Peepshow

Chris Hobbs, February 2007

Award winning set designer/production designer Christopher Hobbs worked on the construction of the magnificent sets for 'Gormenghast' at Shepperton Studios as well as creating original designs for films by Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes and Terence Davies.

Hoogstraten, 'A Peepshow', about 1655-60. London, The National Gallery.

Paintings are windows into another place and another perception. Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th centuries revealed their cosy interiors complete with inhabitants, furniture and fittings, but the real houses, where they still exist, are inevitably changed or empty, their original owners long gone, their atmosphere tenuous. Somewhere between lies Samuel van Hoogstraten's peepshow, constructed around 1655-60.

Wandering through the National Gallery a long time ago, I discovered Hoogstraten's magic box. Not quite a painting, not quite a place, but a space of illusion where chairs and a dog seem to inhabit an illusory three-dimensional hall. Through doorways beside the dog and at the far end of the hall are glimpses of luminous interiors.

When viewed monocularly through peepholes at either end of the containing box, the dog in the hall and the chairs seem to hover between the second and third dimensions, but seen from the side, where one wall of the box is open, the method, or trick is revealed.

The floor and the three walls of the box's interior are painted in minute detail, but the foreground (that is, the central hall apparently closest to the viewer), is painted anamorphically, with half the dog on the wall, the other half stretched absurdly but precisely on the floor. The chairs, likewise distorted, all align with the viewers' limited point of view through the peephole.

In 1976 I was asked to make an exact copy of the peepshow for an exhibition of anamorphic art at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. As I recall, it was disassembled for me and I copied it in oil paints on board as like the original as I could. I was able, perhaps more than most, to appreciate the ingenuity of the anamorphic structure and feel some of the delight Hoogstraten must have felt when devising it.

Holbein, 'The Ambassadors', 1533. London, The National Gallery.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched an anamorphic child's face in the 'Codex Atlanticus', and the distorted skull in Hans Holbein's 1533 'The Ambassadors' is famous too. In the 16th and 17th centuries there are many examples. Some, like Hoogstraten's, are to be viewed through peepholes, some in distorted mirrors, but by the 20th century anamorphic art had lost favour, becoming little more than a mathematical curiosity. Only those little bicycles painted in distorted perspective on cycle lanes remain.

There is one art, however, where monocular perception is still imposed on the viewer, and where trickery dependent on this one circumstance is still relevant. In 1894, on a New York rooftop, Thomas Edison's Biograph-Mutoscope company built a small stage mounted on a circular track. Both stage and camera could thus revolve, following the passage of the sun. This proto-film studio produced films that were, in fact, shown as a peepshow at carnivals and in fairgrounds.

A year later, the Lumière brothers opened the first true cinema at the Salon Indien in Paris. Their one-minute projected films were documentary, shot out of doors with everyday subjects; workers leaving a factory, a picnic and, most famously, a train rushing dangerously towards the audience.

It was Georges Méliès, a professional magician, who introduced the magic of illusion into cinema. Initially his films were, like those of the Lumière brothers, records of contemporary life, but with his background it was inevitable that he would soon exploit the possibilities of this new medium. 'The Dancing Midget' (1902) illustrates his approach well. Two men flank a table set before a darkened arch. A tiny ballerina dances on the table, to the delight of the watchers.

The trick depends on the monocular nature of the film camera. There is no third dimension. The lady dances against a black background about 30 feet away from the open arch, and the camera is aligned so that her feet seem just to touch the tabletop. It is noticeable too that the scenery is painted entirely in 'trompe l'oeil', following the best traditions of the live stage. Even the arch is painted in a fierce false perspective.

As cinema progressed, so the settings became more sophisticated, or rather they began to ape the real world more successfully. An early Pathé set of the Paris sewers boasts a real arch over real water, but the front of the arch is painted in 'trompe l'oeil' again, with painted piping matched to real pipes within the arch, and the whole backed by an entirely painted cloth.

Despite this, a corridor in John Ford's 'Arrowsmith' (1931) demonstrates how durable the old tricks are. Ford's arches are built to suggest the lift doors in a vast building. They are supposedly part of an apparently infinite corridor, but the extended corridor itself is painted flat, just beyond the last built element. The camera is low and to the left of the painted vanishing point so that the ceiling and one side only of the corridor are visible. So long as the camera does not move, the illusion is complete, as in Hoogstraten's peepshow.

John Ford's corridor is comparatively crude, and locks the camera position, but Marcel Carné's 'Les Enfants du paradis' (1945) shows a far more sophisticated approach. For the boulevard scene the designer, Alexandre Trauner, designed an elegant Parisian street. In the drawing it is almost empty, but on screen a vast crowd fills the road from side to side and apparently end to end. In fact only those buildings on the left of the scene were built full size. The rest of the street diminishes in false perspective to houses only seven or eight feet high. With the crowd hiding the lower parts of the buildings, the camera is much freer than in Ford's corridor, and can rove through the scene with little danger that the trick might be exposed.

It is tempting to assume that such venerable techniques would have faded away long since, but in Steven Spielberg's 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (1977), miniature false perspective landscapes were used extensively. Occasionally, as in a brief scene from Roman Polanski's 1976 'The Tenant', perspective is reversed, so that a full-grown man at the far end of a room appears tiny.

The job of the film designer is to create the visual settings for the film to an agreed budget and by any means available. What the audience sees is a pattern of shadows on a flat screen manipulated to create an illusion of life. Dinosaurs can walk again, people can fly or visit heaven, hell and anywhere between, cities may crumble and rise. Nothing is impossible. Everything is a lie.

