Cinema as Weather

Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change

Kristi McKim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415894128
• eBook ISBN: 9781136662096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through analysis of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love, Kristi McKim calls our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond the movies.

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens on time, whether for tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends).

Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. This first book-length study of such a meteorological and cinematic affinity casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring.

Using film theory, history, formalist/phenomenological analysis, and eco-criticism, this book casts cinema as weather, insofar as our skies and screens become readable through our interpretation of changing phenomena.

1 Revealing Skies and Screens: The Confluence of Weather and Cinema

In the late nineteenth century, both skies and screens became readable to a mass audience with the publication of the first International Cloud Atlas and the first commercial film exhibition: on December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers screened their short films in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris,¹ and the first edition of the photographic International Cloud Atlas appeared in 1896. Deeming 1896 the “International Year of the Clouds,”² the International Meteorological Society “realised that an understanding of the weather depended on coordinated observations across national boundaries—something that relied on agreed terminology” and “published a pictorial reference book to coincide with the 1896 International Meteorological Conference in Paris.”³ Within one year, the same city hosts both the first film exhibition and the release of the first internationally conceived photographic means of reading the skies. These two events have more in common than geographical or calendar proximity.

Whereas weatherly predictability and surprise can impact daily experience, more than a century of cinema can attest to the weather's significance within filmic expression and narrative development. With early examples ranging from the whirling, life-threatening storms of F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) to Joris Ivens's glorious poetic documentary Rain (1929), film-makers have incorporated weather as an impetus for narrative progression and innovative cinematic expression; cinematic weather often prompts moments of aesthetic experimentation (how to show this rainstorm?). Akin to cinema's ordering and structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic mastery or narrative control over what changes. While meteorologists study and predict weather patterns, while writers incorporate descriptions of environmental phenomena into fiction and nonfiction, and while ecologists examine the effect of weather upon ecosystems over time, cinema enjoys the privileged yet fraught position of showing weather, through studio/post-production creation or the actual “capturing” of atmospheric phenomena as they occur. In The Virtual Life of Film, David Rodowick defines a medium as “nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold.”⁴ Cinema as Weather establishes weather as a medium, in the spirit of calling our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond cinema. In Atlas of Emotion, Giu-liana Bruno highlights the spatial affinity between cinema and architecture, insofar as “[a]rchitecture is a map of both dwelling and travel, and so is the cinema. These spaces, which exist between housing and motion, question the very limits of opposition and force us to rethink cultural expression itself as a site of both travel and dwelling.”⁵ For Bruno, cinema and architecture both map and move us through space; Cinema as Weather focuses on how space itself—as atmosphere more than architectural structure— moves within our experience of cinematic weather. This book casts cinema as weather, insofar as moments of cinematic animation mimic and often feature weatherly phenomena.

Film histories often acknowledge the “twin imperatives of science and entertainment [that] led to the projection of photographic moving images,” and these film histories expectedly privilege optical developments as the scientific component of this “twin imperative.”⁶ Within this conflation of science and entertainment, meteorology—or, more precisely, cinematic weather—occupies a latent yet compelling position within film history and theory. With cinematic exhibition, a significant catalyst of mass culture, a screen emerges that collectivizes a public; with meteorological developments geared toward a more precise reading of the atmosphere (of which the International Cloud Atlas's publication marks the most significant pictorial and universal to that date), the always-above-us sky becomes an emergent screen that yields atmospheric knowledge. On this latter development, Nature featured an article, “The Photographic Observation of Clouds,” in 1897 that offers the following:

It is a commonplace to say that the phenomena that present themselves most frequently are also those that are least observed with accuracy and intelligence. The ever-changing aspect of our sky, and the screen of vapour covering that adds charm to landscape and variety to scenery, present numberless opportunities for study and critical examination, but they have long waited for adequate description and representation.⁷

Ascribing patience to the clouds that have “long waited for adequate description and representation,” this piece acknowledges the “numberless opportunities for study and critical examination” and, after mourning the dearth of adequate artistic or photographic representations of clouds, proceeds to embrace the “recently issued International Cloud Atlas, a work that may possibly revolutionise our methods of cloud observation.”⁸ Just as reading the skies becomes ever more possible thanks to aesthetic and technological developments, so too does cinematic experience become a comparable screen—an aesthetic sky—by which to read and experience the world. While weather has always been writ on the skies above us (a striking example of what collectivizes us, of what we can be sure to share), modern technologies of both moving images and meteorology (The Weather Channel, for example) make possible our knowledge of atmosphere and environment beyond our immediate experience. With cinema, for the first time, weather becomes a screen. Similar to André Bazin's claim that mechanically reproduced art liberates painting from the burden of representing reality, cinema shifts—or at least expands—the object of mass perception from skies to screens. Cinema lends meteorology a metaphor by which we read our skies, while meteorology reciprocally enriches our conception of film.

Although the conflation of weather and cinema might have newly emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, projections of weather within aesthetic forms have long defined lyrical expression. Consider the famous eighteenth-century anonymous lyric:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow

The small rain down can rain?

