, marginalized and racialized subjects often linger at the edges of images or dissolve into the background. Take the photographic project 97 Empleadas domésticas (97 House Maids, 2010) by the Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz. Collected from Facebook, the photographs it features are striking in their visual uniformity, with the titular workers often lurking out-of-focus behind the centralized upper- and middle-class subjects in the foreground, as accidental residues at the moment of registration.7 What may at first seem a fortuitous and harmless record of familial bliss is revealed as symptomatic of a larger social phenomenon where the structural marginalization of domestic workers is reproduced in a visual economy whose compositions and patterns are as rigid as they are recurrent. Revisionist and materialist histories of the recorded image, from archival studies and found footage films to cinephilic discourses, rely on this centrifugal vision: the background conceals dormant secrets and power structures awaiting retrieval by an attentive eye.8 At the same time, the more an indexical image ages, the more pronounced its background becomes. 

Daniela Ortiz, 97 Empleadas Domésticas, 2010.

3.

A history of the background is a history of human hierarchies. Ahmed’s ideas must be situated within a feminist lineage that includes thinkers such as Marilyn Frye, Val Plumwood, and Barbara Johnson. In their work, the background is deployed as a helpful metaphor to visualize the way phallocratic structures come into relief against women’s socially assigned roles, cast as the “setting,” the “stagehands,” or a “blank page.”9 Although, as Frye points out, the foreground “depends absolutely upon the existence” of the background, “women’s existence”—as background—must remain self-effacing in its constitution and at the service of a patriarchal foreground, often literally so.10 To rest one’s eyes on the background risks shattering a carefully layered distribution that allocates who does the looking and what can and cannot be seen. By way of illustration, Frye turns to the figure of motion: “foreground figures are perceptible, are defined, have identity, only in virtue of their movement against a background.” Hence, she concludes, the background must feature either “no motion at all” or an “unchanging buzz of small, regular, and repetitive motions.” In short, the “background must be utterly uneventful if the foreground is to continue to hang together.”11 

4.

Frye draws her arsenal of examples from theater, yet her remarks offer an irresistible gateway into the cinematic background. Dominant film language relies on devices designed to prevent a background from coming sharply into view. Whether we think of the “unchanging buzz” of anonymous extras, sometimes referred to as “background actors,” or the literal blur achieved through focal adjustment, the background in conventional cinema must remain partially unnoticed and undifferentiated.12 Yet, in many ways, these devices are deployed as coping mechanisms to quell anxieties over a medium-specific feature. Thanks to its indexical and kinetic properties, the background in moving images presses itself forward more than in any other media. The story is well known but worth recounting: when confronted with projected moving images for the first time, spectators were equally if not more enthralled by the leaves swaying in the background than by the human specimens in the foreground. Overblown though it has become, the wind-in-the-trees motif reveals a larger fascination with the medium’s ability to capture eventfulness—an overabundance of details and contingent elements—often in the background: people going about their lives, passersby glancing at the camera, a bird flying across the screen, leaves fluttering in the wind. I use the word elements advisedly, given the preponderance of early-cinema discourses conveying wonderment at all things elemental: plumes of smoke, swirling dust, passing clouds, undulating waves.13 François Albera ascribes to the Lumière films a “transformation of the background,” which changes its status when recorded en plein air: “it emerges and creates an environment in which the figures take their place, surrounding them and sometimes interacting with them.”14 Film registers not only the corporeal and mechanical motion of figures and entities in the foreground, but also the diffuse, often atmospheric manifestations that suffuse and envelop them. Put another way, cinema is the first medium to capture a background that moves of its own accord. 

5.

Shot out in the open, the Lumière films contrasted sharply with Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope views, captured, since 1891, in the first-ever film studio, the Black Maria, built by W. K. L. Dickson. Here we have a different picture: human figures silhouetted against dark backdrops. Tracing this path back in time reveals a different history. One of Edison’s sources of inspiration was Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography, which the French physiologist had been devising since 1882 at his research laboratory, the Physiological Station. Marey developed a camera that took multiple snapshots per second while posing subjects and animals against what he termed “black screens,” achieved by painting the open inside of a deep shed black and covering it in black velvet. With the camera positioned across from the shed in broad daylight, the black cavity, unlike a flat surface, allowed virtually no light to bounce back. It also solved the practical problem of preventing the camera from capturing “too much detail,” which would pull attention away from the subjects.15 As a foundational attempt at producing what Noam M. Elcott terms “artificial darkness,” Marey’s biomechanical experiments were driven by scientific imperatives, and his work swiftly enlisted by the French military to “maximise the efficiency of citizen soldiers.”16 The reason for the black background, Marey noted, was “because the figures stand out more sharply.”17