However, all this costs time and money, and even with the advent of computer-generated imagery the designer may have problems. How, for instance, might one suggest the uncertain world beyond death? Jean Cocteau, in his 1950 film 'Orphée', uses a technique tried earlier in his 1930 film 'Le Sang d'un poète'. A wall was built with arches and rough plaster stonework to match actual locations in the film. The wall was laid out flat on the studio floor and his actors slid across the set, their feet pressed against a vertical 'floor' set upright at the base of the horizontal set. The effect is eerie and otherworldly.

As a film designer I have had my share of quandaries. I have been asked to create a vast industrial city from scratch (and with very little money), to build Rome, to sever a distinguished actor's head, keeping it alive and clearly separate from its body, to create clouds and towers where there are none, to produce the façade of a hotel with ledges upon which a valuable actress must walk without danger four storeys above the street, and, recently, to create a balcony containing another actress hundreds of feet above a stone courtyard. All of these problems could be solved now by digital means. However, several were accomplished before this was possible and the rest were on budgets that did not allow for digital intervention.

Shooting the BBC 'Gormenghast' trilogy. © Christopher Hobbs.

Cityscapes are commonplace on film and are often represented by the use of huge 'miniatures', sometimes 15 or 20 feet tall, shot in thick and unpleasant smoke environment to mimic atmospheric haze. My 'vast industrial city' had buildings three or four inches high.

There are many science fiction films in which mysterious clouds roll across the sky, usually concealing alien spacecraft. These are generated in 'cloud-tanks', that is, large glass-sided water tanks into which various chemicals are introduced to make the clouds.

My industrial city had to have factory chimneys and the chimneys had to smoke. It is a fact that fire, water and smoke will not miniaturise convincingly, but I reasoned that clouds resemble smoke and can clearly be made in miniature. After a few tests, I took a three-foot long aquarium, put my little buildings in it and pumped a mixture of milk and ink through the tiny chimneys. By filming in slow motion the 'smoke' gained scale, and by chance the dissolving ink/milk mixture spread across the cityscape, producing a very convincing haze. I used the idea on several occasions, most recently and far more ambitiously for the BBC 'Gormenghast' trilogy in 1999.

The castle from the BBC 'Gormenghast' trilogy. © Christopher Hobbs.

For the castle of Gormenghast I used two tanks, each seven feet long by six feet wide and four feet deep, filled with water. The models were all under three feet tall and in separate units that could be moved to create different aspects of the castle. Behind them were mountains, largely cut from blue translucent acrylic, and behind them, outside the tank, was a web of fine nylon filaments on which were posed cotton-wool clouds against a natural backing. By introducing various chemicals to the water (I had found that milk becomes foul very quickly) I was able to give a soft haze to the images, and the lensing effect of the water seemed to add great bulk to my fairly small model. The second tank was used for large-scale 'close-ups' of buildings, and cloud production.

Severed head from the BBC 'Gormenghast' trilogy. © Christopher Hobbs.

The decapitated actor, Albert Finney, in the 1995 television film 'Cold Lazarus', was supposed to have been preserved, at least partially, in a cryogenic tank, but still had to speak and react. An animated artificial head would certainly have been complicated and expensive, and a digital solution was beyond our budget, so I experimented using one of my assistants, Tim. When I showed the director a photograph of Tim's severed head supported by tubes they could not see the trick, so I was allowed to go ahead.

In fact it was absurdly simple and cost only a few pounds. The actor sat in the base of the tank, his head emerging into the tank itself. Mirrors were placed under his chin and the edges hidden by tubing. False frost hid any awkward bits and the camera had almost complete freedom of movement without the illusion collapsing.

Lastly and, in a sense, returning to Hoogstraten, there was a hotel and a balcony. The hotel in James Scott's 1990 'Strike it Rich', based on the Graham Greene story 'Loser Takes All', was supposedly in Monte Carlo, and the American actress was required to sidle along a narrow ledge from the balcony of her suite to that of the adjoining suite along the façade, four floors above the pavement. Actresses are expensive, so we could not use a real façade or a real ledge. However, we could build a partial façade, balconies and all, but for safety's sake, the ledge was only a foot or two above the studio floor.

The usual method used to extend the hotel façade to the ground far below would be to use a matte. In other words, a painted extension would be photographed separately and added to the scene later. However, I remembered Hoogstraten.

A scaffold was built for the camera well above the level of the balconies and the ledge, so that a large part of the studio floor was visible. On this I had painted quite roughly the rest of the hotel and the street below, but anamorphically distorted, so that only the one-eyed camera could interpret the strange streaks and elongated blobs on the floor. On film, the illusion is very convincing, and the actress can boast of doing all her own stunts.

Set model from the BBC 'Gormenghast' trilogy. © Christopher Hobbs.

I used the same trick for 'Gormenghast', where the heroine is seen for the first time from high above. Hundreds of feet below her balcony, a stone courtyard is visible. Again, the camera was set on a scaffold above a balcony built only three feet off the studio floor, and again, the descending wall and courtyard were painted anamorphically to camera. I made a model to demonstrate the technique to the director and cameraman which still exists.

Of all the techniques used in cinema to fool the public, and there are very many, anamorphic painting is probably the least used. Nevertheless, like so much in film, it is based on an understanding of simple optics and basic psychology. Digital techniques seem to make these venerable tools obsolete, but they are almost always cheaper, simpler and faster to create than computer-generated imagery, and have the advantage of being right there in the studio, visible and easily adjustable. They are also infinitely more fun to construct and execute.

A film designer needs not only the tools of modern technology, but also an awareness of a past full of ingenuity and artifice, where dragons and castles were built for princely festivals, and mountebanks and conjurers created marvels that can still amaze.

Hoogstraten's little peepshow is part of this wonderful heritage, and as relevant today as it was when it was painted.

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Cinema at the National Gallery