Christ, if my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

Instead of a balladic invocation of the gods, here the speaker appositively invokes the wind “for the sake of change to a better climate. It is the wind that brings or banishes the rain.”⁹ The alliterative “Western wind, when wilt” affords an aural and oral experience equivalent to breath-as-wind, the repetition of the “w”'s that offers a blend of “h” and “w” at once. With a slight break from the unaccented second syllable of “Western,” four of the first five syllables of the poem ask the mouth to mimic the blowing wind, as if preempting the answer to the question of “when” with the answer of “now” (the alliterative breaths blow even if the wind does not). Likewise, the second line's assonance and rhyme suggest that, already, the “small rain down can rain,” if only in the spondaic suggestion of fleeting falling precipitation.

That this weather-framed quatrain then shifts into romantic longing suggests that the weather catalyzes and becomes inextricable from desire. Writes Charles Frey of this poem, “[t]here is a vast difference, admittedly, between a warm, germinal, spring rain that is longed for and a cold winter rain that is shunned, but, under either hypothesis, the wind is harbinger of desired change, bringer of new and needed weather, and so an intermediary between tensionally charged states of mind which are simultaneously contemplated.”¹⁰ In short, weather frames the lyrical expression of longing as it begets memory, desire, and perhaps even consummation. “[S]o familiar to readers in our century that Hemingway can have his hero quote it in A Farewell to Arms,” this concise quatrain suggests how rain can facilitate this conflation of weather and love, despite the ambiguity over whether the speaker has the lover because of the rain or can remember and imagine the lover because of the rain.¹¹ In this indeterminate space of fantasy and physical consummation, we find a realm akin to cinematic projection, a long-enduring art form that functions as a precursor to the jointure of cinematic art and weather. Moreover, that this poem is often the poem that teaches students the sound and sense of poetry (one anthology is even named after the poem)¹² suggests something of the extent to which art and weather, longing and having, form and projection, have undergirded readerly imaginations for centuries.

STORMS, MIRACLES, AND UNUSUAL WEATHER

A sequence that equally conflates weather and form, art and atmosphere, while occupying a comparably significant position within popular culture and (film) history, the famous cyclone scene of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) figures as perhaps a cinematic equivalent to the canonical poem “Western Wind.” Of this sequence, Arthur Upgren and Jurgen Stock write in Weather: How It Works and Why It Matters that “everyone has experienced a tornado, at least since 1939, when L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz was filmed”;¹³ in other words, to screen the film is to experience the tornado. However exaggerated Upgren and Stock's claim, their sentence connects a cinematic experience of the weather with a worldly experience, if only through cinematic expansion of our imagination. Anecdotal memories of this scene abound. David Gold (a professional storm chaser and leader of Silver Lining Tours) recalls of his early experience of the film: “when I was a kid, I used to look for The Wizard of Oz, and it—it would air around the beginning of springtime, and I would sit there waiting for the tornado scene & and I would be, you know, disappointed when the tornado scene ended. That, for me, was the climax of the—of the movie.”¹⁴

Yet this momentous cinematic moment of weatherly climax, “perhaps the most famous wind effect in film history,” is accomplished not by worldly weather but by technological achievement¹⁵:

Special effects supervisor Arnold Gillespie built a 9m (30 ft) funnel of muslin that was motorized to spin at high speed. The funnel was suspended from a gantry in the roof of a stage, while the base of the contraption was connected to a winding track that followed a different path to the top of the tornado. The base of the funnel sat in a pan that blew fullers earth (a very fine powdered clay) into the air around it. As the spinning funnel moved across the studio, the differing paths of its top and bottom gave it the realistic twisting look of a tornado.¹⁶

One of innumerable examples of produced weather built to evoke natural weather, this passage highlights the artifice at the heart of this weatherly experience; when Upgren and Stock claim that “everyone has experienced” at least this Wizard of Oz tornado, they're more precisely claiming that everyone has experienced a cinematic approximation of a weatherly phenomenon. As a cinematic wresting of volatility from a volatile weather event, consider the perfection of its appearance here: how ideal the timing (Dorothy [Judy Garland] longs to be “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and then, voilà, there she goes!), how successful its implementation (her cyclone-induced head injury elicits just the right fantasy that allows her to fantasize “there's no place like home”), and how stylishly orchestrated its appearance to a film audience (Dorothy sits, poised before her window, as a film spectator viewing the “screen” of passing debris). Weather in film, as suggested by this principal example, always happens at the right time and to the right end (even if it's an unhappy end, the film's plot wants that unhappy end); in short, cinematic weather exists as a controllable contingency within an art defined by contingency.

Given the primacy of this particular example, we ought to consider exactly how weather functions in The Wizard of Oz: what do these weather sequences contribute to the film as a whole, aside from this thrilling climax for budding young storm chasers or fetishistic masterpiece for special-effects technicians? Just after the cyclone sequence, Glinda (Billie Burke) exuberantly celebrates Dorothy's arrival to Oz as a supernatural occurrence: “When she fell out of Kansas, a miracle occurred.” In response to this miraculous pronouncement, Dorothy downplays her presence: “It really was no miracle, what happened was just this, the wind began to switch.” Dorothy explains away Glinda's miracle by pointing to a change in the wind. To extend this moment to the film as a whole, weather rationalizes The Wizard of Oz's magic. Addressing the weather only peripherally, innumerable critics have equated Dorothy's experience of Oz w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Film Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Revealing Skies and Screens: The Confluence of Weather and Cinema
• 2 The Cinematic History of Weather and the History of Cinematic Weather
• 3 Interiority and Exteriority: Cinematic Weather as Plot and Effect
• 4 Cinematic Rain
• 5 Cinematic Snow
• 6 Cinematic Sunlight and Seasons
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index