The same rationale informed Edison’s peephole device, though the emphasis was on spectacle: vaudeville performers, serpentine dancers, strongmen. When setting up the Black Maria, Edison himself paid a visit to the Physiological Station in 1889. His idea was also to have figures “stand out with the sharp contrast of alabaster basso-relievos on an ebony ground.”18 Like the Station, the Black Maria depended on the interplay of natural light and artificial darkness: the former resourcefully achieved through a retractable roof combined with a mechanism that rotated the studio according to the movement of the sun, the latter directly modeled on Marey’s inchoate black screens, then dubbed the “black tunnel.”19 Whereas their aims and goals greatly differed, Marey and Edison converged in their predilection for the figure. Closer inspection of their inventions, however, shows that the black background had nothing neutral or natural about it. On the contrary, it was a carefully manufactured device that made possible a figural, often humanocentric, visual regime in the first place. 

William K. L. Dickson and William Heise, Carmencita (frames), 1894.

6.

It’s tempting to trace a bifurcating genealogy of the cinematic background according to its functions and iterations in indoor and outdoor shooting. In its first decade, films are largely set outdoors, yet as cinema congeals into a storytelling medium, it retreats into the studio for full protection from the vagaries of the outside world. Once a source of fascination, the unruliness of street life and elemental serendipities crowding the background of early films turn into a hindrance, posing problems for an industrial model based on productivity and efficiency. As Brian Jacobson notes, from its inception studio filmmaking is envisioned as a “well-tempered” environment insulated from atmospheric vicissitudes “by simulating sunlight and eliminating rain, wind, snow, heat, and cold—except, of course, in the controlled, artificial forms that filmmakers used to produce illusionary cinematic worlds.”20

The move into studios likewise entailed the replacement of physical reality with painted nature, its literal backgrounding as artificial backdrop.21 At first, engineers and set designers turned to photography studios for inspiration, where, since the 1850s, it had been common practice to pose subjects against wallpapers mimicking both interior and exterior settings. Theatrical stages, panoramas, and dioramas likewise offered models for scenic design aimed at deceiving the viewer’s eye. While painted tableaus, or “backings,” as they were also called, retained a degree of flatness through the 1910s and 1920s, by the 1930s Hollywood had made these scenographic elements more three-dimensional and naturalistic.22 As cinema evolved, other backgrounds popped on the scene, including rear projections, green and blue screen mattes, and, more recently, CGI simulations and digital immersive environments.

Yet this seemingly teleological history is also misleading. Not only have some of these techniques co-existed with each other for decades now, surviving to this date as part of synthetic composites in so-called “digital backlots;” they sometimes pertain to distinct technological lineages and industrial histories.23 Likewise, the dichotomy between indoor and outdoor filming begins to falter when we turn to the concept of location shooting, which, at least in its genesis, connoted outdoor places amenable to control and intervention.24 The logic of a cinema made behind closed doors spilled outwards, rendering artificial and natural worlds interchangeable and turning reality into sets. For Jean-Louis Comolli, studio cinema “codified the representation of nature in genre cinema” to the point of inflecting “the majority of ‘exterior scenes.’” As a result, the “role of landscape was reduced to that of ‘décor’—the decorative background,” on a par with “the painted canvas inherited from theater.”25 Within this lineage, nature is only as good as a resource to be framed and ordered as setting. A history of the artificial background is a history of human exceptionalism.

7.

In this history, rear projection stands at a peculiar crossroads. Consolidated in the 1930s, it emerged as an appealing solution for Hollywood studios grappling with the technical difficulties of recording synchronized sound on location. It allowed actors to be recorded safely within the regulated space of the studio while pre-filmed footage, often captured by a second unit, was projected behind them in real time on set. As a technique that folded into one shot images captured both indoors and outdoors while assigning them to different planes in the visual field, rear projection carried an irresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, it preserved the sense of contingency derived from shooting in the outside world; not coincidentally, landscape scenery and elemental formations like sky, wind, rain, and fire were recurrent tropes in the pre-recorded images, though often, as Ariel Rogers tells us, in their more ferocious incarnations as “stormy ocean, flaming inferno, or wild blue yonder.”26 On the other hand, the natural world was harnessed due to its supplementary function as narrative setting, a documentary embellishment literally relegated to the back for the fictional drama to play out on. Dominique Païni has aptly termed the technique “portable nature.”27

During its lifespan, rear projection proved enduring as a cost-reducing, safe and efficient technique. Yet it was far from consensual among personnel and technicians. Given their lower quality when rephotographed, the on-set projected images resisted seamless integration into a homogeneous diegetic space.28 To quote Laura Mulvey, rear projection reveals a “clumsy visibility”: the discrepancy between foreground and background throws into sharp relief a “tension between the figure, its events and actions, and its landscape setting,” with the consequence that the actors’ “gestures become overly considered, almost laboured or acted out.”29 In the literature on the device, Mulvey and Païni included, Hitchcock’s films dominate, partly because the director clung to the technique long after its heyday, and partly because it facilitated his tyrannical control over actors’ presence and appearance—down to the tiniest flicker of their hair. As the story goes, in Marnie (1964), Hitchcock justified the technique in Tippi Hedren’s horse-riding scenes because he wanted “one big close up of the hair blowing.”30 Production notes suggest that a matte effect was the original plan, but early tests revealed that the wind machine made Hedren’s blonde hair glow with a halo on the screen.31 Trivial though it may sound, this anecdote offers a textbook illustration of the hermetic logic of studio cinema. A horse is brought in so the actor can ride it on a treadmill, while wind machines ruffle her hair. Aeolian motion is still desirable, yet less as spontaneous meteorology in the background than as a carefully calibrated artifice serving the human drama in the foreground. The wind that blows Marnie’s hair is not the wind that stirs the leaves in the trees.

Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie (still), 1964..

8.

Some of our most influential environmental philosophers consistently make recourse to the metaphor that the environment has ceased to be a mere background.32 What was once an unchanging given, positioned as an ornamental backdrop against which human history unfolded, now intrudes forcibly upon everyday lived experience due to irreversible planetary transformations. Already in 1993, Plumwood wrote: “the natural world and the biosphere have been treated as a dump, as forming the unconsidered, instrumentalised and unimportant background to ‘civilised’ human life; they are merely the setting or stage on which what is really important, the drama of human life and culture, is played out.”33 In invoking the environment-as-background idea, these thinkers latch on to figurative devices drawn from artistic and cultural practices. Yet, in today’s context, we are urged to treat “settings” and “stages” unmetaphorically, that is, as material forms which, whether in their painterly, literary, theatrical, or cinematic iterations, have played a central role in reinforcing a persistent human-nature dualism that assigns each to a separate domain within a clear hierarchical system.34 As we confront the challenging task of imagining possible futures under increasingly dire conditions, the utilitarian “nature” of backgrounds starkly jumps out at us, and cinema emerges as a clear culprit. 

9.

Not all cinemas, though. If the background is severed from the outside and relocated indoors, it is because there it can be regulated, engineered, domesticated. Go shoot outside, in uncontrolled conditions, and you have a different picture, one that registers the commingling of beings and things as they share one and the same environment. From avant-garde schools and observational documentaries to realist, New Wave, and slow cinemas, there is no shortage of modes and traditions that have thrived and even revelled in the disorderliness of the outside world. We could even say that a genuine cinema of the outdoors is able to alter its surroundings by the act of filming. Pick any early French New Wave film and your attention is sure to be reoriented towards the hubbub surrounding the actors walking through Paris: the unthinking hesitation in the passersby’s gait followed by a half-curious look, the gradual formation of a crowd, the altered rhythm of the street, all happening in a background that refuses to stay consigned to its assigned place.

Agnès Varda, Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (still), 1962.).

Like a force field, location shooting in this configuration exerts something of a magnetic pull, producing an agglutination of bodies that, at least momentarily, erodes the boundaries between figure and ground, actors and bystanders, fiction and reality, art and life. The Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang has made use of this gravitational capacity in riveting ways. In his Walker series (2012–24), Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-Sheng dons the robes of a Buddhist monk to proceed at a snail’s pace through major urban centres, including Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong. An open-air filmed performance, Lee’s glacial steps open up a caesura in its immediate surroundings, exposing, via contrast, the mindless, fast pace of modern life. Located in different planes of the image, the slow-moving monk and the briskly paced urban dwellers clash via contrast. But there is also interference. Some passersby turn curious or bemused, while others slow down and come to a halt, eventually pulling their phones out to film the performance whose filming by the crowd becomes yet another filmed event within the film itself. 

Tsai Ming-liang, Walker (Xingzhe) (still), 2012. From the Walker series (2012–24).